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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cal Newport
Read between
July 30 - August 17, 2022
The Hyperactive Hive Mind A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.
Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen bluntly summarize in their 2016 book, The Distracted Mind:
“Our brains do not parallel process information.”
knowledge workers operate as a state of “divided attention,” in which the mind rarely gets closure before switching tasks, creating a muddle of competing activations and inhibitions that all add up to reduce our performance.
our brains were never designed to maintain parallel tracks of attention.
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.
When the friction involved in asking someone to do something was removed, the number of these requests spiraled out of control.
Friction also motivates the development of more intelligent processes.
To summarize, we often overestimate the rational nature of our workloads.
the overhead of arranging synchronous communication becomes onerous, leading to drawn-out games of secretarial phone tag and piles of missed-call message slips.
An alternative form of interaction that avoids the overhead problem is asynchronous messaging, which doesn’t require a receiver to be present when a message is sent.
it’s important to remember that there’s nothing fundamental about email as a tool that demands that we use it constantly.
this idea that tools can sometimes drive human behavior became known as technological determinism.
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. When these changes then interact with our inscrutable human brains and the complex social systems in which we operate, the results can be both significant and unpredictable.
Hive Mind Driver #1: The Hidden Costs of Asynchrony As argued earlier, email helped solve a practical problem generated by the growing size of offices: the need for efficient asynchronous communication—that is, a fast way to send messages back and forth without requiring the sender and receiver to be communicating at the same time.
The problem, of course, is that email didn’t live up to its billing as a productivity silver bullet. The quick phone call, it turns out, cannot always be replaced with a single quick message, but instead often requires dozens of ambiguous digital notes passed back and forth to replicate the interactive nature of conversation.
A problem that might have been solvable in a few minutes of real-time interaction in a meeting room or on the phone might now generate dozens of messages, and even then might still fail to converge on a satisfactory conclusion.
Hive Mind Driver #2: The Cycle of Responsiveness
The media theorist Douglas Rushkoff uses the term “collaborative pacing” to describe this tendency for groups of humans to converge toward strict patterns of behavior without ever actually explicitly deciding that the new behaviors make sense.
Hive Mind Driver #3: The Caveman at the Computer Screen
It doesn’t require a large leap of speculative evolutionary psychology to arrive at the reasonable conclusion that Homo sapiens are well adapted to small-group collaboration.
the most natural way for small groups to coordinate is in a free-form manner. It follows that the mode of collaboration most instinctually embedded in both our genetics and our cultural memory shares the main characteristics of the hyperactive hive mind workflow. We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that when the introduction of low-friction messaging tools like email made similarly unstructured communication possible in the modern large office scenario, we were drawn to this mode of interaction.
