The unintended maxim of introverts is: Hell is just—other people. Not really, of course, I’m an introvert and I like some people, I just don’t like all the other people nattering on day and night while I’m trying to accomplish some important task like write the great American novel. Self-isolation in the time of COVID19 is a bit of heaven for introverts.
Cal Newport, the master of Deep Work and Deep Focus, sees an opportunity in the midst of the pandemic and has some suggestions how work could be made better from the hard lessons we’re learning now. In Why Remote Work Is So Hard—and How It Can Be Fixed for The New Yorker, Newport begins with some general, and family history:
In the nineteen-sixties, Jack Nilles, a physicist turned engineer, built long-range communications systems at the U.S. Air Force’s Aerial Reconnaissance Laboratory, near Dayton, Ohio. Later, at NASA, in Houston, he helped design space probes that could send messages back to Earth. In the early nineteen-seventies, as the director for interdisciplinary research at the University of Southern California, he became fascinated by a more terrestrial problem: traffic congestion. Suburban sprawl and cheap gas were combining to create traffic jams; more and more people were commuting into the same city centers. In October, 1973, the OPEC oil embargo began, and gas prices quadrupled. America’s car-based work culture seemed suddenly unsustainable.
That year, Nilles published a book, “The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff,” in which he and his co-authors argued that the congestion problem was actually a communications problem. The personal computer hadn’t yet been invented, and there was no easy way to relocate work into the home. But Nilles imagined a system that could ease the traffic crisis: if companies built small satellite offices in city outskirts, then employees could commute to many different, closer locations, perhaps on foot or by bicycle. A system of human messengers and mainframe computers could keep these distributed operations synchronized, replicating the communication that goes on within a single, shared office building. Nilles coined the terms “tele-commuting” and “telework” to describe this hypothetical arrangement.
The satellite-office idea didn’t catch on, but it didn’t matter: over the next decade, advances in computer and network technology leapfrogged it. In 1986, my mother, a COBOL programmer for the Houston Chronicle, became one of the first true remote workers: in a bid to keep her from leaving—she was very good, and had a long commute—the paper set her up with an early-model, monochrome-screen PC, from which she “dialled in” to the paper’s I.B.M. mainframe using a primitive modem, sending screens of code back and forth. “It was very slow,” she told me recently. “You would watch the lines load on the screen, one by one.”
I remember those days. My first modem was an AppleCat II that screamed along at 300 baud. At that speed you could comfortably read the text as it scrolled across your screen. Thankfully, speed got better, and, in the ’90s, I began dialing in my work to magazines across the country. Business culture being what it is, there was pushback. Newport continues:
In February, 2013, the recently-appointed C.E.O. of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, put a stop to all remote work at the company by means of an all-hands memo from H.R. “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” the memo read. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.” I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Best Buy, and other companies curtailed their telework programs; Silicon Valley companies became known for the ludic enticements—free meals, coffee bars, climbing gyms—that they used to keep workers at the office. A month after the Yahoo memo landed, an article in Business Insider lauded Google’s Corporate Concierge team, which helped its engineers accomplish mundane personal tasks, such as planning dinner parties or finding Halloween costumes. “Employees who work for the search giant don’t have to worry about much besides their work,” it concluded.
I know that this is not what Google (and others) were thinking; or at least I hope that is not the case; but I could not help but think of the 19th and 20th century company towns in coal country in general and Pullman, Illinois in particular. The pushback worked and bosses again got to see their minions toiling away dressed like proper drones in proper cube farms.
Today, remote work is the exception rather than the norm. “Flexible work” arrangements tend to be seen as a perk; a 2018 survey found that only around three per cent of American employees worked from home more than half of the time. And yet the technological infrastructure designed for telecommuting hasn’t gone away. It’s what enables employees to answer e-mails on the subway or draft pre-dawn memos in their kitchens. Jack Nilles dreamed of remote work replacing office work, but the plan backfired: using advanced telecommunications technologies, we now work from home while also commuting. We work everywhere.
That worker hell is heaven to the bosses. Our great-grandparents fought—and died—for the eight-hour work day and the 40-hour work week, but we’ve allowed capitalist to gradually erode those gains and we’re working longer hours than ever before, accepting text messages that snap us out of our fitful sleep. I’m less optimistic than Newport here.
As spring gives way to summer, and we enter the uncertain second phase of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s unclear when, or whether, knowledge workers will return to their offices. Citigroup recently told its employees to expect a slow transition out of lockdown, with many employees staying out of the office until next year. Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. of Twitter, went even further, announcing in an e-mail that those whose jobs didn’t require a physical presence would be allowed to work from home indefinitely. In a press statement, Twitter’s head of H.R. said that the company would “never probably be the same,” adding, “I do think we won’t go back.”
Make no mistake. Bosses are not making these decisions for any other reason than that they see the dollar signs of reducing overhead and payroll. If your workforce is telecommuting then it doesn’t make any difference if they’re down the street, across the river or across an ocean from the home office. It is also nearly impossible to organize a dispersed workforce into a union, a big concern for bosses like Jeff Bezos. Newport returns to Yahoo and Mayer:
A week after the Yahoo memo was distributed, the technology journalist Kara Swisher reported that Mayer had been motivated, in part, by a review of the company’s network logs, which showed that remote employees were spending long periods of time logged out of Yahoo’s servers. In a 2013 essay published in Wired titled Yahoo’s Mayer is Right: Work-from-Home Employees Are Less Efficient, a software-company executive articulated a view that many managers likely share: “People who come into the office just get more done… Maybe they just have a better idea of what is expected of them.”
Bosses’ need to boss was surely a factor in the defeat of remote work. But there were other, entirely legitimate reasons for companies to retreat from it, and they are just as relevant today as they were a decade ago. The Yahoo memo, for example, emphasized an obvious problem with telecommuting: the loss of face-to-face interaction. A successful workplace, its authors wrote, depends on “interactions and experiences that are only possible” in the office, such as “hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings.” In theory, technology enables remote equivalents for these in-person encounters: in 1986, when my mother worked from a bedroom in our Houston suburb, she was alone with her computer, while today a remote worker can trade Slack messages and convene video summits. And yet these advances have never really added up to a complete substitute for the office experience.
Workers who are extroverts may need those face-to-face interactions, but us introverts? Not so much. Those interactions are what prevent us from getting shit done.
Drawn-out e-mail conversations can be cut short with just a few minutes of spontaneous hallway conversation. When we work remotely, this kind of ad-hoc coördination becomes harder to organize, and decisions start to drag.
But there are far less intrusive workarounds than dragging everyone back to the cubicle.
Software firms often employ “agile” project-management methods: elaborate systems, punctuated by “standup” meetings and coding “sprints,” which help them track and assign tasks without overloading individuals or creating unnecessary interruptions or redundancies. Leveraging these systems, carefully organized teams of coders can operate smoothly without the informal productivity boosts that come from working in the same space.
Here is where Newport—perhaps knowingly—turns to the superpower of introverts: our ability to not need the buzzyness of an office hive, to function independently; to meet the psychological challenges of remote work. He writes:
Even if a team solves the logistical challenges of remote work, it must confront the psychological ones. When he was writing “On the Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin invented a ritual to help him settle into work each day: he staked out a meandering path through the most scenic areas of his family estate, outside London, placed a set number of stones at the beginning of the path, then walked circuit after circuit, kicking a stone into the hedgerow after each lap. With every go-round, he pulled his thoughts away from personal concerns and toward evolutionary theory. For many people, the rituals of the commute—podcasts on the train, hellos in the elevator—serve as a similar preparation for the day’s work. Without them, it becomes easy to lose track of the distinction between professional and personal life. Work time becomes more scattered, and leisure time less pure. There’s a reason so many professional writers stretch their budgets to lease private offices, even though, on paper, the extra expense seems unnecessary. They knew what many socially distancing knowledge workers are now discovering: deep work requires some degree of separation.
And therein lies the real benefit of remote work. Without the constant intrusions and distractions we can dive deep into projects. Here is where Newport takes an unexpected turn; taking us back to the early days of the Industrial Age.
Technological transitions often stumble when we expect them to sprint. In 1989, the Stanford economist Paul David wanted to understand why so many companies were so slow to adopt computer technology; for historical perspective, he turned to the history of the electric dynamo, which had been invented around a hundred years before, and which, before it transformed industrial production, had also been adopted slowly. In his paper The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox, published in the American Economic Review, David explained that, at the turn of the century, most factories were powered by massive central steam engines. The engines turned overhead shafts, which were connected by an intricate array of belts and pulleys to close-packed machinery. When electric motors were first introduced, factory owners tried to integrate them into their existing setups; often, they’d simply replace the hulking steam engine with a giant electric dynamo. This introduced some conveniences—no one had to shovel coal—but also created complexities. It was hard to keep all the electrical components working; many factory owners opted to stay with steam.
In the end, it took decades for factory owners to figure out how to make the most of electric power. Eventually, they discovered that the best approach was to put a small motor on each individual piece of machinery. Since a factory no longer needed to draw power from a central engine, its equipment could be spread out. This, in turn, changed the nature of industrial architecture. Buildings that no longer required reinforced ceilings to house shafts, belts, and pulleys could incorporate windows and skylights, of the sort we know today from urban loft buildings.
Inertia, David found, had been part of the problem. Factory owners who had spent a lot of money and time building physical plants organized around central-drive trains were reluctant to commit to complex, expensive overhauls. There were imaginative obstacles: powering each machine with its own individual motor may seem like an obvious idea now, but in fact it represented a sharp break from the centralized-power model that had dominated for the previous hundred and fifty years. Finally, technological barriers stood in the way—small issues, compared to the invention of electricity, but persistent and important ones nonetheless. Someone, for instance, had to figure out how to construct a building-wide power grid capable of handling the massively variable load created by many voltage-hungry mini-motors being turned off and on unpredictably. Until that happened, it was central power or bust.
In some respects, we may be in an electric-dynamo moment for remote work. In theory, we have the technology we need to make remote work workable. And yet most companies that have tried to graft it onto their existing setups have found only mixed success. In response, many have stuck with what they know. Now the coronavirus pandemic has changed the equation. Whole workplaces have gone remote; steam engines have been outlawed. The question is whether, having been forced to embrace this new technology, we can solve the long-standing problems that have thwarted its adoption in the past.
That bit of history fascinated me. I was aware of how the early introduction of the power loom destroyed what had been the dispersed cottage industry of weaving, but i didn’t know about how electricity changed the dynamic. There are hundreds of experiments out there and many, many more are cropping up as companies are forced to deal with isolated workers. One of the experiments that Newport writes about is how companies are dealing with structuring interruptions. My boss can’t drop by if I’m not in the office. Newport writes:
Alternatively, a team might channel the flood of check-ins by borrowing the idea of “office hours” from academia. In this system, workers post regular times during which they’ll be available for unscheduled calls or video conferences. If a colleague has an ambiguous question or request, she simply waits until office hours come around to talk it through. As I wrote last year, the software company Basecamp has been using this strategy for years with extraordinary success: the inconvenience of waiting for office hours to begin is greatly outweighed by the control each individual regains over her schedule.
Newport concludes:
There are also social reasons to cheer a more remote future. It might help reverse the geographic stratification of American life. Workers, and their spending, could break out of the unaffordable metropolises and spark mini-revitalizations off the beaten path, from Bozeman to Santa Fe. Remote work could be good for the environment, since less commuting means fewer emissions. (Although the recent movement of Americans out of sprawling suburbs and back into dense cities was, in itself, an environmental good.)
And yet remote work is complex, and is no cure-all. Some of the issues that have plagued it for decades are unlikely to be resolved, no matter how many innovations we introduce: there’s probably no way for workplaces to Zoom themselves to the same levels of closeness and cohesion generated in a shared office; mentorship, decision-making, and leadership may simply be harder from a distance. There is also something dystopian about a future in which white-collar workers luxuriate in isolation while everyone else commutes to the crowded places. For others, meanwhile, isolation is the opposite of luxury. There may be many people who will always prefer to work from work.
In one possible future, the percentage of employees spending half of their time or more working from home will grow significantly in the coming years—increasing, perhaps, from the three-per-cent baseline set in 2018 to something like twenty or thirty per cent. There will be a lot of remote work, but a lot of office work as well. In this future, workflow innovations will allow remote and in-person efforts to integrate more smoothly without the need for constant e-mails or video conferences. Companies will maintain regional headquarters, but they’ll be smaller, featuring more desk-swapping and fewer permanent, pre-assigned offices. Some attractive smaller cities will see populations rise; some larger cities will see housing costs decrease. There will be more variety in work arrangements. Perhaps, in addition to shifted hours and reduced schedules, we’ll require remote-only employees who have never been fully integrated into an in-person office to sign multiyear contracts to work exclusively on a small number of important objectives before moving on. (In their book “The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age,” from 2014, Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh endorse this idea, which they call a “tour of duty.”)
Jack Nilles envisioned a complete transformation of work, in which the central office might disappear—a steam engine giving way to a network of motors. The changes the pandemic will create will likely be more nuanced. This doesn’t mean, though, that their effects will be small. When only three per cent of a workforce is remote, managers can get away with business as usual. When that number climbs to thirty per cent, fundamental changes to the nature of work become necessary. Before the pandemic, we were already suffering through a productivity crisis, in which we seemed to be working longer hours, glued to screens and drowning in e-mails. The solutions that make remote work sustainable—more structure and clarity, less haphazardness—may also help fix these other long-standing problems in knowledge work. Work that is remote-friendly for some may be better work for all.
Perhaps, but I don’t think that everyone is able to create the atmosphere, or find the physical and mental space necessary to do so. If I could have an hour with Newport I would love to discuss the other remote work reality of the pandemic: students.
Bonus No. 1: The office is obsolete. And that’s a good thing. [NOTE: THIS GUARDIAN OPIN-
-ION PIECE IS ACTUALLY UNPAID ADVERTISING. READ WITH THAT IN MIND.]
Bonus No. 2: #RichMitch #RichMitch #RichMitch #RichMitch #RichMitch #RichMitch…
Bonus No. 3: REMEMBER THOSE WHO HAD NO CHOICE AS WELL…
Bonus No. 4: 40 MILLION unemployment claims as ultra-wealthy flee to yachts.
Bonus No. 5: CNN, MSNBC CAUGHT covering for catastrophic Cuomo mistake.
Follow on to this Bonus No. 1.
Bonus No. 6: Trump moves to KILL Twitter, do they deserve it? Follow on to
this Bonus No. 6.
On the subject of taxes, at any level, nearly everyone (we hear you 
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I want to begin this morning with a piece by Matt Taibbi with the headline: 
Marie Antoinette, the Austrian queen of French King Louis XVI is mostly remembered for exclaiming: Let them eat cake! in her response to her starving subjects cries for bread. She most likely wasn’t suggesting that they eat any confectionery, but rather the layer of dough placed on the bottom of an oven to prevent the bread from burning as it baked.
I have said, and written, this more times than I can count: In any free society the response to objectionable speech can never be censorship. The only acceptable reply to offensive words or images must be more speech. I have no problem protecting minors and the mentally deficient from disturbing speech but competent adults need to stand on their own.
In the spirit of 
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