I wish I had a little LED at my desk that would sync with my IM status to show people when I was busy or available to chat online or in person. One of the earliest usability features in the online world but still not replicated in the real world.
That's funny you mention this. I've been remote full time for over four years now and one of the upsides I didn't expect was that I find it much easier to manage my own distractions than I did in an office. Lots of credit goes to things like the IM status and the ability to hold a reasonable SLA on communications (can you imagine silently waiting 5-10 minutes to turn around and answer a question someone asked you in person?).
It never worked that well in the online world, IME. People used their away status message for the equivalent of Weird Twitter; there was little incentive to proclaim yourself "available." Likewise, there's always the person who goes "ping", "ping" at you, and then you say "what," and then they finally ask a question that you can answer in one sentence.
Better, I find, is just talking at someone with a cultural expectation of high latency in their response, which is true of a lot of IRC channels. In many previous HN threads people have mentioned the chat room format being crucial for their work discussion; you can direct a question at someone, while allowing it to be publicly visible too so that someone else can step in.
My ex-company uses those. They would sync up with our Lync clients and you could even set the color for each status. If anyone is interested I'll ask my old contact there.
They also have an (a bit difficult to find) SDK [1] available, for those not using Skype or Lync. But then there are cheaper [2] or different [3] alternatives if you don't need the existing integrations.
What if I want to listen to music, but I don't mind someone talking to me if they need something? What if I want to concentrate with no interruptions, including no noise/music from headphones?
For me - I like having headphones on without music because it's kinda warm and lowers outside noise. If I want to listen to something and still indicate I'm available to chat, I only have one headphone over the ear and the other to the side.
