Why Modern Work Is Frying Our Brains 🤯 & What We Can Do About It

#StressAwarenessMonth

I don’t need to tell you what things cause workplace stress. We have all experienced them, and a series of studies have confirmed the “big five” factors that lead to burnout:

1. Unmanageable workloads — when our to do list never shrinks and work becomes so overwhelming that we feel as if we were drowning.
2. A lack of purpose — which makes us feel that getting up, brushing our teeth, getting dressed and going to work were completely pointless. (The very definition of a bullshit job). Which is mildly depressing.
3. Unfair treatment — everything from: feeling unrecognised for our efforts; discriminated against based on gender / age / ethnicity; unequal pay and; being passed over for promotion. All of the above have the potential to make us feel devalued / angry / a victim of injustice.
4. Unclear role definitions — not knowing what is expected from us or what we are responsible for requires a high threshold for ambiguity and uncertainty, which most human beings do not have.
5. Challenging interpersonal relationships — if we don’t feel supported, enabled, trusted or simply cannot relate to the people we work with we are likely to encounter challenging interpersonal relationships .(And that’s before we come to horrible bosses, micromanagers or direct reports who feel like they are yet to “have a positive impact”…after three days in the job).

But there is a sixth factor, that is missed by a lot of research into workplace wellbeing. And it has everything to do with how we work together. It is the least understood and possibly the most damaging to our workplace mental health.

Say Hello To The Hyperactive Hive Mind

Source: James Wainscoat on Unsplash

We now live and work in a continual state of partial attention — ten thousand people, maybe more, people slacking without speaking, people answering without listening.

This is what the productivity theorist Cal Newport calls the “hyperactive hive mind” and it is characterised by a constant stream of unstructured communication powered by a proliferating suite of tools claiming to make us more productive. In reality the productivity of knowledge workers in advanced economies is declining, whilst distractedness and anxiety induced by the expectation of constant availability are increasing. Newport describes how this:

“tortuous cycle increases the amount of work on our plate while simultaneously thwarting, through constant distraction, our ability to accomplish it effectively”.

Sticking it to the man.

The hive mind is particularly deleterious for managers and team leads confronted with a torrent of unstructured information and growing backlogs of requests requiring swift responses. Many retreat into “task orientated productivity mode”, which is to say, intelligent people are transformed into glorified human network routers. Without the time to think this means millions of knowledge workers worldwide are being reduced to firing out rapid fire responses between back to back Zoom calls.

Source: Sam Hennig

Frying Our Brains

Context switching between topics and workplace systems is very cognitively depletive. As Daniel Levitin, a professor of behavioural neuroscience and author of The Organized Mind explains:

“Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We’ve literally depleted the nutrients in our brain.”

But It’s Only Because You Work In A Startup

Disclaimer: I work for a startup. I knew what I was getting myself into. But thankfully the promise of making the world a better place through technology and vision (the two most powerful forces in 21st century capitalism) gives me a strong sense of purpose. And I get by on a healthy diet of free fruit, barista coffee and table tennis. Because. Everyone. At. A. Startup. Lives. This. Way.

The thing is, anyone with an internet connection is plugged into the hive mind, and none of us will be unplugging anytime soon.We live in a culture of immediacy and constant availability. Slack messages must be answered, and overflowing email inboxes must be tamed. It has become more important to be “on top of things” than to get underneath the surface of things.

App My Life or FML?

There is not a week that goes by where I feel that the most valuable and impactful work I do happens in the margins; time stolen back from superfluous meetings and busy work; time “created” during early mornings or late evenings. A clandestine act of retreat in pursuit of individual productivity. Cool water poured on the embers of creeping burnout.

For a while I have had a hunch that the “productivity” tools I use to do my job are part of the problem. So I decided to “map the apps” that mediate my work life to better understand what is driving me to distraction:

A Bunch of Tools

For me this exercise confirmed that my mental processes are beginning to resemble the tools I use to do my job. In addition to the general purpose tools listed above, I also became aware of a much longer list of tools used across tech driven organisations (so…increasingly all organisations):

• Engineering teams use GitLab, Jira and Stack Overflow. (These are undoubtedly productivity enhancing, but do constitute another interface and workstream to stay “on top of”). Funnily enough most of the engineers I know complain less about being distracted than non-engineering managers. Mind you, they are the ones building these systems.
• Sales teams spend a lot of time working with CRMs like Salesforce or Pipedrive, which are high maintenance, attention seeking systems that extract large sums from their customers. Much like the people that use them then.
• Marketing teams work with an increasingly complex tech stack to connect the dots between buyer journeys, and to measure the impact of campaigns. (Think Hubspot + Google Analytics + BI tools). Gone are the days of lunchtime Negroni’s and moments of inspiration scribbled on a napkin.

So I decided to add the additional tools I interact with on a weekly basis to my list to see what I could learn from this:

So is it possible to unplug from these tools? (Work WhatsApp included!)

Or has constant distraction become an inescapable feature of modern work?

Block and Bunch

I am committed to finding an antidote to hive mind distractions, because no amount of yoga, mindfulness or workcation-ing (yes this is now a thing) will prevent us from burning out, eventually.

One technique that I find effective is to block time for deep work, and bunch my workflow to make headway through complex and connected tasks.

To reduce context switching I try to build at least 2 x 2.5 hour blocks of time into my week. Mornings from 8am-10.30am usually work best for me, as I am at my freshest. My rules of thumb during deep work sessions are:

• Get into the problem, and don’t reach for the dopamine brain candy when it gets hard. Slack is closed. My phone is on flight mode. My browser only has one tab open.
• Block your calendar so you are relaxed and committed to the task you have set yourself. This helps me eliminate the feeling that I should (also) be doing something else. I give myself permission to focus on one thing and escape hive mind distractions. I treat this like a workout or a doctors appointment i.e. I am not available whilst doing this activity.
• Create a ritual around this occasion. I always make myself a ginger and black pepper tea before these sessions. A bit of spice to sharpen the mind, but without the jumpiness of a caffeinated beverage. I am transported into a Haiku: A deep mountain gorge, specked in morning sun, a burbling brook. Kind of.

Sharing With Others How You Work Best

We all have different working styles, but to work together effectively we need to create environments that accommodate both deep work and spontaneous exchanges. (Outsourcing this to the self organising hive mind is doomed to fail).

A much better approach is to define and agree upon ways of working with the people and teams you interact with most frequently, and most closely. It sounds simple, but few people openly communicate how they prefer to work, and how the organisation can get the best out of them. A hat tip to @Elise Moron who introduced me to “The Manual of Me”, a handy guide that can help us communicate how we prefer to work with others, and can help to iron out differences in styles.

When completed in earnest, this exercise has helped me to work more effectively with colleagues who were previously sending me 50–100 “spontaneous” Slack messages per week. They now send me one daily or weekly summary highlighting the main points to review. This allows me to block 30 minutes at the end of the day to provide considered input that is helpful — rather than trying, and inevitably failing, to give off the cuff answers whilst on the hop. More importantly it makes all of us feel less stressed, and increases the quality of the decisions we make.

Create The Right Environment For The Right Task

Sometimes a 15 minute check in is the best format to align. Sometimes we need a three hour working session and whiteboard (physical or virtual) to figure out a complex problem. Sometimes we need to go for a 30 minute walk alone to work something out, or an informal coffee chat to think expansively and dream. Instead we default to a one hour meeting, currently via Zoom / Hangouts or Teams for all of the above.

Don’t let tools dictate the environment you need to be effective. Sometimes the open road is the best productivity tool of all.

Burnout : catch me if you can!

Brain Training

We need to stop snacking on neurological junk food. By firing cortisol into our prefrontal cortexes and adrenaline through our veins we are building destructive habits and distracted minds.

Modern hive mind workers need to establish a balanced diet between: immediacy and having the time to think; between being switched on and being permitted to switch off and between staying on top of things, whilst having the time to get beneath the surface of things.

But what do I know? Maybe a new tool, backed by VCs betting on productivity enhancing enterprise SaaS will help us to reclaim our most productive hours? Mindfulness for our calendars. AI that knows you better than you know yourself. You get it. Technology + vision = value 😉

My advice: Think twice before downloading. It might be the best decision you make all day.