{"id":3090,"date":"2025-01-10T05:41:40","date_gmt":"2025-01-10T05:41:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/?p=3090"},"modified":"2025-01-10T05:41:42","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T05:41:42","slug":"instant-communication-on-work-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/deep-work\/instant-communication-on-work-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Instant Communication on Work Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Number of words: 710<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To return to our question about why cultures of connectivity persist, the answer, according to our principle, is because it\u2019s easier<\/em>. There are at least two big reasons why this is true. The first concerns responsiveness to your needs. If you work in an environment where you can get an answer to a question or a specific piece of information immediately when the need arises, this makes your life easier\u2014at least, in the moment. If you couldn\u2019t count on this quick response time you\u2019d instead have to do more advance planning for your work, be more organized, and be prepared to put things aside for a while and turn your attention elsewhere while waiting for what you requested. All of this would make the day to day of your working life harder (even if it produced more satisfaction and a better outcome in the long term). The rise of professional instant messaging, mentioned earlier in this chapter, can be seen as this mind-set pushed toward an extreme. If receiving an e-mail reply within an hour makes your day easier, then getting an answer via instant message in under a minute would improve this gain by an order of magnitude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second reason that a culture of connectivity makes life easier is that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox\u2014 responding to the latest missive with alacrity while others pile up behind it, all the while feeling satisfyingly productive (more on this soon). If e-mail were to move to the periphery of your workday, you\u2019d be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how long. This type of planning is hard. Consider, for example, David Allen\u2019s Getting Things Done<\/em> task-management methodology, which is a well-respected system for intelligently managing completing workplace obligations. This system proposes a fifteen-element<\/em> flowchart for making a decision on what to do next! It\u2019s significantly easier to simply chime in on the latest cc\u2019d e-mail thread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m picking on constant connectivity as a case study in this discussion, but it\u2019s just<\/a> one of many examples of business behaviors that are antithetical to depth, and likely reducing the bottom-line value produced by the company, that nonetheless thrive because, in the absence of metrics, most people fall back on what\u2019s easiest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To name another example, consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects. These meetings tend to pile up and fracture schedules to the point where sustained focus during the day becomes impossible. Why do they persist? They\u2019re easier.<\/em> For many, these standing meetings become a simple (but blunt) form of personal organization. Instead of trying to manage their time and obligations themselves, they let the impending meeting each week force them to take some action on a given project and more generally provide a highly visible simulacrum of progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also consider the frustratingly common practice of forwarding an e-mail to one or more colleagues, labeled with a short open-ended interrogative, such as: \u201cThoughts?\u201d These e-mails take the sender only a handful of seconds to write but can command many minutes (if not hours, in some cases) of time and attention from their recipients to work toward a coherent response. A little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the overall time spent by all parties by a significant fraction. So why are these easily avoidable and time-sucking e-mails so common? From the sender\u2019s perspective, they\u2019re easier<\/em>. It\u2019s a way to clear something out of their inbox \u2014at least, temporarily\u2014with a minimum amount of energy invested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Principle of Least Resistance, protected from scrutiny by the metric black hole, supports work cultures that save us from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning, at the expense of long-term satisfaction and the production of real value. By doing so, this principle drives us toward shallow work in an economy that increasingly rewards depth. It\u2019s not, however, the only trend that leverages the metric black hole to reduce depth. We must also consider the always present and always vexing demand toward \u201cproductivity,\u201d the topic we\u2019ll turn our attention to next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Excerpted from page number 58-61 of \u201cDeep Work\u201d by Cal Newport.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Number of words: 710 To return to our question about why cultures of connectivity persist, the answer, according to our principle, is because it\u2019s easier. There are at least two big reasons why this is true. The first concerns responsiveness to your needs. 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