Please Unplug

There's simply no tolerance for boredom anymore. None. Entertain me. Now. They get entertained by the internet and communications all day long so much that you're competing with FaceBook and YouTube when you try to have a simple conversation.

There was a recent train crash where the engineer was texting a friend. Need to control the train? Sure, but I have to tell this person I'll never meet I really liked Idol last night. I had a coach tell me his teams were doing stand-ups very oddly: everybody sat down at their computers and read their email. One at a time, a person stood up and explained his status for the day. Nobody listened: they were all mentally engaged somewhere else. Once he was finished, he sat back down and went to his email. Then the next guy stood up. They had the vestiges of this formality -- like an old echo -- but it was pointless.

I'm finding that one of the tougher parts of teaching big teams to become small teams is getting people to actually unplug and get to know each other. When you're in a big, matrixed organization, you can work for years and nobody really knows you. It used to be that you knew everyone in your neighborhood and everyone you worked with. Then it became where you didn't know people in your neighborhood but still knew people you worked with. Now you don't even know those people.

When I explain stand-ups, and working together, and helping each other out, many times I get the same questions. Can't we just email status in? Can't we just work by ourselves in our little cubicles? Do I actually have to talk to my team about when they're going to be available next week? Why not just put a spreadsheet on the share drive and they can update it? Do we really have to come out of our little shell and interact with other humans? Strangers? I'd rather be commenting on some guy's blog who made a post this morning about Terrier puppies or reading FaceBook updates about famous people.

Where will this end? Raising your kids and never actually getting to know them? Sadly, we're probably already there. Living with your wife and not spending any time with her? Already there too.

Living your life without ever meeting yourself?

I don't have the courage to go there.

I can say that I have more social interactions some days on computer networks than I do with real, live people who are sitting across from me. I see kids in McDonalds sitting across from each other texting each other instead of talking. And they're right there!

Now I hear you talking. Daniel, you're becoming a flat-earther. A luddite. Technology has allowed us to reach out and talk to millions of people we could never reach before. We can have types of conversations that were impossible just a few years ago.

Hey -- I'm as big of a tech wonk as anybody. I remember when all of this stuff was new, and I was an early adopter. Sending messages by cell phone? Awesome? Email? Radical. It was all new and cool and very much Star Trek-ish.

But something happened on the way to Utopia. We have meet the enemy, and he is ourselves.

There is something magical about body language, about nuances of habit, about turns of the phrase, about ways of speaking, that we are losing.

Perhaps a better way of looking at this problem is to look at highly complex technical life-or-death environments, like airplane cockpits. Seems like we can handle high degrees of mental involvement if we exclude interruptions. "High degrees of mental involvement" can include just being a social human being. It's all about a balance of attention: managing your focus. Everybody thinks they're really good at this. Few actually are.

Last year I went on a trip to the mountains with my family to stay in a cabin during the winter. It was beautiful. The rule was: no computers for the trip. Just books,%