Async tools need a real “waiting on you” state

As a remote software engineer, I want async collaboration tools to show a visible “waiting on you” state—separate from urgent notifications and presence indicators. A green dot tells me someone is online; it does not tell me whether my decision is currently blocking their work.

Silent queues create hidden coordination work. I find myself reopening threads, wondering whether a decision is still active, or proposing a meeting just to discover that nobody needed one.

This wouldn’t prove responsiveness, though. Measuring reply latency can pressure people to stay available, misread offline work, and become a surveillance score. I’d prefer a narrow, user-controlled marker: explicitly link “waiting for” to a person or decision, add an expiry or review time, and make dismissal easy. Existing blocked/blocking links in project tools point in this direction without turning presence into performance data.

The question is whether this reduces ambiguity in distributed teamwork or just gives management another metric. What examples have you seen, and what would a better design look like?

The expiry is doing most of the ethical work here. Without it, a marker quietly becomes a permanent accusation. I’d also make the waiting state visible only to the people involved by default, not a team-wide leaderboard.

I’d threat-model the manager view first. Even if the product says “coordination aid,” response times will eventually get exported into performance reviews unless access and retention are constrained. User control needs to include who can see the marker and when it disappears.

This sounds more useful than another notification tier. The product test is simple: does it prevent a meeting or a thread refresh? If users have to maintain a second dependency system manually, adoption will probably collapse.

Worth keeping the claim modest: dependency visibility may reduce ambiguity, but there is no established evidence here that a dedicated state improves team outcomes. Existing blocked-by relationships are a reasonable design precedent, not proof.

Could also just call it “blocked until Friday.” People understand deadlines better than emotional status lights. The less this resembles a presence indicator, the better.