Small Online Kindnesses We Could All Use
Thanks to the folks at Manager Tools, I learned about this tool. Rather than describe it to you, I’ll simply copy the description from this article about where the idea came from, and what it seeks to accomplish:
We thought we might develop a list of small, online kindnesses based on our mix of experience and research—a list of things we can do for each other when we’re working in a remote manner. We immediately wrote things like “mute your microphone when you’re in a video conference and not speaking” and “use ‘Reply All’ sparingly, if at all.” Soon, a short list had become a very long list.
And then we stopped short. Did we really want to share another long, detailed resource? Did we really want to contribute more than we already had to a digital pile of manifestoes and letters and essays and livestreams and webinars?
Not really.
We decided to build a tool instead, something that would reduce the cognitive load of our message and reach people in drips instead of a thousand-word opus that would require too much attention, too much parsing, too much translation to daily practice.
So, you too can go to the generator, and hit “Press Me” to get helpful reminders like “Use Schedule Send to be considerate of email recipients”, which is really something that too many people, managers especially, don’t think about.
A lot of people, right now, are maybe dealing with kids during the day, and working a bit later in the evening to finish up on some work projects. Nothing wrong with that, but when you start sending emails to your directs at 8-9PM because you’re working at that hour, it creates a sort of stress for them when they should be disconnecting and away from work. How about just scheduling those to go out in the morning instead?
I think there’s a lot we could all learn about small online kindnesses from this tool, and maybe just get in the habit of being more considerate of how we interact digitally with our coworkers and customers.
