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Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

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Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#21

Post by o5ira »

ShroudedNight wrote: post #10
ahussain wrote: post #8

I think asynchronous communication ( https://blog.doist.com/asynchronous-communication/ ) moves in the right direction on this. 99% of things are not urgent, and people should not be expected to be available instantaneously. But implementing that requires discipline on the part of the person sending the message.

I get the sense that the real problem isn't so much synchronous communication but the need to get information or reconcile state with a specific person. If any team member was equally capable of providing input, each individual would only have to poll 1/n as often

Interesting, but a person who prefers to poll once a day in the morning, perhaps, gets nothing because there's someone else who prefers to poll at the end of the day. How do you allow them the flexibility to design their schedule?

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#22

Post by o5ira »

Jtsummers wrote: post #15
o5ira wrote: post #14

He seems to have no sense of how IP law could stifle the benefit to humanity. He assumes that no matter who innovates something very useful, that it will spread to everyone's workflow. I think the host was correct to suggest that the government should fund this research, as you might be able to ensure it's available for public benefit and not "owned" (licensed?) by Atlassian or whoever it may be. Not to mention he on…

There are a large number of process management tools out there, not just Atlassian. If your office is more creative, they could adopt one of the BPMN-based or similarly generic tools and build out their own processes properly instead of trying to shoehorn everything into whatever Atlassian is pushing. He talks about two benefits: One for the companies (profit and real improvements in productivity), one for the employ…

I don't think framing the world as employers and employees is the right way to reconcile with a potential 10x increase in human productivity. We could consider making employers obsolete at that point. At this point in time, it isn't certain that employers (or capital, largely) will own the benefits of this 10x, is it? Can we make sure to wield it for the benefit of humanity? This is potentially beyond the scale of individual companies, if we don't let them eat all the profits.

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#23

Post by mastazi »

Every single communication product that I tried which was meant to replace email, had a worse impact on my productivity than email itself.

If you want to change the rules of communication in the workplace, sure let's have a discussion. But that doesn't have anything to do with email vs. some other tool.

If you think the problem is some protocol (as in email protocol) or some client[1]... Then my BS detector will go off.

[1] I recognise that some email clients are better than others. It should also be noted that email is one of the few communication modes where you are free to choose whatever client you want, so thee argument "email is bad because Client X is bad" doesn't really hold.

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#24

Post by molsongolden »

foolinaround wrote: post #16

Here are my shower thoughts on this subject - since I have been bombarded with emails at all times, and been guilty of now having to address them. In my dream setup, there are 2 kinds of emails, and the onus is set by the sender of the email. 1) The priority email - in which the sender expects a single person receiver to act on specific aspects, as soon as the receiver is able to. The receiver gets the email asap, an…

Front[1] is for customer-facing teams but functions roughly like this.

Teams collaborate on a shared inbox but Rules can route emails so they only show up in one individual’s inbox. With this setup, everyone else can still text or tag search and find the email but it’s only in the inbox of the person it is assigned to. If you are the lead for a given project then you’ll receive the client emails in your inbox but the rest of your team in To: or CC: will not. If you used to be the lead for something, handed it off months ago, and the client continues to include you on emails, you won’t see those emails because they’ll be assigned to the current lead.

[1] https://front.com/

edit: I guess this is still missing the sender intent component. A similar setup to what I mentioned above could be created for a single gmail inbox using rules and folders but the system falls apart without the sender being in on it.

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#25

Post by foolinaround »

Cerium wrote: post #18
foolinaround wrote: post #16

Here are my shower thoughts on this subject - since I have been bombarded with emails at all times, and been guilty of now having to address them. In my dream setup, there are 2 kinds of emails, and the onus is set by the sender of the email. 1) The priority email - in which the sender expects a single person receiver to act on specific aspects, as soon as the receiver is able to. The receiver gets the email asap, an…

Sounds like JIRA?

to an extent, yes. However, it still uses the email protocols, etc. The more the underlying system changes, then its harder to replace the system.

A lot of what I was suggesting could be implemented as client-side rules?

---

The 'priority email' is assigned to a person, and when the task is completed, no one is put in the 'to' and everyone who needs to know is in the 'cc'.

Further categories can be created to automatically 'archive' this, and maybe a weekend summary email - showing the completed and WIP ones.

---

One of my pet peeves is folks using the same subject line, while changing the purpose of the email, or not using one at all.

I am hoping that AI can be used to catch these kind of emails somehow and make the sender improve it.

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#26

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

Jtsummers wrote: post #9

> Cal Newport: But this had a huge impact on the ability of those frontline workers to produce the work that actually was measured, the work that actually brings profit into the organization, because now they had to wrangle with word processors and they had to wrangle with email and they had to wrangle, later on, with these intranet forums where they’re trying to enter in their travel reimbursement, and they’re tryin…

> The rest of the team is not as effective at quitting at the end of the day

In my experience, the older one gets the more effective one is at setting these limits.

Is that also your experience?

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#27

Post by foolinaround »

molsongolden wrote: post #24
foolinaround wrote: post #16

Here are my shower thoughts on this subject - since I have been bombarded with emails at all times, and been guilty of now having to address them. In my dream setup, there are 2 kinds of emails, and the onus is set by the sender of the email. 1) The priority email - in which the sender expects a single person receiver to act on specific aspects, as soon as the receiver is able to. The receiver gets the email asap, an…

Front[1] is for customer-facing teams but functions roughly like this. Teams collaborate on a shared inbox but Rules can route emails so they only show up in one individual’s inbox. With this setup, everyone else can still text or tag search and find the email but it’s only in the inbox of the person it is assigned to. If you are the lead for a given project then you’ll receive the client emails in your inbox but the…

But this happens on a completely different UX, right...

I am thinking of a product that is built on top of existing clients like Outlook etc, and implements a set of rules and prevents emails from going out, explains why it blocks the sending etc.

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#29

Post by annoyingnoob »

> Usually after six hours of real actual work they need to go home and rest.

People think I'm nuts when I bring up a 6 hour work day. I do my best work in 6 hours, the rest isn't my best even if I'm still productive. Things I do during my personal time are part of what I bring to the table. When work takes away from fulfillment outside of work then I have less to offer.

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#30

Post by sien »

Cerium wrote: post #18
foolinaround wrote: post #16

Here are my shower thoughts on this subject - since I have been bombarded with emails at all times, and been guilty of now having to address them. In my dream setup, there are 2 kinds of emails, and the onus is set by the sender of the email. 1) The priority email - in which the sender expects a single person receiver to act on specific aspects, as soon as the receiver is able to. The receiver gets the email asap, an…

Sounds like JIRA?

In Cal Newport's latest book what he winds up suggesting is pretty much Jira.

Which is amusing to anyone who has worked with such systems for 10+ years. Yes they improve things, but well, there are still loads of issues with where old knowledge is and so on.

Of course it's in a wiki, the current one, or the old one, or maybe in Sharepoint....

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