Excuses for Not Responding on Slack

The green dot has done more damage to office trust than any policy ever written. It reports that a laptop is open. It does not report that the human is in a meeting room two floors down, or on a call on their phone, or standing at a whiteboard, or simply reading something long enough that they have stopped clicking. Everyone knows this and everyone still checks it. The result is a strange etiquette in which not answering for forty minutes requires a defence. The good defences are mechanical, because the mechanics are genuinely the cause: channel notifications off since it hit four hundred members, the message arriving nine seconds before a thread with eleven replies, do-not-disturb having been on since March. None of these are avoidance. They are the predictable output of a tool that treats every message as equally urgent. The one worth admitting to, once, is the killer: you saw it, you thought 'I'll answer that properly', and that is how messages die. Everybody has done it. Saying it out loud is disarming and buys you more goodwill than any story about wifi. Below are ten excuses for not responding on Slack, plus twenty in the generator.