- Facebook has the largest open floor plan in the world with 3,000 employees spread over a 10-acre expanse.
- Twitter’s developers work at long shared desks to encourage “serendipity” and casual conversations.
- IBM sends 2.5 million instant messages within IBM each day.
- 800 of the New York Times’ employees took up the company’s encouragement to tweet while at work.
So what are the mindsets and biases that have pushed businesses away from deep work and toward more distracting alternatives? Newport highlights the following:
The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment. The culture of instant and constant connectivity is easier than the isolation and concentration that deep work requires.
Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.
The Cult of the Internet: If it’s high-tech we assume it’s good. Case closed. We’ve made the Internet synonymous with the revolutionary future of business and government. Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in this culture because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological.
As Newport says, “Assuming the trends outlined here continue, depth will become increasingly rare and therefore increasingly valuable.”