In modern office life, our efforts rarely generate an immediate reward. When we answer an e-mail or attend a meeting, we’re typically advancing, in fits and starts, long-term projects that may be weeks or months away from completion. The modern knowledge worker also tends to juggle many different objectives at the same time, moving rapidly back and forth between them throughout the day.
~ Cal Newport via The New Yorker
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Here’s my proposal: Declare that the days spent working remotely will be dedicated completely to actual uninterrupted work. No meetings, no email, and no chat. Each team should follow the same schedule, saving conversations about work for when everyone is in the office together.
~ Cal Newport via The Atlantic
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The problem with overstuffed to-do lists isn’t just the total time required to execute their contents, but the fact that each new commitment generates its own ongoing administrative demands—emails, chats, check-in calls, “quick” meetings. That’s the overhead tax. Before long, knowledge workers find themselves spending the bulk of their time talking about work instead of actually doing it.
~ Cal Newport via The Atlantic
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Full in-boxes and endless meetings are not intrinsic parts of office work in a digital world; they’re instead a response to an unexpected crisis that subsequently spiralled out of control. The turmoil in knowledge work following the arrival of the pandemic showed the unsustainability of this state of affairs.
~ Cal Newport via The New Yorker
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The bottom line is that the 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. If we accept this interpretation of events, however, we must also accept the necessity of continuing to seek change. So long as these new and excessive levels of digital communication persist, more haphazard upheavals will inevitably follow.
~ Cal Newport via The New Yorker
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