How to disrupt responsive culture with intention and care

Yes, you can do this (and it’s really freaking great)

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At the end of the summer, I wrapped a wonderful client project. It was the one project in my roster that required me to be on Slack, so after I closed out the project I removed Slack from my desktop.

And over the next week I realized that I felt so…much…calmer. 

Now, I understand and have enjoyed the utility of Slack—in particular, keeping conversations in a thread, pinning key documents, cutting down on email traffic, messaging in real time in a professional space (I have never been a fan of giving clients my personal phone number), sharing funny GIFs (if appropriate). On the other hand, it’s not perfect. For example, keeping track of threads—once you have opened a notification and that notification disappears—is challenging. But the big issue is that I have always found the platform and its steady stream of notifications disruptive given how I prefer and need to work—in uninterrupted focused blocks. Yes, I could try to ignore the notification number on the app icon on my desktop while working on other things, but that’s very challenging—which is, of course, the point of notifications.

During a recent conversation on realistic time management tactics with Kelly Nolan, I was reminded that at this stage in my career the disruptive nature of technology at present is, well, especially disruptive. Kelly made this point about the intersection of experience and responsiveness in the workplace:

“We enter the workforce and we're junior, so the real way we contribute to the work culture when we're so young is by being responsive, by making everyone's life easier. And then we get more experienced and our value is more about bringing smart creative strategy to the table. But that requires heads down time—time away from responsive mode to let really smart things come together in your head. But no one tells us that. I think we just need to step into that realization that we need to be responsive for a good portion of the work day, but that there are parts where you also need to carve out the time to do that deeper work.”

This comment rang true for me, especially given my experience in a work environment where I was senior—both in age and experience—and the (heavily 20/early 30-something) work culture was very much about being on Slack all the time, including participating in performative channels. I found it exhausting for a number of reasons. Bottom line: My high-level creative strategy, development, and production work requires—no, deserves—focused blocks of time.

Inspired by my conversation with Kelly I wanted to share seven ideas for how to be intentional and caring in your disruption of responsive culture—not in a curmudgeonly way, but in service of your cognitive well-being and as a way to create healthy communication boundaries.  

1. Turn off your ringer (no joke)

People who know me well know that I am not wild about using the phone. There are some deep-rooted, complicated reasons for why I especially don’t like answering the phone. As a result, for my general well-being, my ringer is always off. There has only been one actual emergency in the last couple of years where not having my phone on was not ideal, but it was over the weekend and the person calling knew to follow up with a call to Jon.

2. Turn off your app notifications (again, no joke)

I remember when I got my first smartphone and was in awe of notifications. I felt like, wow, now I will get notified of all the things and my life will be so much easier! But as my work streams grew and became more involved and varied, notifications soon became onerous and even though my ringer was off, the constant blinking light on my phone—signaling email and social media notifications—was distracting and made me feel scattered. My phone is set up to only blink if I receive a text—which is the primary way Jon, my kids, and I communicate when we are apart—and my life is so much better for it. 

I appreciated Kelly’s framing regarding notifications—be stingy!

“A phone alert’s whole purpose is to break your focus from what you're focusing on and have you focus on something else. So be very stingy with what you give that power to—no news alerts, no social media alerts, maybe no email if you can. It will really help you maintain focus in a very distracted world.”

3. Set boundaries on working time

After I left academia and was scrambling to build a new career from scratch I worked nonstop—I felt like I needed to be responsive around the clock in order to prove that I was doing a good job and to grow my businesses. It was disastrous for me as an individual and for the people around me. So I decided to do two things: First, I set boundaries for myself and stopped working at night. Second, I established boundaries about my work hours with colleagues and clients, making clear that I was not going to respond to evening and weekend emails. Over the years I have had a number of people tell me that modeling this behavior helped them find the confidence to set their own boundaries.

4. Articulate your boundaries in your email signature

Because of the above tactic, I don’t feel the need to use an email auto-response, but in the past I have really appreciated receiving auto-responses that indicate a person’s boundaries around working hours and response times. It’s just beautifully clear and direct. If you struggle with 1:1 communication of responsiveness boundaries, setting up an email auto-response could be a good solution (while you work on leveling up 1:1 boundary setting).

5. Set boundaries within working hours

If you are in a work culture that is wed to things like Slack and shared Google calendars (another tactic I understand the utility of but also loathe), you can still set boundaries within the system. Here are three recommendations:

• Block deep dive time on your shared calendar in order to prevent people from booking you into meetings and to make it clear you are unavailable. Related, you don’t need to make excuses for or justify why you are setting up these blocks as you create them. Just label the blocks as “UNAVAILABLE.”

• During your deep dive times you can change your status in Slack to unavailable to discourage things like inbound huddle requests.

• And if I need to wade back into Slack in the future for a client, I will engage a super old-school tactic: put a sticky note over the app icon at the bottom of my screen so I can’t see the notification number creeping up while I am in deep dive mode.

6. Use a system to corral responses

I talked about this concept in my mini edit on how to handle response overwhelm: a key way I avoid going down a million different response rabbit holes in real time is to corral response needs in my to-do app. For example, say I’m checking email, texts, and social media in a short window between deep dive creative sessions. In my app I will quickly type in the name of the person to whom I want to respond and the communication platform (e.g., “Sarah - text”). This helps me keep track of personal and work correspondence and provides peace of mind knowing that the corral will be waiting when I get to a response window that works for my schedule. I usually take about 15 minutes once or twice daily depending on volume to handle responses in my corral and this system works really well.

7. Create a “clean slate” session

Another option is to create a weekly session, like Kelly Nolan. 

“Don't expect yourself to gather all the action items coming at you from all of those channels in real time, all the time. My weekly ‘clean slate’ planning session is the time where I check all the channels of things coming at me and make sure I have got everything out of them.”

I think it is safe to say that for the majority of us, work and life matters are not so urgent that we need to be available and responsive all the time. Responsive culture has evolved with technology and we need to disrupt it with intention and care. I like to think about inbound communication akin to the rotary phone that was mounted on the wall in my parents’ kitchen—with no answering machine, mind you. If something is really urgent, the person will make another effort, whether by calling again or stopping by. Most other things can wait.

I hope you will take one step to create a loving communication boundary today.