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I recently completed a two-week creative residence at Almost Perfect in Tokyo. I split my time on the trip between working on Booklet and exploring Japan.

The Almost Perfect residence runs continuously, with two residents at a time. Each residency concludes with a public gallery showcasing the resident's work. Many residents are artists who present visual works crafted during their stay. For instance, my co-resident Stu presented illustrations inspired by his explorations of Tokyo.

I wasn't sure what kind of gallery to host because I was an odd "technology" creative with no drawing skills. I considered ideas ranging from a wall-sized mind map to a prototyping workshop. I settled on presenting an "artist statement" about my work at Contraption Company.

The surrounding Kuramae neighborhood, a historic home to craftspeople in Japan, inspired this presentation. The tools craftspeople make for themselves can change the world - such as the printing press. This presentation explores work's future through the lens of software makers.

I gave this talk on 3 February 2024 at Almost Perfect to a small crowd of artists and technologists. The presentation was not recorded, so this essay adapts it to a written format.

I also recorded this talk if you prefer to listen to it on the Contraption Company podcast, or watch it on YouTube.

In the era of the Internet, people create economic value by thinking. This "knowledge work" differs starkly from manual labor. Yet, the ways we organize digital work still resemble assembly lines.

Humans leverage technology to solve their problems.

As hunter-gatherers, humans had scarce food. Farming technology solved this problem, making food supplies more stable.

As farmers, scarce land resulted in fiefdoms and wars. The steam engine started industrial economies by enabling more efficient production and transportation.

As factory workers, labor was scarce. Making more cars required hiring more people. The Internet, computers, and robotics enabled humans to automate processes.

Today, we are in the Information Age. Cars drive themselves wherever we want to go, guided by satellites. We grow food in robotic warehouses. We can instantly communicate with anybody, anywhere in the world. Work happens with our minds instead of with our hands.

People today generally have food, shelter, and jobs. The new scarcity is attention. Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, and your job compete for a limited number of waking minutes daily.

Boredom is going extinct.

A standard job consists of commuting to a workplace for eight hours, five days a week, as an employee of a corporation. We hold this style of work as sacrosanct today. Yet, it is relatively new - Henry Ford standardized this model fewer than 100 years ago.

Before industrialization, work was different. As farmers, people mostly worked from home. They didn't have the technology to commute. Their work wasn't on a strict schedule, and its tasks varied by season.

Computers and the Internet changed the nature of work and transformed the economy. Collaboration has become globally real-time and instant. Knowledge workers create value by manipulating ideas and information. Robots are replacing humans in all manual labor - from factories to driving to warfighting.

However, our labor practices haven't yet adapted for the Information Age. We still live like factory workers - commuting to a workplace for a 40-hour work week in 9-5 shifts with repetitive work as an employee at a big corporation.

Before Ford, craftspeople filled factories doing autonomous work. Workers hated it when Henry Ford introduced his assembly line and began quitting. Ford had to double wages to get people to stay.

Applying the factory model to knowledge work today continues to make us miserable. We hire based on abstract teamwork qualities, enforce arbitrary working hours, and deal with management bureaucracy.

We cannot measure the productivity of knowledge work the same way as a factory. Technology automates, so every workday brings different and new tasks. Different people solve the same problem in different ways. The maker's personality comes through in their work.

Today, developers are rethinking their trade to restore craft and autonomy. Craft and autonomy enable developers to solve complex problems with uncertain solutions. Along the way, software engineers create tools to make their work more efficient. We will look at these tools and workflows today.

My name is Philip, and I am here at Almost Perfect for a two-week creative residency.

I am unusual among the residents at Almost Perfect because I am a "technology" creative. I build software applications that help people work online.

I studied systems engineering at university and apply this "systems" lens to my work today. When considering a change, I analyze its second and third-order effects on the overall system. I draw inspiration from cities, infrastructure, and food around the world.

This trip is my first time in Japan. I spent the last two weeks exploring the country, keenly interested in work culture and urban planning. I spent most of my time wandering in Tokyo, with a brief excursion to Morioka.

I founded three companies in the past, all focusing on rethinking work for the Internet age.

Staffjoy built scheduling software for app-based delivery workers. My senior project in university applied math to increase flexibility for hourly workers. Staffjoy commercialized these algorithms. The company raised venture capital, but failed to achieve mainstream adoption. Today, it lives on as an open-source project, which we will discuss later.

Moonlight sprung from my experiences building Staffjoy. It helps companies hire remote software developers. I built the company while traveling full-time around the world. The company became profitable, raised venture capital, and was acquired in 2020. It continues to operate today.

Contraption Company is my current business. I founded it almost two years ago.

The Contraption Company is a product studio developing tools for online work. There, I build three main products. Booklet is an asynchronous community app that is alternative to chat. Postcard lets anybody make a personal website in five minutes. And FRCTNL is a community for part-time technology workers.

We will talk more about some of these products later.

I'm building Contraption Company in a different way than my past startups. I structure the company in pursuit of craft and autonomy. I avoid time constraints when developing products. The company structure supports operating multiple long-term products. And, it is a one-person business - me - with occasional help from contractors.

My day-to-day work consists of coding in coffee shops around New York City. I write the code for Contraption Company products myself.

This presentation will look at three trends among software developers that may become mainstream: Smaller, remote companies, less rigid work weeks, and written, asynchronous collaboration.

The first trend we will discuss is smaller, remote companies.

When I co-founded Moonlight in 2017, I believed remote work could help startups grow.

Remote work was a hard sell in 2017 - most companies insisted only on hiring on-site employees. A handful of companies believed in remote work and helped Moonlight grow. But, most companies told us they would adopt remote work in a decade or two.

As COVID lockdowns began in 2020, these companies adopted remote work overnight. They already had the necessary tools, so the transition was smooth. As lockdowns lifted, few companies returned to their offices. Momentum had been the only thing preventing the adoption of new, better practices. After a change in norms, momentum prevented a regression to offices.

The way companies worked during COVID remained primitive by remote work standards. People's routines stayed the same, sans a commute.

Now, companies are rethinking the first principles of work for a remote team.

A "remote-native" team can hire the best person for a job, regardless of where they live. Today, most “remote” companies have not achieved this vision of transcending time zones. Once they do, it completely transforms the business, enabling them to operate 24/7.

In the past, companies based salaries on the local cost of living. An office in New York City paid more than one in Arkansas for the same work because living in New York costs more. Remote work is changing compensation from cost-based pay to value-based pay. Companies no longer pay a premium to live in an expensive place. Many workers increased their quality of life by relocating to cheaper areas.

Remote work affects developing economies dramatically. There, one software salary can create secondary jobs. A high-earning worker may hire a cook, cleaner, and nanny. But, local startups now compete with high-paying American corporations for employees, which hurts local innovation.

Remote work creates flexibility in location and local government. I spent two years as a digital nomad, working and living around the world with only a backpack and suitcase. Governments are adapting to attract high-earning remote workers. Japan just announced a digital nomad visa. Applicants must have almost twice the salary of the average Japanese worker. Many other countries have similar schemes.

Location flexibility among workers is changing government. In the past, people could only change their government with votes or revolutions. Now, governments compete for residents. In the USA, remote work triggered an exodus from San Francisco to Austin for lower taxes and cheaper housing. People may also choose a government based on the policies they want. Surrogacy laws, public transportation infrastructure, and welfare programs become differentiators.

Remote work gets rid of boring commutes. But it also flattens the global labor market, creating competition between governments.

For an industrial-era factory to make twice as many cars, it had to hire twice as many people. Capital was leverage for the business.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he decreased the size of the team by 90%. While Twitter has problems, the site generally still works. Decreasing the team size by 90% without a significant outage is remarkable. That would have never worked in a factory.

Elon's changes triggered other tech companies to confront problems of bureaucracy and over-hiring. Investors now encourage companies to keep teams small because efficiency drives profit.

Before my presentation, I talked to Luis about his favorite illustration software, Procreate. A lifetime license costs only $12.99. Procreate's model works because software scales infinitely. After developing the code, selling one extra license costs the company nothing. Software is like a book - the product work is all upfront.

Software's scalability means that a small team can have a disproportionate impact. WhatsApp had 55 employees when it sold for $19 billion. Instagram had 13 employees when it sold for $1 billion. And people soon expect a billion-dollar, one-person business to emerge.

With software, you don't need to hire a big team to be successful. Small teams can serve infinite customers.

Industrial career paths involve a ladder from individual contributor to manager to executive. Technological advancements are reshaping this model.

Since Elon's downsizing trend, many middle managers have returned to individual contributor roles. Recruiting and hiring used to be a core task of technology managers. With a trend toward smaller teams, there's less recruiting work. Improvements in communication enable executives to talk directly to employees instead of relying on managers.

Technology advances continue to make workers more productive. A single individual can now manage tasks that previously required a whole team. Amazon Web Services enables a solo developer to spin up a data center of servers and databases in a few minutes. Figma allows a designer to prototype a clickable application in an afternoon. Mailchimp enables a marketer to contact millions of customers in minutes.

Artificial intelligence is further accelerating these productivity gains. I talked with many people in Japan about how AI could affect their industry in the future. For software developers, AI isn't a future trend. It's already a tool they use every day.

This video shows how I used AI today to help build a Booklet feature. I provide some natural language directions, and then OpenAI writes code. And it writes quality code.

In the past, a senior engineer would manage a team of junior developers. Now, that senior engineer can manage AI instead and get as much done. These AI-enabled senior engineers, sometimes called "centaurs," are wildly productive and efficient.

AI tools make me more productive, enabling me to work alone instead of hiring a team. AI is driving a new wave of creative output by enabling solo creators.

With remote work and smaller teams, new problems are emerging.

The decoupling of work and social results in loneliness and isolation. Offices anchored many people's social lives. They would see the same coworkers daily, have social lunches, and chat at the water cooler. People met friends and even spouses at work.

To make work-from-home sustainable, people need to leave their homes. But many people don't have a place to go. Car culture and suburbanization created sparse landscapes of isolation.

Remote work changed cities. Business districts feel empty, and their restaurants are suffering. But, walkable city neighborhoods are attracting remote workers seeking connection.

I live in New York City, which used to cater to commuters who drove from suburbs to downtown offices. While a massive 23% of New York offices are vacant, a low 1.4% of apartments remain empty. New congestion charges further discourage commuter car traffic into the city.

Cities are not dying - they're shifting to be more residential.

Finally, it's a weird time to be entering the workforce. Companies used to spend months training new hires in anticipation of a long career. With work becoming more transactional and efficient, new hires have to produce immediate value. Exam-focused education ill-prepares graduates for ambiguous, project-based knowledge work.

Next, we'll discuss the second trend: less rigid work weeks.

Before the Industrial Revolution, only the wealthy had access to clocks. Assembly lines required people to be at their stations at the right time for the factory to operate. So, workers had to start caring about punctuality.

In remote teams, nobody sees how long you are sitting at your desk. Instead, you're judged primarily on your work output. Performative acts of "looking busy" no longer matter.

In a factory, productivity was generally a factor of time worked. People had to stand on an assembly line to manufacture cars. Working twice as many hours could produce twice as many cars. We standardized pay based on time.

With knowledge work, work output is no longer a pure function of time but also the intensity of focus. This change means that the value somebody creates per hour may be inconsistent.

In knowledge work, four hours of intense focus produces more than eight hours of moderate focus. The ability to control attention and focus is a rare skill among modern workers.

Companies have begun to adapt to incentivize focus. New "Results-Only Work Environments" measure only work output, not hours. Working faster lets you finish earlier.

One of the trends I'm interested in right now is fractional work. Fractional work is a midway point between freelance and employment. It typically is a half-time job with a company, paid weekly or monthly. This arrangement has more stability than freelance and more autonomy than employment.

Fractional roles allow experienced workers to choose shorter workdays over higher pay. In the age of scarce attention, they free up valuable time for various pursuits. Fractional roles enable raising children, pursuing hobbies, and starting companies. Some even work multiple fractional roles to diversify their income.

On a whim last year, I started FRCTNL as a community for part-time technology workers. Since then, the community has been doubling in size every month. Its members are technologists pursuing part-time work.

Businesses say that a fractional senior engineer costs less and produces more than a full-time junior engineer. New part-time work tools rethink the fundamentals of recruiting and payroll.

Fractional work feels like a new frontier

Fractional work signals a rethinking of the traditional 40-hour work week. But, a move toward fewer working hours comes with challenges we need to address.

A core Silicon Valley innovation was making every employee a co-owner in the business. A typical technology job includes a mix of cash and stock - sometimes half and half. Stock incentives align everybody to care about the company's success.

Fractional work typically includes only cash compensation, not equity. Removing equity compensation decreases the alignment between workers and the company in the long term. Cash compensation makes work more transactional and gives workers less upside.

Stock-based compensation made many workers rich. However, the recent downturn wiped out the value of many workers' stock, leading to resentment of the model. A generational shift could replace stock-based compensation with more time for personal "side hustles."

In the USA, social systems do not support self-employment. Corporations mostly organize healthcare, parental leave, and retirement, not the government. Navigating these systems as a small business takes a lot of work.

Finally, fractional workers have to contend with what to do with spare attention. Many will spend newfound time on low-quality leisure, such as TikTok or YouTube. Encouraging high-quality leisure that promotes creativity and happiness will be a societal challenge.

The final trend we will discuss is written, asynchronous collaboration.

Technology has enabled progressively easier communication - from books to email to SMS. The reality is that the easier we make communication, the more people communicate. When IBM first switched from paper memos to email, within days, they saw communications increase by five to six times.

As businesses embrace chat products such as Slack, communication volume further increases. The overhead of monitoring communications now overwhelms knowledge workers. Most knowledge workers now check chat or email every six minutes. Over-communication disrupts the work we're so busy talking about.

I analogize business chat apps to Facebook's newsfeed. We know that social media feeds present a never-ending supply of low-quality leisure. Now, chat distracts workers with a never-ending stream of new, low-quality messages to read at work.

You're tired from physical work at the end of a factory workday.

You're tired from intense focus and context shifting at the end of a knowledge workday.

Over-communication hurts concentration and productivity by introducing constant context shifts. A rule of thumb for online groups is a single message gets read one hundred times. By making it easier to send, we’ve burdened readers with decoding sloppy messages. This constant multi-tasking destroys work intensity and leads to mental strain.

Over-reliance on chat reveals a deeper disfunction in the structure of knowledge work. Workers chat to seek consensus on unclear work tasks and assignments. Remote-first work environments need a more structured way to organize and assign work.

To learn how software engineers self-organize their work, I want to discuss open-source software.

Open-source is a culture of software developers working for free on free software. Open-source software permeates the world, powering every device, application, and business. iPhones use an open-source operating system called FreeBSD. Most web applications use an open-source SQL database. Almost half of websites use WordPress, which is open-source software. And almost every programming language anybody learns to code on is itself open-source.

Open-source software powers the world, but it has no meetings, no Zoom calls, and rarely has chat. It's entirely asynchronous.

Next, I want to highlight two open-source tools engineers have collectively built.

The first tool is Git, an open-source collaboration tool for code. Almost every software engineer uses Git, through Github, to submit and review work.

Software work is typically organized into Issues. Developers get assigned an Issue or pick an unassigned one to work on. The developer writes code and then submits it for review. Github assigns reviewers who leave comments and either approve or reject the code. Reviews often include automated tests, which enforce expected functionality and style. Accepted code can get merged and deployed, marking the motivating Issue as closed. Git maintains a log of who did what work and when.

This workflow is explicit and unambiguous. After submitting code for review, coders don't wait for feedback - they move on to the next Issue. Instead of constant context shifts, coders batch their attention to work on one thing at a time. Every step has a clear owner - from tasks to reviews to revisions.

The second tool I want to highlight is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an open-source software whose origins are in enabling asynchronous payments. I know that the cryptocurrency industry has had drama. But, the underlying technology allows people to move money without waiting. Banks are a synchronous technology - you can only withdraw money if they are open. Bitcoin addresses the limitations and processes that slow down commerce.

Waiting on others is a leading cause of systemic slowness. Developers pursue asynchronous, non-blocking systems like Bitcoin to make systems more efficient.

Git and Bitcoin signal the future of collaboration, with clear ownership and no unnecessary waiting.

Structured processes enable open source to build massive projects with little coordination.

Communication is closely tied to how organizations make decisions. Airbnb is pioneering a shift toward structured, centralized decision-making in technology companies.

During the pandemic, Airbnb almost died because nobody was booking vacation rentals. Its CEO, Brian Chesky, used the abrupt change as a time to rethink core processes. Airbnb used to work as a consensus culture, where Chesky set high-level goals, and individual teams separately generated plans to achieve them. Now, Chesky centrally decides what the entire company does. He calls it "micro-managing," but it's created agency for the CEO to make changes. He no longer fights against momentum to get things done.

Historically, knowledge workers had freedom in what to work on. This led to over-communication as they sought consensus on decisions.

Airbnb's style shifted to freedom of how to work. With clear objectives and decisions, teams can focus on implementation.

Top-down mandates shift the role of managers from coordinators to operators. Succeeding in this environment requires a deep technical understanding of the team's work.

Changing how Airbnb makes decisions helped the company emerge stronger from the pandemic.

When you look at the communication patterns within Airbnb, chat doesn't suffice. The CEO can't share a company roadmap or product spec in a text message-length chat to the entire company. Chat isn't built for long-form communication. The message could get missed or lost. An instant message from the CEO causes the whole company to stop working and shift contexts.

Chat is a tool for urgent, real-time communication. But, non-urgent information gets lost in it.

We need a new tool for important communication - announcements, decisions, and reports. These types of communications may take thirty minutes to read and understand.

Knowledge workers should plan dedicated communication time every day instead of messaging constantly.

Booklet is the software I'm building to make communication more calm. It is an asynchronous community app that is an alternative to chat. It looks like a modernized email group software. I launched it three months ago and continue to work on it daily.

Slow, long-form communication is the core of Booklet. It batches all new posts and conversations into one email summary per day. Booklet keeps everybody informed, without bothering them.

Booklet's first customers started hobbyist groups. Over time, more professional organizations use it. For instance, investment firms use Booklet to build founder networks. Companies are using it to communicate between offices in different time zones.

Every creative project starts with an insight. Since launching Booklet, I've been building features responding to customer requests. I used my residence at Almost Perfect as a time to return to the original insights behind Booklet and build features I wanted. I added progressive web app support, OpenAI-powered search, and more.

In conclusion, today's work practices are relatively new, and are undergoing a significant shift.

Industrialization introduced the work practices we recognize today: commuting to the workplace, 40-hour work weeks with shifts, and repetitive work as an employee of a corporation.

In this presentation, we looked at trends in software engineering that signal the future of knowledge work: Smaller, remote teams, less rigid work weeks, and written, async collaboration.

But there are still new problems to address. These changes create issues such as loneliness and isolation, more time on low-quality leisure, and disorganized collaboration.

Thanks for joining my presentation, Rethinking Work Beyond the Factory, by Contraption Company. Learn more about my work and products at www.contraption.co, and subscribe to my essays to get more thoughts about the future of knowledge work.

I describe Contraption Company as a digital product studio. Many people ask what that means. "Is it a startup?" (not exactly). "Is it an agency?" (ideally, no). "Do you make apps to spin them out into new companies?" (no).

I envision a digital product studio as a small group of makers who build and maintain high-quality software. They seek growth and economic success like a startup but won't shut down a product that still has customers. They aim to generate revenue as a software business but are open to collaborations with other companies. They may build multiple products, but they intend to operate these apps themselves instead of spinning them out. The studio builds a brand, style, and reputation that compounds over time. I think the principles Cal Newport outlines in his forthcoming book Slow Productivity apply equally to product studios: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality.

Some companies I consider "digital product studios" include 37Signals, Prehype, and Good Enough. In each of these cases, the head of the company spends most of their time making the products instead of managing people. In my mind, that's the fundamental characteristic of the studio model: its leaders are makers who seek to continue their creative work instead of becoming professional people managers.

In one of my favorite books, Shop Class as Soulcraft, the author explores how knowledge work became abstract, arbitrary, and bureaucratic. He considers physical crafts more intrinsically fulfilling because of their egalitarian nature and tangible outputs. However, I believe the studio model - consisting of a small group of makers - can restore agency and craftsmanship to knowledge work. The infinite scalability of software enables a tiny team to serve millions of users, as companies such as Instagram and WhatsApp have proven.

I draw inspiration by studying manual craftspeople operating at elite levels. There's something magical about watching someone operate at their peak while inventing or building. Unlike technology, manual craftspeople can produce only limited work. That scarcity drives them to choose between quality and quantity - inevitably, staying small is the only way to achieve world-class quality.

I'm currently in Tokyo at the creative residence Almost Perfect. I have been exploring the work culture of Japan, which I've found to have an intense dedication to craft and professionalism. I've been to a 6 AM tuna auction, enjoyed many fantastic coffees, and been mesmerized by pointing train conductors. Last week, I stumbled into the Seiko Museum to learn about the history of a major watch company. There, I discovered I could see the company's top craftspeople making watch movements in the northern city of Morioka. So, I spontaneously booked a Shinkansen to observe what a product studio looks like in the watch industry.

The Grand Seiko Studio Shizukuishi is a small building where a few dozen craftspeople assemble watch movements by hand. Within the Seiko corporation, Grand Seiko is a small brand intended to compete with luxury Swiss brands such as Rolex and Omega. Grand Seiko brings its unique perspective to the watchmaking process and has developed internal movement designs. The broader Seiko corporation has over ten thousand employees, but many of their ranked senior craftspeople work at the Shizukuishi studio. The studio's head watchmaker Satoshi Hiraga has received multiple awards, including the title of Contemporary Master Craftsman from the Japanese government.

Grand Seiko's Studio Shizukuishi assembles the mechanical movements at the core of many Grand Seiko watches. Mechanical movements are incredibly delicate and complex - using springs, gears, and pinions instead of electricity. Putting together dozens of tiny parts is a precise, manual task. Few companies manufacture mechanical movements today because they are complex, delicate, and expensive. The resulting products must be accurate enough to measure time within a few seconds daily.

Upon entering, the building reminded me of noma - mostly wood, closely integrated with nature, and built around a central maker space. I'm fascinated by physical spaces that blend functionality and aesthetics seamlessly. Making something both functional and beautiful demonstrates a evident pride in the work. For Studio Shizukuishi, Seiko commissioned architect Kengo Kuma, who previously designed Japan's Olympic Stadium. At the core is a clean room where the craftspeople assemble movements.

The clean room's exposed wood, handmade desks, and panoramic views of Mount Iwate obscure the fact that this dust-free manufacturing facility is packed with air filters and advanced equipment. Those assembling movements work under microscopes in silence, using tweezers and small screwdrivers to build timekeeping devices. Then, the movements are tested over weeks at different angles and temperatures to ensure precise timekeeping.

The precision required to assemble these movements wasn’t apparent until I saw the below screen from a microscope. On the left is one of the screws craftspeople use to manually assemble a movement. On the right is a grain of rice.

When I talk about digital product studios, I imagine the software analog of Studio Shizukuishi—a small group of makers with a relentless focus on building high-quality products.

"Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right."

— Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

In the peak years of Bay Area tech offices, open offices were all the rage. As companies expanded, a physical division emerged between departments. Sales and support teams thrived in a buzzing atmosphere, alive with the sound of calls and collaboration. In contrast, engineering departments cultivated an environment akin to quiet libraries, where focused work prevailed, and meetings were confined to conference rooms. Often, these floors became physically separated - with one looking like a stock trading floor and the other more like a library.

This dichotomy of workspaces catered to the distinct needs of collaboration and concentration. Collaborative roles, such as sales or customer support, benefited from the energy of shared spaces and constant communication. Conversely, roles requiring deep focus, like coding or writing, flourished in the tranquility of isolated environments.

The sudden shift to online work blurred these boundaries. The nuances of physical offices vanished, replaced by a monolithic virtual office space in a chat application, like Slack or Teams. Chat has become the omnipresent digital office - showing who's online, what they're up to, and letting you talk to anybody.

By making chat omnipresent, we’ve begun over-communicating and over-collaborating, which has most affected the concentration-focused roles that thrived in the quiet of the physical office. The result is a digital workspace that's noisy and distracting, making it difficult to focus. We've lost the library's quiet and replaced it with the constant, dull roar everywhere. It's time to rethink how companies communicate online - because digtal knowledge work needs digital quiet.

Integrating concentration-focused workers into an always-on chat culture, symbolized by the omnipresent status indicator 🟢, poses a significant problem. The indicator, showing green when a person is online, subtly pressures employees to be perpetually available. This pressure isn't hypothetical - I once emerged from a deep coding session to find a message from the CEO saying, "It would be nice if the rest of the team saw you online more." We've conflated availability with productivity. But, the best knowledge work happens when a person is offline ⚪️, unavailable, and focusing. Sitting with the green light on all day should not be rewarded more than delivering business impact.

This insistence on constant availability disrupts the essence of focused work. Rather than encouraging employees to tackle complex problems independently, there's a trend, especially among junior staff, to quickly seek help upon encountering any obstacle. The fear is that being "blocked" under-utilizes an expensive team member. However, the nature of knowledge work is solving ambiguous, complicated problems - so the expectation of constant availability can lead to a culture of learned helplessness, which shunts professional development.

Modern companies have started to recognize the need to reduce unnecessary meetings, as seen in Shopify's initiative to delete unproductive meetings. However, many still overlook the importance of streamlining digital communications. Often, there's a misconception that more messages and channels equate to better communication, but this isn't the case. In reality, employees find themselves overwhelmed by an excessive number of messages across various channels. This constant influx of information demands their attention, pulling them away from focused, productive work.

In my experience at a previous company, I was part of over 100 Slack channels, each demanding a different level of engagement. Some channels were crucial for immediate tasks and decisions, while others were purely for informational purposes. The challenge was the expectation to stay constantly connected and responsive to all these channels. This led to a relentless stream of distractions, much like an endless, infinite-scrolling social media feed, where messages kept pouring in faster than they could be processed.

The issue with this setup is that chat platforms often become less about work and more about casual, non-essential conversations. They turn into virtual water coolers, where discussions are dominated by personal opinions and spontaneous thoughts. This environment rarely fosters meaningful decisions or insights. Thus, it's crucial for companies to realize that effective work rarely happens in these cluttered chat spaces, and to adjust their communication strategies accordingly.

By its nature, knowledge work demands deep concentration and an unbroken chain of thought. It involves holding and manipulating complex systems in one's mind, be it a sophisticated software architecture or the intricate details of an essay. Interruptions are not merely minor distractions but significant obstacles that break this chain of thought and require considerable time to re-establish. Flow state research details the psychology of concentrated work and finds it takes about 23 minutes to regain focus after an interruption. However, data shows that we're opening chat an average of every six minutes. Interruptions crowd out important, focused work - resulting in decreased productivity. People work late at night or on weekends because it’s the only time they can find quiet to concentrate.

Our current digital workspace has yet to acknowledge or address the substantial costs of context switching. I believe it's a significant contributor to fatigue and burnout in knowledge work. Chat channels can feel like sitting in multiple conference rooms simultaneously, listening into different conversations while trying to follow each one individually. The result is a constant state of mental exhaustion.

To reshape our digital communication landscape, we need to:

• Elevate the threshold for initiating conversations, discouraging trivial interruptions.
• Promote well-considered, clear communication to reduce the need for follow-up clarifications.
• Understand that not all messages necessitate immediate responses or reactions.
• Use synchronous meetings when back-and-forth communication is required.
• Offer flexibility in monitoring communication channels, with options for summarized updates.
• Ensure vital information is highlighted and not lost in a sea of trivial exchanges.
• For genuinely urgent communications, continue to rely on pagers and phone calls.

It's time to rethink communication best practices for knowledge workers. Communication is core to the job - people have things to share, questions to ask, and updates to give. Most communication should be long-form and asynchronous so people can follow up on their schedule. The expectation should be that knowledge workers batch their communication times, for instance, by scheduling an hour per day on their calendar for admin and collaboration - like they would a meeting. During this planned communication time, they can review and follow up on a queue of communications. Then, they should turn off communications until their next scheduled communication block. Topics that require back-and-forth discussion should result in a meeting. This approach balances collaboration with concentration.

A desire for digital quiet is why I’m booking Booklet. Businesses need an asynchronous way to communicate, and Booklet fulfills that by mixing the best of email and chat products. Booklet's early adopters have been "second communities" like investor networks, clubs, and communities. But, my goal and vision is for Booklet to gain traction in workplaces as knowledge workers push back against low-quality communication. Amazon fought against low-quality communication by banning PowerPoints and mandating memos. It won't be long before a similar forward-thinking enterprise bans chat in favor of long-form, async communication. The chat problem is the worst at the top - modern CEOs are in so many channels that chat is nearly useless for them, and they desire a better way to know what’s happening across their companies.

I championed remote work before the pandemic, and many companies couldn’t believe they would ever be remote. Five years later, the norms have inverted - in-person work is the exception rather than the rule for most tech companies. I firmly believe the next major shift in online work will be toward asynchronous-first communication. Many companies will resist such a shift in working styles, but if Bezos can ban the PowerPoint, then another forward-minded CEO can bury chat. All they need is a better tool to replace it, and I'm hoping Booklet can be that tool. A shift to asynchronous communication will enable globally distributed teams, enhance knowledge worker productivity, reduce burnout, and remove the assumption that everybody must work the same hours.

We may no longer have the quiet engineering floors of the past, but we can and should strive to split our digital lives into practices that support concentration versus collaboration. Remote work offers an opportunity to move closer to a quiet, concentrated way of working and promises to improve the productivity of companies that achieve it. In doing so, we reclaim the essence of productive workspaces, adapting them to the realities of our digital era. Restoring this balance is not just about enhancing productivity; it's about respecting the nature of different types of work and the environments they thrive in.