Chaos tools

The modern era has seen a growing dependency on collaboration tools of one form or another. As distributed or remote working teams have taken off, these tools have become more prominent than ever. But there are so many teams with specialised work and tools that we now have to work with a wide range of tools.

In our work, we might be expected to be available on or updating materials on five different platforms. Take MS Teams. Yes, it enables rapid communication, but it's easy to find yourself on multiple teams each of which can have multiple channels. And every time someone posts something in one of those teams, you'll get a pop-up with an audible notification. And on departmental teams when you have a specialised skill set (eg DAM) a lot of that broader departmental communication is of no value or interest.

So let's ask the obvious question: is this a feature or a bug? From the point of view of team leads, availability of their people is a feature. From the point of view of bad managers who judge the value of team members based on how visible they are in the department (yes, I have heard of this being used as a metric) or their response time, these are features.

From the point of view of someone who has work to focus on, constantly being distracted by pop-ups is a bug. Microsoft are so aware of this that they've implemented options to disable notification sounds and to mute teams. If Teams wasn't known to be creating too much noise in our working lives then such options wouldn't be necessary. And this is just one platform.

Our working lives offer no ability to pare these tools down. But we still have work to do. How well do you work with regular notifications from multiple tools? They act to attract immediate attention when we already have something to focus on. As technology increasingly makes our routine work more complex, the impact of interruptions to our focus becomes more significant. As such, we can start thinking of them as chaos tools, not collaboration tools.

If MS Teams had an avatar, it would surely be this: Hearthstone's Psychotron. Each collaboration tool adds more interruptions and distractions from our increasingly complex work. Do we really have collaboration tools or chaos tools like the Psychotron that fill our lives with increasingly valueless noise?

Collaboration is something that comes from the ground up. It comes from people having shared goals that they're interested in or passionate about paired with the capability to make productive connections. If these elements are missing, then the imposition of a new chaos tool isn't going to bridge the gaps. It might make people resent their management or their colleagues who’ll use the tool to generate more spam than Nigerian Generals.

With so many options already, the greatest challenges are filtering out the tools that demand we serve them. We need to drop the chaos tools with their pretend productivity.