What Is Your Take On the "Stop By Office" Chat?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:05.000 | All right, our next question here comes from Christoph.

00:00:09.000 | Christoph asks, what is your take on the informal

00:00:13.000 | stop by the office chat?

00:00:16.000 | He notes it's synchronous but also disruptive.

00:00:19.000 | Instead of multiple emails, a quick chat with my boss while I walk by his office

00:00:22.000 | and he waves me down, gets a quick informal project update.

00:00:26.000 | What is your take on these type of informal meetings?

00:00:30.000 | Well, Christoph, there's two different forces

00:00:34.000 | that are working cross-current when it comes to this habit of office stop by.

00:00:38.000 | So the positive force is that it helps the boss feel more

00:00:42.000 | connected to his or her employees, and I think it actually

00:00:46.000 | does achieve that effect, right? It means that you get to have

00:00:50.000 | a regular interaction with the people you work with that might not otherwise really happen at all

00:00:54.000 | and quite infrequently that does have a social cohesion effect which is positive.

00:00:58.000 | The negative force that this creates, of course,

00:01:02.000 | is context switching. We now know because we've all read my book, A World Without

00:01:06.000 | Email, we've all venerated the book, we all talk about it all the time with our bosses

00:01:10.000 | and buy numerous copies for our friends and relatives in the upcoming holiday season.

00:01:14.000 | We all know from that book that there's a really non-trivial cost to having to switch

00:01:18.000 | the target of your attention from one thing to another. Christoph, you probably

00:01:22.000 | feel a sense of fatigue, cognitive fatigue, after your

00:01:26.000 | boss stops by, grabs you, you do an update, and you're trying to go back to the things you're doing. You probably

00:01:30.000 | feel that fatigue that makes it hard to get going again. Maybe you just devolve into

00:01:34.000 | "Let me go into my email inbox. I just don't have it anymore."

00:01:38.000 | That's not random. That's the cost of the attention residue of having to completely

00:01:42.000 | switch your cognitive context from whatever you were doing to what the boss is doing. So there's a really big

00:01:46.000 | footprint from that that can give you cognitive fatigue and more generally lower your

00:01:50.000 | cognitive capacity. So we have a positive and a negative.

00:01:54.000 | I think the right thing to do here, in my personal opinion, is find

00:01:58.000 | an alternative way of accomplishing the same positive benefit

00:02:02.000 | of the stop by, the social cohesion benefit, that sidesteps the

00:02:06.000 | context switching cost. So what this means is

00:02:10.000 | let's have a regular way that we can talk with each other, but it's predictable.

00:02:14.000 | I know when it's going to happen. It's not going to happen in the middle of something

00:02:18.000 | else I am doing. If you practice office hours,

00:02:22.000 | which I think almost every office environment should, where everyone

00:02:26.000 | says on a set days at set times, "Here are my office

00:02:30.000 | hours. My door is open. My zoom is on. My phone is on.

00:02:34.000 | I expect to do nothing in here but to talk to people, call me with questions,

00:02:38.000 | stop by my office with questions." If you practice office hours, now

00:02:42.000 | the boss can basically circumnavigate those office hours.

00:02:46.000 | And now you can get that same effect if you're the boss by saying

00:02:50.000 | "I keep track of when all of my different employees' office hours are

00:02:54.000 | and I want to stop by each employee's office hours once per week."

00:02:58.000 | No disruption because that's the point of the office hours, but

00:03:02.000 | you also get that social cohesion. I can regularly be talking to you. So I think that's probably the right

00:03:06.000 | balance, but you are correct to note that cost you feel.

00:03:10.000 | That cost you feel accruing from the

00:03:14.000 | stop by is real. That's actually a neurological, a qualia

00:03:18.000 | of the neurological dance that goes on when you have to keep switching

00:03:22.000 | your attention from one target to another, then back again.

00:03:26.000 | [Music]

What Is Your Take On the "Stop By Office" Chat?

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