Читать книгу It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work - Jason Fried, Jason Fried - Страница 15

Ask people where they go when they really need to get something done. One answer you’ll rarely hear: the office.

That’s right. When you really need to get work done you rarely go into the office. Or, if you must, it’s early in the morning, late at night, or on the weekends. All the times when no one else is around. At that point it’s not even “the office”—it’s just a quiet space where you won’t be bothered.

Way too many people simply can’t get work done at work anymore.

It doesn’t make any sense. Companies pour gobs of money into buying or renting an office and filling it with desks, chairs, and computers. Then they arrange it all so that nobody can actually get anything done there.

Modern-day offices have become interruption factories. Merely walking in the door makes you a target for anyone else’s conversation, question, or irritation. When you’re on the inside, you’re a resource who can be polled, interrogated, or pulled into a meeting. And another meeting about that other meeting. How can you expect anyone to get work done in an environment like that?

It’s become fashionable to blame distractions at work on things like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But these things aren’t the problem, any more than old-fashioned smoke breaks were the problem 30 years ago. Were cigarettes the problem with work back then?

The major distractions at work aren’t from the outside, they’re from the inside. The wandering manager constantly asking people how things are going, the meeting that accomplishes little but morphs into another meeting next week, the cramped quarters into which people are crammed like sardines, the ringing phones of the sales department, or the loud lunchroom down the hall from your desk. These are the toxic by-products of offices these days.

Ever notice how much work you get done on a plane or a train? Or, however perversely, on vacation? Or when you hide in the basement? Or on a late Sunday afternoon when you have nothing else to do but crack open the laptop and pound some keys? It’s in these moments—the moments far away from work, way outside the office—when it is the easiest to get work done. Interruption-free zones.

People aren’t working longer and later because there’s more work to do all of a sudden. People are working longer and later because they can’t get work done at work anymore!