John

“For managers, whose jobs often have less visible outputs, this may feel especially hard, but it is crucially important. Think about how you spend your time each day. Are you calling meetings because you relish those moments where everyone’s in the same space, or does each meeting have a specific goal? Are your meetings serving each employee, or are they simply the easiest way for you to download information? If the answer is that it primarily serves you, then chances are you are creating more work with tertiary, administrative tasks that you’re passing along to others. It’s not your fault. It’s part of a classic trap where performative work begets more performative work.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Like every other state-of-the-art conference room AV system in the history of the world, it failed to work on the first go and so it was necessary to summon someone who understood how it worked; and like all such persons he could not be found.”
― Neal Stephenson, Termination Shock

“Work expands to fill the time available to it, and digital technologies gradually and efficiently carved more and more time out of our nonwork lives.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“27 If we go in for quackery or conspiracy theories, that is often because the personal cost of believing is low and the personal reward of believing is high. Believing that 9/11 was a government plot or that Barack Obama was not born in America does us no personal harm, but it can help us feel enmeshed in a special group of insiders with privileged information. Experiments show that a good way to help people think more rigorously and accurately is to pay them to get the right answer; when they have skin in the game, the personal cost of being wrong goes up.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth