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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

#51

Post by cwp »

rdiddly wrote: post #19

Why do people hate email so much? (Because they haven't mastered it yet, Grasshopper, but anyway...) The thing is, it's communication. Are we shocked that a big chunk of our work burden is the burden of communication? "He spent 1/3 of his time at work answering emails!" Outrageous! vs. "He spent 1/3 of his time at work communicating with the other workers." Yeah sounds about right, if not a little low. The other thin…

I think most people that think they hate email just hate Outlook. Some MS product manager decided that it would force you to top post, and then endlessly growing but completely indecipherable quote vomit below the message became the norm.

Back in the day, email was great. A listserv targeted to a specific community of people that know their netiquette is the best way to collaborate.

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#52

Post by slgeorge »

systemvoltage wrote: post #37
rdiddly wrote: post #19

Why do people hate email so much? (Because they haven't mastered it yet, Grasshopper, but anyway...) The thing is, it's communication. Are we shocked that a big chunk of our work burden is the burden of communication? "He spent 1/3 of his time at work answering emails!" Outrageous! vs. "He spent 1/3 of his time at work communicating with the other workers." Yeah sounds about right, if not a little low. The other thin…

Anytime anyone wants to change something and they give you one of these reasons, run away! 1) We want to modernize it 2) X is so 1990's 3) It is old fashioned. That means that person is grounded in fashion/trends/what-others-think and not objectivity. Email didn't come with a date stamped on it - "Hey this technology must be used in 1990-2010 era". For the love of the god people, think from the bottom up. Stop follow…

I voted you back up because generally I agree that using weak value judgements (e.g. X is old fashioned) without saying WHY a particular thing needs to be improved is not very useful.

In fairness, in the article he does say why all these communications tools are a problem in his opinion.

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#53

Post by abdullahkhalids »

spoonjim wrote: post #13
peterhartree wrote: post #7

> Fixing the hive-mind is going to be a billion dollar industry Cal Newport was one of the inspirations for https://inboxwhenready.org . At this point, people have paid me over $100K to make it harder for them to read their email. I've made some effort to persuade the Gmail and Superhuman teams to take this issue seriously, but to no avail, yet. If anyone here is building an email client or popular Gmail extension, I…

You know 17 years ago I used to work at a company that only delivered email at 5 minutes before the hour (9:55, 10:55, etc) and then didn’t deliver email at all between 9pm and sometime in the morning like 4am or 5am. It was amazing. Email from customers were delivered immediately as were internal emails if you marked it high importance (with the “!”).

This is what I want from Thunderbird from the receiver end. The most you can do is set the interval at which to check for new messages. But I want to specify some times at which mail is retrieved.

Of course, having the organization agreement where you know your email won't be delivered till a specified time would be even better. But that's beyond my control.

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#54

Post by malshe »

cratermoon wrote: post #43

People are focusing on the mention of email but that's just a detail. What Newport is really onto here is horrible state of office organization, of which having to deal with email is just a symptom. The hive mind arises because instead of having 1 or two people handle things like coordinating a meeting, everyone involved has to coordinate with everyone else. > Rather than strategic thinkers, managers work as human sw…

This is what I thought too.

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#55

Post by rchaud »

'Email' seems to be a trigger word for a lot of people, but I never see Slack or IM mentioned in these discussions. Slack is just as disruptive in my experience.

I long for the days when email was the only medium of electronic communication. Now it's email, Slack, Basecamp, Teams, Jira and Zoom.

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#56

Post by spoonjim »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #53
spoonjim wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know 17 years ago I used to work at a company that only delivered email at 5 minutes before the hour (9:55, 10:55, etc) and then didn’t deliver email at all between 9pm and sometime in the morning like 4am or 5am. It was amazing. Email from customers were delivered immediately as were internal emails if you marked it high importance (with the “!”).

This is what I want from Thunderbird from the receiver end. The most you can do is set the interval at which to check for new messages. But I want to specify some times at which mail is retrieved. Of course, having the organization agreement where you know your email won't be delivered till a specified time would be even better. But that's beyond my control.

Yea, the great thing about the organization-wide decision was that everybody in the company knew it, so nobody expected quick responses.

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#57

Post by musicale »

cratermoon wrote: post #41

> everyone got an email address and most lost their assistants This is important. In the 90s I was working in an office with a half dozen other people, and the director had a secretary who also managed the office. She handled things like everyone's travel bookings, routine administrative stuff, and the like. And she was good at it. Fast forward to today and all but the most senior people spend days dealing with corpo…

Fire the expert admins and have non-experts waste a large amount of expensive time on things they're bad at - sounds like a plan.

On the other hand, it can be much more satisfying to book your own travel and accommodations vs. having a corporate travel department book the cheapest, most inconvenient, and most unpleasant travel and lodging they can find - which is also generally non-negotiable and impossible to change. (And often designed to reinforce the status hierarchy - management get nice suites and business class while rank and file get stuck with cramped rooms, room-shares, economy class, etc..) The incentives are usually not aligned with employee interests. The administrative overhead of making one's own arrangements sometimes pays off in spades.

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#58

Post by sjg007 »

systemvoltage wrote: post #37
rdiddly wrote: post #19

Why do people hate email so much? (Because they haven't mastered it yet, Grasshopper, but anyway...) The thing is, it's communication. Are we shocked that a big chunk of our work burden is the burden of communication? "He spent 1/3 of his time at work answering emails!" Outrageous! vs. "He spent 1/3 of his time at work communicating with the other workers." Yeah sounds about right, if not a little low. The other thin…

Anytime anyone wants to change something and they give you one of these reasons, run away! 1) We want to modernize it 2) X is so 1990's 3) It is old fashioned. That means that person is grounded in fashion/trends/what-others-think and not objectivity. Email didn't come with a date stamped on it - "Hey this technology must be used in 1990-2010 era". For the love of the god people, think from the bottom up. Stop follow…

Email has been around since the 1960s and the best part of it was asynchronous world wide cheap communication.

Today it is a platform that supports all kinds of various business workflows. You can run a business via email alone. It sucks but you can do it.

What's interesting is that these workflows are all in conventions and human protocols and not encoded in email itself.

Email can be seen as a big send and store packet which requires human decoding. Anyone has a public address which you can send to etc...

Anyway, interesting way to think about it.

Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

#60

Post by hudsonjr »

cratermoon wrote: post #43

People are focusing on the mention of email but that's just a detail. What Newport is really onto here is horrible state of office organization, of which having to deal with email is just a symptom. The hive mind arises because instead of having 1 or two people handle things like coordinating a meeting, everyone involved has to coordinate with everyone else. > Rather than strategic thinkers, managers work as human sw…

I'm only part way through the book, but agree with this assessment.

I know I try to create ways of automating or semi-automating things to not be in e-mail or slack. The problem I have is that people just direct their reports to e-mail me or @me in slack. I think that's likely because of the "hyperactive hivemind" where that's the quickest way for them to move a task on.

Likewise I see the problem he mentions where people half-ass an e-mail just to move it out of their inbox. I have to fight not to do that myself and it's usually when someone wants "one thing", but that one thing is actually 3+ high level things with other sub-tasks that need to be accomplished.

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