You have a meeting on your calendar. It is thirty minutes long. There are six people invited. The topic is something that could be summarised in two sentences. By the time everyone joins, exchanges pleasantries, gets distracted, and finally discusses the actual subject, you have burned three person-hours of collective time.
That meeting should have been an email.
But wait. You sent an email. It was three paragraphs explaining a decision. Nobody needed to respond. Nobody needed to discuss. You just needed people to know something. Now six people have another email in their inbox, another thing to read, another context switch in their day.
That email should have been a Slack message.
But wait. You posted in Slack. It was a quick update. Nobody needed it right now. It could have waited. It interrupted people who were focused. It added noise to an already noisy channel. It will be buried in an hour and nobody will remember it.
That Slack should have been nothing. You should have said nothing. The information was not important enough to interrupt anyone. You communicated because communicating feels like working, not because communication was needed.
The communication cascade
Most workplace communication is unnecessary. We generate it because silence feels like inactivity. We schedule meetings because meetings feel like progress. We send updates because sending updates feels like contributing. The act of communication has become disconnected from the purpose of communication.
So we end up with meetings that cover things that were already decided, emails that repeat what was said in meetings, Slacks that summarise emails, and stand-ups where people report what they already posted in Slack. Information bounces around the organisation without ever landing anywhere useful.
The solution is not better communication tools. The solution is less communication. Default to silence. Only interrupt when interruption is necessary. Only meet when meeting is necessary. Most of the time, it is not.
Meetings are the worst
A meeting takes everyone’s time simultaneously. It is the most expensive form of communication by far. Six people in a thirty-minute meeting is three hours of collective work destroyed. That better be one important meeting.
Most meetings are not important. They are status updates that could be written. They are discussions that could be async. They are decisions that one person could make without consensus. They are habits from a time when real-time communication was the only option.
Every meeting should justify its existence. Why does this need to happen synchronously? Why do all these people need to be here? What will be different after this meeting that could not be achieved another way?
If you cannot answer these questions, cancel the meeting. Send an email. Or better, send nothing and see if anyone notices.
Emails are often overkill
Email feels official. It creates a record. It lands in an inbox and demands attention. For important, considered communication that people need to reference later, email is appropriate.
For everything else, it is too heavy. A quick question does not need email. A brief update does not need email. Something that expires in relevance after a day does not need email. Using email for ephemeral communication creates a pile of messages that feel important but are not.
The inbox becomes a todo list of things that are not actually tasks. You end up with hundreds of unread emails, most of which required no action, but all of which demanded your attention long enough to determine that.
Slack is a distraction engine
Slack was supposed to reduce email. Instead it added another channel of constant interruption. Now you have email and Slack and maybe Teams and maybe Discord and maybe group texts. More ways for people to reach you. More notifications. More context switches.
Slack’s design encourages immediacy. Messages appear in real time. Presence indicators show who is online. The expectation is that you respond quickly. This is terrible for focus. You cannot do deep work while monitoring a chat application.
Most Slack messages do not need immediate response. Most do not need response at all. They are thoughts people had that they typed instead of keeping to themselves. The friction of communication is so low that we communicate reflexively, not intentionally.
The radical alternative
What if you defaulted to silence?
Do not send that update. See if anyone asks for it. They probably will not. Do not schedule that meeting. See if the decision gets made anyway. It probably will. Do not post that Slack message. See if the information spreads organically. It probably does.
Most communication exists to make the sender feel productive, not to help the receiver. We send messages to feel involved, to look busy, to demonstrate that we are working. The recipient’s attention is the cost we do not consider.
Saying nothing is underrated. It preserves focus. It respects attention. It forces communication to be intentional. The messages that do get sent actually matter because they cleared a higher bar.
How to actually communicate
When you must communicate, pick the lowest-weight option that works. If a Slack message suffices, do not email. If an email suffices, do not meet. If nothing suffices, say nothing.
Make async the default. Let people respond when they can. Meetings should be rare and reserved for genuine discussion, the kind where back-and-forth is necessary and synchronous communication adds value.
Write things down once, in a place people can find them. A wiki page, a doc, a README. Then stop repeating yourself. Do not email the update, then Slack the update, then mention it in standup. Write it once, link to it, done.
The goal is maximum information transfer with minimum interruption. Most organisations have this backwards. They maximise interruption and hope information transfers somewhere along the way.
The meeting should be an email. The email should be a Slack. The Slack should be nothing. Say less. Mean more. Let people work.