Is too much communication in teams a bad thing?

Communication is inevitable! Whether the quantum of communication is good or bad depends on the frequency of communication and the productivity of that communication.

It almost certainly depends what the team is doing. If they are building something (like we are in our team) then I would tend to agree with you. If the team is fighting a fire right now then rapid communication is more useful. There's this middle ground where you're trying to define vision or direction but this is best done in person ideally, or using a video / phone call. In our team, we turned off instant messenger. It really bogs you down. Pilita Clark wrote an interesting article on Slack in the workplace called 'How constant Slack messaging has made work more taxing': https://www.ft.com/content/e0360... These two lines summarise the article quite well: "There are times when its use does make sense. For a one-off team assignment with a pressing deadline, it is brilliant. It can also help to keep far-flung team members in touch." "But the chief reason I will always find it hard to love Slack is that it can be such a monumental distraction." What keeps Slack going for you? It just seems like a massive productivity drain to me. I think in the context of making, too much communication is detrimental. Agree a direction, implement it, review it. Agree the next direction. When we had IM on the go we were constantly questioning the direction, because we could, now we have to wait until Friday when we have our review meeting.

For me - yes, especially if we're talking about video meetings. Many of them are a total waste of time and can be easily substituted by a single email or a solid collaboration and task management tool. I also need to turn off notifications in Slack (or simply shut it down) to eliminate the distractions and focus on an important task.

I generally only ask for 3 scrums(Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) a week out of my dev team, with only 1 being an actual in person meeting, the rest are just scrum docs. It seems to work. At first I did to little like 1 or 2, and it didn't seem to be effective. My engineers would be slow to respond and wouldn't communicate what's going on in their end for development. Granted that we are an early stage startup in our pre-seed stage, and most of our developers are undergrads. Curious if anyone thinks 3 scrums a week is too much or not enough? And how I can implement more effective communication strategies.

Definitely yes. Communication (whether strategic or tactical) should be limited to what matters when it matters. Piling up meetings (even 'stand ups') or Slack messages will just disturb everyone, and dilute the key messaging. Team members should be empowered and autonomous. Free to seek help/advice when needed, but let to operate as they feel. This creates great productivity. "Reporting" or "alignment" times should be kept at a minimum, otherwise people feel micro-managed and actually disempowered, which can trigger a very bad negative spiral.

I'd say the team shouldn't have to worry about any messages outside of their work schedule. If you have all of these urgent conversations needing to be done or notifications to send outside of work time, you probably aren't planning in a good manner. But, I see the case for really high level urgent problems. Examples are like the service shuts down, users can't sign in, verification emails aren't being sent. Support your team by making it clear that they shouldn't be looking at notifications outside of their time. If they really needed to be contacted, call them. If not, it should wait. A simple notification about a new task, review, or change can really tarnish time outside of work. It throw's the brain back into work.

I think it can definitely be taken too far. I often interpret over-communication as that person not trusting me to get the job done, and/or micromanagement. I'm sure others prefer this style of communication, though. I think it's important to understand each other as individuals and adapt (to a degree) to their preferences. Or at least seek to understand them.

Communication can differ. Communication process has to be organised effectively. Thus it will be useful.