It’s one of the more fortunate aspects of human life that we work better together. Collectivism – yay!
At a place of work, we usually work alongside others, where the collected skills assembled under one (sometimes virtual) roof produces an end result. This hopefully results in a line going up on a graph, which is good, and everyone gets paid, plus the shareholders get another super-yacht. Capitalism – yay!
But if we accept that every person is different with different skills, we also know that the tools we each deploy can be very different from one another’s. Carpenters, bricklayers, hod carriers and plumbers use different tools. There are some tools in common, like pencils or pieces of string. And specialist tools, like, errrr, tenon saws and pipe wrenches and dowelling drill bits and hods. But the building gets built.
Stick ten people in an office or remote version thereof, and there’s an assumption that everyone uses the same tools to get stuff done. Typically, that means everyone runs email and a web browser, and some kind of messaging app. It’s a pretty safe assumption. There might be something specialised too, like an application that just goes ‘beep’ whenever the car park barrier goes up. What is also assumed, however, is that everyone uses basically the same tools to the same degree. This is not true.
There are plenty of jobs that involve sitting on top of one’s email inbox and a tab or three open in a browser, with a messaging app or two just a click away. Let’s call these jobs ‘Category E’ jobs (where E is for Email, see?). Lots of Category E roles involve interacting with other Category E roles. So therefore, Category E workers think it odd that anyone work in a way that’s not Category E-like. But oddness is generally a good thing – it harks back to the collectivist idea presented above, where lots of different skills combine to form a better whole.
Apparently, it’s a good thing to behave like a Category E worker, even if you’re not one, and oddness is therefore not good. In fact, not behaving like a Cat E bod can be the source of cries of poor communication, being termed difficult to get responses out of and even accusations of not being part of the “community” of the workplace (where “community” is defined as a construct that hides the unpleasant fact of everyone being forced to co-exist for eight hours a day in order to be able to eat).
When I am supreme ruler of the universe (as of next week, subject to contract), Category E workers will be forced to use Emacs, Git, a command line interface for file management, and any number of TUI apps of their choosing (I am nothing but magnanimous). This will be the new normal.
Further to my mighty stipulations, making sense of an email ‘conversation’ in Outlook running on Windows 11 will not be a valued skill. Responding with an appropriate level of fluffiness to an endless thread of messages in Slack/Teams about the cake in the office kitchen will be a matter for a disciplinary hearing.
I think that the reason why so many well-paid office types quit their jobs to become tree surgeons or micro-brewers or wilderness wardens isn’t a desire to work with their hands closer to nature. It’s because they know that one day, they will lie at death’s door and ask themselves what they did with their lives. If the answer were to be along the lines of “I shuffled email around all day” then they throw in the towel. Either that or f*cking notifications will have brought on a curable form of epilepsy.
TL;DR: Not everyone has the same ‘workflow’ as you. Leave me alone to concentrate.