Like many others, I have been using one of the most popular workplace messaging platforms extensively for work. Over the last five years, I have noticed a habit that both bothers me and makes me curious: In a chat between exactly two people, or as some of us call it, “1:1” or “one- on-one” chat, why do so many users still @mention or tag the other person? To simplify for those who may not be familiar with this messaging platform, it’s like chatting with one friend, mind it, just one friend, and calling their name out loudly. Is it necessary? If you are talking to me, you are talking to me. Is there a need to call my name with an emphasis where it pops up as an alert, pushing my mind to wake up, thinking, is the world on fire or whether I left the geyser on before leaving home? Is this just a habit, a misuse of a feature, a false sense of urgency or simple ignorance? I ask these questions because, last time I checked, the people sending these pings are still human beings, not robots blindly executing a script with zero awareness of the chaos they're causing on the other end. I don’t know, so I decided to probe a bit and explore what might be going on.
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
I went down the rabbit hole (yes, I am creative. I can have Alice and Hamlet in the same storyline), to understand why this happens. My research assistants were the traditional Google Search and my aide, Claude AI. Credit where due. What I found is that the reasons behind this behaviour can be bucketed into 3 categories, phrased in a way that might feel familiar and perhaps wake up the subconscious.
(1) It’s not a bug, it’s a feature - To be fair, many people don't fully understand how the notifications work and assume tagging is always necessary. That’s fine. I see an opportunity here to educate them. Fellow earthlings - Breaking news, don’t assume, use your brain to decide till you have not outsourced your thinking to AI. Another reason could be more from an angle of not trusting the recipient’s tech saviness enough; they don't fully trust that the other person will see the message, so the tag feels like a double notification guarantee. But is it a guarantee, really? The point that they are missing is, just because you can, you don’t have to do.
(2) If others are doing it, it must be right - A lot of habits are picked up through observation. It’s how we teach kids: demonstrate a behaviour, and they learn it. They learn it often without formal teaching or questioning. Workplace norms spread the same way. If someone sees their seniors using a lot of 1:1 in tags, they just replicate it, assuming that’s expected and accepted. I understand doing it once in a while when urgent attention is genuinely needed. But as a default habit, why? It’s worth pausing to ask whether the tag adds anything at all.
(3) I need instant attention - Tagging feels like underlining the message or calling out your name loudly. It signals "This is important, I really mean YOU" even in a 1:1 where that's already obvious. Isn’t it obvious? Take a pause and think again. Isn’t it obvious, it’s 1:1, which is self-explanatory, that the discussion is between you and the other one? Tagging someone, even in private, can feel like a subtle assertion of authority. It’s like summoning someone with a loudspeaker rather than just talking to them. It’s like a reminder that ‘You better address my chat immediately’. Is it needed?
That makes a calamity of so long life
I am not a neuroscience expert, but I am endlessly curious. A quick read of Kent Berridge’s work (Source: The debate over dopamine’s role in reward: the case for incentive salience) suggests that every ping, tag, or message can trigger a dopamine response in the brain. Your brain treats it as a potential threat or reward and forces attention toward it. You cannot fully ignore it even if you try. I also read a research paper on Frontiers (Source: Digital workplace technology intensity), and took away a related point - an unexpected ping, especially one that feels urgent (because of the tag), causes a small but real cortisol (stress hormone) release. If one experiences it repeatedly during the day, they would end up running on stress. Do we want to delegate such stress to our colleagues? There’s a very interesting study about how the amygdala, an important component of human brain functions. The amygdala is essentially your brain's smoke alarm. It constantly scans your environment for anything that could be dangerous, threatening, or emotionally significant. In our premise, the tagged ping activates the brain's alarm system. Even if the message turns out to be trivial, your amygdala is already fired. That reaction time is wasted mental energy. A redundant, non-urgent tag-ping is still an interruption. Your brain doesn't know it's non-urgent until after it has already broken focus. For knowledge workers doing creative or analytical work, repeated flow interruptions mean significantly reduced output quality, not just speed. It’s also ironic because the recipient often feels guilty for not responding immediately, which adds another layer of cognitive load.
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
In my opinion, if each of us becomes a little more thoughtful about how we communicate, it can create a butterfly effect for the people on the receiving end. Habits take dedication to cultivate, but it’s possible. As an observer (and someone who still believes we can learn and grow), here are some practices we can adopt and a few we can unlearn.
Here’s a simple rule of three to begin with -
(1) Use @mention in a 1:1 sparingly - Since both people already receive notifications for every message in a private chat, adding an @mention on top is unnecessary in most cases. Think of it as in 1:1 chats, @mentions are more of a luxury than a necessity. Reserve them only for when you are emphasising something genuinely urgent. Be judicious; you save your energy and the recipient’s, too.
(2) Use @mention in a 1:1 purposefully - When you do use an @mention, make sure it carries clear intent. I often get chat messages 1:1 where I am just tagged with a Hi. Well, I don’t mind a Hi, but I do mind just a Hi, especially when you are tagging me and not giving any context. Let’s be honest, if you genuinely wished to say me a Hi, you can make that purposeful with not tagging and adding a note that - Hi <my no tag name>, thought of sending you a Hi and checking in if everything is fine at your end. It’s better not to leave a message hanging with a tag and no follow-up. In today’s world of information overload and constant chat streaming, optimizing the chat message content helps you and the recipient. When I get a chat message with a tag and a Hi and no context, it feels like one of my parents is calling me from the other room, and that already makes me anxious, thinking that I might have left our pet cat inside the shoe rack. Hence, let’s be purposeful and save the cat, ehh I mean save the energy.
(3) Use @mention to use not overuse - Many cultures have a version of the “cry wolf” story: if every alarm is urgent, people stop believing any of them. When everything is tagged, nothing feels special. So the one time you truly need immediate attention, your signal may get ignored.
Let’s choose to Be… Thoughtful and Not Be… Mindless
You might be thinking, "Why is this all on the sender’s behaviour? Of course, the recipient always has choices too, but the origin is usually the sender, so that’s where I focused in this article. If you’re reading this from the recipient side, remember you can set expectations: “What’s urgent about this?” “Can this wait until tomorrow?”, etc. That said, there’s a separate angle worth exploring: sometimes a sender escalates to tagging because the recipient is often unresponsive and progress stalls without a nudge. That’s a different topic.
Small actions lead to change. I am not here to sweat over the small stuff, but small stuff accumulates and becomes culture and gets normalised. Consider the virus - tiny, microscopic, seemingly harmless. Yet look what it can do to an entire world. Now imagine that virus, but for your focus and sanity, spreading one redundant @mention at a time. I'll spare you the rest of that mental image, but you get the idea. If we can be a bit more deliberate with @mentions in 1:1 chats, we can reduce unnecessary stress and keep “urgent” meaningful when it truly matters.
It was said about Hamlet that though this be madness, yet there is a method in it. So, can we also try to find that method in this madness of notification fatigue and all things overload?