Reading your post reminded me of a common social conundrum among lawyers who negotiate deals. Sometimes I will run into a businessperson, on our side or the ot

Reading your post reminded me of a common social conundrum among lawyers who negotiate deals. Sometimes I will run into a businessperson, on our side or the other side, who loves to send follow-up messages, or even makes calls, demanding progress reports or turnaround times. Almost never do these messages have even the slightest effect on how quickly I get to a job, or finish it. I have a to-do list, a calendar, and a list of priorities. Their content-free follow-ups affect none of them, unless it includes genuinely new and relevant information. Very, very, very rarely does an ongoing deal slip my mind. It may be that I was right in the middle of finishing a turn of an agreement when they interrupted me. I had no way to know their message wasn't reporting some important new development in the negotiation. Having stopped to check, I've broken focus, and will probably take longer to finish what I was doing. But from their point of view, they're reinforced every time they send a low-effort follow-up message and see progress a relatively short time later, whether the two were causally related or not. Even if the message actually delayed delivery. This leads to yet more follow-up messages, both later in the current deal and in other deals. It leads to disappointed expectations when mashing the lawyer's button doesn't make them scribble faster. Anecdotally, I see this most from people with strong sales backgrounds. Either way, I almost always find it worthwhile to cut it off preemptively, by making it very clear that I'm an organized professional, and not a rower in their galley. I have threatened to fire a client for putting me in their CRM for automated follow-ups. Things got much better, for both of us, from there.