Mastodawn

Nami May 3, 2023

Recently, I have been overwhelmed with the sheer amount of coordination and communication that comes with my involvement in different projects and organizations.

I have several friends who have similar problems and aim to reduce their communication overhead or simply complain about it.

Do you people have any advice or ideas on how to deal with that?

One idea I already heard about is "simply wait a bit before replying, because that makes the overall pace slower". (Speed upholds institutions)

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Nami May 3, 2023

The tricky thing is that communicating doesn't even feel like work, and even though you are very exhausted after reading chats and replying for 2 hours, it doesn't feel like *success*, not even like *effort*.

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Nami May 3, 2023

And another problem is that you can only do interpretative work for so many different projects, because keeping details, relevant people, and circumstances about more than 3 endeavours in your head will just not work, and you will forget and overlook things. This is often the first point where people realize that they have to do something about it; it feels like personal failure, weakness, and burnout.

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Laura Hilliger May 3, 2023

@compl4xx I've found that it is *incredibly* helpful to have distinct blocks of time for different buckets of projects/orgs/comms work. On Tuesday afternoon, I know I'm going to look at ONLY THIS PROJECT's slack, update, people, trello, emails, etc. If the comms channel is sort of random, like a FOSS channel, I conceptually bucket it as "pro bono work" and do multiple FOSS things in that block. I leave "Jenny" unread in my inbox until it's her afternoon.

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Laura Hilliger

@compl4xx Also, I'm against instant reply. Your emergency != my emergency. I mean, I'm not cruel or anything, but most of the time the thing can wait a day or two.