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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cal Newport
Read between
March 2 - March 7, 2021
“They form a separate communication network that powerfully influences our behavior.”
Shifting in your seat, leaning forward, demonstrative gesticulating—these behaviors, which are mediated largely through the autonomic nervous system (“an extremely old neural structure”), provide a surprisingly accurate reading of the true intentions of an individual in the interaction.27
“The executives [in the group setting] thought they were evaluating the plans based on rational measures,” Pentland explains, “[but] another part of their brain was registering other crucial information, such as: How much does this person believe in this idea? How confident are they when speaking? How determined are they to make it work?”
“Memos and emails simply don’t work the same way that face-to-face communications work,” Pentland bluntly concludes.29 It’s no wonder that our inboxes so often leave us with an unspecified and gnawing sense of annoyance.
This annoyance is heightened by the fact that we often overestimate our correspondents’ ability to understand our messages.
egocentrism,
The conclusion of this work is that emails are commonly misunderstood because of the “inherent difficulty of moving beyond one’s subjective experience of a stimulus and imagining how the stimulus might be evaluated by someone who does not share one’s privileged perspective.”
His solution is simpler: “Go talk to them.”
it is instead an impoverished simulacrum of the types of complex and nuanced behaviors that through most of human history defined our communication.
This brings us back to my original contention that we can blame email—or more accurately, the hyperactive hive mind workflow it enabled—for much of this shift toward overload.
Simply adding a small amount of friction significantly reduced the requests coming the scientist’s way.
If slightly increasing friction drastically reduces the requests made on your time and attention, then most of these requests are not vital to your organization’s operation in the first place; they are instead a side effect of the artificially low resistance created by digital communication tools.
Too little friction can lead to feedback loops that spiral out of control, as happens when a microphone gets too close to a speaker and the self-amplification recursively explodes into a deafening screech.
Friction also motivates the development of more intelligent processes.
When we made communication free, we accidentally triggered a massive increase in our relative workloads.
three specific ways in which the hyperactive hive mind workflow makes us unhappy: the psychological anxiety of an inbox that fills up faster than we can empty it, the frustrating ineffectiveness of text-only communication, and the out-of-control overload that results when friction is eliminated from office interactions.
As I established, it solved a real problem—the need for high-speed asynchronous communication—and did so in a manner that was relatively inexpensive and easy to master.
You can enjoy the practical benefits of email, in other words, without having to also embrace the hyperactive hive mind workflow.
maybe the way we work today is much more arbitrary than we realize.
So who ultimately decided that everyone should instead start interacting five to six times more than normal? To some who study this question closely, the answer is radical: it was the technology itself.
this idea that tools can sometimes drive human behavior became known as technological determinism.
“Print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind,” he writes, “and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content.”
A key property of technological determinism is that the innovation in question alters our behavior in ways that were neither intended nor predicted by those first adopting the tool.
New tools open up some new options for behavior while closing off others.
The technologies in question in these studies are not literally deciding how humans should behave, but their effects can be so surprising and sudden to those involved that a story line of tools determining behavior seems as valid as any for describing what’s going on.
Determinist dynamics similar to what Adrian Stone observed at IBM went on to unfold in offices around the world as email spread throughout the 1990s, ushering in a general embrace of the hyperactive hive mind without anyone ever stopping to ask whether this radical new way of working made any sense.
While the business world came to see synchrony as an obstacle to overcome, computer theorists began to realize that it was fundamental for effective collaboration.
People are different from computers, but many of the forces that complicate the design of asynchronous distributed systems loosely apply to humans attempting to collaborate in the office.
What she uncovered was a social feedback loop gone awry—a
Homo sapiens are well adapted to small-group collaboration.
the most natural way for small groups to coordinate is in a free-form manner.
increasing the size of a team doesn’t necessarily increase its effectiveness in direct proportion.
But another key factor is the rising complexity of communication.
Throughout most of human history we worked together in small groups, communicating in an ad hoc fashion without any particular structure or rules. The rise of the large office in the early twentieth century completely disrupted these natural modes of collaboration, requiring us instead to send memos to be carbon-copied in typing pools, or have secretaries arrange one-on-one phone calls.
“He must be absolutely tolerant and pay no attention to how a man does his work.”
“The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail,”
Drucker argued this approach was doomed to fail in the new world of knowledge work, where productive output was created not by expensive equipment stamping out parts, but instead by cerebral workers applying specialized cognitive skills.
[Knowledge work] demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.
The negative consequences of the hyperactive hive mind, in other words, are unlikely to be resolved by small shifts in individual habits.
It’s now widely accepted that continued industrial growth requires continual experimentation and reinvention of the processes that produce the stuff we sell.
But when we turn our attention back to knowledge work, we find this same spirit of experimentation and reinvention lacking.
Drucker calls this push to make knowledge work more productive the “central challenge” of our times, writing: “It is on [knowledge work] productivity, above all, that the future prosperity—and indeed the future survival—of the developed economies will increasingly depend.”
The Attention Capital Principle The productivity of the knowledge sector can be significantly increased if we identify workflows that better optimize the human brain’s ability to sustainably add value to information.
In the knowledge sector, by contrast, the primary capital resources are the human brains you employ to add value to information—what
To obtain the dramatic productivity increases that Peter Drucker prophesied for the twenty-first century will require a commitment to finding approaches to knowledge work that can generate much better returns.
What Drucker realized was that knowledge work was too skilled and creative to be broken down into a series of repetitive tasks that could be prescribed to workers by managers, as was the case with manual labor.
when you delegate productivity decisions to the individual, it’s not surprising that you end up stuck with a simple, flexible, lowest common denominator–style workflow like the hyperactive hive mind.
Knowledge work is better understood as the combination of two components: work execution and workflow.
When Drucker emphasized autonomy, he was thinking about work execution, as these activities are often too complicated to be decomposed into rote procedures. Workflows, on the other hand, should not be left to individuals to figure out on their own, as the most effective systems are unlikely to arise naturally. They need instead to be explicitly identified as part of an organization’s operating procedures.
seek workflows that (1) minimize mid-task context switches and (2) minimize the sense of communication overload.
