Chapter 10
Relationship Status: It's Complicated
With a deadline for a project fast approaching, I decided recently it was time to “disconnect.” Thirty-six hours—no social feeds, no e-mail, no entertainment media.
Finally, some time away from the scourge of modern technology.
Except that during that time, I used the Web for controlled bouts of research. And typed on my laptop. And listened to my “focus” playlist through noise-canceling headphones on a flight (nullifying the nontech distraction of a screaming baby).
Thank God for the Gift (?!) of Modern Technology
Technology is ever more powerful, ubiquitous, and maddening when it doesn't work. The modern workplace has a love-hate relationship with technology. It's the cause and the cure of our problems. It's a panacea, and it's a plague. It can increase productivity and boost the bottom line, but it can also be hard to adopt and a huge distraction for employees.
As leaders, our job is to maximize the benefits while minimizing the downsides. The lack of technology frustrates many workers. According to one survey, 89 percent of employees feel deprived of the latest technology.1 At the same time, employees don't feel equipped to handle the distractions tech creates. In an Oxford Economics study, just 41 percent of employees said they had the necessary tools to block out distractions in the workplace. Sixty-three percent of executives, on the other hand, thought the opposite.2
Despite these frustrations, it doesn't seem to be due to a lack of trying. In 2016, nearly nine out of 10 businesses actively invested in an initiative to make their workplace more digital.3 The commitment is there, but too often the hidden and complex implications are ignored, leaving money invested while unintended consequences abound.
Our love–hate relationship with technology can be summarized in three paradoxes.
Paradox 1: We Want to Be Accessible But Need Boundaries to Stay Sane
Twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger spoke of technology as “the summoning of everything into assured availability.”4 Perhaps he should have summoned only most things.
Technology opens a floodgate that lets everything in—whether we want it at that particular moment or not.
It's the conduit for our professional and personal lives. On vacation, you want your phone to take pictures and preserve memories. But it's still spitting out work e-mails and meeting alerts that nag at you. Conversely, you feel pressure to ignore personal texts at work (at least until no one is looking). E-mail provides easy access but can also choke our inboxes. The same tools create both efficiency and inefficiency.
Paradox 2: We Want to Focus But Need to Be Interrupted by What Matters More Than What We're Doing in the Moment
Electronic interruption is bad when wasteful but helpful when urgent or otherwise important. Fifteen texts analyzing your fantasy league are a hindrance at work. One text saying a client is about to bail might help you prevent disaster.
Paradox 3: We Want to Disconnect But Fear We Will Miss Out
Then there's the fear of missing out, or FOMO. For a leader, this could mean the urge to interrupt your people with frequent check-ins. Tech can somehow make leading versus micromanaging even tougher to navigate.
These paradoxes result in some challenging dynamics in our corporate, team, and consumer cultures—and more than enough blame to go around.
Technology Meets Culture
Human beings are usually at the heart of distractions. Not just the loud guy in the next cubicle or that crying baby on my flight. Marketers target us with ads and alerts for their products, colleagues e-mail questions and demands, and friends and family text about tee times and when we'll be home for dinner.
These interruptions aren't a tech problem. They're a cultural one.
Organizations face their own cultural challenges. Sometimes the technology in place works fine but isn't being used properly. Sometimes it needs upgrading, but change-averse leadership instead piles bad tech on top of bad tech. Employees themselves can feel wedded to a certain technology or complain about changes they had no voice in shaping. People can be opinionated, obstinate, and unpredictable and deliberately try to subvert what otherwise would have been a welcome technological change.
And those people are probably (generally) well-intentioned. What happens when they're not?
Technology Meets Greed
Business technology aims to drive engagement so that businesses will prosper. Many of us want to make Silicon Valley the villain—perhaps a subtler version of the Matrix monster feeding on our distraction.
And why not? A lot of tech is practically designed for addiction, as Adam Alter explains in The Guardian.5 This is the same force at work that addicts people to slot machines. It's called intermittent reinforcement, a concept first revealed during the 1950s in an experiment by B.F. Skinner.6 He put hungry rats in a box with a lever. In one setting, a food pellet would drop out when the rat hit the lever. This rat quickly learned it had a constant source of food and nourishment. So, it enjoyed life, exercised on its wheel, and accessed a pellet whenever it pleased. Another box didn't dispense pellets at all. This rat also lived a healthy life, never paying any mind to the useless lever. It ran on its wheel, slept, and searched for food elsewhere. Yet another box intermittently dispersed pellets. Sometimes a pellet would drop out when the rat hit the lever. Other times…nothing. Sometimes the rat would hit the lever 10 times before a pellet came out. This poor rat became so neurotic that it wasted its entire existence hitting the lever, in fear of missing out. It didn't run on its wheel, and sometimes it didn't even leave the lever to go drink water. Many of these rats died of exhaustion or starvation. The inconsistent and unpredictable reward is what creates the addiction. Just as gamblers do with slot machines, we invest a lot of time and energy into our tech. To walk away from it means we would lose everything we invested. When we get even the smallest of rewards, it reinforces our addiction, causing us to invest even more—just like a gambler after winning a few shiny quarters.
Social media has created a new category of addiction. Ongoing interaction on social media often elevates the production of both oxytocin and dopamine, “mimicking what happens when we have a drug addiction.” Compulsive Facebook users share some of the same brain patterns as gambling or drug addicts, according to a sobering study in the journal Psychology Reports.7
And this is just one of many psychological triggers that tech companies employ to keep the attention of their customers. Gamers, including children, are enticed to continue uninterrupted for just 99 cents or to buy their avatars extra lives for just $1.99 (with down-the-line charges strategically hidden). Silicon Valley must be run by a star chamber of soulless profiteers, right? Where is their collective sense of responsibility?
This sentiment is neither fair nor realistic. Companies exist to create and sell products people want to use. To do so, they must engage with customers in the most effective ways possible—hopefully delighting rather than alienating them.
And in case you still want to blame Mark Zuckerberg for making Facebook so irresistible, consider another conclusion from the aforementioned study. Unlike the brains of cocaine addicts, the part of the brain that inhibits compulsive Facebook use works just fine. You can choose to cut back on the social media crack; you just don't want to.8 As much as studies on the brain can give us powerful clues into the way we work, the reality is we love to be victims. It's much easier—and satisfying—to blame someone else instead of ourselves. Whether it's the latest report on TechCrunch or an interview with Tristan Harris on “60 Minutes” telling us we're being programmed,9 if we can find something that reinforces our behavior as out of our control, we'll take it. After all, it's so much more fun to scroll endlessly on Facebook than finish that project we know we should be doing.
In other words, we can control such behavior but don't. After all, it's not illegal and doesn't seem obviously harmful. (More important, why hasn't anyone liked my vacation pictures yet?)
The problem is that we cede this control throughout the day and don't correctly value the time we lose.
Social reciprocity is a prime example. If someone mentions us on LinkedIn or Facebook, a notification kindly pops up on our screen. Maybe someone liked our comment. Or hated our post (and felt it was her civic duty to tell us in the comments section).
Once the suspense is over, we find ourselves in the wilderness of a bottomless feed. Twenty minutes disappear as we chase intriguing distractions.
In the same way, it feels rude not to answer a text. And when the boss e-mails a question, we're expected to reply, often immediately. As leaders, we often set up these systems without focus in mind, inadvertently creating open avenues for distraction.
Focus-wise technology is essential to the constantly connected workplace. It encourages the smartest allocation of your people's attention, promoting focus and effective management.
And it starts with a simple but profound question: Are you serving technology or is technology serving you?
There is a way to enjoy the efficiency our technology provides without becoming the tools of our tools. In other words, don't be a tool. It's time to realize we control technology, not the other way around.
For our technology to serve us, and not the other way around, we can use these three guiding principles:
- Does it promote or prevent focus?
- Does it save or sap attention resources?
- Does it encourage or erode engagement?