I recently had time to do more reading than I usually manage and used it to finish reading Deep Work by Cal Newport. It’s a book, and an idea, I had read about a lot previously, but there’s much more to it than just the idea of reading emails v writing something. And it chimed with something I read somewhere recently (but can’t credit right now) about our approach to work.
When we are at basic school, we sit at tables, we do the same lesson, we arrive and leave at a certain time and we are assessed on the same criteria and benchmarked against each other. Part of the act of schooling is simply being at school.
Then many of us go to higher education and everything is different. Certainly in the humanities or social sciences, you have a very low number of times where you have to be somewhere every week – a lecture per subject and a tutorial maybe, or an afternoon of workshops. For the rest of the time you are provided an outcome – an essay, a piece of group work – and left to get on with it. Each day will be different depending on what we do. When we need to get our head down to write something, we might head out to the local coffee shop to avoid the distractions of home or the interruptions of campus. When we have a group assignment, we get together in a working room at the library, or a corner of our faculty building and work on it. That might happen early in the morning, or in the evening because one of the group has a shift at the cafe they work at to pay their tuition.
And then we start work and for many of us, we go back to the school situation. We have to be in a certain place at a certain time. We have to do things in a certain way. We are assessed not just (not even?) on what we do, but how we do it.
I wrote a piece about this in 2016, where I put forward the idea that workplace flexibility isn’t just about time, but also about place. That was of course before the pandemic. COVID showed those of us in knowledge work jobs, that we could be independent of place and get our work done. And I don’t know about the situation where you were during the pandemic, but where I was, a community services organisation, we worked out of our skins in those times*. It was perhaps a bit more of the university vibe: we knew what we had to do, and we found our best way of doing it within the limits of the situation we were in.
And now after all that, after all the adjustments we made to our personal spaces and lives to fit work into them, the pendulum is swinging back the other way. Workplace after workplace after workplace is requiring people to come back. But it doesn’t feel like they’ve learned any lessons of the great remote work experiment. Yes, in-person interactions are important for innovation, silo-breaking etc. But I do not believe they are sufficient in themselves for those things. What are these companies doing to actively foster those things, beside requiring people to be in the office? Furthermore, being in an office can be actively detrimental to many of the things that are so important to knowledge work and come under the heading of what Cal Newport calls “Deep work”. Does “being in the office” encompass going for a walk to wrap my head round a knotty problem, or working for an hour in a local cafe to get a different perspective on a problem? It may for some, but I suspect it doesn’t for many.
It’s easier said than done, but I think as workplaces consider what the working arrangements are for their workforces, maybe a bit more uni and bit less school might be to everyone’s benefit.
*Of course, we had a very clear motivation, given that as an organisation we were providing services to many of those most affected by the pandemic. Something we can think about another day.
Reference
Deep work : rules for focused success in a distracted world, C. Newport.Grand Central Publishing, New York ; Boston, 1st ed. edition, (January 2016)
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
This post was originally posted on Substack on 17 April 2023.