The “new way of working” where we are all interconnected and all available all of the time doesn’t work.
Companies are adding tools to their ecosystem every year to solve specific problems, and each tool seems to have its own notification and chat system. Most of these tools are driving towards “real time communication” and this idea has been sold as a great feature, driving faster innovation and greater collaboration.
We already know that multitasking doesn’t work, it may even cause permanent brain damage. But we don’t need to neuroscientists to know that it’s hard to concentrate and deliver quality work when we are interrupted, and most of the tools supposedly delivering the “new way of working” are highly interruptive.
The default setting for our email system includes an icon notification, a pop up and a sound as the default notification. It’s easy enough to change but every so often a reboot will reset it to default. Imagine anyone thinking that a sound notification would be a good idea in an open plan office.
But is “real-time communication” a good idea? In a crisis it might be necessary, but most of the time we’re not working in crisis mode. In a recent Recode Decode interview Jason Fried said
…as a primary method of communication, real-time communication is a bad idea in most workplaces most of the time…People cannot get their work done at work anymore because they’re being constantly interrupted by all these real-time tools.
The constant interruptions break our focus, and it can take more than 20 minutes to recover our concentration. This cannot be good for productivity, every person I know has developed strategies to reduce the interruptions, including;
- no sound or vibration notifications
- removing apps with high notification rates from the desktop/homescreen
- turn off notifications on apps (weirdly this isn’t always possible – even temporarily)
- close email and any social media tools to allow focus
- use airplane mode to appear unavailable
- book appointments in outlook to do focused work – which triggers a “busy status” on skype
But could we also call on tool designers to rethink their notification systems from “push” to “pull”, perhaps they could allow us to schedule mini-breaks from notifications. Could system designers set up notification hubs where we collect the notifications for new work? Or could notifications get really smart and only appear when we’re working on the relevant project?
Imagine how much we would get done in a day without interruptions.
image via pixabay
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