As any modern professional or very online person can attest, managing notifications from different tools can be overwhelming. This is especially true in a transparent company where we have access to more information than we necessarily need for our day-to-day work. Here is a quick overview of how to prioritize:
Prioritizing:
- Your top priority will almost* always be fulfilling the duties and expectations of your role. So your communication priorities will start there. That includes:
- Communicating with your team and your manager. That includes direct messages or Campsite posts with your manager, and all conversations that happen in your area’s spaces in Slack, Campsite, and any other relevant tool.
- Communicating with other stakeholders for your work and projects.
- After that, you are expected to keep up with company-wide notifications and discussions in Slack and Campsite.
After you’ve prioritized those two categories, then please use your judgement on the remaining areas:
- Participating in culture-building communications. This includes the fun- Slack channels, building relationships and connecting with those outside of your immediate team.
- Keeping up with other teams’ work and decisions. It’s nearly impossible to keep up with everything and still get your work done, so you will have to make some tradeoffs! Choose which areas are the most important to your work or the most interesting to you, and then rely on the Weekly Newsletter and monthly All Hands for updates on the rest.
*Exceptions to this rule include:
1) An “all hands on deck” company-wide emergency in which you are performing a function different from your usual role
2) A personnel situation in which you are covering for someone outside of your usual team in a short-term capacity