The Digital Equivalent of 'Asses in Seats'

Cal Newport got this Arsenal fan to smile this morning when he noted that the new owner of rival Manchester United has "embrace[d] pseudo-productivity:"

Image by Science History Institute, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

My problem with Ratcliffe's return to office plan is instead the evidence he used to justify it. As reported by The Guardian, Ratcliffe supported his new policy by noting that when he experimented with a work-from-home Fridays program with another one of his companies, they measured a 20% drop in email traffic.

Here we find a pristine example of the central villain of my new book: a management philosophy called pseudo-productivity, which leverages visible activity as a crude proxy for useful effort.

I haven't read Newport's new book, but I would feel comfortable betting that he discusses another, more traditional proxy there: asses in seats.

If this is how the new owner at United thinks, I can't see them harming Arsenal's title chances any time soon.

On a more serious note, I have found Newport's thinking about email and other electronic communication methods quite refreshing: It is insane to expect knowledge workers to be truly productive -- i.e., to concentrate on difficult problems -- while having to keep one eye on an in-box or a Slack channel, with the thought that they might have to drop everything at any random moment to context-switch to something else.

In my own experience, sometimes just having an appointment that I already know about coming up can gum up the cognitive works. See also : makers' vs. managers' schedules.

As fellow blogger John Cook once once put it, "[H]ow do you handicap intelligence? With interruptions."

-- CAV