Bing… bing… bing… You hear that sound? It’s the sound of a hundred notifications hitting my phone. I would like to say it’s because I am incredibly popular. But it is not. It’s just my work phone notifications, constantly beeping away and demanding my attention. “I’m here. Look at me. I have a really important message for you.”

I have said before that content is the mouth that always needs feeding, and in my world I can’t feed it fast enough. But it got me thinking. Today you can be contacted through so many channels. I have to keep up with Outlook, Teams, WhatsApp, messages, socials, calls (yes, sometimes people still like to call) and any other way someone might find to reach me. I dread to think what happens when Mr Musk’s neuro chip is implanted in all of us and I can’t even switch it to do not disturb.

And within all of those you have multiple chats, within multiple channels, within multiple teams. It’s information overload. No wonder stress in the workplace is on the rise. It’s all consuming.

It wasn’t that long ago that you could, what, call someone, maybe fax them, and potentially send an email. And that was kinda it. Could you imagine? That’s all you had to manage communication wise. The odd call and a fax. It sounds blissful. Yet here I am with my phone beeping constantly, getting more and more frustrated with me. I’m pretty certain the beeps are even getting more on edge, like it’s hit a new frequency or pitch just to really antagonise me.

Even my dog now rolls her eyes when my phone goes. In fact, if it goes off more than once, she gets up, moves to the other side of the room, lies down in some sorta grump and lets off the biggest humph you have ever heard. All this from a six-year-old Westie.

So I try to respond. In all honesty, I feel like 90% of my job is just responding to people I have already let down. I must start at least 60% of my replies with “Sorry”. “Sorry seems to be the hardest word”? Not in my world. It’s the most common way I start any conversation at the moment. I’m starting to think I have Tiddler syndrome. Just like my daughter’s favourite book, I need to come up with a tall tail: “Sorry I didn’t get back to you, I was riding on a sea horse.”

But honestly, how do you get anything done if you spend your entire day fighting off lines of communication? Can you imagine that on your CV or LinkedIn profile? Achievements: I responded to 100 emails in a day! Over a year I replied to over 15,000 messages. Absolute hero. You would get absolutely laughed at. And yet that feels like most of the job right now.

Now you might say, well, that’s what being a manager is. It’s less doing and more, well, managing. And you may be right. But it doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

So what can we do? Turn off the phone? I could, but I might get fired for ignoring the entire company. And that doesn’t look great on the LinkedIn profile. I could set a do not disturb, but that doesn’t help. If anything, it sets me on edge, wondering what I’ve missed, like some little FOMO teenager who was grounded for one night and thinks they’ve missed the most epic night ever.

I could silence it. Take that, phone. You will now suffer in silence. Yet pure muscle memory has me picking it up and checking it anyway.

So what, just embrace it? What can I do? I can’t fight it, so you’re right, phone. It’s me and you, buddy. We have got to stick together. God, how depressing. I have become nothing more than an extension of my phone, chasing the self-gratification of clearing notifications.

Give me a simpler time, when two tin cans and a string between them felt like cutting-edge technology.

Bing….