Recently, I blocked an hour on my work calendar for an appointment. I was unavailable, at least according to my calendar, but while I was sitting there trying to focus on a conversation that had nothing to do with work, I could hear Teams pinging in the background.
I have muted plenty of channels because there are simply too many conversations happening at once to leave every notification turned on. Direct messages and tags still get through, though, and it is surprisingly hard to hear that sound without wondering who needs you, what happened, or whether something is wrong.
Most of the time, nothing is wrong. That is part of what I find so strange about the way we communicate now. Very few of the messages that interrupt my day are actual emergencies. They are questions, updates, approvals, scheduling discussions, requests for information, and conversations that could probably wait until I finish whatever I am already doing. Yet they all arrive with the same little signal that something wants my attention now.
When Responsiveness Became Immediacy
I remember when most professional communication happened through email. There was an understood gap between sending something and receiving a response. Unless the situation was genuinely urgent, you did not assume someone would reply within five minutes.
Slack and Teams changed some of that. I have experienced it with clients, coworkers, internal teams, and external teams. Someone sends a message, tags you, or asks a question in a group conversation where several other people are watching. If you do not respond quickly, someone else may answer before you do.
No one necessarily tells you that you are expected to respond immediately. The expectation develops more quietly than that.
I have noticed it in my own behavior. If I answer everything the second it arrives, I am creating a pattern that people can reasonably expect me to continue. Then ten or twenty minutes begins to feel like a delay, even though it really is not.
I care about being responsive. I do not want people waiting days for an answer or wondering whether I saw something. But I am starting to think more carefully about the difference between being responsive and being continuously available. Sometimes that means letting a message sit for a few minutes while I finish what I am already doing instead of automatically allowing the newest request to become the most important one.
When More Communication Creates Less Clarity
The interruptions themselves are only part of it. The volume and fragmentation can be just as exhausting.
I was out of the office for one day recently and came back to a long chat that had moved through several different subjects. There were conversations about approvals, creative work, reporting, scheduling, client requests, and decisions happening in other chats. People were tagging one another, quoting earlier messages, adding colleagues for visibility, and referring to conversations I had never seen.
Before I could do anything, I had to reconstruct what had happened. I needed to figure out which decisions had already been made, which requests were still open, what actually involved me, and whether something mentioned in one place had been resolved somewhere else. None of the individual messages were unreasonable. In fact, most of them were attempts to keep people informed.
That is what makes this complicated. Overcommunication often comes from a good place. People do not want someone to miss something important, so they add another person to the chat, tag someone for visibility, repeat an update in another channel, or move a conversation somewhere else where the right people can see it. Eventually, though, more communication can create more places to look rather than more clarity.
That may also explain why so many of us end up muting channels in the first place. A tool designed to keep everyone connected can become so noisy that the only way to concentrate is to stop listening to parts of it.
An Environment Built to Interrupt
I recently read a Psychology Today article about distractibility. One of the ideas was deceptively simple: finish what you are doing before moving on to the next thing.
It made me think about how difficult modern work environments can make that. It is one thing to be distractible. It is another to work in an environment that is engineered to interrupt you.
A message comes in while you are writing. Someone tags you while you are analyzing something. A meeting reminder appears. You open one chat and discover three other things that need attention. Even when you decide not to respond, part of your attention has already shifted.
We tend to talk about focus as though it is mainly an individual discipline problem. Turn off notifications. Block your calendar. Manage your time better. Protect your focus.
Those things can help, and I use several of them. But they do not completely solve the underlying problem when so much of the workday happens inside systems built around constant, real-time communication.
It also creates an odd relationship with urgency. When everything comes through the same channels and everything can reach you immediately, a routine question and an actual time-sensitive problem start to look surprisingly similar. I can think of very few times when something coming through Slack or Teams truly could not wait. Yet it is remarkably easy to become conditioned to react to the ping before deciding whether the message deserves that level of attention.
Grateful for the Tools, Questioning the Expectations
There is another side to this that matters to me. For all of my frustration with Teams, Slack, and the expectation of constant communication, I am genuinely grateful that so much of my work can happen this way.
I have profound hearing loss, and I was reminded recently at an eye appointment how difficult ordinary face-to-face communication can sometimes be for me. I missed pieces of what people were saying and had to work harder to follow conversations that other people probably did not have to think about at all.
Remote work and written communication remove some of that barrier. Being able to read a conversation instead of relying entirely on what I can hear in a room has made my working life easier in ways I do not take for granted.
That is why I do not think the answer is to reject these tools or romanticize some earlier version of work. They solve real problems. They make collaboration easier, give people access to information quickly, and, in my case, make communication significantly more accessible.
What I question is the assumption that because someone can reach us instantly, we should also be available instantly.
I am still figuring out what reasonable responsiveness looks like in a world where the tools themselves encourage immediacy. I do not want less communication, and I certainly do not want to disappear when people need me. I just think there should still be room to finish a thought, complete a task, attend an appointment, or simply spend twenty minutes doing one thing without feeling as though something else is already waiting impatiently on the other side of a ping.
