Fridays are a social construct
I feel like I could have written this post. I agree entirely:
Some of the phenomena governing people's schedules are natural. It does get dark at night and people do need light. It gets cold in the winter and people need heating. But the Earth does not care whether it's the weekday or the weekend, a Wednesday or a Saturday. And yet somehow the society has decreed that Wednesday is a serious business day and any adult roaming the streets during daytime on that day might get weird stares.As the author points out, knowledge work doesn't depend on people doing it at the same time. In fact, the title of his post is 'Against the synchronous society':
Perhaps there's no need for people in the workplace to expect others to be able to instantly respond to them. In fact, slower, asynchronous communication can lead to more robust institutional memory inside of an organisation. Instead of the easy fix of tapping a colleague on the shoulder to get an answer, the worker might instead devise a solution for an issue themselves or figure it out while typing up an email, adding to the documentation and making sure fewer people have that question in the future.Great stuff. I, for one, am looking forward to a time when we're collectively spend a bit more time reflecting, and a bit less time (knee-jerk) responding.
As an aside, the software running the blog, Kimonote, looks interesting:
Kimonote is a fancy plain text organizer, a macroblogging platform and an antisocial network. It supports Markdown, which allows for a consistent look-and-feel no matter whether you're looking at your own private notes or someone else's public posts. Additional niceties are available, such as a table of contents.Source: mildbyte