occurred somewhere between the late 1980s and the early 2000s: the
same period when email spread throughout the working world.
Another piece of evidence comes from the experts themselves. David
Allen and Gloria Mark, among other relevant commentators,
specifically connect email with our current state of frenetic activity.
We can also identify a plausible mechanism that helps explain
how email might have increased our workload.
I opened this section
with the story of the frustrated scientist fending off requests from his
boss. When the scientist’s email was temporarily removed, the boss
stopped handing off the extra requests, even though his office was
only two doors down from the scientist’s laboratory. Simply adding a
small amount of
friction significantly reduced the requests coming
the scientist’s way. For
many knowledge workers, this story probably
makes sense—how many of the quick asks for someone else’s time
and attention that you dash off over email during a normal day
would you still make if you had to instead walk down the hallway and
interrupt someone’s work?
This effect implies there’s something irrational lurking in this
system we use to allocate cognitive resources in the workplace. If
slightly increasing friction drastically reduces the requests made on
your time and attention, then most of these requests are not vital to
your organization’s operation in the first place; they are instead a
side effect of the artificially low resistance
created by digital
communication tools. The idea that eliminating friction can cause
problems might sound unusual, as we’re used to thinking about more
efficiency producing more effectiveness, but among engineers like
me, this concept is commonly understood. Too little friction can lead
to feedback loops that spiral out of control, as happens when a
microphone gets too close to a speaker
and the self-amplification
recursively explodes into a deafening screech.
Something like the workload equivalent of the microphone
screech is happening in modern knowledge work. When the friction
involved in asking someone to do something was removed, the
number of these requests spiraled out of control. I frantically try to
grab other people’s time and attention to make up for the time and
attention they’ve already grabbed from me. Soon everyone is like
Brigid Schulte, up late at night, drowning in the “frantic flotsam of
daily stuff.”
What would happen to this “stuff”
if some friction was
reintroduced to the system (as in Gloria Mark’s email freedom
experiment)? My guess is that a lot of these urgent tasks would
simply disappear: the vital question I dashed off in a quick Slack
message suddenly becomes less vital when asking it requires me to
go interrupt what you’re doing and confront that look of annoyance
on your face. I might drop it or just handle it myself. Many other
tasks would probably get consolidated into more reasonable chunks.
What used to unfold over a few dozen ad hoc messages might
become a larger discussion at a regular status meeting. This is
slightly
more annoying in the moment, as you now have to keep track
of things you need help with until the next meeting, but everyone
ends up much less distracted.
Friction also motivates the development of more intelligent
processes. Imagine that I frequently need you to sign a certain type
of requisition form. With low-friction communication tools like
email, I might simply shoot you copies of the forms to sign whenever
I need them, as this gets the responsibility
off my plate with minimal
effort. Without email, however, the pain of having to come physically
find you for every signature will motivate me to develop a better
system, such as one where I put these forms in your mailbox on
Friday morning and you promise to sign them and have them back to
me by Monday morning. This system is much better for you, as it
frees you from yet another source of unscheduled requests for your
time and attention, but it was unlikely
to emerge in a setting where
just firing off the forms electronically generated essentially zero cost.
To summarize, we often overestimate the rational nature of our
workloads. If a task is on our plate, we believe, it’s because it’s
important—part of the job. But as I’ve just argued, both the type and
quantity of the efforts that make up our day can be strongly
influenced by less rational factors, such as the
relative cost of asks for
someone else’s time and attention. When we made communication
free, we accidentally triggered a massive increase in our relative
workloads. There’s nothing fundamental about these newly increased
workloads; they’re instead an unintended side effect—a source of
stress and anxiety that we can diminish if we’re willing to step away
from the frenetic back-and-forth that defines the hyperactive hive
mind workflow.
