Somewhere along the way, work became a full-contact sport of acknowledging messages. A brutally honest look at modern workplace overload and operational noise.
Somewhere along the way, work became a full-contact sport of acknowledging messages. A brutally honest look at modern workplace overload and operational noise.
Katie Raymon
Somewhere along the way, employment stopped being about production and became a full-contact sport of acknowledging messages. Slack did not fix communication. It industrialized interruption.
You can feel it now in almost every company. Not just the giant enterprise monsters with seventeen layers of management and an internal vocabulary that sounds like a hostage negotiation between consultants. Smaller companies are drifting into it too. Everybody is online. Everybody is reachable. Everybody is “circling back,” following up and making sure everyone has visibility.
The modern office increasingly runs on awareness. Awareness of updates, timelines, meetings, messages and whether Trevor saw the revised Figma link before tomorrow’s alignment sync. There are employees whose entire professional identity appears to consist of maintaining the illusion that they are currently looking at something.
The problem is that all of this activity resembles productivity from a distance. Messages are being sent. Calendars are full. Meetings are happening. Project management software is lighting up like a casino. Something must be getting done.
Except sometimes it isn’t.
There was a time when meetings existed because a decision needed to happen. Now meetings frequently happen because the previous meeting created emotional debris that apparently requires processing in another meeting. Entire companies are beginning to function like support groups for workflow anxiety.
Somebody schedules a “quick touch base,” which is often corporate language for, “I am uncomfortable with uncertainty and would like twelve people to experience that feeling together.” Everybody joins a Zoom call where one person shares a screen nobody can read while somebody else says “moving forward” every four minutes like a verbal screensaver.
Forty-five minutes disappear, nothing particularly important changes and somehow everyone leaves exhausted anyway.
The strange part is that focused work has gradually become the thing employees have to squeeze between all the activities designed to support the work. People write proposals between meetings, solve problems between Slack messages and attempt serious thinking during whatever 37-minute opening happens to survive on the calendar. We have somehow built workplaces where doing your actual job can feel like something you need to sneak in.
I don’t think most companies are necessarily drowning in work. They’re drowning in awareness of the work.
The average employee operates inside a steady stream of Slack notifications, calendar reminders, Teams messages, texts, emails, project management alerts and random software demanding a password reset at the least convenient moment possible. A normal workday can feel like trying to assemble IKEA furniture while strangers throw tennis balls at your head.
The interruptions always sound harmless. “Quick question.” “Got a sec?” “No rush.” “Just checking in.” Individually, none of them seems particularly destructive. Collectively, they can consume enormous pieces of the day because the five-minute interruption isn’t really five minutes. There’s the interruption, the conversation and then the effort required to remember what you were doing before somebody needed to “run something by you.”
That’s the part companies rarely measure.
Companies tend to think about communication problems in terms of time because time can be measured, tracked and color-coded inside spreadsheets by people named Connor. But the larger cost may be fragmentation.
Human beings aren’t particularly good at doing thoughtful work while a glowing rectangle asks for acknowledgment every few minutes. A single interruption feels manageable. So does one Slack message or a calendar invitation titled “Quick Sync” from somebody you vaguely remember meeting once in Q3. But stack enough of those interruptions together and people eventually stop entering deep concentration because deep concentration becomes operationally difficult.
The workplace then starts rewarding responsiveness instead. Employees become very good at answering messages, attending meetings, updating project boards and demonstrating that they are engaged. Unfortunately, being highly responsive and being highly thoughtful are not the same thing.
One creates meaningful work. The other creates extremely fast replies to messages about work.
This is the part I think companies have a harder time admitting. Some workplace communication isn’t really about exchanging information anymore. It’s about reassurance.
Status meetings reassure managers that projects are moving. Excessive reporting reassures leadership that everyone knows what’s happening. CC’ing fourteen people reassures the sender that nobody can later claim they weren’t informed. The 9:17 p.m. Slack message beginning with “No rush” reassures somebody that the thought has been transferred out of their brain and into yours.
Organizations become dependent on visibility because visibility creates the feeling of control. If everyone is available, updating and responding, leadership can see the machinery moving. The problem is that observing the machinery can eventually become part of the machinery itself.
Some employees end up spending more energy demonstrating that they’re available than doing anything particularly useful with that availability. That’s a strange way to build a company, but we’ve normalized it remarkably quickly.
One thing I’ve noticed about really effective teams is that they can feel strangely calm compared with dysfunctional ones. They’re less frantic, less performative and less obsessed with proving every eleven seconds that work is happening.
People know what they own. Decisions happen before they fossilize into committee archaeology projects. Communication still exists, obviously, but it serves the work instead of consuming it. There is less narrating and more doing.
That can almost feel suspicious now. We’ve spent so long associating activity with productivity that a quiet employee concentrating for three hours can somehow look less productive than somebody sending 47 messages while attending four meetings.
I know which one I’d rather have working on something important.
Most companies probably don’t have a communication problem as much as they have an environmental problem. They built workplaces optimized for interruption, visibility, reaction speed and constant availability, then became surprised when people struggled to concentrate.
Nobody intentionally designed it this way. It happened gradually. One dashboard, one meeting, one notification and one “quick touch base” at a time. Each addition seemed reasonable on its own, which is how a workplace can slowly become unreasonable without anyone making a particularly unreasonable decision.
I’m certainly not arguing that companies should stop communicating. People need information. Teams need coordination. Managers need visibility. But communication is supposed to support the work, and somewhere along the way a lot of companies reversed that relationship.
That’s probably the part worth examining.
Not whether your company communicates enough.
Whether everyone is so busy communicating that they no longer have enough time to work.
Katie Raymon is Creative Director at Fireball Agency, a Kansas City-based marketing agency helping businesses build AI authority and visibility. Connect with Katie on LinkedIn.
Katie transforms complex ideas into brands people remember. She leads Fireball’s creative vision across brand identity, digital experiences, and marketing campaigns that earn recognition, inspire trust, and help clients stand out in an increasingly AI-driven world.
