2Tired2Tango
Tech Monkey
Simple question...
In your day to day business, do you find chat clients are a help or a pain?
In your day to day business, do you find chat clients are a help or a pain?
Are chat clients much help?
- Thread starter 2Tired2Tango
- Start date
I'd have to say both.
I think chat clients are indispensable as they've been a good tool to have. Frequently I'd need to chat with one or more people in real time to confer on projects, exchange notes, etc, and being able to exchange links, data, and files quickly and efficiently helps with this. Email does not offer this.
On the flipside, leaving chat programs running all day often can mean frequent interruptions, distractions, and pestering that makes it hard to get anything done if they aren't managed well.
So it comes down to if the user is able (or had the forethought) to keep his "business" clients separate from his social clients, then they can be more of a help than a problem. Personally I know some people that couldn't get much done without them since they often do half of their work not actually from their office.
I think chat clients are indispensable as they've been a good tool to have. Frequently I'd need to chat with one or more people in real time to confer on projects, exchange notes, etc, and being able to exchange links, data, and files quickly and efficiently helps with this. Email does not offer this.
On the flipside, leaving chat programs running all day often can mean frequent interruptions, distractions, and pestering that makes it hard to get anything done if they aren't managed well.
So it comes down to if the user is able (or had the forethought) to keep his "business" clients separate from his social clients, then they can be more of a help than a problem. Personally I know some people that couldn't get much done without them since they often do half of their work not actually from their office.
2Tired2Tango
Tech Monkey
I purposely didn't specifiy any particular client...
Remote Assistance is possibly a different topic.
I think IM chat clients have their ups and downs. Their ups is that it allows me to have on-going conversations with more than one person at once, which is hard to do on the phone. So I can talk to a friend, and someone at some company we deal with, while talking to my host about our downed-server, just as an example.
The downside for me, and this is a big one, is that they can also draw a lot of your time, and take away your productivity. I find whenever I'm on an IM, I get a lot less work done, so I try as much as possible to stay off when I really don't need to be on.
The downside for me, and this is a big one, is that they can also draw a lot of your time, and take away your productivity. I find whenever I'm on an IM, I get a lot less work done, so I try as much as possible to stay off when I really don't need to be on.