“the largest open floor plan in the world” and other information about Facebook’s new headquarters: Hoare, Rose. “Do Open Plan Offices Lead to Better Work or Closed Minds?” CNN, October 4, 2012. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/04/business/global-office-open-plan/.
“We encourage people to stay out in the open” and other information about Square’s headquarters:
Savitz, Eric. “Jack Dorsey: Leadership Secrets of Twitter and Square.” Forbes, October 17, 2012. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/10/17/jack-dorsey-the-leadership-secrets-of-twitter-and-square.
“province of chatty teenagers” and “new productivity gains” from the following New York Times article about instant messaging: Strom, David. “I.M. Generation Is Changing the Way Business Talks.” New York Times, April 5, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/technology/techspecial4/05message.html.
More on Hall can be found at Hall.com and in this article: Tsotsis, Alexia. “Hall.com Raises $580K from Founder’s Collective and Others to Transform Realtime Collaboration.” TechCrunch, October 16, 2011. http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/16/hall-com-raises-580k-from-founders-collective-and-others-to-transform-realtime-collaboration/.
An up-to-date list of the more than eight hundred New York Times employees using Twitter: https://twitter.com/nytimes/nyt-journalists/members.
The original Jonathan Franzen piece for the Guardian was published online on September 13, 2013, with the title “Jonathan Franzen: What’s Wrong with the Modern World.” The piece has since been removed for “legal” issues.
Here is the October 4, 2013, Slate piece, by Katy Waldman, that ended up titled “Jonathan Franzen’s Lonely War on the Internet Continues.” Notice from the URL that the original title was even harsher: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/04/jonathan_franzen_says_twitter_is_a_coercive_development_is_grumpy_and_out.html.
“Franzen’s a category of one”: from Jennifer Weiner’s response to Franzen in The New Republic: Weiner, Jennifer. “What Jonathan Franzen Misunderstands About Me.” New Republic, September 18, 2013, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114762/jennifer-weiner-responds-jonathan-franzen.
“massive distraction” and “If you are just getting into some work”: Treasure, Julian. “Sound News: More Damaging Evidence on Open Plan Offices.” Sound Agency, November 16, 2011. http://www.thesoundagency.com/2011/sound-news/more-damaging-evidence-on-open-plan-offices/.
“This was reported by subjects” and related results from: Mark, Gloria, Victor M. Gonzalez, and Justin Harris. “No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 2005.
“Twitter is crack for media addicts” and other details of George Packer’s thoughts about social media: Packer, George. “Stop the World.” The New Yorker, January 29, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2010/01/stop-the-world.html.
The Metric Black Hole
“A ‘free and frictionless’ method of communication” and other details of Tom Cochran’s e-mail experiment: Cochran, Tom. “Email Is Not Free.” Harvard Business Review, April 8, 2013. http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/04/email-is-not-free/.
“it is objectively difficult to measure individual”: from page 509 of Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014.
“undoubtedly true”: Manzi, Jim. “Piketty’s Can Opener.” National Review, July 7, 2014. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/382084/pikettys-can-opener-jim-manzi. This careful and critical review of Piketty’s book by Jim Manzi is where I originally came across the Piketty citation.
The Principle of Least Resistance
“At first, the team resisted”; “putting their careers in jeopardy”; and “a better product delivered to the client” as well as a good summary of Leslie Perlow’s connectivity research can be found in Perlow, Leslie A., and Jessica L. Porter. “Making Time Off Predictable—and Required.” Harvard Business Review, October 2009. https://hbr.org/2009/10/making-time-off-predictable-and-required.
For more on David Allen’s task management system, see his book: Allen, David. Getting Things Done. New York: Viking, 2001.
Allen’s fifteen-element task management flowchart can be found in Allen, Getting Things Done, as well as online: http://gettingthingsdone.com/pdfs/tt_workflow_chart.pdf.
Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity
The h-index for an academic is (roughly speaking) the largest value x that satisfies the following rule: “I have published at least x papers with x or more citations.” Notice, this value manages to capture both how many papers you have written and how often you are cited. You cannot gain a high h-index value simply by pumping out a lot of low-value papers, or by having a small number of papers that are cited often. This metric tends to grow over careers, which is why in many fields h-index goals are tied to certain career milestones.
“To do real good physics work”: comes around the 28:20 mark in a 1981 TV interview with Richard Feynman for the BBC Horizon program (the interview aired in the United States as an episode of NOVA). The YouTube video of this interview that I watched when researching this book has since been removed due to a copyright complaint by the BBC (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgaw9qe7DEE). Transcripts of the relevant quote, however, can be found at http://articles.latimes.com/1988-02-16/news/mn-42968_1_nobel-prize/2 and http://calnewport.com/blog/2014/04/20/richard-feynman-didnt-win-a-nobel-by-responding-promptly-to-e-mails/ and http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/DCARead?standardNo=0738201081&standardNoType=1&excerpt=true.
“Managers themselves inhabit a bewildering psychic landscape”: from page 9 of Crawford, Matthew. Shop Class as Soulcraft. New York: Penguin, 2009.
“cranking widgets”: This concept is a popular metaphor in discussing David Allen’s task management system; c.f. Mann, Merlin. “Podcast: Interview with GTD’s David Allen on Procrastination.” 43 Folders, August 19, 2007. http://www.43folders.com/2006/10/10/productive-talk-procrastination ; Schuller, Wayne. “The Power of Cranking Widgets.” Wayne Schuller’s Blog, April 9, 2008. http://schuller.id.au/2008/04/09/the-power-of-cranking-widgets-gtd-times/; and Babauta, Leo. “Cranking Widgets: Turn Your Work into Stress-free Productivity.” Zen Habits, March 6, 2007. http://zenhabits.net/cranking-widgets-turn-your-work-into/.
More on Marissa Mayer’s working-from-home prohibition: Carlson, Nicholas. “How Marissa Mayer Figured Out Work-At-Home Yahoos Were Slacking Off.” Business Insider, March 2, 2013. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-marissa-mayer-figured-out-work-at-home-yahoos-were-slacking-off-2013-3.
The Cult of the Internet
Alissa Rubin tweets at @Alissanyt. I don’t have specific evidence that Alissa Rubin was pressured to tweet. But I can make a circumstantial case: She includes “nyt” in her Twitter handle, and the Times maintains a social media desk that helps educate its employees about how to use social media (c.f. https://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/newyork-times-social-media-desk_b53783 ), a focus that has led to more than eight hundred employees tweeting: https://twitter.com/nytimes/nyt-journalists/members.
Here is an example of one of Alissa Rubin’s articles that I encountered when writing this chapter: Rubin, Alissa J., and Ma?a de la Baume, “Claims of French Complicity in Rwanda’s Genocide Rekindle Mutual Resentment.” New York Times, April 8, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/world/africa/claims-of-french-complicity-in-rwandas-genocide-rekindle-mutual-resentment.html?ref=alissajohannsenrubin.
Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.