Modern work requires attention – constant alerts steal it
The real problem is complexity, which has gone exponential.<p>When I joined the work force in 2000, my life was comparably so stunningly simple. Just a few guys in the same room. Barely any process or documentation. Email was still new so the concept of an outside world barely existed. Chat did not exist, but wouldn&#x27;t make sense anyway. We talked a bit here and there but 80% was actually doing the work, not talking about it. Management had no idea what we were doing and metric porn did not yet exist.<p>A lot has changed. More complicated tech stacks means more deeper specializations, requiring more handovers. A lot is outsourced now so you may need vendors to move things. You may have off-shored things. Nobody has clarity on what you need to do, hence you need to hop the organization to find out the details. You need to pass legal and the privacy office. You need to report status constantly to an army of bean counters. Testing has become amazingly complicated and so is system administration.<p>It requires super human effort to move things by an inch. So no, &quot;collaboration is not a force multiplier&quot;. Collaboration isn&#x27;t a product or outcome. Ideally you&#x27;d have an absolute minimum of it. The ideal workflow is that you create a clear and detailed work package, hand it over to the worker, whom you then leave alone to actually do it.<p>Your companies&#x27; purpose is to ship software or whatever else it does, it isn&#x27;t to ship emails, chat, status updates, approvals and documents.<p>It is absolutely baffling to me how highly paid office workers&#x27; productivity is pissed away like this without intervention. Don&#x27;t send them to a yoga class to cope, fix the fucking problem. You&#x27;re setting your money on fire.