Posted on 2025-04-19 by Matt.
In Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut describes a dystopian future where smart people are forced to wear a device that frequently blasts their ear with a sharp noise to prevent them from using their brain to its full capacity. Our industry must have missed that this was satire, because our modern digital workplace looks like it was designed to keep us from thinking clearly or doing quality work.
Instead of a government transmitter that broadcasts sounds designed to scramble our attention, we have the gentle knock knock knock of a Slack notification. This would be preferable, except each one of those notifications comes with a message for you read.
Anyone who is actually serious about doing real work will be in the habit of exiting the Slack app before going heads down. Sadly this isn't a cure-all.
Obviously, everyone has their own individual tolerances for how long they feel like they can be off the grid like this. Some people, it's a general anxiety that they're missing something urgent or important. For others, it's a matter of balancing the need to be unreachable with a work culture that punishes it, or with one that promotes being hyper-responsive.
When you come back online, there are going to be channels, threads, direct messages, private groups, canvases, and God knows what else to catch up on.
And there are actually times where you need to have Slack open. This is where the all-or-nothing nature of these apps really gets you. In the real world, you can ever only be in one physical place at a time, but in the digital realm, you're expected to hyper thread between any number of these streams. So when you open Slack because you needed to find some specific piece of information, or have an almost-real-time back and forth with someone, you're now right back in front of the fire hose.
Maybe you don't use Slack, but none of the alternatives are going to be better or worse enough to make a difference.
It doesn't stop at instant messaging anyway. The information minefield is also going to include email, comments on things like Pull Requests, Jira tickets, and Confluence docs. And as more and more LLM features appear, like weeds, in these products, it just becomes easier for someone to one-click add some fake-productivity commentary so they can pretend that they're contributing.
If asynchronous messages are noise, company knowledge base systems like Confluence are landfills. Documents are added by anybody, with no vetting, little editing, and abysmal organization. Most of these systems require admin permissions to archive (not actually delete) a document (that maybe you created in the first place), making them effectively add-only. To make matters worse, deluded directors ask for more documentation, not less, and clueless managers encourage adding to these garbage heaps in the same conversations that they admit, "We really have to clean this up one of these days!"
As an industry, we've started to accept that the more code we have, the more we have to maintain, but we don't seem to consider that the same lesson applies to our documentation. Most documents are either going to be inaccurate in the first place or just quickly out of date. It's pretty telling that if you find a document that seems to be what you need, the first step is always asking around, "is this still accurate?"
There's a reason that most public facing projects out there will present information at different levels. You'll have quick start guides and cheat sheets, overviews and summaries, and then access to the full reference. It's because we know there's value in having this information distilled and concentrated, and that too much information is usually just as bad as not enough.
Lastly, let's talk about the unforced error of using phone-based 2FA. This is basically suggesting that you always have the biggest source of distraction within arm's reach. Some handle this better than others, but let's be real; most aren't doing anything to prevent this from bleeding their attention.
Some twisted individuals even make things worse for themselves by getting their iMessages or Google Messages on the computer they're actually trying to do work on. I've known several alleged professionals who couldn't figure out how to even temporarily disable these alerts, leaving them in a perpetual state of flux between their work and personal life.
All of these practices are allegedly intended to make us more productive, but it all backfires. Maybe you think they're more about giving control and visibility to managers? The joke's on them, most managers are so overwhelmed by all this that they have even less of an idea of what's going on or what anyone is doing.
Considering that all these practices have the complete opposite effect, it's hard to imagine us coming up with anything worse. Maybe if we try, we'll miss the mark just as much and actually come up with a halfway decent way of working.