March 17, 2020: WFH and Spontaneous Chats
Good morning,
Today is the first day of mandatory home isolation here in SF. It feels strange to be taking severe actions (I agree with the actions!) for something most people have never “seen” with their own eyes.
Meanwhile, Italy’s daily new cases declined on Monday compared to Sunday, 14 days after the lockdown began. China also showed a similar two-week lag time from starting lockdown to daily new cases decreasing.
If you’re exploring WFH apps and services, check out NoHQ’s extensive list.
On to the update!
WFH and Spontaneous Chats
A classic challenge with WFH is the lack of spontaneous chats.
When you’re in an office, spontaneous chats follow this pattern:
You have an idea.
You walk to the person you want to talk with (might be the nearest person, or someone specific).
You interrupt them and start the conversation.
The key step that doesn’t reliably work in a remote context is #3: interrupting and capturing their attention. In-person, it’s (usually) socially acceptable to interrupt someone, and very much not socially acceptable to ignore someone who is speaking to you. Both of those weaken when you’re not physically there.
One way to fix this might be to change the social norms, but that has two serious downsides. First, interruptions kill focus time (even in the office!) and focus time is something to be preserved. Second, changing social norms is extremely hard. Imagine trying to force someone to respond to your texts. Relationships can fall apart when couples fight over this!
A better fix assumes this new state of the world where people are distributed. One option is the “ritualized idea time” concept. There are two parts to this solution:
Create a ritualized time to talk about ideas.
When you have an idea at another time, write it down.
I’ve found that once-per-week is a good frequency for the ritualized time. I also have different times for different buckets of ideas. One ritual is for business and writing ideas, another for therapy, and another for more general life ideas. I also have a monthly meetup with a friend around edtech ideas.
Once-per-week might not be enough for some things. For example, my girlfriend and I talk about our day every evening, and again in the morning!
A team or company might try to scale this by creating a weekly “all-hands virtual happy hour” where people are encouraged to reach out to teammates with time that is carved out from normal work. Perhaps a team or company leader can kick off the meeting with a mini-presentation before people “disperse” into chats.
Try this out with a friend at work, and tell me how it goes!
Conorovirus Prepping Photo Of the Day
While most people were braving chaos at the supermarkets, these preppers flooded the local marijuana store, because… I guess California needs its weed?
Take care, and see you tomorrow,
Andrew