In an ongoing work from home environment, it’s smart to prevent digital overload. This happens when a growing number of technological innovations start to disrupt your productivity.
Back when you were in an office, time with people and time with technology was more balanced. Now, you interact through Zoom calls, text messages, emails, project management software, and phone calls. Together, they can produce a lot of interruptions.
The website, The Conversation, recently did interviews with 120 experts around the world on the working-from-home revolution. The findings include:
- Almost all agreed digital overload has increased due to too many digital tools, too much information, and too many hours spent in online conferencing;
- Online meeting were cited as particularly exhausting;
- People are experiencing fatigue from being online all the time and from being expected to send and respond to messages.
To help prevent digital overload at work, consider these tips:
Don’t Try to Recreate Your Office Online
It’s tempting to try to find a digital equivalent for every interaction in a physical office. But it’s difficult to recreate things like a hallway conversation in an online world. It just takes longer and you miss out on things like non-verbal cues.
Digital tools are tools and how you use them will define your success. A screwdriver in the in-person world may be more like a hammer in an online environment.
Instead of trying to find an exact match, back up a few steps and consider the function you want to have happen and what is the best way to achieve that interaction in a digital workplace.
Can everyone agree on a policy for updates? For instance, ongoing daily updates, on non-urgent matters, may be better than multiple messages.
Reminders
Project management software is designed to keep everyone in the loop on progress. It is set up for a generic team and that may be a team that requires a lot of reminders.
As someone who worked with daily deadlines in TV news for a decade, I don’t need a lot of reminders. In fact, getting them tends to irritate me and disrupts my thinking. That’s how my brain is wired.
For me, the solution is to reduce or turn off the number of reminders. In your world, consider that every reminder is a distraction and whether it’s being repeated from another source.
You want to make sure work gets done but if you have a team that’s good with deadlines, then you may be undermining their performance with reminders.
Set Communication Expectations
It’s easy to become buried in email or text messages. Get with your team to come up with expectations for responsiveness. For instance, are there messages that are more informative and don’t need a response? Let people know it’s just an update and does not require a response.
And don’t forget to set expectations for responding to messages after hours. Don’t make people guess what you want.
Also, you can cut down on the number of messages from employees by having them group updates, that are not urgent, into one or two daily messages, instead of sending them out constantly during the day?
Create Quiet Times
While it may not be possible in your industry, can you set aside some time every day when internal communication takes a break?
It may take some getting used to but do you think it would be beneficial to make sure people have a half hour or an hour, when they can just focus on their work? This is a shift but it may be a good fit in the digital office.
Digital Overload and Meetings
If a weekly in-person meeting was an hour, then why does it have to be the same length online? Does the session really need to be that long or fit the length that was set up by a calendar application?
Again, this is an opportunity to gather your team and brainstorm how your online meetings can be improved. Maybe a higher priority needs to be placed on starting on time and finishing when there’s nothing more to discuss.
Ken Okel Performs Virtual Keynotes Too
