The spreadsheet is a lattice of potential lung disease, a complex map of silica dust concentrations that I have been staring at for 119 minutes, and then the screen flashes. It is a small, innocuous bubble in the corner of my monitor. A ‘ping’ that carries the weight of a physical blow to the back of the head. I am Jamie A.J., and as an industrial hygienist, my life is dedicated to measuring the invisible toxins that slowly kill people in the workplace. I track the parts per billion, the stray fibers of asbestos, the microscopic spores that wait for a lapse in judgment to colonize a lung.
But as I sit here, my mouth still tingling with the acrid, metallic bitterness of the moldy sourdough I just bit into-a discovery that happened exactly 9 seconds before this interruption-I realize that the most dangerous contaminant in this office isn’t the dust. It’s the ‘quick question.’
The Looting of Competence
‘Hey Jamie, what’s the guest wifi password?’
My sandwich sits on the desk, a jagged bite taken out of the crust, revealing a forest of greyish-green fuzz that I somehow missed in the dim light of the breakroom. It’s a perfect metaphor for the modern Slack channel: something that looks like nourishment from a distance but reveals itself to be a biological hazard upon closer inspection.
The interruption hasn’t just cost me the 9 seconds it took to read the message. It has triggered the Great Reset. The 19-stage mental architecture I had built to understand the flow of silica through the ventilation system has collapsed. I am no longer an industrial hygienist; I am a glorified search engine with a pulse and a sour taste in my mouth.
The Lubrication of Friction
There is a specific kind of cruelty in the way we use instant messaging. We have mistaken ‘instant’ for ‘obligatory.’ In the old days-perhaps 49 years ago, when the pace of business was dictated by the speed of a typewriter-you had to think before you spoke. You had to walk to someone’s desk. You had to risk the social friction of a physical interruption. Now, that friction has been lubricated into non-existence. The ‘quick question’ is a micro-aggression against deep thought. It is the lazy man’s research tool. Why spend 59 seconds looking through the company handbook-which is pinned to the top of every single channel-when you can spend 3 seconds typing into my life?
The Tax on Expertise
We are punishing our most knowledgeable employees by turning them into human help desks. Every time I answer one of these, I am teaching my colleagues that my time is less valuable than their effort. I am subsidizing their lack of curiosity with my own cognitive reserves. It is a tax on expertise.
Information that resides in the 89-hour drafted FAQ document.
The document is indexed. It is searchable. It is, for all intents and purposes, a masterpiece of clarity. But it requires the user to open a tab. It requires them to engage with a database. And humans, much like the mold currently colonizing my lunch, prefer to grow where the nutrients are easiest to reach.
The competent are the new infrastructure; and we are crumbling under the weight of the lazy.
The Privilege of Ignorance (Moment 2/4)
Expertise requires constant defense.
Ignorance is subsidized by others.
In this economy, ignorance is a luxury, and expertise is a prison.
I’ve started to wonder if I should just pretend to be slightly more incompetent. If I started ‘forgetting’ the wifi password, or the OSHA limits for formaldehyde, would they finally look at the documents I’ve provided? Or would the whole building just slowly succumb to a cloud of toxic gas while everyone pings each other asking where the masks are?
The Machine as Responder
This is why the current state of internal knowledge is so fundamentally broken. We have all the data, but no one wants to do the labor of looking at it. We need a way to make the machine do the heavy lifting of being the ‘person who knows things.’
This is exactly the kind of friction that
aims to eliminate by turning that massive, ignored handbook into a living, breathing responder that doesn’t have a silica report to finish or a moldy sandwich to mourn. If a machine answers the ‘quick question,’ the competent human can go back to solving the problems that actually require a soul.
Calculating the Peril: What is the permissible exposure limit for ‘quick questions’?
The Post-Focus World
There is a cost to this constant state of availability that we haven’t even begun to calculate. In my field, we talk about ‘permissible exposure limits.’ We know exactly how much lead a human can breathe before their brain starts to fray. But what is the permissible exposure limit for ‘quick questions’? At what point does the 149th ping of the day cause a permanent loss of cognitive function? I suspect we passed that limit years ago. We are living in a post-focus world, a slurry of half-finished thoughts and interrupted workflows.
The Hive Mind (Moment 4/4)
19 Years Ago
Could go four hours without an electronic beep. Deep problem-solving achieved.
Now
Interrupted so often, I don’t have time to check if my bread is edible. We are just routing signals.
We need to stop pretending that being ‘reachable’ is the same as being ‘productive.’ We need to acknowledge that every time we ask a colleague something they could have found themselves, we are stealing from them. We are stealing their focus, their momentum, and their sanity. We are the mold on their sourdough.
Until we build systems that value the time of the expert as much as the convenience of the novice, we will all just be sitting in the dark, breathing in the dust, waiting for the next ping to tell us how to turn on the lights.
I type the password. I type the same eleven characters I have typed 79 times this year. I hit send. The interruption is over, but the damage is done. The silica dust report is a foreign language to me now. I have to start at page 1 again.