You will be able to write chat messages on Teams, Slack or WhatsApp that someone can answer in one go.
Your phone buzzes at 2.47pm. It's a message on Teams from someone in another department you have never spoken to: "Hi." You reply "Hi, how can I help?" and go back to your work. At 3.15pm the next message arrives: "Do you have the Q3 file?" Which Q3 file? You ask. At 3.40pm you find out. The whole exchange took an hour for a question that needed one message and one reply.
Chat feels like conversation, so people write it like speech, one line at a time. But the other person isn't sitting across from you. They're in three other chats, a meeting and a spreadsheet, and every half-message makes them stop, switch and come back.
The single biggest fix is this: don't send "hi" on its own and wait for a reply. Put the greeting, the context and the question in one message.
Before:
"Hi"
"Are you free?"
"I need some help with the shipment report"
After:
"Hi Aisyah, I'm Jun Wei from finance. Could you send me the Q3 shipment report for the Pasir Panjang warehouse? I need it to close the monthly accounts by Thursday. If it's someone else who handles it, could you point me to them? Thanks."
The second version is longer, and that's fine. Aisyah can answer it whenever she next looks at her phone, in one go, without a single question back. It also takes care of the awkward part of messaging a stranger, because she knows who you are and why you're asking before she replies.
Many people send "hi" first because it feels rude to launch straight into a request. In chat, the polite thing is to respect the other person's time, and a greeting in the same message as the question does that. If you want more warmth, add a line: "Sorry to message out of the blue."
In a busy team chat, questions and answers drift apart. Someone asks about the roster at 9am, someone else posts about a printer at 9.05, and when the answer to the roster question arrives at 10.30, nobody can tell what it's replying to.
Keep one topic per thread. In Teams and Slack channels, answer inside the thread under the original message so the reply sits with its question. In WhatsApp groups, use the reply feature so the answer quotes the question. If you have two unrelated questions for the same person, send them as two messages so each can be answered and found on its own.
Nurses on a ward who swap shifts over a WhatsApp group know this well. "Can anyone take my Saturday PM?" followed by three other conversations and then "OK I can" leaves everyone wondering who agreed to what. A reply that quotes the original request settles it.
Most chat tools let you flag a message as urgent or important, and words like "URGENT", "ASAP" and "need this now" do the same job. They work when you use them rarely. Put them on everything and they stop meaning anything, and the message that really can't wait gets read with the same shrug as the others.
Keep urgent words for things that can't wait until tomorrow: a client on the phone, a shipment about to leave with the wrong paperwork, a system down. For everything else, give a real deadline instead. "Could you send this by 4pm today?" is more useful than "ASAP", because the reader can plan around a time.
If something truly is urgent and the person hasn't replied, call them. A chat message marked urgent that sits unread for an hour wasn't the right channel.
Voice notes are popular in Singapore, especially on WhatsApp, and they're quick to send. You can talk through a problem while walking to the MRT. For the person receiving them, they're slow. They have to find a quiet place or headphones, listen at your speed, and can't skim for the part that concerns them. A two-minute voice note often holds what a three-line message would have said.
They're also hard to search later. If the voice note contained a decision or a date, nobody can find it next week.
For work, ask before using them: "Easier if I send a voice note on this?" Some colleagues will be happy with it. Others, especially those in open offices or long meetings, would much rather read. When you do send one, follow it with a one-line text summary of the main point.
Here is one more before and after, from a bank analyst messaging a colleague in IT.
Before: "Hello." "U there?" "The dashboard is not loading." "Urgent." "Pls help."
After: "Hi Marcus, the credit risk dashboard has been showing a loading error since 10am. I've tried two browsers and cleared my cache. I need it for the 2pm risk committee pack. Could you check, or tell me who should? Screenshot attached."
Marcus can start working on it the moment he reads it. He knows what's broken, when it started, what you've tried and why it matters by 2pm.
The hardest case is a first message to a stranger, because you have no shared history to lean on and they owe you nothing, so that is the case the activity below gives you to practise on.
Write the single chat message you would send a colleague you have never spoken to, asking for a file you need by Thursday.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).