Is it just me? I’ve noticed that much of what used to be individual emails are getting wrapped into omnibus newsletters. My working theory is that this arose as a form of communciation elsewhere (maybe the push towards mailing lists as part of a personal platform?) and has since gotten folded back into everyday work spaces and practices.

It took me a while to realise this but it dawned on me last year that this form of communication is a lot less accessible for me and that it’s a problem with noise compounded by a problem with navigation. Here’s the scenario: if I get ten emails, which are each about a single “thing” I can quickly sift pointless noise from important announcements by paying attention to the subject lines, scanning opening lines and deleting before deep dive reading. When it’s in a newsletter, I have to scan in a linear way (worse still, sometimes leaving my email application and the flow of work which pertains there for a PDF reader) and can’t sift as easily for information which is actually for me, or actually necessary knowledge. The end result is that I process the entire thing in great detail.

I think that maybe MS Teams has the effect on me of making all of life like this because there’s not much one can do to “sift” – conversations can’t be easily threaded, so you have to read everything when you’re just trying to find a reply. I’m wondering if anyone else finds this to be a struggle? If it’s just me, that’s one kind of request I need to make. But if there are others also struggling, then maybe there’s good reason to ask if colleagues doing this kind of bundling can do it in a more careful way… Just wondering which I should pursue! Thus are the travails of unmasking, developing a disability identity, and learning on the fly how to request (and be rejected) accommodations from friends and colleagues.

This gets even more oppressive when the people who are driving these changes around sending correspondence in a newly consolidated way start to set rules on how others can’t use alternative forms of communication. Please stop bombarding me with all these short emails – it’s so unhelpful just put it in the “bullitein”! or worse still, requirements about how we must continually attend to notifications on MS teams, leaving our email on at certain times of the day, responding at certain regular intervals etc. The idea that you need to just be open to a bunch of small distractions across the whole day seems about as sterotypically allistic as I can imagine. Different kinds of cognition may require consolidation of work tasks. And this in turn can make a person/worker more happy and productive to work in a neuro-affirming mode.