Hey, did you get that email I sent you about updating Trello? I also put it in

slack. Do you want to just zoom about it? From American public media, this is

Marketplace Tech. I'm Matt Levin. The sound track to the modern workplace sounds a lot like this.

Ah yes, the familiar pings and notification sounds of digital communication tools like email,

slack, Zoom and teams, all of which are supposed to make us more productive, but all too often they can feel overwhelming.

Interfering with, you know, actual work.

Marketplace's Kristen Schwab has been doing some reporting on this.

She interviewed a small business owner in Nevada who was struggling to keep up with all those pings.

So Susan Hoy owns a guardianship company in Las Vegas. So she's talking with doctors,

lawyers, family members, lots of people all day all night. And she told me about how when things

started to go hybrids, she just became overwhelmed with pings.

She got into this habit of like waking up at 4.30 in the morning and just scrolling

through all of the emails and chats that she had and she noticed that her

employees were starting to feel this kind of anxiety too here's what she said about that.

Like literally I have a staff member who would come into my office and say did you see that email I just sent you like no I did not

You know like there was this lack of like this trust.

So she was just feeling this anxiety spread around her office

and she decided she really needed to figure out some way to manage it.

Obviously these tools are supposed to be helping us, not hindering us.

Why is this such a nightmare?

Well, yeah, so these tools were created to help manage our time, but they've almost created

more tasks for us to do. You have emails to go through,

...