Cal Newport

Why does that get so hard?

Why do you find yourself like jumping around and looking for easier messages?

Because each message is a different context than the other and that's torture for the brain.

It's really, really hard to go from

all right, this is a complicated question one of my employees is asking me, and now this is a completely different issue, completely unrelated to that, where I have to think of a good title for something, and now here's a completely different issue, and you're trying to switch one after another.

Our brains aren't wired for that.

It really makes us unhappy.

Yeah.

Well, it's hard unilaterally.

If you've changed nothing else about your workload or your communication protocols, if you just say

I'm not going to be on Slack from this hour to this hour.

I only check my email twice a day or whatever that standard advice was from 15 years ago.

It doesn't work well because if you're involved in a large number of projects that are timely and the way progress is going to be made is with ad hoc back and forth messaging.

You have to be in there checking.

That's the brutal part of the hyperactive hive mind is that it has defenses to its elimination built into its very nature.

Right.

Because if this is how we're gonna figure this out, like we have to have five or six back and forth messages to figure out what we're gonna do about this client coming tomorrow, we have to get this done today.

That means you have to see my next message right away so that we have time for me to answer you and you to answer me and for that ping pong match to happen.

That means you have to be checking your inbox or Slack constantly.

Otherwise, you're not going to see my next message in time for this whole game to unfold.