I worked for a news agency where we used IM as an intercom. Not so faceciously I can say its practical purpose was to keep us from getting into the zone EVER.

What is worse, endless procrastination at home or endless interruptions in an office setting?

In a lot of companies I talk to — at least within teams — IM is the new email.

This is a double-edged sword for sure, since IM, obviously demands immediate attention in a way that typical email may/should not. A part of me agrees it’s smart to start treating email more as the way to distribute non-time-sensitive information that people can then filter however they want — while IM essentially assumes the role a phone might have had up through even the early 90s.

One tip I’ve picked up from my Google friends? Consider using your IM status/away message to indicate your preferred mode of contact and/or level of interrupt-ability. EG:

• “Coding — would prefer email”
• “Call if it’s an emergency”
• “Only here for ‘Project Foo’ questions”
• “Build day - please catch me tomorrow or Monday”

Anyhow, like all this stuff, it comes down to how your team likes to work. But I’m intrigued by the idea that a responsible, respectful group of folks could (could) craft IM into a sustainable way to efficiently escalate the need for quick blasts of attention.

I work in a helpdesk/customer service environment. IM is often used for quick questions. “Are you working on this outage?” It is also very handy when you are screening calls.. You can let somebody know who you are transfering to them so that they can decide if they want to pick up this particular sales guy or not.

I often ask somebody for input… “If you get a miniute can you look at case 11242 for me and give me a suggestion?” This doesn’t interrupt them, but allows them to ask questions without going back and forth with a bunch of emails.

I’m in an academic environment, and we use IM for a wide range of communication — everything from extensive collaboration meetings (which, oddly enough, are usually conducted one-on-one in sequence rather than in chat rooms) to quick questions to code copying/pasting to notification of new papers and information… In fact, because we do quite a bit of coding in the workplace, I’ve discovered that even in our cube group we tend to communicate about academic and professional topics more often through IM than through personal interaction.

Typing that out, it sounds a little sad. But - it works.

Firstly, you have to be disciplined about setting your busy, on phone or in meeting status as I use this to control people’s access and allow me some time to do my job and cut down on the distractions.

The best uses I have for it are :

• If you open a group chat during an online presentation from a 3rd party them you can share comments and thoughts as the presentation as it goes along. I have found that this helps us get the most out of the presentations.

• To have 1to1 or 1to2 chats about a piece of information or to check someone has done something so rather than sending an email or picking up the phone I will just IM them to say have you done this or when will you be able to get this to me.

Another best practice is only contact people when they show as available.

Normally have it up and running for quick questions with a couple of members of the team I work in.

The nuisance comes in when people inevitably use it inappropriately:

• succession of questions blinking away instead of picking up the phone and calling

• using it to bypass the normal processes for handling a request, because their request is obviously far more important than everyone else….

The people who are guilty of doing this are generally those who abuse email etiquette anyway.

I just switched jobs, from an environment that used IM to one that doesn’t. I have to say that I am much happier without the constant interruptions.

In my previous position, IM was abused like crazy: “Did you get my email?” It was also used as a pager system, which was the most aggravating, “Can you come down here?”

After the first couple of weeks of this and getting burned on a major project, those requests to “come on down…” turned into anxiety inducing needle-like pains. They were always short, never descriptive of what I would be coming down for, thus I never knew if I was going to be scolded or if it was just to discuss a great idea.

I tried using a variety of away messages to explain that I shouldn’t be disturbed, but that was just like telling people to not disturb me, but leaving my office door open.

In my new job, I have a much smaller IM list, which excludes the management, making it much more useful for the quick questions, etc.

I telecommute from my home in Iowa to my job in New Jersey. Some of my coworkers live in California, Canada, and even the Ukraine. The ones I use IM most extensively with are the coders in the Ukraine (so both sides of the IM are fairly tech-savvy). We use it for real-time status updates and communicating results of testing and questions about what results should be. We basically use it as a less-intrusive on-going phone call. I may go a week or two without an IM from anyone, and then a big testing phase will occur and I’ll be IMing constantly throughout the day for several days. Usually if we don’t get a response fairly quickly, we will also email the person, because we recognize that the technology can sometimes crap out. We are too wary of losing important communications to trust them solely to IM.

I used to have a problem with personal IM being distracting at work, but I have since become more selective about who I’ll talk to when, and it has become a non-issue.

I work in a large global company and Instant Messaging is a great productivity tool for us. The last time I heard numbers a couple of years ago we were over 250.000 users.

In the daily worklife everybody uses it when behind their laptop. We use Sametime, our IM tool, to ping colleagues around the world for quick questions, sometimes longer questions and for coordination of (customer) conference calls.

I don’t know the numbers, but am quite sure the global use of Sametime has a possitive business case, saving us a lot of money on telecom cost.

As for productivity? We can’t live without it!

I am a Messaging Consultant, having worked with different messaging systems I have seen IM come a long way and know it has a long way to go. IM in the workplace can be a boost to productivity and it can be the bane to the workplace as well. I have seen it abused and misused, I have seen it used for valid work communication and I have seen it as a distraction to workers.

It really depends on each individual on how they use it. With regard to a corporate IM program many companies, educational institutions and government entities use it for a select few while the vast majority of other users rely on the public IM such as AIM, MSN, Yahoo and GMail to name just a few.

Users need to recognize that many IM’s do NOT have sufficient security to warrent using it for confidential information and I have seen many requests from lawyers, police and the FBI asking for the transcripts and archives of not only email but now IM conversations. Armed with the proper warrant they get what they want and sometimes more if the IM network servers are confiscated.

Personally I have used it for quick conversations with fellow employees, finding out if they truly are there (some do change their status) and asking for information to be sent to me. The programs I have installed and used in a corporate setting are secure in that the information is sent encrypted, however, remember that many persons do not use a screen saver nor do they lock their computers, so information while sent encrypted is very visible to passer-bys or visitors to your office.

Usually in educational settings corporate IM is NOT used by students, unless they are student workers. I regularly use GMail for talking to friends around the world by means of my headset, others use Skype or other programs. For catching up with friends quickly it can be great to have, but remember that your employer does not pay you for speaking to friends and relatives and doing so may cost you your job.

It’s like personal email, use only email programs at work that do not download a copy of the email to your work computer, if it is downloaded it is now the property of your company since it resides on their computer. Be careful, be watchful, and be aware of proper etiquette when using either IM or email.

If your work offers an IM program, inquire as to the rules for use, ask if it is for confidential information use as well. Once you have found out what the guidelines are - adhere to them.