My friend, long time colleague and US Immigration green card referee, not to mention sometime commentor on my blog posts, Nigel Dessau, runs a great blog, podcast, video series called the 3-Minute Mentor. Well worth subscribing.

I get lots of instant messaging interrupts, Lync internally, Chatter for internal social media, Facebook, Twitter, even Yahoo from time to time. Today I had an interrupt from a colleague that wanted to get some information over to our Mergers and Acquisitions team, it sounded like a useful idea but it took quite a few interactions to get to the point of what he was asking, why it was interesting a what it applied to. Then after I agreed a couple of to-do’s, and did mine and told him, I closed the chat only for it to spring back open with some additional info and ended with an apology “Sorry…”

Here are my top 3-tips for communicating with anyone over instant messaging, I didn’t check to see if the 3-Minute mentor covered this…