Instant Messaging

Instant messaging, IM in short, normally viewed as a distraction, is now seen as more efficient than face-to-face meetings, email, and phone calls. Want to chat with someone in the office? Look at IM, see if they are available, and get that answer!

Instant messaging, long associated with teenagers staying up late to touch base with friends, is moving into the workplace with an impact that has started to rival e-mail and the cell phone. Less intrusive than a phone call and more immediate than e-mail, instant messaging grew by more than 50 per cent in the last year alone, so that nearly one-third of American adults are now IM-ing, as it is called, with their children, clients, colleagues and each other. Unlike e-mail, which caught on widely only after corporations began training employees to use it, instant messaging is infiltrating the workplace from the bottom up, by way of employees themselves. As people who already have IM software urge other friends and colleagues to get it so that they can add them to their list of contacts, its growth has spread like a virus. David Beckman, a lawyer at Beckman & Hirsch, a firm in Burlington, Iowa, said he installed instant messaging with some trepidation (=anxiety) when he needed to stay in contact with an employee who was working from a different location. ''I came at instant messaging like this was going to be horrible. But honestly, it's the most productive thing I've ever seen'' Mr Beckman said. Adapted from nytimes website