Overwhelmed With Work Emails and Messages? Follow These Strategies to Manage Communications

The rapid change of communication that has brought geographically dispersed teams together has changed how teams work. People from all over the world can now collaborate and deliver work with unprecedented speed. Unfortunately, this increased work speed has also led to information overload and stress among team members. The recent Microsoft Work Trends Index 2022 found the average Microsoft Teams user now sends 42% more chats per person after hours.

This is not sustainable. The endless streams of work messages never stop and the silos of information created from separate but related communications make it very hard to keep up with information and retain context.

Better communication tools are needed to prevent this problem from spiraling out of control.

Speed of work

In the past, work was done by people communicating in person or via postal mail (remember that!). This was replaced by email, which made communications much faster . However, human beings need a sense of connection when communicating, which email does not provide. Email messages come across as dry, without any intention of empathy, understanding and the energy humans need when connecting. Besides, email can be slow as you must wait for the receiving party to respond since you don't know if they have even read your message.

Then, along came instant messages to solve the problem of email speed. The rate of communications has increased dramatically since the recipient knows the sender is aware they have read the message, and there is pressure to respond quickly. To add even more urgency and allow meeting participants to see each other's body language, video conferencing was invented and has become very popular. "Zoom" is now a verb!

All this has sped up the pace of work. Sure, productivity has jumped, but so has stress.

Information overload

Information overload is not just the number of information items one must deal with; it also includes understanding the context behind each communication. You must spend time researching if you need to process a message, even if you do not fully understand the context behind the communication. With multiple modes of communication, this research can quickly get out of hand and cause information overload.

A recent Wall Street Journal article talked about a user who used to respond to emails at 2 AM! She even used her laptop in the bathtub to watch her messages as she was soaking. Despite all this effort, she had over 46,000 emails languishing in her inbox.

The article discussed various ways in which people can gain control over their inboxes. Some ideas include deleting all the pending messages because if they were essential, they would come back. Some suggested setting a fixed interval in the workday to deal with letters. Creating folders with automated routing rules to prioritize messages was another idea.

Strategies are needed to manage this information overload.

Strategies to manage information overload

Determining how information is processed , stored, and referenced and using the right tools can help manage this exploding information overload. Here are some strategies that can be employed to manage information overload.

Limit chat channels

Slack popularized the idea of chat channels. These are topic-based group chats where group members chat about a topic of interest. For example, a Marketing Channel will likely include all marketing team members, keeping each other abreast of the team's activities.

In principle, this is a great idea and does speed up communications , but it has the potential to create a lot of noise. If you are a member of a chat channel, you are alerted each time there is a new chat. The chat may not be necessary for your work, but you can't afford to miss it if it is. This is distracting and leads to information overload.

Limiting the membership of chat channels may be possible to limit information overload. Be a member of only those channels which are required for your work.

Reserve email for external communications

While chat has become famous for team communication, email hasn't gone away . Email retains the "official" communication label and is favored when communicating with people outside the company. By reserving email for sharing with partners and using chat for internal communications, messages can be naturally separated and prioritized without additional work.

Leverage context-based communications

No communication is isolated. Almost all messages have their genesis in previous related messages. For example, an email might lead to a chat, a voice call, and a to-do. All these are connected. By leveraging technology that keeps them connected to appropriately named workspaces, context is preserved. This reduces the need to search for information as it can be retrieved by simply checking the related workspace. This increases the speed of response and guarantees accuracy without stress.

An innovation in context-based communication is a new technology called Subject Chats. These can alleviate many of the problems associated with email overload and noise from chat channels while maintaining all their benefits.

Subject Chats

Emails are discrete. Every email has a subject, and the body contains information relevant to the issue. It is a very efficient way of classifying the information and preserving the communication chain without extra effort. But reading multiple emails on a continuous topic can become laborious.

This is where chats come in handy. But conversations can become unwieldy when multiple people are involved in the team discussion. Not all the group members need to participate in the group chat. They only need to be included when required. This is where the innovative Subject Chat plays a role.

A Subject Chat is a chat with one or multiple participants and, as the name implies, has a subject attached to it. Including the subject gives the chat the same benefit as an email. It compartmentalizes communications. However, unlike an email, a Subject Chat can be continuous as participants add to conversations as needed. Another feature of Subject Chats is that participants can be added and removed as the conversation unfolds. This reduces the distracting noise common to chat channels. Now the chat participant is included only when needed and does not have to waste time reading chats that are unimportant to their work.

Subject Chats speed up work without creating distractions . But this is not their only benefit. Unlike a direct chat or a chat channel, subject conversations are naturally broken into discrete chronological blocks. These blocks can be added to relevant workspaces, related emails, calls and to-dos. This is not possible with any other types of chats.

Information overload is caused not only by an increase in the quantity of information we receive but because of the different types of communication we receive. These include chats, emails, calls and cloud documents. Trying to recall context or related messages leads to even more overload. New technologies like Subject Chats and Workspaces help reduce information overload by automatically classifying and organizing information. This reduces stress and increases productivity without changing the way you work.