Dr. Cal Newport

They're all generating these asynchronous back and forth conversations.

Most of these have some sort of time sensitivity, right?

So if I email you and say like, what's going on with like the guests coming later today?

We have to kind of resolve this

before later today.

So now it's not just that these messages are going back and forth with all these different threads, but I have to keep checking my inbox to make sure the gap's not too big.

This is not a failure of habits.

It's not a moral failure.

It's necessitated by the fact that all these back and forth conversations have to keep moving forward.

So it is difficult then if you're in this system

to step out by yourself.

Because this is the way we're collaborating, is these asynchronous back and forth messages.

And I can't disengage myself from that without slowing things down.

From a mathematical game theory point of view, it's a suboptimal Nash equilibrium.

It's not the right place, not the right way to run this.

The utility value of this configuration is low, but no one individual can deploy a different strategy that's going to be higher value.

We're stuck in it.

And so now it becomes really hard for an individual just to say, I want to check my email less often.

It's built in systemically into this hyperactive hive mind workflow.

And the only way to break free from the suboptimal configuration is to basically have the organization itself do like a really high cost change to the rules of the game.