Are we playing paintball or working in the mortgage industry?

I hear and read about the importance of communication all the time; I even wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about mortgage professionals and how they choose to communicate with each other (if you missed it, check it out here). There are entire branches of sociological and psychological study dedicated to communication. Universities and businesses the world over put so much emphasis on the benefits of having good communication skills, there is no escape – it’s time to send a read receipt to the universe; memo received – communication is important.

That is all well and good but there is such a thing as having too much communication. No, you do not need to make an emergency visit to your eye doctor, you read that correctly. It’s called information overload folks. We are all victims, and guilty of victimizing others, with this behavior.

In the business world, we are always in search of the next info bomb to drop on our staff and customers. No one can fault us for wanting to share juicy tidbits with the masses, but perhaps we should stop for a moment and ask ourselves if we’re bringing quality information to them or if we’re simply using the “splatter technique”. Sometimes between meetings, announcements, phone calls, Teams messages, and emails, it feels like we are being pelted with paintballs filled with information – and frankly, a lot of that information is missing the key ingredient – that of being informative.

This overload can cause truly important data to simply fall into the void with the rest of the material we’re faced with daily and become nothing more than white noise. Before scheduling your next meeting or sending that next company announcement, ask yourself, is this relevant? Do we really need to have a meeting to discuss when it would be best to have another planning session, or could we just get down to brass tax and do the work?

In a world that is becoming hardened by rapidly changing markets, let’s try to take the fluff out and streamline what is shared. Try to remember that with every ping of an unread email, or untimely meeting, that is less work being done and more time for the market to get away from us.