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Online Technology and Work
Before the Internet and smartphones, we left our work at the office. We typed reports on typewriters (or on word processors and PCs). Calling meetings was complicated. Today, e-mail and chat connect us around the clock to colleagues around the world. We share information quickly and easily—and are often interrupted. We must process and filter far more information. As we show in this chapter, the changes that online technology has wrought in recent years may be impeding our work, reducing our productiveness, and taking its toll on our well-being.
The Hard Thing about Deep Work
As Alex sat down to work on this chapter for the first time, he shut off his Internet access and settled in to read the research he and his research assistant, Sachin Maini, had collected on the impact of technology on the workplace. About fifteen minutes into reading on his computer screen off line, Alex clicked on a URL because he wanted to read a related article. He turned his Internet access back on, went to that article, and found that he would need to search the web for a PDF version.
This meant a side trip to Google Scholar and an additional search. The search turned up more than a dozen related articles, many of which appeared to be interesting. Alex filtered the responses by year and soon realized that a lot of the Google Scholar results pointed to low-quality research. But they gave him ideas for other avenues of inquiry, so he entered some new search terms into Google Scholar and pulled out new articles. One of the new articles looked particularly promising, so he e-mailed it to Sachin and Vivek. Twenty minutes had passed since he had diverted his attention to the Internet. Alex had lost his flow but learned a few things along the way.
All of that would have been fine, except that Alex was on a tight deadline to finish this book. He again turned off Internet access to start over. But he also realized that writing a book in twenty-minute spurts of concentration interrupted by Internet research and e-mails was a poor strategy. As a university student, he had been able to write for two to three hours at a stretch without interruption, maintaining a more or less consistent train of thought. As a child, he had often read for five hours straight with scant rest. For his part, Vivek had whiled away entire afternoons coding without feeling the need to do anything else. Concentrating was just something you did; you didn’t have to engineer a specialized existence in order to prevent distraction.
What had happened since those days? What had made it so much harder to get long stretches when you could concentrate and get tasks done? You already know the answer to this question. Technology has made it a snap to research books, find information, and share that information. Researching a book like this in the 1980s would have required weeks in a university library looking at microfiche and dead-tree journal articles. Now, such research can happen much faster on line, and even on mobile phones, and the articles can be easily shared with research assistants.
What we now have trouble doing, however, is staying focused. The distraction and the difficulty in focusing are so great that despite the far easier access to much of the world’s knowledge, the fractured path from A to B that results from the addictive and interruptive temptations embedded in technology may be making us less productive than we were before.
There’s no doubt that technology can make work more productive in key ways. E-mail and chat have made sharing documents and collaborating and conducting asynchronous communication across time zones and teams easier—at least in principle. Technology enhances our access to knowledge and information, making many tasks far more efficient. Think of the plight of a repair worker in the field sifting through paper manuals in the 1970s. Today, workers can receive the latest maintenance updates on a phone or a tablet and quickly find precisely the information they need. But they may feel compelled to respond to unimportant work e-mails during that same work task.
A growing body of evidence suggests that the darker side of technology use—distraction, interruption, and resultant lags in resuming concentration—is likely to frustrate and stress us and impede deep, sustained, thoughtful work, the kind that continues to be the most valuable to organizations and businesses as well as the most satisfying to workers. (Alex dives in to check his e-mail. That takes just fifteen seconds, but it incurs a huge cost: at least five minutes more for him to mentally settle back into his original task!) Nearly all the evidence points to our having become scattered, interrupted, and detained in meetings to a far greater degree than in the past. (Alex shuts off Internet access but then turns it back on to leave a comment in a document for his research assistant.)
Our personal experiences in writing this book were more distracted than we would have liked. This distraction is, we believe, increasingly representative of most people’s experiences of technology and work. Pervasive social media, mobile applications, and other technologies use powerful psychological tools to hijack our attention. And companies seeking to win the war for our attention at work are using the same arsenal.
Worse, our employers themselves want more of our attention in ways that further dilute our focus, in ways formerly reserved for our personal lives. Employees are commonly expected to share company news on social media—and on the growing list of tools designed to coordinate and amplify marketing campaigns via individual employees’ messages. In other words, our employers are actively encouraging us to repeatedly interrupt our own work!
Whereas pressure to attend to social media in our personal lives arises through manipulation of how we perceive our personal relationships, on the job there are strong corporate pressures to respond and participate. In survey after survey, workers say they feel compelled at work to check e-mail, text, and chat in order to respond quickly to any messages they receive or issues that crop up. The companies and organizations that foster this mindset give almost no consideration as to whether our always-on cycle for response and participation is ultimately productive and enhances both our personal satisfaction and the efficacy of the organization.
We believe that the adverse effects of new technology in our work lives have begun to outweigh the beneficial ones. Communications technologies and workplace norms put us in a constant state of alert and are eating into our time to focus on individual deep work. More concerningly, organizations are increasingly using technology to monitor and surveil us at work. The argument for surveillance is that employees will be more productive if they can get real-time feedback. The reality is that this type of surveillance and feedback—which comes in the guise of gamification—is simply another cause of distraction, frustration, and bitterness.
In the past decade, productivity increases in the U.S. economy have stalled. Economists have posited explanations—primarily, that it takes a long time for the impact of big technology shifts to show up in total factor productivity numbers, the gold standard for measuring productivity. This is not unusual. In past technology shifts, we saw a similar period of stagnation before a big leap. But other researchers propose a different explanation for continuing productivity stagnation: that, as it is currently used, technology at work is detracting from productivity.
The Productivity Paradox and Polyani’s Paradox
Economists have long struggled to demonstrate a clear relationship between the adoption of the latest wave of technology—computers and the Internet—and improvements in productivity. Since the 1960s, they have closely tracked the impact of computers and information technology on how we work and on how efficient we are. And in the earlier periods of technology adoption, economists tracked rapid increases in efficiency, although those were largely concentrated in the technology companies themselves.
But a fundamental problem of productivity measures is that they were designed to measure production of physical things rather than of services. Production of physical things has become increasingly automated as industries prioritize efficiency. As a result, employment growth in the more advanced economies has been in knowledge and service sectors. Measuring output in this new economy is extraordinarily difficult, and economists continue to struggle with it. Measuring outputs of goods such as software is equally challenging. And productivity measurements don’t accurately account for the benefits of price declines. For example, in 2005 we paid several hundred dollars for a dashboard Garmin GPS unit. Today, GPS is available through free applications on our smartphones; we pay nothing for the same functionality. The cost reduction in real dollars is probably close to $1,000. Applications such as WhatsApp and Skype, which allow us to talk for free, and even the calculators that are a basic feature of every computer and phone, are also illustrations of things that used to cost money and now cost nothing (or, after you buy the phone and pay your phone bill, next to nothing). There is no easy way to factor such improvements into current statistical analyses.
Measuring productivity improvements resulting from the introduction of new technology is as difficult as measuring productivity in the new service economy. The effects are elusive and complicated.
We intuitively know, for instance, that e-mail is exceptionally helpful for distributing documents. But we may not accurately account for the detrimental effects of spending too much time checking for incoming e-mail messages—or of relying on e-mail rather than on face-to-face conversations. (As we’ll detail in this chapter, research has shown that live conversations are far more likely to elicit a meaningful response from people we don’t know than e-mail is.)
Similarly, even if we are aware of them, researchers cannot easily measure the negative effects on productivity of the scarcity of opportunity to engage in “deep work”—a term popularized by computer scientist Cal Newport to describe work that requires extended thought and concentration.1 Newport makes a strong case that such work is behind most of the great intellectual advances of our time and that the ability to engineer a life that supports deep work is a critical component of success. Newport builds on mountains of research concerning “flow,” a psychological state popularized by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Ability to achieve a “flow” state is widely accepted as the core underpinning of how the world’s greatest athletes and musicians attain and maintain greatness.
In what has become known as “Polyani’s paradox,” Michael Polyani hypothesizes that we are less susceptible to automation and robotics than we think we are, because most of the jobs we do today have subtle nuances impossible to reduce to explicit instructions. Folding laundry, for example, is a task difficult for robots because it entails a great many skills that, though we take them for granted, robots don’t possess. Let’s say you tell a robot to gently tug on the corners of a sheet to stretch it out before folding. What does “gently” mean, exactly? And what if the sheet is a fitted sheet, without obvious corners? What is the difference between a round corner and a square corner? And can you describe the difference between a T-shirt and a sock in a jumbled pile of laundry? Until it can be made precise, no machine can successfully interpret the simple instruction “Please fold my laundry.”
The tasks we perform every day at work, too, are far more nuanced than we may appreciate. Sending out a new report by e-mail to get feedback may actually result in a lot less feedback than handing each individual a copy of the report, looking them in the eye, and asking them to please read it and give you feedback on it. In imposing an intermediary, we may think we are increasing efficiency and improving productivity, but we are also bumping into Polyani’s paradox: it’s far harder than we may realize to capture the full importance and scope of work activities. Interpersonal interactions have long been part of the process, and removing them wholesale inevitably has unintended consequences.
We build on the themes that Nicholas Carr explored in his book The Shallows, about the effect of the Internet on our brains: work activity is growing shallower, more fractured, more time-consuming, and less rewarding; productivity growth slows; and workplace uncertainty increases.2 According to Stanford University professor Jeffrey Pfeffer in his book Dying for a Paycheck, technology companies (which, unsurprisingly, tend to be technology intensive) are increasingly unhealthy places in which to work.3
Technology has totally obliterated the border between work and other parts of our lives, leaving us no safe zone. On the one hand, some argue that this is a good thing, as the ability that technology fosters to work from anywhere on any device gives us incredible flexibility. It lets us run errands during short breaks on work-from-home days and allows us to keep working, without coming into the office, even if we are sick. Some knowledge workers are able to take “workcations,” in which they visit a foreign country and work a regular day but after hours and on weekends experience the culture and surrounds of the place they’re visiting.
On the other hand, this same facility for remote work reinforces unhealthy expectations that we should constantly be responsive to work demands. As well, it increases fragmentation of our work efforts by further segmenting our days into smaller discrete stretches of work, impeding deep work, the kind that is the most satisfying and productive. And the technology makes it very easy for us to multitask, which too easily reduces productivity.
Some work organizations have tried to mitigate this effect by aggressively enforcing absence from work during vacations and by experimenting with requirements that employees leave their smartphones at work when they go home. For example, German automobile manufacturer Daimler AG allows employees to set their e-mail accounts to “delete” while on vacation. Doing so automatically sends a reply that reroutes message senders to the person responsible for covering for the vacationer.4 Notably, Google’s human resources (HR) department strongly encourages employees to take vacations because it has found that rested employees are more productive and happier. Other tech companies are taking an even more radical approach by paying employees thousands of dollars during their vacations to refrain from answering e-mails or otherwise engaging in work tasks or discussions.5 That companies are paying employees to ignore digital communications—an escape that employees should be able to relish during their time off—speaks volumes.
All told, the evidence strongly indicates that the turbulence, psychological burden, and constant interruptions resulting from modern workplace communications technology are disrupting our work and harming our well-being.
Information Overload, Communications Overload, and Metcalfe’s Law
It is by now a truism that we live in an era of information overload. This arises from easy access to articles, songs, movies, and podcasts courtesy of the Internet. Many of us could spend fifty hours a week reading the latest news in our feeds and still not come close to keeping up. As information has become more accessible and its volume has burgeoned, we are increasingly required to filter its inflow—a task to which our evolutionary development has poorly suited us.
The rapidly evolving technological landscape and deluge of new information we are exposed to every day forces us to struggle to keep abreast of developments in our industry that are relevant to our professional lives. Filtering out noise, in the form of irrelevant and useless information, becomes ever more difficult, and the “signal,” the truly relevant and useful information, remains increasingly elusive.
Exacerbating this conflict is our workplace technology, which now fights for our attention and competes in the attention economy nearly as aggressively as advertiser-driven models such as social networks and search engines. E-mail, text, and text-based chat now swamp voice in terms of time we spend on them per week.6 This is unfortunate, because the newer forms of communication, though easier to digest and deal with, tend to be far less information-rich than voice conversations or in-person meetings. In a phone call, the tone of a conversation is easy to discern. In an e-mail, such nuances remain obscure. Additionally, flowing conversations, on the phone or in person, can yield insights or allow for the type of free association that enables creativity. In contrast, e-mail creates stilted, transactional interactions with little tendency to promote the free association and logical leaps that can lead to better ideas.
Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a communications network increases with the square of the number of users. That’s why Facebook as a network is so incredibly valuable: it connects two billion people, which is more than any nation-state or any religion except for Christianity does. The darker side of this relationship emerges as the costs of communication approaches zero. Organizational expert Michael Mankins posits that “as the cost of communications decreases, the number of interactions increases exponentially, as does the time required to process them.”7
Today, communications are virtually free. Yes, we pay for network usage, and we pay for our cell-phone and broadband access. But we rarely perceive there to be a cost associated with sending an e-mail or a text or chat message, because in the developed world there is virtually no added cost in most cases. Free Wi-Fi is becoming more common, particularly in urban areas, and sending a business e-mail costs nothing. That has spurred the explosive growth in interactions predicted by Metcalfe’s law.
The Radicati Group projected in February 2017 that by the end of 2021 the volume of business and consumer e-mails sent and received would reach 319.6 billion messages per day (and reached 269 billion by the end of 2017).8 WhatsApp, which employees use for both business and personal communications around the world, is relaying fifty-five billion messages a day free of charge, a total that exceeds the entire global volume of traditional SMS texts.9 Over the course of a few years, Slack has grown to become a popular workplace chat and team-collaboration application. Many others, such as Atlassian’s Stride (formerly HipChat), offer similar capabilities. Today, chat is, in many workplaces, deeply embedded as a third online communications mode after e-mail and text.
In Silicon Valley and the technology realm, Slack is now the dominant work chat application. As of October 2017, it was used by more than nine million people, in fifty-five thousand companies. Many of its users leave Slack running all day on their phones, receiving Slack notifications by e-mail or by SMS alerts on their phones. And, following the pattern of consumer technology’s translation into work-productivity tools, the growth of chat applications at work reflects the rapid growth of consumer chat accounts. In 2017, five billion people were using chat tools globally, according to the Radicati Group.10
Naturally, there is a hidden cost to all that frictionless loquacity. Even as Slack touts its ability to radically improve productivity, numerous critics have decried uncontrolled Slack (and chat) use at work as doing the exact opposite: creating a giant time sink that also magnifies FOMO and other human information-processing flaws such as recency bias: the tendency to believe that what has been happening lately will continue happening.
This shift in how we interact at work is compromising work quality and productivity in profound ways that also detract from worker happiness. The productivity cost is much greater than the time spent looking at e-mail or checking Slack: employees are less “present” in meetings, less able to focus on tasks, and less able to devote uninterrupted time to critical tasks.
Evolutionary selective pressures did not favor brains with an ability to maintain perfect concentration while flipping back and forth between tasks. UC Irvine’s Gloria Mark constructed careful studies that measure workers in real work situations or near-realistic work simulations, such as reading from a document and following instructions on sending e-mails to colleagues.11 Mark found that interruptions can increase the total time necessary for completing a task, often significantly, and that it usually takes twenty-three minutes to return to a task after an interruption. At work, she found, these workers were switching tasks every ten minutes or so.
The task switches that do the most damage are those requiring a worker to switch contexts: from one project to another, or from one topic to another. Interruptions that remain within the same context are less disruptive. So, for example, an e-mail interruption about building slides for a report is not so bad if the worker is at that moment working on the report as it is if the worker is working on something else, such as writing performance reviews or reviewing a white paper.
Mark found that interruption even of tasks requiring less mental energy—such as sending an e-mail—stresses those interrupted, even if they can make up the time, possibly because they are left with less time in which to complete the task. In another study, Mark found that workers who switched tasks more and had less focused time in a day felt that they had achieved less.12
Not surprisingly, Mark is concerned about the impact of all this switching on productivity and creativity.
As long ago as 2008, she told Fast Company:
“When people are switching contexts every 10 and half minutes they can’t possibly be thinking deeply. There’s no way people can achieve flow. When I write a research article, it takes me a couple of hours before I can even begin to think creatively. If I was switching every 10 and half minutes, there’s just no way I’d be able to think deeply about what I’m doing. This is really bad for innovation. When you’re on the treadmill like this, it’s just not possible to achieve flow.”13
And it’s not only e-mail: employees check their smartphones on average 150 times a day.14 Achieving anything at work when inundated by e-mail, social media, smartphones, and other technologies requires a Herculean feat of self-discipline.
Researcher Sophie Leroy has found that switching rapidly between tasks results in “attention residue” as the brain continues to work on an old task even after it has flipped to a different one.15 The rise of communication and collaboration tools leads to so much time processing messages and calls for collaboration that workers are forced to perform their jobs at home at night during quiet hours.16
The temptation to rely on electronic communication is understandable: it feels less intrusive and requires less emotional energy, particularly if there is any chance of even mild disagreement in the conversation. But the fragmented nature of modern communication perversely bakes new and painful inefficiencies into our workflows. A long conversation conducted over an office chat application may stretch out over hours, span meetings, and sustain multiple interruptions for other pressing tasks. In calculating actual time spent, it might have been far more efficient to pick up the phone or walk over to a colleague’s desk. And the mutual understanding that results from these fractured conversations is less than the understanding arrived at through dedicated, rich conversational flows. (For this reason, Alex has a three-response rule. Once an e-mail or chat has gone back and forth, he prefers to talk in person, on a video call, or in a live voice conversation.)
Ultimately, the switching costs of constantly moving between tasks, the costs to our attention of distractions, the compulsive use of e-mail and other communication or notification systems, the lack of boundaries between work and home, and the inefficiencies and artificiality of electronic communications are now making our jobs much harder to do efficiently.
Worse still, we are often imposing switching costs on our co-workers even when we have no intention of interrupting their attention. Anyone who has sat next to someone at a meeting who is constantly checking e-mail or sending chat or text messages can attest that it’s hard not to glance over, even inadvertently. Our brains and eyes are wired to monitor activity. So in meetings when laptop and smartphone usage is unrestricted and open, we end up fighting to maintain our focus even if the laptops and smartphones are not our own and we are trying to restrict our own usage to improve our efficiency and focus. How do these switching costs affect our ability to learn and to gain information?
Researchers at the U.S. Air Force Academy created an experiment to test learning performance using three groups. One group took classes in which computers were prohibited in the classroom. Another group took classes in which computers were allowed (although some students elected not to use them). A third group took classes in which tablets were allowed but had to remain flat on the desk. The result was that students in classrooms from which computers were excluded fared much better and learned more in general than students in classrooms in which tech was allowed. What’s more, the performance degradation was not dependent on individuals’ tech usage; it applied to all members of the group.17
So uncontrolled use of technology may harm innocent bystanders; it is a form of ambient pollution. Some economists now treat this spillover effect as a negative externality, just like pollution. With this in mind, much of the confusion over what appears to be lagging productivity in the face of mass tech adoption begins to make sense. Technology is not an unalloyed net positive and can detract from productivity mightily. A blog post titled “Is the economy suffering a crisis of attention?” written by Dan Nixon, of the Bank of England’s staff, argued that technology is retarding productivity and driving us to distraction.18
Though saying so may seem controversial, it seems to both of us that people often get less done in an hour now than they used to in past decades. This reduces employee satisfaction, because a sense of fulfillment is one of the top motivators for people at work, and a sense of accomplishment doesn’t readily flow from spending your entire day distracted and in meetings. Even when we do get as much done in an hour as before, the ubiquitous tech-driven interruptions add significant stress to the work.
Shut Them All Down: A Tale from the Office
A good friend of ours, Mark, is the chief operating officer (COO) of a fast-growing venture-backed enterprise technology start-up. He is a very hands-on manager and a really good guy. We told Mark what we were writing about, and he told us about his notification-detox routine for new staff members:
Whenever we onboard a new employee, I have to tell them turn off notifications. They come in and want to be notified of every Slack message, be included on every e-mail, and set up those systems to notify them on text if anything comes up around the topics they are interested in. It’s borderline insanity.
So I literally sit with them and have them turn off their notifications one by one. We tell them that if we really need to talk to them on the weekend, we will call them. Most of them seem shocked because it’s the first time in memory they have had an employer ask them to connect less, not more. But we have found that too many notifications distract our engineers from doing good work. They can’t see it, but we can.
Mark found that by decreasing the communication responsibilities of his workforce, he allowed them to focus more energy on what’s important. A rich body of work supports this finding—and finds that this type of focus makes for a happier workforce. To date most of the research has focused on e-mail. You may recall that Gloria Mark has shown that e-mail distractions and overuse lead to greater frustration and stress when performing office tasks.19 In that particular study, Gloria Mark recommends that workers find ways to limit their exposure to e-mails and to batch e-mail reading into predictable windows.20 But that’s easier said than done. In the next section, you will see why.
In Practice: How Technology Kills Productivity and Work Satisfaction
Easy access to a multiplicity of tools of text communication is creating unprecedented bottlenecks in the modern employee’s workflow. In the past, a message would be a note on the desk or a voicemail. Then came e-mail, and suddenly the volume of messages soared into the dozens per day. Then came chat applications and instant messaging, and those messages—all demanding attention and even more open-ended and less formal—ballooned further. Adding text messages from cell phones or WhatsApp or Skype or Zoom or Facebook Messenger (which your overseas colleagues probably use) commonly leads an employee to have to process hundreds of messages of various types every day and thousands per month; and managers have to deal with five or ten times that number. It’s a recipe for message paralysis, courtesy of modern technology.
Collaboration is another way in which technology does us a disservice. In theory, collaboration is a good thing. But it is like most good things: too much of it hurts an organization. In the past, the cost of collaboration was fairly high—requiring meetings, input in person or in writing (typed or handwritten), and other physical actions. Rarely did you see situations in which ten or twenty individuals were consulted on decisions. The miracle of modern technology has made it easier to collaborate on most processes. Want to bring everyone into a decision? Throw up a poll on Slack and ask everyone to weigh in. Or send a group e-mail or group comment request with a link to a Google doc. It’s easy, and everyone’s feedback can be captured and collated, instantly.
Although this process can add useful inputs and creative thoughts, it can also impede work and increase bureaucracy. Sixty percent of twenty-three thousand employees that the technology consultancy CEB surveyed had to consult with at least ten colleagues, and 30 percent, with at least twenty colleagues, each day in order to effectively discharge their daily duties.21 Unsurprisingly, CEB has found in surveys that many types of business processes, from hiring new employees to completing enterprise sales to finishing an information technology (IT) project, take longer than they used to a decade earlier.
This retardation partly results from meeting sprawl. In the pre-Internet era, setting up a meeting with five participants was time-consuming. No one had online calendars. There was no easy way for all five to communicate simultaneously until they were face to face, so if they happened to be in different offices, then just setting up the meeting was complicated. These barriers had the effect of limiting the number of meetings that people arranged. As Michael Mankins explains, the introduction of online calendaring programs and e-mails has made it much easier to sync calendars and set up meetings.22 As a result, by his calculations, the number of meetings has increased dramatically.
Using people analytics and data-mining tools, Malkins and his Bain & Company colleagues combed through e-mails, calendars, chat applications, and other sources of information on how an organization spends its time. They found that the proportion of an organization’s time spent in meetings had increased every year from 2008 to 2016, when it had reached roughly 15 percent; and that most midlevel managers spend even more time in meetings: twenty-one hours per week. With an additional eleven hours spent in processing e-mail, the poor manager has less than fifteen hours per week to do thoughtful, deep work!23
This was just one study. But in our experience, the study understates the case. We have both seen jobs in which senior managers spent more than 70 percent of their time in meetings and most of the rest in interacting by e-mail. And it’s worth remembering that the attendance of senior managers in meetings entails a cascade of organizational effects: others must prepare the executives for them. One regular executive committee meeting that cost the executive team seven thousand person-hours per year cost the entire organization three hundred thousand person-hours per year due to meetings cascading from that top-level conclave, and that tally did not include meeting preparation time or research.24 Work increasingly means conducting meetings, preparing for meetings, and sending and responding to e-mails, with diminishing time available for performing primary job functions. Harris Interactive surveyed two thousand office workers and found that only 45 percent of their time was spent completing their primary job duties; 55 percent was spent on secondary organizational tasks such as e-mail, meetings, and scheduling.25
The Slot Machine at the Office
One of the signature trends of technology in the Internet age has been the reversal of technology adoption flows. In the past, the copy machine, the fax, the mobile phone (before smartphones), and the personal computer all started as work tools and then moved into the consumer realm. With the Internet, and with smartphones, that trend reversed. Unexpectedly, consumer tools such as chat, e-mail, and social networks were brought into the workplace—not by IT managers, but by employees looking to increase their productivity. This path had been greased by the demands of workers that they be able to use their own smartphones (and, to a lesser degree, laptops and tablets) to conduct work business such as making phone calls and sending e-mails.
So the slot machine in our pockets was tossed into the workplace, with unsurprising results. Our work tools began to more closely resemble our consumer products. Chat tool Slack uses numerous techniques (as discussed in chapter 1) that encourage workers to pay attention to it as much as possible and consume as much as possible. The company’s tagline, after all, is “Where Work Happens.” Translation? Don’t leave Slack; you will miss something and fail at your job. Urging us to turn on desktop notifications, e-mail notifications when someone mentions our name, and shortcuts that allow us to post GIFs in the chat channel, the product designers of Slack have clearly read Nir Eyal’s book.
Slack is one of many services engaging businesses and work teams using approaches similar to those of consumer product designers. In fact, most providers of work technologies, from human resources systems to document-sharing systems to systems managing customer relationships, now emphasize some sort of interruptive notifications system to alert us to a new message or some other event. The result is a blizzard of notifications and intense pressure to keep many of those notification systems on because ignoring a notification is likely to mean ignoring something that somebody considers important.
This new reality of notification insanity obstructs our concentration not only as individuals but also when we are together—in the flesh, or in a virtual conference. In a study of 1,200 office employees in 2015, videoconferencing company Highfive found that, on average, 4.73 messages, texts, or e-mails are sent by each person during a normal in-person meeting. Seventy-three percent of millennial respondents acknowledged checking their phones during conference calls, and 45 percent acknowledged checking them during in-person meetings. Ironically, 47 percent of respondents’ biggest problem with meetings was that co-workers were not paying attention.26
So the behavior that intermittent variable rewards induces bleeds over easily from our personal lives into our work lives. The slot machine is in our pockets, on our laptops, and on our videoconferencing systems.
The Trouble with Electronic Communications: Why Can’t We Just Talk?
As a result of this trend toward meeting sprawl and a glut of messages, we spend less time in the most important form of communication: one-to-one or very-small-group discussions face to face. The evidence is clear that e-mail is a less effective communication tool than voice or in-person conversations. According to a large body of research, we as humans tend to misunderstand the effect of our e-mails on others and struggle to properly ascertain the tone of those we receive, a typical difficulty being that something intended to be funny may come across as sarcastic.
Research indicates that e-mail is not only more confusing but also less effective than conversation. A study of more than four hundred people given the task of convincing others to take a survey found that in-person requests to strangers were up to thirty-four times as likely to work as e-mailed ones.27 This experiment clearly is not 100 percent transferrable to the workplace, where workers are all dealing with bosses and co-workers whom they already know, but the effect probably exists there, too. Many of us have had the experience of walking around from desk to desk to collect money for a gift for someone’s birthday or sitting in a room together to complete an HR survey after everyone failed to complete it on their own.
Taking this a step further, many technology companies are rethinking whether remote work is as good as in-person work. In March 2017, Michelle Peluso, chief marketing officer of IBM, notified her team of 2,600 distributed employees that they would need to either commute to one of six core office locations or relocate.28 IBM had long been a pioneer of remote work, so this announcement sent shockwaves through both the company and the technology and business ecosystem.
The announcement, though, was bowing to reality. Most of the research on virtual teams finds them to be less effective when face-to-face collaboration is a core part of the job. As a 2016 article from the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior concludes, “Virtual teams have higher levels of confusion and lower levels of satisfaction than their face-to-face counterparts, as well as less accuracy recording their decisions. The end result of these communication problems is a reduction in mutual knowledge among team members. A further issue in virtual teams is a lack of social and status cues.”29
IBM’s Peluso is not alone among big-tech-company executives in having come to realize that remote work is a poor substitute for physical presence. Facebook chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg offers employees hefty subsidies to live within a short drive of a Facebook office. Former Apple boss Steve Jobs always emphasized the importance that coming in to the office held. And Google has long paid for an expensive employees’ bus service to make it easier for its employees to travel to work.
Academic research is also finding that face-to-face work can result in higher levels of creativity. “If you are part of a team or managing others, you need to be in work [in the office] most days of the week,” says economist Nicholas Bloom in an article in the online publication Quartz. He should know. Bloom authored one of the most influential papers that originally found strong benefits in telecommuting. The verdict is now clear: the majority of researchers find that remote workforces are not as productive or creative as in-person teams. After decades of favoring remote work, many companies are now mandating at least some physical presence in an office.30 Technology has failed to conquer distance.
Economists are also struggling to find evidence that technology adoption has led to higher productivity over the past decade. In seminal research on growth and the economy, economist Robert Solow showed that increases in human living standards come largely from improvements in productivity rather than from working longer hours. For many years, productivity improvements driven by technology boosted living standards. But U.S. productivity growth slowed sharply after the Internet boom. During those boom years, from 1995 to 2004, labor productivity rose at an average rate of 3.25 percent per annum, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Between 2004 and 2010 the rate of annual productivity growth leveled to 2 percent on average. Since then, from 2010 through 2016, productivity growth in the U.S. economy has plunged to 0.5 percent, a rate of growth so low that it could mean real declines in living standards. All the other developed economies have experienced a similar deceleration in productivity growth.31
This so-called productivity paradox perplexes economists, given the rapid improvements in technology accompanied by plunging prices of tech goods and services. In the past, such innovation would have spurred productivity growth. One common explanation is that we are not measuring productivity gains effectively because our measurement metrics are outdated and still geared to a world of agricultural and industrial production. A second explanation is that, like other massive technological shifts, there is an interim period before businesses and organizations can absorb the changes and take advantage of them to boost productivity (and subsequently profits and wages).
Economist Robert Gordon offers an alternative explanation for technology’s failure to continue making marked improvements in productivity. He hypothesizes that earlier technological revolutions—the power grid, the railroad, the automobile—were more foundational and that our digital revolution is less general purpose and more cosmetic.32 Either the common explanations—poor measurement, slow absorption—or Gordon’s interpretation, however, may be consistent with what we propose: that technology has become more destructive and less helpful to work and productivity. The more tech we get, the less productive we are.
Even as technology has had profoundly positive effects on collective productivity—think Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb—the costs of our embrace of it to those using these services have been high. We posit that the advantages in using these technology-advantaged platforms may not outweigh the drag of addictive and interruptive technology systems on our individual levels of productivity and happiness. To say that technology has had no positive effect would be inaccurate, but we must consider the distinction between collective cost–benefit and personal cost– benefit comparisons, which too extend into collective effects. Striking the right balance between habit change and addiction, and between efficiency and obsession, is something our society has failed to do.
The Rising Specter of Technostress
Studies have increasingly labeled the negative effect of technology that we are describing here technostress. The by-products of this stress are a poor work–life balance, a growing sense of insecurity, and a strong fear of missing out. According to technostress researcher Monideepa Tarafdar, technostress “comes from our feeling forced to multitask rapidly over streams of information from different devices, having to constantly learn how to use ever-changing I.T., and the sense of being tied to our devices with no real divide between work and home.”33
Tarafdar cites a host of research that underscores the depth of the pathology. Nearly three-quarters of six hundred computer-using professionals surveyed felt that not being constantly connected would put them at a professional disadvantage, and this cohort reported on average twenty-three minutes per day at home responding to e-mails (though given our human tendency to under-report, the real investment is likely to be significantly higher).
The continual disruption inherent in switching from task to task and endlessly learning new technology tools results in less quality time with colleagues, clients, and partner companies. Tarafdar concludes, “The very qualities that make I.T. useful—dependability, convenience, ease of use and quick processing—may also be harming productivity and people’s well-being.”34
Vivek and Alex have seen many friends wake up to the stress and damage that technology can cause to their productivity and their work. The ones who are slaves to technology—working at organizations that demand fast response times and do a poor job of prioritizing communication demands—rapidly burn out and become disillusioned with their jobs.
To conclude this section on work, we propose a slight twist on an old adage. Parkinson’s law, first appearing in a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955, expresses mathematically the notion that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.35 Generally, it is used to describe the sprawl of bureaucracy in an organization, and the phenomenon it describes is never considered a positive thing. A corresponding rule of thumb in the technology age may be the Law of Application Sprawl: the number of applications that employees are asked to use at work is inversely correlated with their productivity and happiness.
Complexity Begets Unhappiness at Work
Much of what has been written about technology implies that modern technology empowers workers to be more effective and more efficient in two ways: by allowing them to be more independent and by providing the means and capacities they need through technological intermediaries. In our experience, the opposite is usually true. We used to share information in the office through the interoffice memo or a conference call; then the channels expanded to encompass e-mail, chat, text, and other technologies. We used to store information on paper in a file in a cabinet. Then we had a hard drive and maybe a network drive. Now, many workers rely on Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box.net as well as individual hard drives and a network drive.
When Alex started work at Mozilla, he found that his team was using more than a dozen tools for chat, file sharing, and project management, including Skype, IRC, Slack, Dropbox, Campfire, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Google Sidles, and Microsoft Excel. Finding a document or understanding where it was located was next to impossible without finding the person who had the “tribal knowledge.” The difficulties were compounded by generic titles on files and a lack of version control.
This was a classic example of chaotic application sprawl. Each application required its own password and its own account management. Each had a different user interface. Each had its own conventions for searching, for sharing, and for other key functions. Some of these conventions may have been similar, but rarely were two functions located in the same place or expressed in the same way.
Each additional application requires employees to remember and deal with more such variations. Larger variations cause bigger problems still. For example, Google Drive, Skype, and Dropbox can all be used for file sharing, but they do it in different ways and have different size limitations on file transfers. So if you want to transfer a file, you have to think which one will be the best tool rather than just share the file. That’s not to say that any one of them is wrong. But an employee having to deal with all three must remember three times as many combinations of characteristics, and that becomes taxing very quickly. Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel likewise differ in ways that can make sharing files back and forth a chore. Equally difficult are the dramatic differences between the two in where features are located, and in what features are available. Being proficient at both is a waste of mental energy and time.
Adding external agencies and partners into the mix can exacerbate this problem. Sometimes, in order to be more efficient, the relationship owner inside the client company chooses to use the tools the agency likes rather than the company’s usual tools—with the perverse effect of forcing company colleagues to work with yet another application.
Information-retrieval problems are magnified by application sprawl. If you work at a company and need to find the latest version of a document or a presentation, even moderate application sprawl may triple the time it takes for you to search in the different places and applications where the document may be stored. If you received the information but didn’t bother to save it to one of your own storage applications, you will also have to search your e-mail and potentially your Slack channels. This replication generates massive overhead. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company and others have found that employees spend 19 percent of their workweek searching for information necessary for doing their jobs. (Ironically, the McKinsey report argues that social tools can reduce the time that employees spend in searching—if they are properly used.)36
Application sprawl has become far more pronounced in the past decade because we can now deliver applications over the Internet and have them running in minutes, making the immediate cost of solving a problem with a new application (or tool) very low. Most organizations (and knowledge workers) fail to consider not only the long-term cost, in time and complexity, of any single new application but also the time and complexity inherent in the constellation of tools an organization expects workers to use.
Though technology robs us of work satisfaction partly through the blurring of boundaries between work and home, and partly through consumerization of work technology with intermittent rewards, a considerable portion of the blame for our increasing frustrations at work belongs to poor system and process design. As anyone who has had the experience of reformatting an Excel document into sheets or trying to find a file among a dozen versions on deadline at 11 p.m. on a weeknight can tell you, technology system and process design has real consequences for our daily lives. Yet it’s usually tackled only as an afterthought.
The shortfalls in design result in chaos. Nature abhors a vacuum, so work expands to fill time, and so does technology, leading us to spend less time on doing meaningful work and more on managing technology and trying to remember where we stashed our work—not a fulfilling way to spend our working hours. We hate to manage e-mails. We hate to search for files. We spend far more of our day than we’d like to as slaves to our applications, administering technology, attending meetings facilitated by technology, and responding to low-priority communications made frictionless by technology. And we now find that this wonderful technology, rather than make our lives easier, has trapped us in a relentless and demoralizing techno-prison of our own design at the office.