Private chat is the fastest room in the building and the worst filing cabinet. Used well, it resolves questions in minutes; used carelessly, it scatters decisions across dozens of invisible threads that no one can audit later. This chapter covers the mechanics and the manners.
Starting and Shaping a Group Chat
A group chat begins the moment you add a second person to a direct conversation. Give it a name immediately — an unnamed group chat shows up in everyone's list as a string of personal names, and once three topics collide in one thread, nobody can find anything. Rename it after the purpose ("Q3 pricing review"), not after the people.
Keep group chats small. Past about six participants, response rates collapse and the conversation should move to a channel where lurkers can read without being notified.
Mentions: Urgency Is a Budget
The at-sign mention exists to pull a specific person into a specific message. Spend it deliberately:
- Mention one person when one person owes the answer.
- Mention a group or team only for genuine everyone-must-see notices.
- Never mention someone in a message that merely copies them; put them in the cc-line of your head, not the notification centre of their phone.
People calibrate to your habits. If everything you send is urgent, nothing you send is.
Pins, Saves, and the Search Box
Two tools stop information from evaporating. Pinning a message keeps it at the top of the chat for every participant — ideal for the link everyone asks for weekly. Saving a message files it privately for you. And when a colleague says "I sent it last month", trust the search box with a sender filter rather than scrolling; scrolling is how afternoons die.
Read Receipts and Typing Indicators
In one-to-one chats most platforms show whether your message was seen. Treat that as ambient information, not a contract. Seen does not mean answered, and chasing a "seen" message within the hour trains people to disable receipts — which makes the tool worse for everyone.
When chat is the wrong tool
Move to a channel when: the decision affects people not in the chat, the content must survive staff changes, or you are about to paste the same answer for the third time. Move to a call when: the thread exceeds ten messages without resolution — typing is now slower than talking.
A Small Etiquette Checklist
- Open with the question, not with "hi" followed by silence.
- One topic per thread; start a new chat for a new subject.
- Attach context: links, file names, deadlines — in the first message.
- Respect status: do not expect replies from someone marked as focusing or off-shift.
Master these habits and private chat becomes what it was designed to be: a scalpel, not a shotgun. The next chapter moves from private rooms to shared ones — channels — where the organisation's memory actually lives.
