Hypothesis: all difficulties in professional relationships stem from a communication imbalance. Not enough questions were asked, or politics prevents a certain kind of communication flow, or someone important didn’t have email for 12 hours.
In the era of multimodal business comms, where inter-party convos happen across all available channels — in meetings (IRL/virtual), phone calls, emails, SMS, chat apps — what all digitally-connected comms channels have in common is the ability to control notifications: how and how quickly one receives a digital bloop that something might need your attention. Let’s include calendar events here as well.
I do what works for me: zero email notifications, almost no red badges, and everything else kind of makes its way in, at least to my desktop during work hours.
But other than the one or two colleagues I may have discussed notifications with, I really can only assume what notifications others receive, and that’s probably not great.
Notifications are an important part of communicating asynchronously, but we’ve sort of left it up to the individual to decide their own notification hygiene. In the last 15orso years, I don’t recall reading anything influential about notification management on the scale of, for instance, Inbox Zero, bullet journaling or todo list workflows.
So while I assume everyone with me on Teams gets Teams notifications, it seems that sometimes follow-up emails are necessary. Was that a notification problem or something else?
Additionally, I’d like to occasionally send an email at 7pm without worrying that someone on my team thinks its urgent; I’ll never send an urgent email at 7pm and expect a response right away. I probably just had something on my mind I want to get out there. I personally assume emails to be non-urgent all of the time. Having realtime notifications for email always seemed kind of maddening to me.
Lack of notification hygiene can also lead to too many bloops, obviously, and I think having an awareness of notification management — especially disabling as many red badges as you can get away with — can lead to greater mental health. For a newly installed app, assuming that the options are either “receive notifications” or “receive no notifications” could cause the over-notified to simply disable all new notification requests by default, which is fine until it isn’t.
At the moment, having a team meeting to discuss notification standards seems like a woo-woo silicon valley-inspired business practice, but I’ve really never heard of such a thing. I’d like to hear about it though. Having a set of notification expectations seems very reasonable in 2023.
