“Orwellian” is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian

The other night we had dinner with our friends. He just got a new (remote) job at a hip marketing firm, which specializes on creating premium content for their customer’s digital presence. He mentioned that he got a note by his manager, that he should be online more often. Based on his slack status she came to the conclusion that he was digitally not present, therefore not working and slacking off.

It reminded me of a dead man’s switch that identifies if the operator it not operating anymore. It is used with machines that are dangerous without a person operating it.

Our friend told me that every morning is it now custom to have an unplanned digital “checkin” for a lack of a better word, where everyone sends seemingly random emoticons to each other demonstrating that they are ready to work. If you don’t react digital to a comment, a question or a funny gif you are in risk of not appearing present - and therefore not working. I agree with a team having a daily, starting the day together. The difference is the purpose with the aforementioned checkin being a flag ceremony for the sole pupose of taking note who is “working” and who is not.

This is a company creating mostly written content. Writing content is hard. You need to study the target audience, you have to know what the search-crawlers like to read, it has to be fresh it has to be unique, funny and ultimately increase the visits on your customer’s page. But here you are, working in an environment that forces everyone to be online, reachable at any time and ready to respond - thanks to the power of digital communication software such as slack. No chance to sit back, get in a deep thinking mode where creativity lurks.

There are enough studies that show the negative effects of distraction. Such as Even Small Distractions Derail Productivity . The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress measured a whopping 23 minutes of getting back into your flow work after a distraction.

Before the pandemic people we working in an office. Most offices had doors. You could close them - a clear sign that you do not want to be disturbed. It is a physical act to open a door, it takes effort. Glancing over one of your collegues “do-not-disturb” state in slack, ignoring it, and start asking questions is no effort at all. The person on the other side is bound to answer thanks to the toxic culture of always on, always reachable.

I was working in an open office with no doors before the pandemic. Each teamspace was open and usually people just came around, approached the desk and asked if they may interrupt me. We started to use do-not-disturb lights , giving the surrounding a visual clue not to interrupt. I was hoping for more effect, but most collegues ignored the light. Most of my teammates ended up removing the light from our monitors.

Being interrupted is annoying and stops your flow of thinking. Being forced to keep the slack status “available” by constantly being digital present by responding to chat messages is destructive. What if you are being forced to solve a little captcha puzzle everytime you want to chat with a collegue that does not want to be disturbed? I bet my friend would be able to concentrate again with all his collegues failing to solve the captcha (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqnXp6Saa8Y). Then there is still the problem with the manager… I am sure one can find a digital solution for that as well :-)