The three-tier rule that fixed my team's communication
Readtime: 3 minutes
Someone told me something a while ago that I keep coming back to:
"If you check Teams every five minutes, don't be surprised when you think in five-minute fragments."
Because every time you glance at Teams or Slack or email, you're breaking whatever train of thought you were on. And the train doesn't just pick up where it left off. It takes time to get back to where you were. Sometimes you never get there.
So if you're checking messages every few minutes, you're basically thinking in the gaps between those message interruptions. And those gaps aren't long enough for anything good to happen in them. (They're fine for replying to messages. But that's about it.)
There's a reason your best thinking happens in the shower, on a walk, or at 6am before anyone else is awake. Those are the only times nobody can message you.
I used to think every message needed a fast reply. It turns out most of them didn't need me at all.
I spent years replying to things quickly because I thought that was part of being good at my job – the person who was always responsive, always available, always fast.
But then I started noticing something when I couldn’t respond straight away. When I was on long international flights. Or on holiday.
Most of the messages I would have previously rushed to reply to either resolved themselves, got answered by someone else, or turned out to be far less urgent than the notification made them feel.
I was prioritising speed over everything else. And the things that suffered were the things that needed me to think for more than five minutes at a time.
The tricky part is that being responsive feels productive. You reply, you tick something off, and you feel useful. There's a little hit of completion every time. Whereas deep thinking feels slow and uncertain. You sit there, you stare at something, and for the first 20 minutes it can feel like nothing is happening at all (maybe longer sometimes…). So it's no surprise that most of us default to the inbox.
In my last few years as a partner at KPMG, I eventually did something about this. I set up communication protocols with my internal teams. Simple, explicit rules.
If it was an email, we'd expect a response from each other within a few days. If it was a Teams message, within a few hours. And if something was truly urgent, we’d pick up the phone.
That was it. Three tiers. Everyone knew where they stood.
The effect was immediate. People stopped chasing and I stopped reacting. And because everyone knew that a Teams message would get a response within a few hours (not minutes), nobody panicked when they didn't hear back straight away. It removed the guesswork, which turned out to be the thing causing most of the anxiety in the first place.
I had faster response times to clients, because clients genuinely do need quicker replies. But internally, almost nothing needed to be instant. We'd just been behaving as if it did.
I still use something similar now. The people in my team know that I'll get back to them promptly, but very little is instant.
What surprised me most was how little changed when I stopped replying to everything immediately. I'd built this idea in my head that my fast responses were essential, but they just weren't. What did change was the quality of my thinking. When I stopped fragmenting my attention, I could actually hold bigger ideas in my head for longer. I could work through something complex without losing the thread halfway through.
I think there's a question worth asking yourself here. If you look at your last working day, how much of it was spent reacting to other people's messages, and how much was spent on work that actually needed your sustained attention?
The ratio might surprise you.
The answer here isn’t to ignore messages or become the person who never replies. The answer is somewhere in the middle: being deliberate about when you check, and maybe setting some explicit expectations with the people you work with most closely. It doesn't need to be complicated. Those three tiers worked for me.
Your best work probably needs longer than five minutes of uninterrupted thought. The question is whether your habits are giving it that.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
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