Something weird happened during the pandemic that pushed work communication into the absurd. Managers scheduling 9:00 on-the-dot calls to ensure everyone was at their desks. Requests to hop on calls or present without warning became the norm. Colleagues incessantly pinged and dinged on Teams or Slack (or the less-popular Skype), tugging at our sleeves like obnoxious toddlers. Some even mandated a camera-on policy, turning our workdays into a hyper-connected hellscape with you as the star of the show.
Honestly, it was a crazy time. But being stuck inside or having to social distance was nowhere near as unusual as how some people and companies responded to the shift.
First, it was the odd Skype for Business message—fine. Then the Zoom calls that inevitably got cut off after your minutes ran out because senior leadership hadn’t paid for the right tier. Or any tier.
Oh, and let’s not forget the forced online camaraderie and ‘happy hours’. Started out cute, but got old quickly. Please, no more online quizzes.
Then came Teams. And Teams calls. And stand-ups. And uppity micromanagers requiring you to let people know when you’re about to head out on break, lest your eager boss or colleagues should be left to wait more than 30 minutes for a response to a rather low-priority question. How do you know it’s a lower priority than lunch? Because nobody is dying, ideally.
What is this mania we’ve slipped into? We’re constantly available, often expected to be. I’ve actually hallucinated the sound of a Teams call while barely asleep.
There are people out there wondering if you’re even working if you dare to take a couple of hours away from the tyranny of Teams for actual focused work—that is, to do better quality work for the same company. And that small fact cracks me up because it’s these distractions that are stopping us from doing our best, most creative work.
It’s nothing short of a new pandemic. Back-to-back meetings with scarcely enough time to piss. Having to block out time for lunch for fear people will see that you’re free at lunchtime and book a meeting for then, confused when you decline.
The incessant pinging and dinging and notifying across more platforms we can count isn’t just bad for focus—it’s a nightmare for creatives and neurodivergent folks in particular. Imagine just getting into the flow of a great piece of writing or being a few minutes shy of the perfect creative angle for a campaign you’re working on. Ding! Gone. Ding! What was it? Ding! Nope, it’s gone. No breakthroughs for you today. Sorry.
With all these meetings scheduled in, catch-ups carved into the calendar, and messages swarming around you like so many locusts, when are you finding the time to do the work you’ve actually been hired to do? Not the admin—the emails, the calls, the follow-up, the circle-backs and so on.
I mean the work that you were excited to do. Do you have energy left after the locusts have picked at your energy levels all day? Do you have the time after you’ve been answering emails and replying to the pings with more dings? And rest assured: there will always be more. Catching up (to what? WE may never know) is a myth.
I don’t necessarily have an answer to society’s renewed obsession with presenteeism—albeit now a mix of offline and online presenteeism, which is probably worse than the good old-fashioned ‘first one in, last one out, my marriage is falling apart as a result’ kind.
All I know is that I need to log out of Teams and Outlook at least once a day to get any truly productive work done. It helps, so do try it out if you find your focus fleeting—all it takes is a friendly status message, and directing colleagues to your emails instead (which you can check at your leisure). It works a treat.
What do you think? Are you plagued by all the platforms we seem to need for work in 2024? Has it affected your ability to focus, or feel fulfilled at work?