Look, I get it. You have a question. It's important. You need to get this resolved NOW.

Imagine you are super focused, in the zone, headphones on, music blasting, getting all sorts of work done. Suddenly, someone taps you on the shoulder to ask you a question. It turns out, you're not even the right person to talk to. They walk off to the next person. And repeat.

How many people were in that channel you just used @here on? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands?

You just tapped every single person on the shoulder asking for immediate attention. Most couldn't even answer even if they wanted to. How much time and focus have you just wasted? You probably even popped up in some important meeting through screen share as people forgot to mute their notifications.

@here is for group emergencies!

• Are you seeing errors in production again? Before you reach for @here, take ten seconds to check the monitoring dashboard or logs. If it’s a real outage, trust me, someone else is already halfway through fixing it. You don’t need to summon the entire department for moral support.
• Is your company website feeling slow or is a service is acting up? Post normally in the ops channel. No need to hit the panic button. @here doesn’t make servers heal faster, it just interrupts 40 people who were already working on the same thing.
• Are your marketing campaign results not showing up? Before you blast @here, maybe check the analytics tool or ask your teammate first. Everyone else doesn’t need to stop working to confirm Google Analytics still exists.
• Does your customer demand an answer "right now" on the phone? Tag the two people that can actually help. Waking up 200 others won't make your deal close faster.
• Wondering if today is a holiday in your country or if payroll already went out? Please don't ping the entire company for that.
• You can't find an invoice or a transaction record? Definitely important, sure. This is still not a company-wide emergency.

Is the channel small where everyone is attending a meeting that just got rescheduled or moved to a new room while people are on their way? Alright, send off an @here. It's important. You actually save peoples time, not waste it.