My dad was an English teacher for 30 years and, more relevantly, a department chair for much of that time. He’s been retired for about 20 years. So, his entire career was before the digital revolution. This means that when he wanted to communicate with a large group of people at work, he had to write a memo. He had to actually WRITE a memo on a memo pad or piece of paper. Then he had to go the the mimeograph machine and ‘run off’ copies of said memo. Then he had to either distribute those or have someone else do that.
For all that effort, that better be an important memo. In other words, the effort involved in communicating set a bar that was pretty high in terms of what was worth communicating about. Fast forward a single generation and many of us are inundated with emails, texts, slacks, teams, and other avenues I probably haven’t even heard of yet. The problem with this is that there is no longer a serious barrier to communication. Of course, in some ways, that’s fantastic. We can share important information and broadly seek relevant resources more easily than any other time in human history. Unfortunately, that useful information often gets lost amongst the flotsam and jetsam of everyone else’s more trivial thoughts.
Most people in a corporate environment don’t even ask themselves how OVER communicating might affect others. It takes discipline and executive function to ask one’s self if something is worth sharing or worth asking. Most people don’t ask themselves, “Can I find this answer in five minutes of doing my own work?” Maybe? But, often people default to asking instead of doing, sometimes by asking a whole group of colleagues. What they are really doing is trying to get an answer without doing any work.
Most people don’t think about the fact that they are shifting that work to someone else, or many, many other someones. Even if one of the members of your working group knows the answer, they still have to take the time to read your message and send you a response. And, tragically, everyone else in that group still loses time and efficiency by having to read both message son the group chat. Also because of each individual worker bee’s desire to cover their own bee-hind, everyone gets cc’d on everything, which is also a coporate culture issue.
I would argue that this is an issue for everyone who works in a large organization. But it particularly affects those of us who are easily distracted/derailed and who struggle with transitioning and processing speed. I’m sure there are plenty of neurotypical people who don’t see it as a burden to have to transition their attention to read a slack eight times an hour during their work day. But that is a real issue for us.
I’m not sure I have a unifying answer to how to handle this. But I would suggest speaking to your supervisors about the issue. I bet you aren’t the only person that struggles with this. I would also suggest setting boundaries with your team and your direct reports. On a personal level, I think it’s okay to temprarily shut off the faucet by turning off your notifications for certain communication streams for periods of time during your day in order to be able to “batch” dealing with them so that you can handle them with less transitioning and less disruption.