YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE
In our rush to become more technologically e cient, have we become less practically effective?
The premise of the Your Kickstarter Sucks podcast is simple: two Nashville-based hosts, Jesse Farrar and Mike Hale, make fun of embarrassing and misguided projects pitched on the website Kickstarter. The site is one of several crowdfunding companies that allows the hoi polloi to pledge their money to ideas ranging from board games to film productions to designer pens – if the product meets its funding goal, those pitching the product on Kickstarter receive the pledges to fund their idea.
The worst products highlighted by the show are part of what is commonly referred to as the Internet of Things. That’s when you take a normal household product, add some sort of digital gadget – often nothing more complex than a thermometer or a built- in speaker – create an accompanying smartphone app that alerts you on the minute-by-minute status of your Smart Vacuum Cleaner or iRake or whatever, and then charge your customers a monthly subscription fee for the privilege of controlling something with their phone that they could easily do themselves.
Most of these inventions are both redundant and expensive, solving problems you didn’t even know were problems: consider the electronic pillow with self- adjusting temperature, or a device that takes selfies while you drive your car. Despite the show’s best efforts to put to bed the notion that digital technology automatically makes everything better, the success rate for many of the featured products is alarmi ngly high. Some exceed their fundraising goal several times over.
This is mystifying until you realize that people don’t love digital technology because it makes them more productive or efficient; they love technology because it makes them feel like they’re more productive and efficient.
Much like security theatre – those annoying airport measures meant to elicit the feeling of safety among travellers rather than actually making them more safe – digital technology is about the illusion of accomplishing things “with the click of a button,” despite the reality that “button” may add an unnecessary and clunky step to what is already a simple process.
And before you assume you’re any different from the suckers lining up to get their smartsensor underwear, consider the technology that few of us would ever consider living without: email.
While most of us regard electronic mail as an indispensable business tool, if it were a Kickstarter pitch, it would be laughed off the web: “It’s human conversation, but typed up on a keyboard and exchanged between computers!” or “You’ll be alerted via an app on your phone at all times of the day – even while you’re trying to work!”
In the magical world of email, discussions that would have once taken all of five minutes over a conventional landline or in-person are now painstakingly composed, and yet still often fail to avoid ambiguous meaning, awkward syntax and various people confusingly “looped in.” And unlike normal human conversations which must end when one or both people leave, email threads have no clear delineated finish line. They can last for weeks, months and even years.
Worse still, an increasingly smaller number of the emails we receive today are actually relevant to our work. Even benign, in- house spam – “There’s cake in the common room! Sign up for our online training course!” – diverts our attention and demands a response, even if it’s to angrily delete it. Over time, these little email interruptions add up, breaking up our focus and taking attention away from the task at hand. All in the name of productivity.
Of course, email isn’t all bad. It provides a written record of a conversation to keep everyone accountable, an improvement on the old method of taking notes by hand. It also allows one person to send information instantaneously to a group of
people, something few meetings and no single phone call can accomplish.
Yet users rarely limit their use of email to when it is most appropriate or useful. They write emails because in the moment it feels easier than having to engage in the messy, nuanced and sometimes anxiety-inducing business of human interaction, where one must think on the fly ( in addition to dialing a phone number or getting out of one’s chair). Yet despite how it often makes us uncomfortable, a five- minute conversation is still vastly more efficient than email for most banal work issues.
Even if you’re one of those people who prefers old-fashioned talking, you’re still out of luck. Spoken conversations, even scheduled meetings, will almost always be “followed up on” via email. And don’t think you can just ignore these messages; failure to respond to email in a reasonable timeframe, which can vary depending on the office culture, is in many workplaces considered impolite, if not downright rude and potentially harmful to your longterm job prospects, as your boss will assume you’re either lazy or antisocial.
At the same time, some bosses think nothing of sending an email at 10 p.m., even though they would never think of calling an employee at that hour. Some even expect a prompt response. Though many workplaces are thankfully addressing the problem of 24/7 connectivity, that many consider this practice normal reveals email’s pervasiveness.
These complaints are not new of course, and some tech entrepreneurs have long recognized email’s flaws. However, to date, the proposed solutions to these problems have been to develop more technology. Now we have collaborative software programs like Slack, which allow for more seamless online digital interaction between colleagues, all in one place. Yet Slack, as fun and addictive as it can sometimes be, simply replicates the same issues that drags down email – on yet another platform.
To understand why, imagine your boss decides to schedule a daily eight- hour all-office meeting in the conference room. “Don’t worry,” she tells you. “You can work during the meeting. You just need to be available if someone calls on you.” Fine, you think, slightly annoyed at the idea. When someone eventually calls on you, say, to describe what happened at a work event last Thursday, you start to speak before you’re interrupted – “No,” your boss tells you, “you have to type your response out on your computer.”
If this sounds preposterous to you, it’s a more or less accurate description of how many offices use Slack. In a sane world, we would question the value of working this way and the sanity of its proponents. Today, awed by whatever Silicon Valley throws our way, we call it “tech-savvy.”
There are thankfully some healthy pockets of resistance to the idea that all this digital connectivity makes us more productive. The productivity writer and associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, Cal Newport, has made a career out of questioning the value of email, particularly when it comes to so-called “knowledge work.”
In a 2016 Harvard Business Review article titled “A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email,” Newport describes how the low barrier to sending emails encourages an “unstructured workflow,” one in which skilled knowledge workers are reduced to “human network routers,” constantly responding to iterative messages and requests. As Newport writes: “This incessant communication fragments attention, leaving only small stretches left in which to attempt to think deeply, apply your skills at a high level, or otherwise perform well the core activity of knowledge work: extracting value from information. To make matters worse, cognitive performance during these stretches is further reduced by the ‘attention residue’ left from the frequent context switching required to ‘just check’ if something important arrived.”
In other words, while stopping to respond to an email in the middle of a work project may seem like no big deal in the moment, these interruptions add up over time, constantly shifting and eventually degrading our ability to focus. Attending to these constant interruptions is a sign we don’t take our work seriously. We wouldn’t expect a surgeon, lab researcher or firefighter to stop what they’re doing and check their email every five minutes. While we might consider our own jobs to be far less noble or important than these, the effect is the same.
Newport borrows his solution to the problem of email from academia. He suggests employees set office hours, a time of the day when others can come and chat, phone or instant message you on Slack. The rest of the working day would be cordoned off for you to focus on your work. If this idea sounds pollyannaish to you, you’re not wrong. Newport, who also recommends deleting or taking a long break from your social media accounts to avoid distraction, tends to gloss over one of email’s most pernicious elements: its addictiveness. Though our habit of constantly checking our inboxes may be more related to fear than the excitement of validation or acceptance social media provides, the compulsion is the same.
As with its bigger, badder cousins – Twitter and Facebook, companies that learned long ago how to exploit and monetize your need to con- stantly look – we check our email or Slack all the time because it holds the promise of something novel, something to break up the strain of focus our work often produces, some small form of validation. The little burst of whatever brain chemical that comes with the notification of a new email is hard to resist, particularly when the cost is low in one instance but high in the aggregate.
Though Newport often depicts email as a subject that divides people into strongly pro and strongly con, the truth is no one likes it in the same way they like good conversation. There is ample evidence that the regular use of email, Slack, Facebook and Twitter makes us miserable, including a cottage industry of books on the deleterious effect of online connectivity on our mental health, from Newport’s own Deep Work, to David Carr’s The Shallows, Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation or Adam Alter’s Irresistible, each of which quote various peer-reviewed studies on how social media platform makes us unhappy.
The issue, therefore, is not one of knowing that email or Slack makes us sad and saps rather than enhances our productivity – it’s about how we actually break our addiction.
On that score, the news is mostly bad. Right now, the proposed solutions offered up by the techie naysayers – rules over use, setting timers, deleting apps from your device, leaving your phone at the door – are simply variations on “don’t check your email,” the weight- loss equivalent of telling someone to “eat healthier food and exercise.” And we know how well that messaging works.
There are however some effective ways to reduce email’s tendency to fracture workflow. An approach developed in the 1980s by Italian software developer Francesco Cirillo called the Pomodoro Technique – a name derived from the tomato timer he used – has made the rounds in productivity literature. The method involves setting a timer for 25 minutes in which you only focus on your work, taking a five- minute break, and repeating the cycle four times before taking a longer, 15- 20- minute pause. While the Pomodoro Technique offers some structure to your day, it still takes Herculean will not to stop work from time to time to check an inbox, or Slack messages, or Facebook, Twitter and so on.
And therein lies the problem; even a successful struggle against the lure of email, Slack and the rest is still that: a struggle, and I don’t foresee a world where that struggle will ever end.
Technology has irrevocably changed the way we communicate, s t ri pping human conversation of its speed, its immediacy, its subtle cues and vocal inflections, its natural inclination toward a finite resolution. Instead, we must face a tangle of unresolved threads, demands on our attention, messages to tactfully compose and the promise of avoiding human intimacy forever.
The Email Kickstarter was fully funded years ago, many times over, and there is no going back.
INCESSANT COMMUNICATION FRAGMENTS ATTENTION, LEAVING ONLY SMALL STRETCHES LEFT TO THINK DEEPLY.