Executive & Brand Communications Strategist
Executive & Brand Communications Strategist
I used to pride myself on being responsive.
Now I watch the green dot appear and think: Do I actually need to engage with this right now?
The answer is almost always no.
Here’s what happened: WhatsApp stopped being a communication tool and became a dumping ground for everything no one wanted to think carefully about.
Group chats with people I’ve never met asking if I’m free three weeks from Thursday. PR firms creating threads with forty participants who share nothing except that they once attended the same industry event. Voice notes, rambling three-minute streams of consciousness that could have been: “Can we reschedule to Thursday?” Forwarded messages about everything from miracle cures to government announcements that turn out to be from 2019, sent to twelve different groups without anyone checking if they are actually true.
Every notification used to mean something. Now it mostly means someone assumed I had time to sort through information they couldn’t be bothered to organise themselves.
The problem isn’t spam. It’s entropy.
Spam I can filter. What breaks WhatsApp is well-meaning people who treat my attention like a public resource.
They create group chats because it’s easier than deciding who actually needs to be included. They send fragmented thoughts across seven messages because typing is faster than thinking. They forward without reading because everyone else is doing it.
No one is being malicious. They are just doing what everyone else does. Which is exactly how useful systems degrade.
Why This Happens
Digital platforms reward speed over thought. Over time, that trains users to externalise thinking. The platform doesn’t decay. Behaviour does.
I’ve spent over twenty-five years helping organisations figure out what’s worth saying and to whom. The principle is always the same: clarity requires effort on the sender’s side, not the receiver’s.
WhatsApp inverts this completely.
Twenty people trying to coordinate school pickup through scattered messages sent between meetings. Parents doing mental maths about whose turn it is while twelve others debate whether Thursday or Friday works better. Half the thread is people checking messages hours later, asking questions already answered three times.
The structure makes laziness inevitable.
When it’s that easy to add everyone, people add everyone. When there is no distinction between urgent and informational, everything gets sent immediately. When forwarding takes one tap, misinformation spreads faster than corrections.
It transfers all that cognitive load to the recipient.
Twenty people trying to coordinate school pickup through scattered messages sent between meetings. Parents doing mental maths about whose turn it is while twelve others debate whether Thursday or Friday works better.
The structure makes laziness inevitable.
When it’s that easy to add everyone, people add everyone. When there is no distinction between urgent and informational, everything gets sent immediately. When forwarding takes one tap, misinformation spreads faster than corrections.
We adopted a system that punishes thoughtfulness and rewards whoever types fastest.
And now we’re surprised it doesn’t work anymore.
Email went the same way. So did SMS before that. Every open system eventually drowns in noise because we confuse access with permission.
I keep hearing that AI will solve this: smarter filters, better prioritisation, automated summaries of the 247 unread messages in your school parents’ group.
Maybe.
But you cannot algorithm your way out of structural design failures.
The problem isn’t that we can’t sort the messages. It’s that we never should have received most of them.
What WhatsApp needs isn’t better filtering. It’s better friction.
Friction that makes you pause before creating yet another group chat. Friction that asks whether this voice note actually requires interrupting someone’s day. Friction that forces you to decide if you’re sharing useful information or just forwarding something because everyone else is.
Some organisations are trying. Clear group chat guidelines. Designated communication channels. Boundaries around response times and after-hours messages.
But mostly, we just keep migrating. WhatsApp becomes unmanageable, so we try Slack for work. Slack becomes chaos, so we move to Teams. Someone creates a Telegram group “just for urgent stuff” that immediately fills with non-urgent stuff.
Because we never fix the actual problem: we’ve normalised treating other people’s attention as though it costs us nothing.
I still use WhatsApp. But now I ask myself three questions first:
The Three Questions I Use
Before sending, ask:
Most of the time, I don’t send it.
It’s not about being precious with my communication. It’s about respecting that everyone I’m messaging is already drowning in notifications from people who didn’t ask themselves these questions.
We kept the immediacy and abandoned the intention.
The magic of WhatsApp was immediate connection with intention.
We can get it back. But only if we stop assuming access equals permission and start designing communication systems—platforms, workplace norms, and personal habits—that make thoughtfulness the default instead of the exception.
I write about these attention and communication patterns regularly in Field Notes.
Otherwise, we’re just waiting for the next thing to break.