Lord of the Pings. Are Notifications Ruining Your Life?

Richard Bradbury: Are work notifications ruining your life? Do you spend more time reacting to pings than doing your actual work? Are productivity tools ruining your productivity? You’re not alone.

Richard Bradbury: Are the pings ruining your life?

Matt Armitage:

• No. I know the pitch for today is ‘you’re not alone’.

• But I’m not one of that group. I keep my stuff pretty well boxed.

• But I’m a consultant, essentially working with clients rather than a team.

• So the dynamics I experience are different.

• And this is an issue that seems to affect a large number of workers who live in fear of worktime chirps and beeps.

• Work is something we talked a lot about at the start of the pandemic.

• About the shift to remote work and the explosion of tools that could help to facilitate that shift.

• But we haven’t really followed up on those trends too much.

Richard Bradbury: Nothing about the new Apple releases?

Matt Armitage:

• The most interesting thing about the Apple product launches is how muted the media responses have been.

• Even at some of the big tech sites it doesn’t seem to have made top billing.

• Which tells you quite a lot about how the world has moved on.

• In fact, the most interesting thing about the launch wasn’t the products themselves but Apple’s commitment to replace passwords with biometrics and encryption keys.

• Which we will come back to as a story.

• But today isn’t about Apple.

• I thought this week and next week we could do a bit of a two-parter.

• This week to look at how well we’ve integrated and coped with some of those new technologies.

• And then next week to look at some of the emerging trends that are defining how we look at work.

• Let’s start with noise.

• We did a show a few weeks back about the benefits of silence and the increasingly noisy world we find ourselves in.

• And how our digital devices are designed to cut through all that background radiation to grab our attention.

• And we talked about noise levels and how it isn’t always the loudest sounds that are the most annoying and intrusive.

Richard Bradbury: Like the sound of a baby crying?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes. For some people that noise means ‘I need to help’, whereas for other people that noise means, I’m leaving and I may not be back.

• And that’s because there’s that evolutionary aspect to a baby’s cry that triggers the fight or flight reflex.

Richard Bradbury: And you’re all flight?

Matt Armitage:

• 100%. That noise signals one thing to me: somebody else’s problem.

• But there is one noise that irritates me even more:

Play FX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiMbf0ovXT4

Matt Armitage:

• Of course, that’s the noise my computer makes.

• Yours may have something that’s the same but different.

Richard Bradbury: Don’t you mute your phone and computer?

Matt Armitage:

• We kinda had this chat a couple of weeks back.

• Yes. My phone is completely muted all of the time.

• Which is doable for me because I wear a smartwatch and I’ve set specific notifications and contacts to vibrate.

• But I cannot get my desktop to stop pinging.

• I’ve put it on various mute or silent modes.

• Manually switched notifications off both in notification centre and the app settings themselves.

• But for some reason, some of them still ping.

• Usually when I’m recording these shows, but as my sound is diverted to headphones, it’s me they disrupt rather than you.

• But not everyone does silence their notifications.

• My wife often doesn’t and she’s a lot more popular than I am.

• So if she leaves her phone or computer in the room, it plagues me with endless pinging, dinging and singing.

• In any case, our phones know that we’re trying to ignore them.

• So they develop ever more clever methods to let us know that there’s a new post, a new like, a new email.

• By flashing different colours and combinations of lights at us.

• By lighting up the bedroom in the middle of the night.

• And by telling us when an insomniac colleague has had a 4am brain start.

Richard Bradbury: Where does this fit in with the whole pandemic productivity thing?

Matt Armitage:

• For starters, we’re using a lot more collaborative tools.

• For example, when I was prepping this show.

• I was looking at a beta release for a piece of software we both use from time to time.

• Descript – which has now become a full-fledged video as well as audio editor.

• And one of its latest features is collaborative video editing.

• Now, one part of me can see how this might be useful.

• Tweaking scripts and captions, adding to B-Roll. And not having to wait until the previous person has finished before you can get started.

• I see that.

• But the idea of half a dozen people piling on and tweaking a video at the same time kind of makes my brain freeze.

• Because the thing that you’re trying to edit will be morphed by someone else as you’re doing it.

• That requires a lot of human-level organisation and agreement to prevent that task from becoming overwhelmingly convoluted.

• And I think that’s where the reality of what we can cope with lags behind the abilities of the software.

Richard Bradbury: We started with the premise of looking back at trends that began during the lockdowns. Are we seeing similar levels of over-saturation with more mainstream digital office products?

Matt Armitage:

• This is where it would be really interesting to hear from our listeners and for them to tell us their experiences with the current generation of productivity tools.

• Pop us a message from one of your socials and let us know how you’re getting on with all this stuff.

• One of the reasons for doing this was a friend messaging me a relative’s experience with their company and using the messaging and comms tool Slack.

• I’m not naming names in this instance because I don’t want anyone getting into trouble with their bosses.

• All team communication happens over the platform.

• Essentially no email. So documents, communications, team huddles.

• All taking place on the platform.

• And the result is that this person spends their day managing Slack rather than working.

Richard Bradbury: In this instance, isn’t Slack the work?

Matt Armitage:

• I think that’s where we get into the confusing territory.

• Gamification is a huge buzzword in everything from education to work to erm, gaming.

• But we get into complicated territory when we start looking at gamification for work.

Richard Bradbury: We’re back to the pings?

Matt Armitage:

• In a sense. A lot of people gain huge satisfaction from ticking off tasks.

• Especially if you’re rewarded with a ping or a screen flash.

• A lot of productivity apps have these pop-ups that tell you how awesome you are when you hit milestones.

• Or give you some opaque positivity quote.

• So the apps are designed to give you those little dopamine rushes as a reward for getting things done.

• Which brings us back to that earlier question: isn’t slack the work?

• Well, no. And I’m not singling Slack out here by the way – this is the same with most productivity tools built into office suites.

• The work is still the work. The actual job or task that needs completing.

• Slack or Google Docs or whatever is simply the delivery mechanism for that work.

Richard Bradbury: Unlike more traditional methods like email?

Matt Armitage:

• Even traditional email – isn’t strange to talk about email as traditional?

• Email has become a lot more like instant messaging.

• There are lots of apps like Spike that skin it more like a slack or Whatsapp style tool.

• Anyway, productivity tools tend to highlight how collaborative they are.

• But the gamification element can push them into being more performative than collaborative.

• So you get into this cycle of proving that you’re working by commenting on every single thing.

• We did a show a few years ago about an automated telephone assistant. I think it was by google.

• It could make calls, reply emails, all on your behalf. But posing as a person rather than a machine.

• We talked about these hypothetical scenarios where two sets of assistant machines could end up talking to each other in these infinite loops.

• With neither realising that the other is a machine.

• And we seem to be doing something similar with productivity tools.

• Because of these gamification aspects, every comment becomes its own task.

• Something you have to look at, consider and comment on.

• Without some control or direction, the communication tools supposed to shortcut processes and increase efficiency.

• Can start to exponentially increase the workload itself.

• And, of course make it harder to retrieve the information that is important.

Richard Bradbury: How much of this is the tools themselves and how much is it about the way companies operate?

Matt Armitage:

• So, ok. This isn’t a ‘technology is neutral’ argument.

• Companies arrive at communications solutions for all sorts of reasons.

• Feature sets. Simplicity. Flexibility. Cost.

• One of the reasons that the corporate world is such a hodge podge of incompatible systems is simply because companies have incompatible aims and structures.

• The set of features Slack has, may not suit one company as well as Monday or ClickUp might do.

• And for all that we like to say that there is no I in team.

• Teams are groups of individuals with different needs and approaches.

• When a company chooses their supposedly optimal digital toolset, it will only be optimal for some of their workers.

• Hopefully, that will be a majority. Occasionally it isn’t.

• History is littered with companies trying out productivity tools and methods that either don’t improve the situation or make it actively worse.

• So you have all these new tools, new working methodologies and they won’t work for everyone.

• They can’t work for everyone.

Richard Bradbury: That still doesn’t get us to the point where the tool becomes the work…

Matt Armitage:

• This is something that I face with the clients I consult with.

• Now, typically, I work with small to medium organisations.

• Often with companies at the start up stage.

• And that task is slightly easier in a sense because you’re building a methodology for working and sharing information from the ground up.

• Rather than imposing something new on a company already working at scale.

• So you can tweak and fine tune and figure out the best way for all the relevant parties.

• Heresy here – sometimes that might even mean putting different teams on different tools.

• Most of the time, productivity tools are flexible enough that you don’t need to do that.

• But there may be certain use case scenarios.

• And the second heresy – some teams may not need to use the tools at all.

• Email, file sharing and some collab office software may be all they need to function.

• And that brings us back to why that software is there. Which we’ll talk about more after the break.

• The perhaps flawed culture of efficiency that underpins.

Richard Bradbury: When we come back. More from the Lord of the Pings.

BREAK

Richard Bradbury: Are notifications ruining your life? That’s the question we’re asking on Mattsplained today. Where are we pinging off to now?

Matt Armitage:

• I quite like the idea of being the Lord of the Pings.

• I could be a modern-day Sauron. An evil with presence but no solid form.

• A Tolkienesque character for the digital era.

• I’ll see if Amazon studios wants to do a big-budget epic series about me.

• I’ll take Daniel Craig as me. Or Jimmy Carr. Depending on the way the director takes it.

• Daniel Radcliffe can play you.

Richard Bradbury: Is this your strange way of pivoting the conversation towards efficiency?

Matt Armitage:

• In that I’m wasting time and making no sense?

• Nope. That’s just me. But we will get onto efficiency in the broader sense shortly.

• Going back to those productivity tools that are ruining people’s lives with incessant notifications.

• We were talking about the role of the company in defining those tools and their performative aspect.

• So we have to look at the reasons those tools are used in the first place.

• Efficiency and organisation is one reason.

• But another reason that may be as important, and sometimes even more important, is tracking.

• The tools are a way of quantifying how much work someone is doing.

• The administrator dashboards of a lot of those apps have all sorts of employee performance metrics baked in.

• You can see who is more likely to complete tasks on time.

• How much they are commenting or contributing to team discussions.

• How many likes their comments or posts get from other teammates.

• That can be even more important for teams that are working or distributed remotely.

• RFID tags are no longer telling HR or bosses how much time you spend in the bathrooms to pantry areas.

• So these tools become even more important to see not just that work is being done, but how you do the work.

Richard Bradbury: Is that a fair use of the tools?

Matt Armitage:

• It depends what you mean by fair.

• I’d prefer that kind of surveillance to key loggers and web-cam software.

• Surveillance in the workplace isn’t anything new.

• That’s why our line bosses are supervisors. They supervise. Which means to observe and direct.

• We sometimes focus too much on their directing role and sort of forget that they are also there to observe us.

• You can especially lose sight of that in companies that have relatively flat hierarchies.

• There are plenty of anecdotal accounts of junior staff members assigning tasks or subtasks in these apps to their bosses.

• Because the flat hierarchy has confused them into thinking that everyone is truly on the same level.

• But if that person is signing off your performance review, then the field isn’t level.

• And the same mistake can be made with commenting. Sometimes a request might be politely phrased but require no comment.

• Only action.

• Which brings us back around to the how and why of implementing these tools.

Richard Bradbury: Is this the more pandemic-related aspect?

Matt Armitage:

• Partly. Some companies have been using Slack and similar tools since they were rolled out.

• Those companies may have an edge in how they employ that software.

• And I say that not from a technical standpoint but a behavioural one.

• Very often, when these tools are rolled out, the focus is on explaining how they work from a technical and functional standpoint.

• Click box A etc etc.

• People aren’t necessarily trained for the behavioural best practice of the software.

• So what do I mean by that?

• Well, look at email. At the beginning of email’s corporate genesis we were swamped with the stuff.

• Employees complained about the weight of email in the same way they now complain about the tools replacing it.

• Over time, companies tamed those distortion effects. They built behavioural policies for email.

• Codes of conduct on how to talk to colleagues. How succinctly to reply to email.

• Whether or not you were expected to respond out of office hours.

• By and large those policies still hold for tools like Slack or Clickup.

Richard Bradbury: And this brings us back to the performative aspects of the software?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes, it’s the electronic equivalent of making yourself look busy.

• And as we said, there’s that exponential amplification factor from the comments-based nature of some of the tools.

• So it’s very important for companies to come up with policies and training documents that address the behavioural aspects of these tools.

• Especially if bosses don’t care about those performative aspects – then you’re essentially playing to no one and for no reason.

• In fact, your conduct is an impediment to the performance of the team.

• For companies that have only started using this kind of software in the last couple of years,

• Survival may have been uppermost in their minds, rather than looking at normalising the use of those tools and integrating them into prevailing company structures.

• And I can understand that they still may not feel that they have the breathing space to do that.

• We’re in a cost of living crisis, and as much as we act as though the pandemic is over,

• It isn’t. Supply chains are still disrupted and distorted. Covid is still a major cause of staff absenteeism.

• And many companies are having problems with recruitment.

Richard Bradbury: Is there any link between efficiency and productivity tools and the issues surrounding recruitment?

Matt Armitage:

• I think you’d be hard pushed to find a direct, causal link.

• What we do know is that employees are pushing back against employers more.

• Whether in terms of salary or working conditions.

• There have been various reports this week about the attempt of corporations to bring staff back into offices.

• Again, you get splits along various lines.

• Some jobs lend themselves to remote or teleworking more than others.

• You can’t telework an Amazon warehouse job, for example.

• Although there has been an increase in the number of remote forklift operators over the past couple of years.

• Piloting the machines like drone pilots or esports stars.

• And even within the occupations where it is possible, some people prefer to be in the office and others don’t.

• What is clearer is that there is something of a generational corporate shift.

• Tech companies – not uniformly – seem to be more open to permanent hybrid working arrangements.

• I think I saw a CNN report where reviews site Yelp reported that only 1% of their workers wanted to be in office all the time.

• For other companies it’s simply a financial decision: they’re locked into property leases and are paying for huge, currently empty premises.

• So why bear the costs of office space and remote work?

• It’s clear we’re in this transformative space in relation to working cultures.

• And the problems that my friend is having with tools like Slack are part of that transformation.

• We’re mid-journey if you like. It’s a bit like moving house. Packing and unpacking and being in a horrible mess until it’s finished.

Richard Bradbury: That’s cheery. And inefficient.

Matt Armitage:

• As usual, I talked about this being a show of two halves.

• When in reality it turns out to be a game of seven eighths and the bit left over.

• But yes, in whatever time we have left I wanted to talk more specifically about efficiency.

• Or rather the lack of availability of efficiency.

• There’s a great post on the Roblog substack called The efficiency movement, written by the strategist Rob Miller who works for a company called Big Fish.

• And he talks about our obsession with efficiency and how much is too much.

• That’s a very interesting point: how much efficiency is enough?

Richard Bradbury: Is there an answer?

Matt Armitage:

• I don’t know if it’s an answer as much as a set of observations, or rather our obsession with efficiency.

• The analogy I make is with lithium ion batteries.

• We’ve made enormous gains with those power cells, sufficient that we can build electric cars with a range of hundreds of km.

• But we’ve made most of the gains with that technology that we can.

• Any gains we now make are incremental.

• And the same may be true with efficiency. It’s that same obsession that built the supply chains and just-in-time manufacturing…

• That turned out to be so fragile during Covid.

• Turns out holding inventory can have an upside when container ships can’t dock in your ports.

• Efficiency came at the price of resilience.

Richard Bradbury: You made the analogy with lithium-ion batteries. If we find a new technology for producing electric cells, does that analogy still stand up?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes. Because we’re also looking at technologies to replace human workers.

• Namely, AI.

• Automation and innovation in automation were also hallmarks of the pandemic.

• Robot kitchens in China, for example.

• For the most part, we are still in the assistive phase of AI.

• Similar to the production lines that needed human workers to feed the machines before the robots took over.

• That’s where we are with AI. We make a good team.

• When or if those machine learning tools are sufficiently capable of taking over autonomously remains to be seen.

• I’m not sure we’ve ended up in the right place today, with any sense of resolution.

• But this is where we are.

• So, turn off the pings if they annoy you. Try to filter what you see on Slack or whatever tools you use for work.

• And remember that not every comment or suggestion is helpful. Especially mine.

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