Limit the number of messages
When I ran my survey with about 500 employees of a major tech company, 20% of the employees identified chat messages as one of the biggest barriers to deep work. A 2021 survey by Cendex quantifies how much time employees lose to communication tools.
“The average full-time member of staff in a medium to large business loses 9.3 hours per month, or 112 hours per year on digital communication programmes, products and tools.”
Of course, communication is a part of our jobs, but there’s a case for making it more effective. One fallout of the short messaging culture in our personal lives is that we communicate in short, often incoherent sentences. While those habits have their own fallout outside work, when we bring these behaviours to work, we end up creating loads of noise. Before you know it, you have 50 messages for what could have been an email or just a single, well thought out message.
It’s ok to write longer chat messages! Save everyone the extra notifications. Use emojis and text formatting to make these messages easy to read. Not only will you save others from the interruptions, writing a single coherent message will allow you to go back to your own work quicker.