२७ डिसेंबर, २०२३

"[T]he abrupt rise in digital interaction following the arrival of the pandemic made knowledge work more tedious and exhausting..."

"... helping to fuel the waves of disruption that have followed.... So long as these new and excessive levels of digital communication persist, more haphazard upheavals will inevitably follow. We need to get serious about reducing digital communication—not just small tweaks to corporate norms but significant reductions, driven by major policy changes.... [Business owners] could declare that, from now on, e-mail should be used only for broadcasting information, and for sending questions that can be answered by a single reply. One implication of this system would be that any substantive back-and-forth discussion would need to happen live; to prevent an explosion of new meetings, managers could simultaneously introduce office hours, in which every employee adopts a set period each day during which they’d be available to chat in person, online, or over the phone, with no appointment needed. Discussions that seem likely to take fifteen minutes or less should be conducted during office hours, minimizing the number of intrusive meetings and freeing everyone from endless back-and-forth e-mail threads.... The need to constantly monitor ongoing chats can be even more disruptive than frequent e-mails and meetings.... [Businesses could] opt out of chat services completely...."

Writes Cal Newport, a computer science professor, in "An Exhausting Year in (and Out of) the Office/After successive waves of post-pandemic change, worn-out knowledge workers need a fresh start" (The New Yorker).

२४ टिप्पण्या:

Enigma म्हणाले...

Tags: Wishful thinking; Those who can't DO, teach; Living in an academic bubble; Revenge of the Nerds in real life

There are many, many knowledge jobs that never required in-person meetings or communication. Workers went to the office because old-school micromanagers required it and because of tradition. They weren't socially adept then, they weren't good communicators then, and they certainly aren't different now. A better summary of the post-COVID19 remote work era is: "Lockdowns revealed the true skills required for many technology-enabled jobs. Some people inadvertently discovered they are in there wrong career path."

Extraverts often suffered. Introverts often benefited. Extraverts generate their inner thoughts through social contact, so they want more and endless interaction (e.g., virtual water cooler meeting periods), while introverts want limited, controlled, and structured communication.

rhhardin म्हणाले...

Computers are the opposite of exhausting. What you have here is a computer science control freak.

tim maguire म्हणाले...

Spoken like a man who’s never had an office job. You can’t simply apply the college professor’s open-door office policy to the workplace. You can’t guarantee that you will be free during this block every day for people to call you (one at a time—did he consider that part of the coordination?). That seems like it would be far more burdensome than working out an issue by email.

Temujin म्हणाले...

Weird concept. Talking face to face with other people to discuss- live- how to solve a problem. Just...so weird.
Next they're going to talk about how sales people might get in front of clients? So...2019 of them.

J Severs म्हणाले...

Agree with 'wishful thinking' from @enigma. Also, the suggestions are unenforceable.

gilbar म्हणाले...

if if's and but's were candies and nuts.. We would have ALL had a Merry Christmas

n.n म्हणाले...

White collar privilege, the world's smallest violin, and a single, digital tear to empathize.

Tofu King म्हणाले...

Lots on nonsense here, but I have found myself moving more to chat which I find can get to a resolution quicker than emails. Standing team chats can be useful instead of calling a meeting.

Email is ripe for AI. I should not wade through 100 emails to find the 5-10 I care about. AI should give me a brief summary of the ones I care about and file the rest in case I need to care about them in the future.

MalaiseLongue म्हणाले...

This would really be asking for trouble. I can think of at least two ways, and here they are.

1. In work processes that involve a product that passes through many stages and hands, the earlier an error occurs and is not corrected, the more new errors the initial error creates in its wake, and the more the quality of the product suffers. Everything along the chain has to be documented.

2. This is the very formula for working around and otherwise outside of established communication and production chains, thus allowing incompetence to flourish, and leaving some people (especially women, in certain sexist workplaces) out of the loop.

What a doofus.

rcocean म्हणाले...

LOL. The idea that desk jobs are exhusting is absurd. Some manual labor during my college days, showed me what REAL work is like.

Anyway, emails and written communication are good because it keeps the chatty kathys from wasting your time. OTOH, as an seasoned citizen, the preference for my younger co-workers to engage in endless emails and endless IM word strings, drives me up the wall.

I often end up writing "can i just call you?", and then we talk and get the whole matter completed in 5 minutes.

MadisonMan म्हणाले...

e-mail should be used only for ... sending questions that can be answered by a single reply
Strongly disagree if an email can be used to avoid a meeting.

CJinPA म्हणाले...

Is a Computer Science Professor the best person to be restructuring the real-life workplace?

I appreciate the motivation, but what does he know about such things?

Christopher B म्हणाले...

While I do recognize that some folks here have legitimate disagreements with the details, I think the overall thrust of the excerpt is correct. In general, the explosion in use of virtual communication encourages way too many people to be CC:ed on too many emails, encourages the creation of too many single-purpose meetings with too many invitees, and encourages group chats that similarly include more people than necessary. In addition to dealing with constant interruptions, much of the communication should be captured in project planning and requirement tracking tools by dedicated staff and isn't. Too many organizations think email and chat can substitute for real project governance while that is being forced onto technical staff, in the same way that Microsoft Word and email turned executives paid 6 figure salaries into the virtual steno pool.

Joe Smith म्हणाले...

Anybody remember that sometime in the '90s we were going to have paperless offices?

How's that working out?

dicentra63 म्हणाले...

Slack.

The answer to this is Slack.

You post questions in a team's channel and get an answer as soon as someone has time to address your question.

Or you direct-message someone and they get back to you when they can.

Nice and asynchronous, and there's even an option to pop onto a live meeting as needed.

loudogblog म्हणाले...

What a verbose way to say: Modern management is driving its employees nuts by totally abusing the new digital tools that the pandemic jump started.

This guy really likes to hear himself talk.

loudogblog म्हणाले...

Joe Smith said...
"Anybody remember that sometime in the '90s we were going to have paperless offices?

How's that working out?"

A few months ago someone asked me to print out the lighting spreadsheets for the new Haunt maze. It was 250 pages long.

We go through more paper now than we ever did.

Oligonicella म्हणाले...

CJinPA:
I appreciate the motivation, but what does he know about such things?

I would suggest you misread the motivation. It's "You're doing it wrong." motivation, no more.

Email in business is never going away. It's the info age paper trail of what actually happened.


Joe Smith:
How's that working out?

Depends on what office but pretty well mostly. I recall when all the banks were recycling (dumping) literal tons of green bar accounting reports. Lots got transferred to microfiche but a helluva lot were too faded and so, utterly lost. I wrote a wire transfer subsystem to sort and spin off daily activity to fiche instead of green bar. Later, I moved it to DVD.

Since this was all linked to the emergence of office tech, lots of corps were doing this. All those green bars used to sit up in the offices at one time. Now the info is looked up on screen.

E and voice mail have taken a big bite out of personal office communications.

Joe Smith म्हणाले...

'The answer to this is Slack.'

My very small company were fairly early users.

It really was a great way to exchange ideas in real time...

Oligonicella म्हणाले...

But for Computer Academia? Don't pay attention to them when it comes to anything business. They have no experience, think they do and cannot be convinced they're wrong.

Example:

A friend of mine John was the go to guy for problems relating to intra-bank FedWire. The guy in the US. A guy banks flew out for trouble shooting.

His sister had a professor of Comp Sci for a husband.

One dinner, this guy went on about his new book on the Federal Wire Transfer System, how it worked and how it interacted with SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications).

The guy was so wrong about so much that John, a usually very quiet and graceful individual, couldn't take it and unloaded on him in detail. The guy's response was foreseeable, "You don't know what you're talking about."

John. The guy. I developed code to talk with FedWire, John handled all the gritty from there on. I had hero worship for his expertise.

The professor was fully aware of what John did.

Oligonicella म्हणाले...

Tofu King:
Email is ripe for AI. ... AI should give me a brief summary of the ones I care about and file the rest in case I need to care about them in the future.

Exactly; with the caveat that you are the one controlling how it behaves, otherwise it could easily morph into a conveyor of directives ala all the dystopian scifi. Your servant, not your overlord.

Boss emails are bad enough.

If a business is using visual chats for anything more than something requiring an immediate vote for solution, emails would do.

The technology has nothing to do with whether it's being used appropriately. I and others have been in plenty of meetings that were all face to face groups that never called for input.

Nothing new.

Josephbleau म्हणाले...

"I often end up writing "can i just call you?", and then we talk and get the whole matter completed in 5 minutes."

Yes, people don't understand that if they want help they have to give me context, I am not going to type 5 scenarios with branching, call me and let me get an idea what you are really interested in hearing.

Bunkypotatohead म्हणाले...

I used to have a work friend who never responded to emails and had no phone number listed. It was frustrating when I needed his assistance, but from his perspective it worked great.
Like Silent Cal's thought, that if 10 troubles are coming at you, 9 will end up in the ditch before you need to be concerned about them.

mikee म्हणाले...

My father used to say that anything that could be written on a 3x5 index card to file away should not be typed out. He ran several successful businesses with 3x5 index cards recording all necessary data on his customers and sales.

That thought applies to the current modes of communication. If it can be communicated via text, do that. Call if back and forth is necessary. If it needs an email with attachments, do that. If it needs a meeting, do that. But DON'T call or email or meet when a text will suffice, and so on up the ladder. And say so if someone overreaches on the communication method used.