Paul GrahamVerified account

i only see it from people I don't know, though.

What, they don't use Trello?

This behavior is evidence of being an asshole. The only protocol that's lacking here is decorum, not a technical protocol. That person would still abuse a todo-list protocol. The story of product that solves this should start with: "So I fired that person, and then solved this."

We don't know the situation, it could be an urgent issue or a blocker. If you can't move forward without a reply which would take only 5 minutes to write, it would make sense to 'ping' a person. People used to use phone calls for this.

I'll take your tech worldview word for that. For me it's also evidence of the total disintegration of people's attention, and the abdication of our minds to our smartphones. There's a big trend here towards "building a second brain" but we're also destroying our first one.

How are smartphones different from paper-based organizers? They aren't, really, and people used them for ages without "destroying their brains". Short-term and intermediate-term memory was always a weak part of a human brain, so using tools makes sense.