On a hospital ward, the monitors never stop talking. They beep for a lifted finger, a loose lead, a heart rate that wandered two points off baseline. Studies put the share of those alarms that are false or clinically meaningless at 72 to 99 percent. So nurses do the only thing a human can with that much noise: they stop hearing it. The fix that medicine learned too late is the same one your team needs — a piece of radio engineering called the squelch.

In a two-way radio, the squelch is the threshold that mutes the static so a real transmission can break through. Most teams run with no squelch at all: every ping, every channel, every "just looping you in." Then they wonder why the one message that mattered got missed.

This is an argument against the most repeated advice in remote work — over-communicate. That advice isn't wrong. It's missing a condition. Past a certain volume, more communication doesn't add signal. It buries it.

What a Squelch Actually Does

Forget the everyday verb for a second — this isn't about squelching dissent. In electronics, the squelch is, in Wikipedia's words, "a circuit function that acts to suppress the audio (or video) output of a receiver in the absence of a strong input signal." It's "a specialized type of noise gate designed to suppress weak signals." Without it, an open radio channel is a wall of hiss. With it, you hear silence until something real arrives.

The simplest version, carrier squelch, "functions strictly on the signal strength" — it's why a walkie-talkie stays quiet until someone keys up. A smarter version, CTCSS, "continuously superimposes any one of about 50 low-pitch audio tones on the transmitted signal, ranging from 67 to 254 Hz." Your radio only un-mutes for transmissions carrying your tone. Everyone else's traffic is on the same frequency; you simply never hear it.

That's the whole idea, and it has two failure modes. Set the squelch too low and you drown in static. Set it too high and you miss a weak-but-real call. The skill was never "less radio." It was choosing the threshold — and that is exactly the skill most teams have never been taught to apply to their own communication.

"Over-Communicate" Is Advice With a Missing Condition

To be fair, the gospel earned its place. The default failure of a new remote team is under-communication: silent silos, assumed context, decisions made in a DM nobody else can see. "Default to transparency" and "over-communicate" are the right correction for that disease. I'd give the same advice to a team that just went distributed.

But the advice quietly assumes communication is free and additive — that every extra message adds a little more shared understanding. It doesn't, because the receiver is finite. Researcher Gloria Mark has found that attention spans now average 47 seconds on a screen before switching, down from two and a half minutes in 2004. The channel has a fixed capacity, and you are pouring an infinite stream into it.

Here is the counter-intuitive part. Once you cross a threshold, each additional message lowers the signal-to-noise ratio. More communication produces less received signal, because the important note is now one of three hundred. The team that posts everything to everyone becomes the team where nobody reads anything. Without a squelch, over-communication creates the very silence it was meant to prevent. It's the over-correction to a real fear — that on a distributed team, what you can't see, you can't manage. But the answer to a visibility problem was never to make everyone shout.

Your Team Is a Radio With the Squelch Wide Open

This is not a metaphor that stays cute. It's the same mechanism that kills patients. Alarm fatigue, in the clinical literature, "occurs when clinicians, especially nurses, become desensitized to safety alarms due to the sheer number of alarm signals." Between 2005 and 2008, the FDA "received 566 reports of patient deaths related to monitoring device alarms." The Joint Commission, which puts the share of non-actionable alarms between 85% and 99%, logged 80 alarm-related deaths in three years. Nobody muted the machines. The noise muted the people.

Your Slack does the cheaper version of this every day. On Hacker News, one engineer described accumulating "upwards of 200 (not a typo) Slack notifications every single day because it became a battle ground of people competing for attention." Another named the real gap precisely: Slack "doesn't allow you to a) stay alertable to a subset of the company... while b) ignoring everyone else." That is a person asking for a squelch and being handed an on/off switch.

The pressure is structural, not personal. Slack's own research found that 37% of desk workers log on outside standard hours at least weekly. And 54% say they do it because they feel pressured to, not because they choose to — those workers score 20% lower on productivity. The static is self-reinforcing: the more you broadcast, the more everyone feels they must monitor everything, which produces more broadcasting. A June 2026 industry roundup put numbers on the toll, citing a Deloitte finding that 58% of Gen Zs and 54% of millennials report digital fatigue from "constant alerts, tool switching, and multiple platforms." When everything is an @, the @ that matters is invisible.

Why Your Squelch Breaks When You Scale

A squelch setting that works for five people is wide open at fifty, and the math is unforgiving. Fred Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month gives the formula for communication paths on a team of n people: n(n − 1)/2. Five people have ten possible connections. Twenty people have 190. Fifty people have 1,225 — Brooks's own example — and "as n increases, their output decreases."

Now layer the tools on top. Each new platform you adopt is another band of static broadcasting on its own frequency: Slack, email, the project tracker, the docs tool, two more for good measure. Too many Slack channels is just the most visible symptom; the real disease is that the number of people grows quadratically while the number of channels per person grows on top of it. Every one of those crossings carries a context switching cost, and the threshold you never set keeps falling behind reality. That's how information overload stops being an annoyance and becomes the default operating condition.

This is the part founders miss when they treat "we over-communicate here" as a permanent virtue rather than a setting. It was a virtue at eight people. At forty, the same behavior is the noise floor that hides every real decision. Communication overload isn't a sign your culture is open. Past a point, it's a sign your squelch hasn't moved since the early days.

How to Set Your Team's Squelch

A squelch is not a mute button, and this is not a plea to communicate less. It's a plea to set a threshold deliberately instead of leaving it at zero. Four adjustments do most of the work.

Tune the carrier squelch — decide who a message reaches. Default channels to muted and let people opt in. The norm shifts from "post it everywhere so nobody's left out" to "route it to the people for whom it clears the bar." An FYI to thirty people is almost always static for twenty-eight of them.

Add tone squelch — route by priority, not just topic. Like CTCSS, give urgent traffic a tone that always breaks through and let everything else stay quiet until someone tunes in. A blocked teammate and a logo tweak should not arrive through the same channel at the same volume. When you separate the tones, the signal-to-noise ratio climbs without anyone saying less.

Raise the bar to transmit, not just to receive. Most "squelch" advice is about filtering your inbox. The higher-leverage move is asking before you send: does this clear the threshold to interrupt thirty people, or is it a comment on a doc? Reducing notification fatigue is a sender problem first.

Keep one clear frequency for the genuine 10%. A squelch set too high misses weak-but-real calls, so protect a single, high-trust channel for true urgency — the golden-hour problems where waiting is the expensive choice. The goal is fewer interruptions and faster response to the ones that earn it.

This is where the channel itself matters. A focused live session — video plus a shared canvas where the work is visible — is high-signal by construction: synchronous, in context, with no static between the people in the room. It's why Coommit pairs the canvas with a contextual AI that surfaces the open decision and flags who hasn't weighed in. That's a squelch you don't have to operate by hand — the signal rises above the noise floor on its own.

The Point Isn't Silence

The squelch was never about hearing less. It was invented so the one transmission that mattered could be heard at all. Your team doesn't have a communication problem because people talk too much; it has one because nobody set the threshold, so the urgent and the trivial arrive at the same deafening volume. Set the squelch — by audience, by priority, by a real bar to transmit — and the static drops away from the signal you actually needed. As your team scales, that threshold isn't a one-time fix; it's a dial you keep turning up. The teams that win the next few years won't be the ones that communicate the most. They'll be the ones you can still hear.