It’s all happening at once, and we have to choose. What to read, listen to, answer? A spam from a scammer An @ mention on Slack A voice mail from the boss An email from a customer A DM on Sla…
It’s all happening at once, and we have to choose.
What to read, listen to, answer?
A spam from a scammer
An @ mention on Slack
A voice mail from the boss
An email from a customer
A DM on Slack
A last-minute sale email from a store you’ve never visited
A year-old blog post
A new blog post
A new podcast
A …
[sorry, got distracted.]
The idea that we can strip mine attention, wasting what we don’t need, is long gone. Like oysters and oil before it, attention is a scarce resource, and we need to use it wisely. Too often, it feels cheaper to simply take what we can get, but when we overreach, the cost in trust is real.
And each of us gets the same amount of attention to spend each day. It’s a competitive advantage to figure out how to focus it to get something done.
Last week I wrote that The Future of Work is not The Gig Economy. No surprise really, but sometimes it has to be said. The breathless commentaries that get written and reported on by futurists and commentators alike leave you… well... ‘breathless’ and with little time to think about what is being said.
In 1805, if you listened to music, you heard it live. Every time. Today, perhaps 1% of all the music we hear is live, if that. In 1805, if you listened to a lecture for school or work, you heard it…
Ana Cristina Pratas's insight:
In 1805, if you listened to music, you heard it live. Every time.
Today, perhaps 1% of all the music we hear is live, if that.
In 1805, if you listened to a lecture for school or work, you heard it live. Every time. Today, that’s still true.
That’s crazy.
Ten years ago, Sal Khan pointed out that thanks to the internet, we should have students watching best-in-class lectures at home, after school… and doing their homework together, with teachers, during the day. (HT to Alison King who wrote about this 26 years ago). That hasn’t happened yet, but it should.
If we’re going to persist in creating hyper-expensive live lectures for millions of people every day, perhaps it’s time to change the dynamic. Imagine that there’s an app (I’ll call it Backchannel) and that the lecturer or her assistant has a dashboard.
Every student already has a phone. Let’s put them to use.
The Backchannel app begins by blocking all other apps–by reporting student participation. If we’re going to do this expensive lecture process in real-time, at the very least you can stop checking Facebook.
Second, the lecturer can at any time ask for students to answer a simple question about what’s being discussed. If a lot of students can’t answer the question, time to slow down. On the other hand, the Backchannel app can also act as a tool for students to anonymously let the lecturer (and the system) know that they’re bored. It’s hard to embrace how obvious this is, and yet it doesn’t get done.
The app can show via the dashboard how active each student is, by percentage or even by name.
Questions can stream in from the app, so the lecturer can get a quick view of what needs to be covered.
Students can have a discussion with one another (no private chats, though) about the last few minutes of what was covered. It’s asynchronous and can lead to far more airtime for people who might not be brave enough to raise a hand.
And of course, just as the school is rating the students (that’s a core tenet of the education-industrial complex) the students can rate every lecture, every time. What a dramatic shift in power, in attention and in reporting.
If we ended up with a classroom where the lecturers were on their toes, where students were actively engaged at all times and where the interactions were far more in sync, wouldn’t that be worth the hassle of putting our devices to better use? We can build this and start using it right now, not someday.
If we insist on lectures being the way they’ve always been, which is a one-way recitation, then let’s simply have students watch best-in-class recordings instead of the wasteful act of recreating them live, every time. But if we’re going to do it live, then let’s actually do it live.
As technology advances, some businesses are forgoing physical locations and having everyone work from home.
Ana Cristina Pratas's insight:
Sometimes it’s maddening.
Sitting in traffic, or enduring interminable Red Line delays, only to get to the office and do pretty much the same thing you could do at home — only with more people around. And better lunch options.
At a time when technology seamlessly connects people around the globe, and work can be done from almost anywhere, companies are realizing that employees who sit at computers all day don’t necessarily need to be in the same place to get their jobs done.
An estimated 100-odd companies with at least 10 employees, including a handful in the Boston area, have ditched their physical offices or never opened any to begin with, according to FlexJobs, a job-search site whose workforce is fully remote. And workplace analysts expect the trend to grow, especially as executives realize they can stop shelling out big bucks for office space and start attracting employees with no geographic boundaries.
With sky-high housing prices driving people out of expensive cities and everyone clamoring for more time with their families, many employees are thrilled to hunker down at home. Some companies even have virtual offices where employees’ avatars can attend meetings in video-game-like worlds.
But putting the entire office in the cloud takes some getting used to.
Zapier, a Web-services company with a San Francisco mailing address and 250 employees scattered around the globe, including several in Boston, faced skepticism when it started raising funds in 2012. Investors would say, “So this remote thing, that seems weird,” recalls chief executive Wade Foster. “Do you really think you can be successful that way?”
Today, he said, it’s a “total 180.”
“Some of those same people are, like, ‘This is the future . . . can I invest?’”
Less than 5 percent of the US labor force works remotely full time, according to census data, But nearly 50 percent of all workers do so occasionally, up from just 9 percent in 2007. In Massachusetts, the concept could become even more popular if Governor Charlie Baker’s proposed telework tax credit goes through.
Some companies are dipping a toe in the all-remote waters, trying it out one department at a time. But cutting all ties to a particular location, especially an expensive one, is a game changer, executives say.
“When your workers can’t afford to live in the city you’re headquartered in, that really makes it hard when you’re trying to grow a company,” Foster said.
For employers, going virtual can save an estimated $22,000 per employee per year in an average US city, according to the consultancy Global Workplace Analytics, based on real estate and transit subsidy savings, increased productivity, and reduced turnover and absenteeism.
Hiring time also decreases when people can work from anywhere, and job performance jumps. A recent Stanford study found that employees who worked from home four days a week were 13 percent more productive than their onsite counterparts.
Of course, this arrangement can be a double-edged sword: When you work from home, you’re always at work.
The cloud services provider Egenera recently moved its engineering team out of its Boxborough office and made its workforce 100 percent remote.
“I take calls after dinner; I take calls after the kids are in bed,” said chief executive Scott Harris, who has worked from home for six years. “If you hire the right type of people . . . you’ll get as much work out of them, if not more.”
There was some resistance when Egenera announced the change, Harris said — mostly from managers. “There’s always that fear of: How do you keep track of your workers?” he said.
Having no headquarters to report to also gives employees the flexibility to relocate without missing a beat. One employee for an all-remote Boston-area company is working from Seoul while her husband teaches there. When Kate Criniti, the Lexington-based chief legal officer for the all-remote health care technology company Redox, visits her mother in Connecticut, the only co-workers who notice are the ones she video-conferences with regularly. They might say: ‘That’s a different painting behind you’, ” she said.
These frequent video calls can give remote workers a uniquely intimate window into one another’s lives. Doug Gaff, vice president of engineering for Zapier, works out of his Milton home, sometimes with his cat, Ginger, staring into the webcam beside him.
“Somebody’s kid will pop their head in the window,” he said. “People kind of like it, actually.”
Not everyone is cut out for remote work, however. It can be isolating. And there are no random moments of inspiration when you bump into someone at the printer.
Robert Glazer, the Needham-based founder and chief executive of the marketing agency Acceleration Partners, is careful about hiring “raging extrovert” types who say they work better around other people. Most of his 160 employees are located within an hour of one of 10 hub cities to make it easier to gather employees together — though there are no offices. This means less gossip, but also little word-of-mouth communication.
“It’s always forced us to be super intentional about everything we do,” said Glazer, including a weekly newsletter he writes to keep employees connected.
This hyper-focus on communication can bring co-workers closer together than they ever were at traditional companies, said Becca Van Nederynen, head of people operations at Help Scout, a fully remote software company founded in Boston that pairs up employees for “intentional water cooler talk” via video calls.
At Zapier, workers are encouraged to get involved in their community. Join a sports team. Volunteer. Whatever it takes to combat the isolation office-less workers can experience.
The real estate firm eXp Realty, with more than 21,000 agents around the world, regularly brings its workers together in virtual reality. The company has its own campus in the cloud-based world VirBELA, a program created by Dartmouth native Alex Howland on top of a video game platform.
The agents’ avatars get together there, while in real life the agents — including Tom Truong, a Southborough resident who runs a team of 300 — are miked together at their home computers. Some staffers spend their whole day there, working side by side. If they want to change things up, they can jump on a virtual power boat.
“It’s always forced us to be super intentional about everything we do,” said Glazer, including a weekly newsletter he writes to keep employees connected.
This hyper-focus on communication can bring co-workers closer together than they ever were at traditional companies, said Becca Van Nederynen, head of people operations at Help Scout, a fully remote software company founded in Boston that pairs up employees for “intentional water cooler talk” via video calls.
At Zapier, workers are encouraged to get involved in their community. Join a sports team. Volunteer. Whatever it takes to combat the isolation office-less workers can experience.
The real estate firm eXp Realty, with more than 21,000 agents around the world, regularly brings its workers together in virtual reality. The company has its own campus in the cloud-based world VirBELA, a program created by Dartmouth native Alex Howland on top of a video game platform.
The agents’ avatars get together there, while in real life the agents — including Tom Truong, a Southborough resident who runs a team of 300 — are miked together at their home computers. Some staffers spend their whole day there, working side by side. If they want to change things up, they can jump on a virtual power boat.
People feel so present in the space that at a recent meeting someone complained that his avatar didn’t have a chair.
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At a time when many companies have a mix of onsite and remote work, some far-flung employees note there is a “proximity bias” favoring co-workers in the office. Having no physical location can be a great equalizer.
Criniti, the Lexington lawyer, previously worked from home for such a hybrid operation. “It’s almost like we worked for two different companies,” she said.
Now, with all of her colleagues working remotely, she said: “It doesn’t matter where you are; you’re in the same circle.”
How do you get people – including yourself – to do what you want?! Meeting expectations or changing habits is hard – whether it’s New Year’s resolutions o
While some find it hard to imagine life after capitalism, the digitally connected people of the world have begun embracing a new set of ethical concerns requiring new types of economies.
In Chapter 10, “Teaching as an Amusing Activity,” Postman looks at another area of social life that has been transformed by television — education. He starts with an apt subject: the long-running…
The changes remote work has introduced have happened so gradually you may not have noticed. But its growing popularity is remaking how we work, the tools we use to work, how we communicate at work, and even the hours we work. It’s also connected to population shifts from big cities to less populated areas, and it’s upending sectors of commercial real estate, both in terms of how spaces are designed and where they’re located.
A lot of my work, in both public speaking and private consulting, is rooted in foresight and anticipatory research. Unlike “futurology” I’m less interested in predicting the future than anticipating…
This Web-only article is a special rich-media presentation of the feature, " 12 Events That Will Change Everything ," which appears in the June 2010 issue of Scientific American .
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The attention crisis is real
It’s all happening at once, and we have to choose.
What to read, listen to, answer?
A spam from a scammer
An @ mention on Slack
A voice mail from the boss
An email from a customer
A DM on Slack
A last-minute sale email from a store you’ve never visited
A year-old blog post
A new blog post
A new podcast
A …
[sorry, got distracted.]
The idea that we can strip mine attention, wasting what we don’t need, is long gone. Like oysters and oil before it, attention is a scarce resource, and we need to use it wisely. Too often, it feels cheaper to simply take what we can get, but when we overreach, the cost in trust is real.
And each of us gets the same amount of attention to spend each day. It’s a competitive advantage to figure out how to focus it to get something done.