David (@hellodavidryan)

In a setting where activity provides a proxy for productivity, the introduction of tools like email (and, later, Slack) that make it possible to visibly signal your busyness with minimal effort inevitably led to more and more of the average knowledge worker’s day being dedicated to talking about work, as fast and frantically as possible, through in

One of the first studies in this area was the now famous work of a nineteenth-century French agricultural engineer, Maximilien Ringelmann, who demonstrated that when you dedicate more people to the task of pulling a rope, the average force exerted by each individual decreases—leading to diminishing returns as group sizes grow. Though the physical t

What the rise of the large office really needed—a productivity silver bullet of sorts—was some way to combine the speed of synchronous communication with the low overhead of asynchronous communication.