Narrative:

This is one incident and report that I'm not sure exactly where to begin. It was the first officer's leg; and right off the bat on climbout from our departure airport; ATC gave us a reroute. The ATC communications; instructions and clearances became increasingly frequent. ATC required multiple; and I repeat; multiple speed changes; heading changes; clearances to a fix; altitude changes and entire reroutes multiple times! Then; when we would change the frequency; the new controller would change it all over again; and then; the approach controller changed the arrival runway also. It wasn't that the flight crew was in inattentive; incompetent or inexperienced; it got to the point it was literally overwhelming. It was excessive!both crewmembers were working full-time to keep up with ATC demands. One particular ATC clearance was to cross 30 miles south of rockford VOR at 13;000 feet. It was put in the FMS; however the pilot flying failed to change the altitude alert and the pilot monitoring failed to notice due to the extremely busy nature of this flight. Both pilots and ATC all noticed about the same time that the aircraft was high on the profile and ATC asked if we were starting down. We had just started down; said yes; and expedited the descent. We were a little high crossing the fix; asked ATC if there was a problem with not making the crossing restriction and he said no. He handed us off to another ATC frequency.if ATC could limit number of instructions to flight crew unless absolutely necessary; it would reduce crew saturation.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: EMB-175 Captain reported excessive number of ATC route modifications and instructions that resulted in a high workload and task saturation.

Narrative: This is one incident and report that I'm not sure exactly where to begin. It was the First Officer's leg; and right off the bat on climbout from our departure airport; ATC gave us a reroute. The ATC communications; instructions and clearances became increasingly frequent. ATC required multiple; and I repeat; multiple speed changes; heading changes; clearances to a fix; altitude changes and entire reroutes multiple times! Then; when we would change the frequency; the new controller would change it all over again; and then; the approach controller changed the arrival runway also. It wasn't that the flight crew was in inattentive; incompetent or inexperienced; it got to the point it was literally overwhelming. It was excessive!Both crewmembers were working full-time to keep up with ATC demands. One particular ATC clearance was to cross 30 miles south of Rockford VOR at 13;000 feet. It was put in the FMS; however the Pilot Flying failed to change the altitude alert and the Pilot Monitoring failed to notice due to the extremely busy nature of this flight. Both pilots and ATC all noticed about the same time that the aircraft was high on the profile and ATC asked if we were starting down. We had just started down; said yes; and expedited the descent. We were a little high crossing the fix; asked ATC if there was a problem with not making the crossing restriction and he said no. He handed us off to another ATC frequency.If ATC could limit number of instructions to flight crew unless absolutely necessary; it would reduce crew saturation.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.