The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital than it often seems in the moment.
If you slacked off your attention for even a moment, you could stall the entire line – forcing workers into an unnatural combination of boredom and constant attentiveness.
Optimize processes, he urged, not people.
As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.
All things being equal, workflows that minimize this never-ending stream of urgent communication are superior to those that instead amplify it. When you’re at home at night, or relaxing over the weekend, or on vacation, you shouldn’t feel like each moment away from work is a moment in which you’re accumulating deeper communication debt.
These are the knowledge work equivalents of speeding up the craft method of car manufacturing by giving the workers faster shoes.
Recall our XP case study, where Greg Woodward noted that a lot of developers dislike the extreme environment and end up leaving after a few weeks. The aspect that most distresses them? The transparency. You’re either producing good code, or you’re obviously not. Some are simply not comfortable with this blunt assessment of what they’re actually accomplishing.
Humans are naturally biased toward activities that require less energy in the short term, even if it’s more harmful in the long term – so we end up texting our sibling instead of calling them on the phone, or liking a picture of a friend’s new baby instead of stopping by to visit.
Basic control over your schedule breeds balance.
What we know at this point,” Shakya told NPR, “is that we have evidence that replacing your real-world relationships with social media use is detrimental to your well-being.
The title of this book, A World Without Email, turns out to be just an approachable shorthand for the more accurate portrayal of my vision: A World Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow.
The world without email referenced in the title of this book, therefore, is not a place in which protocols like SMTP and POP3 are banished. It is, however, a place where you spend most of your day actually working on hard things instead of talking about this work, or endlessly bouncing small tasks back and forth in messages.
The Hyperactive Hive Mind A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.
When he ran a review of his team’s Slack usage, he found that the most popular feature was a plug-in that inserts animated GIFs into the chat conversations.
There is a performative dimension to writing emails and cc’ing everybody, like ‘Look at all the work I’m doing.’ It’s annoying.
As long as we remain committed to a workflow based on constant, ad hoc messaging, our Paleolithic brain will remain in a state of low-grade anxiety.
Be disciple of depth in shallow world.
For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life. Reducing the easy distraction without also filling the void can make life unpleasantly stale.
The idea that it’s valuable to maintain vast numbers of weak-tie social connections is largely an invention of the past decade or so – the detritus of overexuberant network scientists spilling inappropriately into the social sphere.
The key lesson I want to extract from Marshall’s story is that management is about more than responsiveness. Indeed, as detailed earlier in this chapter, a dedication to responsiveness will likely degrade your ability to make smart decisions and plan for future challenges.
This same trend holds for the growing number of fields where technology makes productive remote work possible – consulting, marketing, writing, design, and so on. Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer.