All right, our next question here comes from Christoph. Christoph asks, what is your take on the informal stop by the office chat? He notes it's synchronous but also disruptive. Instead of multiple emails, a quick chat with my boss while I walk by his office and he waves me down, gets a quick informal project update.

What is your take on these type of informal meetings? Well, Christoph, there's two different forces that are working cross-current when it comes to this habit of office stop by. So the positive force is that it helps the boss feel more connected to his or her employees, and I think it actually does achieve that effect, right?

It means that you get to have a regular interaction with the people you work with that might not otherwise really happen at all and quite infrequently that does have a social cohesion effect which is positive. The negative force that this creates, of course, is context switching. We now know because we've all read my book, A World Without Email, we've all venerated the book, we all talk about it all the time with our bosses and buy numerous copies for our friends and relatives in the upcoming holiday season.

We all know from that book that there's a really non-trivial cost to having to switch the target of your attention from one thing to another. Christoph, you probably feel a sense of fatigue, cognitive fatigue, after your boss stops by, grabs you, you do an update, and you're trying to go back to the things you're doing.

You probably feel that fatigue that makes it hard to get going again. Maybe you just devolve into "Let me go into my email inbox. I just don't have it anymore." That's not random. That's the cost of the attention residue of having to completely switch your cognitive context from whatever you were doing to what the boss is doing.

So there's a really big footprint from that that can give you cognitive fatigue and more generally lower your cognitive capacity. So we have a positive and a negative. I think the right thing to do here, in my personal opinion, is find an alternative way of accomplishing the same positive benefit of the stop by, the social cohesion benefit, that sidesteps the context switching cost.

So what this means is let's have a regular way that we can talk with each other, but it's predictable. I know when it's going to happen. It's not going to happen in the middle of something else I am doing. If you practice office hours, which I think almost every office environment should, where everyone says on a set days at set times, "Here are my office hours.

My door is open. My zoom is on. My phone is on. I expect to do nothing in here but to talk to people, call me with questions, stop by my office with questions." If you practice office hours, now the boss can basically circumnavigate those office hours. And now you can get that same effect if you're the boss by saying "I keep track of when all of my different employees' office hours are and I want to stop by each employee's office hours once per week." No disruption because that's the point of the office hours, but you also get that social cohesion.

I can regularly be talking to you. So I think that's probably the right balance, but you are correct to note that cost you feel. That cost you feel accruing from the stop by is real. That's actually a neurological, a qualia of the neurological dance that goes on when you have to keep switching your attention from one target to another, then back again.