The Burden of Over-communication in the Workplace

If you work anywhere near operations, you’ve probably felt it: the calendar creep. A 30-minute “touch base” that wants to be a series. A Slack ping that spawns a thread that spawns a meeting that spawns… more threads. It’s death by a thousand calendar invites.

After COVID, connection got easier. Click “Join,” and you’re suddenly in a room with seven people and twelve notifications. We told ourselves the extra engagement meant momentum. But a lot of what we created wasn’t momentum—it was swirl. Meetings became our default way to care about work. And because it’s so easy to interrupt someone, we stopped feeling the cost of the interruption.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: low-friction communication erodes accountability. If it takes almost no effort to convene a room, it also takes almost no effort to skip preparation, to blur ownership, to outsource thinking to “the group.” Add recording and transcription, and we’ve introduced a new tax: everyone can weigh in later… which means decisions wait for ghosts.

The turn

Healthy processes are picky about communication. Burdened processes are needy. The difference isn’t volume—it’s whether communication carries a job to done.

What healthy communication looks like

1. Prescriptive → Ritual → ReportGreat teams don’t start with a meeting. They start with a prescription: “For this type of work, use this channel, with this artifact.” Once that’s clear, they ritualize it (cadence, roles, agenda). Then they “report” the expected outcome: the single source of truth where the decision or deliverable lives. No “home,” no meeting.

2. Every message pays rentBefore you send or schedule, answer: what job is this message doing? Informing, deciding, coordinating, or documenting. If the job is “inform,” default async. If the job is “decide,” define decision-maker, deadline, and success criteria in the invite itself. If none of that is known, you’re not ready to meet.

3. Decisions have a homeEmail is not a home. Neither is a recording. Pick one system where decisions live—named, searchable, dated, and linked back to the work. “If it’s not in the home, it didn’t happen” sounds harsh. It’s also how you de-swirl.

4. Constrain the room, speed the workInvite the fewest people who can (a) supply facts, (b) own the decision, (c) own the execution. Everyone else gets the artifact. If someone says “record it for me,” translate that to an action: “We’ll post the decision summary and link you for comment by 4 PM.” You don’t need more voices. You need more clarity.

5. Default to “two-way door” rulesMost choices are reversible. Time-box them. Make the smallest safe decision now, document the rollback, and move. Meetings become shorter when decisions get smaller.

Try this next week

• Write the job in the invite: “Decision needed: choose X by Friday; decider: Jamie; inputs: A/B/C.”

• Kill FYI meetings: Replace with a 5-bullet update in the work system.

• Create a “Decision Log” view: Date, owner, link, status, rollback plan.

• Institute a 2-minute prep rule: If the purpose and artifact aren’t clear in 120 seconds, decline and ask for it.

• Adopt a “one ping, one path” rule: A Slack ping must either link to the artifact or create it—no free-range threads.

Here’s the punchline: the problem isn’t that we talk too much. It’s that we talk without a home and without a job. When communication carries work forward—into a ritual and back into a reliable report—you feel the meetings get lighter and the decisions get faster.

Process Debt Truth: Most organizations don’t drown in silence; they drown in noise that isn’t attached to ownership.