How to reach me, v. 1 ☎️ 🤙

Last reviewed: August 22, 2022

The main thing

I try to answer every mes­sage, what­ever the chan­nel, within a rea­son­able time. My rea­son­able time may seem too long to you. Sometimes I’m busy and will reply in a week or two.

📎 If I’m taking a long time to reply, I most likely have a task some­where to answer you, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Please don’t be offended: it’s not because I think your mes­sage is unimportant. I don’t sup­port the cul­ture of urgency and being online 24/7, and I pro­tect my per­sonal space.

Right now I’m in the GMT+2 time zone, an hour ahead of Kyiv. That means

🕗 🕐 I’m open to syn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tion (calls, with or with­out video) from 12 noon to 5 p.m. Kyiv time.

How I work

  1. Message me on Telegram: that’s easiest. After 10 p.m. it’s better to send silent mes­sages, but I’ve had sound noti­fi­ca­tions off 24/7 since 2014, so it’s fine even at three in the morning.
  2. Sometimes I reply ”+” or “Got it”. That means I agree with what’s writ­ten above and will do what we agreed. It doesn’t mean I’ve already done what we’re talk­ing about. You can reply to me like that too.
  3. I try not to miss mes­sages or forget about them. But if I haven’t answered for more than a week, write again.
  4. I keep an empty inbox in Telegram, so once I’ve read a mes­sage, I won’t lose it. It’s normal if I’ve read it but haven’t replied right away.
  5. I use Google Calendar to sched­ule meetings. If you want me to add you to an event, send me your email address.
  6. I hold video calls in Google Meet. I usu­ally send the room link a couple of min­utes before the meeting. If we’ve put the meet­ing in the cal­en­dar, the room link will be in the event description. We meet there.

How I don’t work

  1. I use Telegram for per­sonal and work contacts. I rarely open the other mes­sen­gers (Facebook, Viber, WhatsApp and LinkedIn) and don’t go through the noti­fi­ca­tions there. Better not to write to me there.
  2. I don’t go through my email either. A mes­sage sent by email needs to be repeated in a mes­sen­ger, or just don’t send it there (what the hell for?).
  3. I don’t work in messengers. If we have a project together, we set up a task man­ager, any task man­ager, and work in it. My team works in Planfix, but for a small project we can meet in Notion or Trello.
  4. Important! Don’t set up a task man­ager you won’t look at. Better invite me into your own inter­nal task man­ager: I’ll figure it out quickly with­out anyone’s help.

What’s synchronous and what isn’t

💼 I try to keep syn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tion to a min­i­mum for work and to a max­i­mum for per­sonal things. I want to call my friends more often, and to get on calls for work less.

📞 I most likely won’t pick up if you call with­out warning. I may be work­ing, eating or sleep­ing at that moment. Write me what happened. I’ll call back as soon as I see it, if it’s really urgent.

📋 Work meet­ings should have an agenda: a list of the topics we need to dis­cuss and the ques­tions you want answered. Send me the agenda at least a day before the meet­ing, so we spend the time productively. Sometimes a work meet­ing can do with­out an agenda, and that’s OK too.

For employees

Message me on Slack about urgent mat­ters and in Planfix about every­thing else. If in doubt, write in Planfix. If I’m slow to reply in Planfix and it’s burn­ing, knock on Slack right away with a link to the Planfix task.

Don’t hes­i­tate to write to me over your man­ager’s head if some­thing wor­ries you and you couldn’t sort it out with them. Hierarchy has noth­ing to do with it.

Message me on other mes­sen­gers only if your Slack isn’t working.

Follow the com­mu­ni­ca­tion rules in our Playbook.

Voice messages: OK?

🎥 I’ll gladly watch your video cir­cles (Telegram’s round video mes­sages) and listen to your voice mes­sages, but text gets priority. If you have a long, emo­tional story, tell it in a video circle and add a text note on what’s inside.

That said:

⛔ Short voice mes­sages instead of text: not cool.

⛔ Voice mes­sages with no text to go with them: not cool.

⛔ A long voice mes­sage that could fit into one sen­tence of text: really not cool.

My notes on the subject

⌘240. Zero inbox in Telegram

⌘196. How to use work chats effectively

⌘197. On chats for work, part 2. Do we need them after all? Yes!

Why I made this page: ⌘244. “Did you get a chance to look?”