How much should I talk at work?

What’s enough? What’s too much? How do I know the difference?

BY Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Although human beings have created an impressive range of sophisticated and complex communicational methods, including over 7,000 current languages, rich nonverbal communication (body language) signals, and the rather impactful large language models powering today’s AI, our efforts to communicate with others often backfire, even in highly-consequential situations, such as professional or work settings.

Consider that while knowledge workers spend around 88% of their working time communicating, misunderstandings abound, not least because people are generally too self-centered, prone to overinterpreting things, and unwilling to depart from their own preferred style to meet others where they want to be met, causing major workplace stress as well as performance deficits.

To illustrate this with a simple example, many people are not even clear about the amount of time they should spend talking, either in meetings or one-on-one interactions with others. Deviations from the optimal norm tend to result not just in errors of........

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