Protect your productivity quadrant to escape the rat race for good
How lucky are we that, as knowledge workers, we can make use of the most advanced set of tools ever seen by humanity? Software tools like Gmail, Slack, Discord, Jira, Figma, Office… have become a standard. We are a few clicks/dollars away from enjoying an amazing set of features for collaborating, communicating, designing, organizing, creating and executing. Multitasking for the win… if only.
I am not a Gartner pundit to pontificate on any 10-year long productivity trend. What I know is that humans are s**t at multitasking effectively. We are so bad at it, that those very same experts who years ago praised multitasking as an inherent human “feature” are now blaming it unashamedly as the obvious “bug”. Now they call it “context-switching”. Google it if you dare to.
Context switching is our impulse to switch from one task to an unrelated one not because you feel like doing it, but because very powerful tools nudge you to. Enter “notifications”. As product Jedi Steven Sinofsky reminds us, “notifications don’t solve the ‘take notice’ scenario users have. They solve the ‘take more notice of me’ problem apps have.” And of course, don’t get me started on the sheer volume of jobs emerging from and along these platforms. Good luck with that.
So, at https://www.honest.is/ we have come up with this XY chart to better understand what works and what doesn’t. Tools are not evil per se, they are just high-maintenance, high-attention seekers, overlapping with similar ‘characters’ aiming to capture a piece of your most precious and scarcest resource, Time.
Time can be split up into two main subsets: one that relates to spontaneous interactions vs time-boxed ones (scheduled-unscheduled) and another one that relates to the way you interact with others (sync-async). Taking into account that all projects are anything that require collaboration -even if it's "only" between you-today and you-tomorrow- this XY chart encapsulates over 95% of all cases.
On both extremes of the X axis (synchronicity), email and phone calls (or Zooms) are great at solving both use cases. Same with the Y axis, where many tools are 9-to-6 business-only tools while others are unscheduled by default. Frustration soars when the originator and/or recipient of a “job” can’t align on the priority of that “job”. A very human “bug” that percolates across all teams. Surprisingly, instead of working as a counterbalance of that bug, many of these tools simply reinforce it: the more Slack comments a user creates, the happier the product manager in charge of reaching her KPI quarterly target is. Quick win for a few, unfathomable long-term consequences for all.
Let me use a basic example for this: if I send you an email (or Slack comment) asking for your help on some minor detail regarding a complaint from one of our users, but I forget to mention how important it is to me (or when exactly am I expecting your answer to show up on my email), we are both undermining the basics for this task to be expedited optimally. Without a quick agreement on a deadline and its priority, we have just created a lose-lose situation for both out of thin air. Multiply than micro inefficiency times the number of close colleagues you work with times notifications times emails times tasks times tools… that’s quite a somber script unfurling.
By piggy-backing on Paul Graham’s legendary post on the “maker’s schedule, manager’s schedule”, you realize we can all relate to one or both roles and similarly, struggle when any of those schedules gets disrupted. Whenever we ask for something from somebody, he/she has to switch contexts (mentally, physically) at your discretion (not theirs). Be assured everyone will pay a price for every slight “disturbance in the Force”.
The sched-async quadrant is where your highest productivity (per time unit) is. And productivity drops because context-switching is "expensive" (being "focus" the currency of choice). Anything "attacking" that quadrant (unexpected phone calls, colleagues pinging you on different tools, rescheduled meetings, mounting notifications, etc) equals reversion to the 9-to-6, white-collar, unproductive mean. I call it the tool-wagging-the-dog problem, where humans live by whatever their tools ask them to do, not the other way around.
Protect your time and focus and I assure you will escape the rat race for good.
"Where humans live by whatever their tools ask them to do, not the other way around."
This isn't about productivity tools, but this line reminded me of something my grandpa always used to say. He couldn't understand why I relied on weather apps on my phone to determine what to wear, what activities to do that day etc...he'd always just tell me to "JUST LOOK OUT THE WINDOW!" haha. Obviously, the main point of weather apps is their ability to "predict," but it's true that I've canceled BBQs or hikes based on a weather prediction that turned out to be wrong.
An overreliance on apps can definitely often be a setback.
Long live your grandpa! :-) Play more to work better, not the other way around.
Yeah you are right. But nowaday we have to rely on different tool. Personaly I am also using different tools for managing different activities of https://besttravelpurse.com/ . If I miss the notification of any tool so I lost that time and the work of it.
Hey Carlos, super helpful post, thanks for sharing. I can especially relate to what you wrote here:
"If I send you an email (or Slack comment) asking for your help on some minor detail regarding a complaint from one of our users, but I forget to mention how important it is to me (or when exactly am I expecting your answer to show up on my email), we are both undermining the basics for this task to be expedited optimally. Without a quick agreement on a deadline and its priority, we have just created a lose-lose situation for both out of thin air."
This is sooo true! I generally assume a colleague would only be coming to me once they've attempted to solve the issue themselves or find an answer elsewhere, so always assume their query must be urgent...which is often not the case. Like you said, it's just a lose-lose.
So true! Especially when you're a less-senior member of the team, I think there's an even greater pressure to prove your worth and attend to every query straight away. But it can be so intimidating, ESPECIALLY as a less-senior member of the team to ask more senior members whether what they're asking you to do is actually a priority or whether it can wait...should the onus be on the person receiving the message to ask, or on those who reach out to others for help to state the urgency?!
I couldn't have said it better myself. 100% agree Maaike!
I'm sure there are better way of saying it, but I'm so glad to hear it's not just me struggling with it. Many of these super tools have given us endless features to delegate our most basic responsibilities onto others, without giving them enough countermeasures to fend us off. Every digital interaction with others (email, Slack comment, Kanban task...) should have "constraints", like in real life. "Time", "money", "limited number of X"... to reduce noise and increase signal.
This is very thought provoking. I used to use a lot of productivity apps, now I realized that dealing with fewer apps is actually better. I can relate to your writing to a book named "Deep Work."
thanks for the tip! Will check it out