9 ms·

Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush

189 points by SQL2219 9y ago

codeulike 9y ago
He presents a silly argument ("computers encourage generalists but Adam Smith said specialisation was the way forwards") and I'm pretty sure he's aware its silly, its more of a hook to build the rest of the musings around.
leoedin 9y ago
The big barrier to outsourcing anything has always been information transfer. It's all very well handing a presentation over to a designer, but if they don't know what it should contain then they can't design it. In the end the spec document for the presentation ends up looking almost like the presentation itself. Likewise, the office typing pool would probably be typing up a manager's hand writing. Ubiquitous typing skills now (at least in theory) should mean that the manager today spends no longer writing their document than they used to, but it comes out of that process already typed. Ultimately something like MS Office essentially act as captured knowledge. They know how to lay out a presentation to your company standards, so you don't have to. The ideal (although nobody has quite got there yet) is that the tool is so seamless that the user can only spend their time worrying about the important bits - information transfer, in the case of a presentation. Flight booking tools are now also so easy to use that the overhead for the person actually taking the flight is fairly minimal. That's not to say they couldn't be better, but we're almost at the point where you tell Sky Scanner that you want to travel from A to B on a certain date and it allows you to seamlessly book it. It's taken the place of the administrative assistant, who would still have had to consult you on where and when you wanted to go anyway. (Saying that, having an admin handle flight bookings is still easier than doing it yourself, so we do have some way to come here).
- skybrian 9y ago
  Information transfer happens better when you're both in the same room talking. One idea would be to have a designer who is an expert in the presentation software essentially take dictation from the person who wants the presentation done, saving the time needed for a non-expert to fumble around with the software. But I don't know if this would save much time?
- dkarl 9y ago
  This strikes me as the answer, too, especially with the PowerPoint example in mind. Working with somebody who is only an expert at communication to get them to communicate on your behalf about a topic you're expert on requires a lot of laborious back and forth, which reduces quality because the subject matter expert spends most of their time trying to make sure that the composer's "improvements" don't accidentally mean something opposite or orthogonal to what is intended. If a manager and a PowerPoint design expert worked together at the same computer, with the manager dictating content and the PowerPoint expert performing the edits and suggesting design improvements, you would get a better end product, but I doubt it would amount to a productivity gain.
- mwcampbell 9y ago
  Case in point on the subject of information transfer: I prefer to book my own flight, directly with the airline, so I can make sure the "Blind or low vision" checkbox gets checked. Then, maybe, they won't tell me to get in a wheelchair, assuming the correct information gets transferred all the way to the person helping me through the airport.
- gpsx 9y ago
  I agree with you here and think Microsoft Office does not make us les productive, for the reason you give. It would be nice if the OP actually did some measurements to test his idea or at least the extent to which it is a factor. Maybe he linked to it and I missed it. At the same time, this could be an opportunity. Maybe there is some way tools and workflow could be designed to better allow experts to help. For example, the manager is driving power point and the presentation expert is virtually over his shoulder, waiting to help out where needed. And I am thinking of having a real person as the helper, along with any software assistance built into the program.
frou_dh 9y ago
You don't need the mentioned smartphone to be exposed to Candy Crush. Last time I clean-installed Windows 10, there it was in the Start Menu by default. And, even after using the Settings app to uninstall it, it would go on to reappear multiple times. The message I took from that is that the PC is no longer something of an intellectual space, and Microsoft want to forcibly assimilate you into mainstream garbage.
- titanix2 9y ago
  Yeah Windows 10 Start Menu is awful in part because of that. It’s like after the Windows 8 debacle Microsoft is telling us: "oh you like this Menu that much? Ok, here is your menu..." and give us one so bad no one dare to use it anymore as a revenge. And it works. I almost never use it because it cannot find what I want. And that’s when is shows anything at all, because on my VM it’s broken 1/4 of the time (no problem with 7 & 8.1 in the same configuration).
  - red75prime 9y ago
    > because on my VM it’s broken 1/4 of the time Have you sent bug report? There's "Feedback Hub" app for that. Sending bug report to the VM team isn't unthinkable too.
    - titanix2 9y ago
      No I didn’t. It took a screenshot so I’ll do that some day.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    Have you tried Start10, which helped to bring the menu back? It’s modelled on Win7 start menu. https://www.stardock.com/products/start10/ https://www.stardock.com/products/start10/
    - petepete 9y ago
      While this is nice I shouldn't need to install extra software for such basic functionality. Was Windows 7's start menu really so bad? On personal machines, whatever, but games ads shouldn't be forcefully appearing on a tool I want to use for work.
ryz 9y ago
Seems like he lacks the self-control, willpower and confidence to set boundaries for himself and others. These are definitely skills which are needed in a modern office environment and they especially apply to "senior staff". I get what he's trying to say, but it's really a matter identifying the critical skills needed for your line of work, then building productive habits and killing inproductive ones - nobody said you HAVE to have funny memes in your presentation and in turn waste 20 minutes searching for them. So don't do it and voilà, one distraction less. This is the information age and being able to filter out superfluous information is a valuable (and neccesary) skill - don't blame external factors, they won't go away. If anything, this is "survival of the fittest" in the modern world.
- coliveira 9y ago
  I understand your point, but the goal of technology should be to help us be more productive, not to try to separate the ones that have strong willpower from the rest. The clear trend here is that technology companies want people to become slaves to whatever process they setup, instead of working to improve our lives.
  - watwut 9y ago
    I agree with you in abstract, but examples in this article are quite odd. Leaving aside typing, which is faster if you do it by yourself once you learned it, they just don't take that much time. Neither travel booking nor filling expenses nor work related supermarket shopping. Even normal power point presentations are done very fast with company template. Preparing speech and content when presentation mattered a lot seemed to take way more time then layout. Even candy crush is an odd example, middle management is not main audience and I doubt they play it all that much in work. And then again in larger corporations, middle management (the ones that are not part of teams that produce) are what used to be administration. They have zero decision power, know nothing about projects they are assigned to and they are there to produce reports so that programmers don't have to.
    - coliveira 9y ago
thesumofall 9y ago
In consulting it’s typical that consultants draw the layout of their sides on paper and send it to a center specialized on PowerPoint to produce it. Or they dummy it in PowerPoint and the specialists take it from there. For Word, at least my firm blocks most of the layouting stuff so that you can only use the official styles. Works for me
- hectormalot 9y ago
  We probably work for the same firm. I think it works well for basic formatting, but information transfer already becomes time intensive when you’re looking to create something high-end (eg where Message and conceptual design are closely linked) That said, yes, I see many clients spend significant chunks of their time on creating the ppt compared to how long they need to write down their ideas on paper. (And off topic: the other major corporate timesink i see is time spent in meetings, often because it’s unclear who has the mandate to make decisions, and as a result everyone gets invited)
rubidium 9y ago
The biggest point is more administrative staff would help productivity. I'm flummoxed by the lack of admins at the large, successful company I work for. Many senior managers and staff could be x2-3 more effective. One marketing manager spent all week doing ppt layout for a 10 minute slide deck for the president. Another BU lead spends hours resolving a shipping and receiving fiasco for _one_ package. When these people do what they're paid for they are really good. But when they get absorbed into administrative tasks they're terribly inefficient.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Totally agree. I have spent months last year parsing corporate documentation rules. if we had more tech writers whose job is to make sure the docs are in the right form we could free up years of engineering time. Same for booking travel. We have to do it ourselves but still follow a ton of rules you always forget if you do it only once or twice a year. If we had one person that could book travel and get visas a lot of time could be saved.
- jen729w 9y ago
  The “administration” role has disappeared. Now we have “business analysts” who, in many cases, do basically the same thing: they just get paid $600/day to do it. (Context: Australian IT projects, particularly those for the large banks.)
greggarious 9y ago
I would have thought removing clippy would raise those numbers ;) (Who among us didn't spend an embarrassing amount of time interacting with that little rascal?)
- jccalhoun 9y ago
  Honestly, I think Clippy might be due for a comeback. Of course I don't think actual Clippy will come back but I think that some actual intelligent AI could help with office tasks if it worked (which is a big if). In the same way that Word knows I want an outline if I type "I." I think it might be useful if Word could know I want to type a letter if I start with an address or something.
  - tempodox 9y ago
    > I think Clippy might be due for a comeback. I suspect so. Just a few days ago I found an ASCII version of that troll in a frigging code editor (http://kakoune.org/img/screenshots/screenshot-i3.gif http://kakoune.org/img/screenshots/screenshot-i3.gif)
  - greggarious 9y ago
    My main memory is one of the animations in the 2D version looked vaguely like he's giving the finger, and we'd right click -> animate to cycle through looking for it.
  - contextfree 9y ago
    Both Office and Google Docs have been recently adding features that try to do this sort of thing, sans anthropomorphic paper clip.
pacaro 9y ago
In 1989 I worked at a pharmaceutical firm that still had a secretarial pool. As a lab technician if I was writing a document (typically a Standard Opening Procedure or SOP) I was expected to write it by hand and leave a copy in my outbox (literally one of two trays on my desk) with the correct request form. The next day I’d receive a draft, and then I’d painstakingly provide corrections (typically every technical term and chemical name was wrong) and repeat as needed, after about a week we’d be good and it could be signed off and filed. While this felt inefficient, and probably was, part of that process also included review from my boss, so done was reviewed and done. When someone wanted to call a meeting, that was another form, then invitations in inboxes (again physical trays on desks) replies, room assigned. Meetings were scheduled at least a week out. The flip side is that you could and did request secretarial support for meetings — someone in the room whose only purpose is to take notes, and who will go back and type up detailed minutes.
- styfle 9y ago
  That sounds glorious. I've had plenty of meetings where 15 min in I have to ask "What's the purpose of this meeting?" Or at the end of the meeting, "Ok who was taking notes? No one?"
  - stctgion 9y ago
    Another good question to ask is "Did we all really need to be here?" after someone adds a mailer to the invite..
  - pacaro 9y ago
    Having professional minutes was amazing, maybe we’ll be able to automate it at some point. I would assume that an automated transcript isn’t so far away.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Having good secretarial staff is under appreciated. Yeah, I can do my own time (I bill by the hour), book my flights, find open meeting times, etc. But if an administrative assistant can support 3 professionals saving them just 5 hours a month, they can pay for themselves.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dmix 9y ago
The chart he linked to shows a very weak correlation between smartphones/productivity, even as a single data point... https://bankunderground.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/chart.png https://bankunderground.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/chart.pn... There was an even larger drop in the late 1970s (what caused that?) and the dip started around the time of the recession in 2008 as well which must have had a large impact. There were very likely many causes to productivity and I'd be curious to see what the major historical drivers predating the modern smartphone/financial crisis era dip.
- cma 9y ago
  > There was an even larger drop in the late 1970s Women began entering the labor force en masse. Way more employees available = less productivity unless you can invent a bunch of new needs immediately.
zxcb1 9y ago
Should one understand this as a productivity tool that contributes more as a distraction than something actually designed to distract? Or maybe, that the productivity tool no longer is employed as a productivity tool?
vignesh_m 9y ago
Contrary to what the title may imply, he doesnt shit on Office and say its a bad product.
makecheck 9y ago
What drives me the most crazy is that after decades these tools can’t get the basics right, like text editing. That has to be the single biggest waste of time. I always prepare my material in a real text editor, until I’m completely satisfied with the content, before I risk dumping it into PowerPoint or another terrible editing environment. I mean, 99.9% of presentations contain bullet points and it’s still a mystery what will happen the next time I type a key: will there even be a bullet in front of the next line of text, will it just invent a new line spacing different from the previous bullet, etc.? Then, as if to punish me for having the audacity to save time composing text outside of Office, its Paste mechanism utterly destroys text in ways that almost seem malicious. I end up having to find and disable so many settings just to restore a reasonable set of behaviors for stuff like Paste (bad defaults).
- DuncanKeith 9y ago
  Try using beamer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX)) as an alternative to PowerPoint.
  - maksimum 9y ago
    Having made multiple presentations in beamer, it's definitely not better at everything than WYSWYG presentation editors; some things like non-standard slide layouts are more laborious than they need to be. I think the take-away is that it would be useful if a presentation WYSWYG editor (or any other power-user-oriented program) produced unique and invertible human-editable source code that corresponds to the document. Then the editor would just be a visual programming environment that complements the text programming environment. And it would be up to the user to decide what is more convenient to do in each environment. For example I would like to typeset equations in the text environment, but draw diagrams or play with the layout in the visual environment.
    - tomsmeding 9y ago
      Having a visual frontend for a textual format sounds nice but is always dangerous, in my experience. Before you know, you have some subtle features in the textual format that the GUI can't represent, and as a result, any modifications in the GUI will break your usage of the feature.
crazygringo 9y ago
> Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to produce ugly slides that nobody wants to look at. They also file their own expenses, book their own travel and, for that matter, do their own shopping in the supermarket. ...it is partly bad organisational design: sacking the administrative assistants and telling senior staff to do their own expenses can look, superficially, like a cost saving. Not just superficially -- it is a cost savings, and a net benefit to society. It's the realization that slides can be ugly and still get the point across just as well. And doing my own expenses when everything's charged to a company card takes all of 5 minutes for a weeklong trip. This means we can free up talented designers to improve mobile apps used by millions instead of presentations seen by ten, or administrative assistants to work where they're most needed, such as in health care. I also don't know where the author gets his claim that average productivity growth has been negative since 2007 -- a chart here [1] for the US shows it's been positive for 18 of the past 21 years, and the average is clearly positive too. And while there are certainly plenty of theories as to why productivity growth might be decreasing, the idea that it comes from ugly presentations not only has zero supporting evidence, but seems almost laughable. [1] https://qz.com/946675/us-productivity-growth-was-negative-in-2016-and-economists-arent-sure-why/ https://qz.com/946675/us-productivity-growth-was-negative-in...
- timthorn 9y ago
  The author is writing for a UK audience, where productivity is an issue.
  - majormajor 9y ago
    If the UK trend is so wildly different than the US trend, then that alone looks like a pretty big flag that technologies shared by both the US and UK (computers and phones!) aren't to blame, no?
- mmcconnell1618 9y ago
  Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft but have nothing to do with Office. PowerPoint has a feature that suggests design ideas based on the content of your slides. This is to solve the specific problem of non-designers spending too much time trying to make slides look better: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/About-PowerPoint-Designer-53c77d7b-dc40-45c2-b684-81415eac0617 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/About-PowerPoint-De...
spicymaki 9y ago
Companies want generalists so they can easily replace employees. Employees with specialized skills can command higher wages and can be difficult to source and replace. You need to understand the business, be an admin, handle shipping, book your own travel (at the lowest price), manage your work hours, train yourself, and do your day job. Would be great skills as an independent consultant, but this is happening as a full time employee at a fortune 500 company.
weinzierl 9y ago
> Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to produce ugly slides that nobody wants to look at. So true. Nowadays, whenever I can, I slap something together using impress.js and call it day. I‘m faster and the result is much nicer.
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
FWIW Tim Harford's "More of Less" programme is one of my favourite radio programmes - it's based on statistics relevant to popular media and news stories.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Doh, should be "More or Less".
essayist 9y ago
So on the one end, you have the manager who wrestles with Powerpoint, Project, Word, Kayak.com etc.and spends only 20% of her time working as a systems designer, her real area of expertise. On the other, you have the manager who dictates his email to be typed up by a secretary, and who reads only printouts of incoming email. Where is the sweet spot, DIY where it makes sense, and delegating to others where that makes sense?
- e_b 9y ago
  Only reading print outs and dictating emails sounds like a sweet mechanism for managing your time.
agumonkey 9y ago
The spreading of capabilities often fails because of this, you don't have the experience. And since you're not in it deep, you don't build real skills. Spreading one self thin. The argument often came in the last decade. Everybody could be <foo>. And technically yes, the average smartphone of today has the potential to be EMI + Warner Bros + ... Yet it doesn't scale with the number of users. People did as much if not better with old sequencers or vintage paint programs. It's rarely the tool that matters. I regularly think that the world would lose by being flat. You need peak and valleys so you can master and enjoy the complexity of a domain. Having access to everything is akin to the paradox of choice. It's seducive but only on a short term basis.
tvanantwerp 9y ago
I've definitely seen and done what is described here. I always justified it to myself as doing the things that keep me sane long enough to do the things I actually have to do.
majormajor 9y ago
The author confuses short term efficiency with true desirability, I think - economically, too, not just in the "extreme efficiency is hell for us as people," sense. What happens to your super-efficient workforce of people doing exactly one thing over and over when the industry shifts? It's very similar to code, here: highly optimized processes are hard to refactor. The world is full of not-sufficiently-explored market spaces, hence the ability of small companies to disrupt large ones, and the growing desire to be agile and use MVPs even at large companies. Specializing to extremes is the opposite, and it will get you eaten in many, many businesses.
xtrapolate 9y ago
In a modern office there are no specialist typists; we all need to be able to pick our way around a keyboard. PowerPoint has made amateur slide designers of everyone. Once a slide would be produced by a professional, because no one else had the necessary equipment or training. Now anyone can have a go — and they do. I'm struggling to follow. Putting your thoughts down on a piece of paper is something we all need to be able to do. Do people waste time doing it? Sure, some people will waste some time. A myriad of reasons to it. Boredom, clumsiness, a strong need to let out your creative sides, just to name a few. Perhaps this entire piece comes down to being more aware of the things that distract you. The side quests that often start small, but end up consuming large portions of your time. In a modern office there are no specialist typists Sure, in a modern office you won't come across many such people (amongst other esoteric examples). But there's a counter argument here - forcefully introducing additional bureaucracy by proxies is just as hurtful, if not more.
- fsloth 9y ago
  "Sure, in a modern office you won't come across many such people (amongst other esoteric examples). But there's a counter argument here - forcefully introducing additional bureaucracy by proxies is just as hurtful, if not more." Who said anything about bureaucracy? It all could be lean and agile - but with tasks such that people could concentrate on the value adding tasks. It seems more efficient to hire less people to do n amount of tasks but what happens when the productivity of those people plunge? As an extreme example, we in finland use the public health services a lot. Every time I go there, the doctor fiddles about on his computer doing this adminsterial task and that. It would be much more efficient if the doctor had some secretary who could manage the bureaucratic fiddly bits and let the doctor focus on medicine.
  - xtrapolate 9y ago
    The doctor example is great, but where do we draw the line exactly? Offloading some aspects of your work by utilising other people and their expertise is surely the way to go, but there's a balance to be kept. Sticking to your example, good secretaries (much like good engineers) are expensive, and are hard to come by - isn't that enough to explain why public health services skimp on those? You could argue that in an ideal world/society, everyone would just do those few specific things they're really good at/love, and nothing else.
fsloth 9y ago
Top down management. People who have no understanding of the process dictating how many people are supposed to do it. And adding useless tasks that secretaries could handle to the professionals task list, because "computers can now do it". Which, what anyone who has worked with computers, can tell that is horseshit. A menial task is a menial task and will cause interruption of flow no matter what. And, since the expert is not so good at the typist thing, it will actually take a lot more time for him to do the typing. So, we have, the time the expert uses t_e, the time of the secretary t_s, and the multiple of time that the expert will spend on the secretaries task. At high enough multiple of cost it would always be cheaper to have a secretary to do the typing. And, it's not only the wage difference. There is also the cost to the organization for not implementing all of the workload that they could implement, if all of the experts were firing on all cylinders. Especially in public health care these negative externalities can be considerable (I imagine).
matthiasware 9y ago
when i see what people try to swat with excel, i pretty much agree.
erikpukinskis 9y ago
Office is a productivity drain because they successfully pivoted away from the "productivity" market to the "job protection" market. The former was a product Microsoft sold to employees on behalf of the company. The latter is a product Microsoft sells to employees on behalf of the employee (although on the company dime) and which the employees use to protect their job title, against the interests of the company. These kinds of pivots are inevitable as these core software markets become commoditized. You can only make money off a software product for a decade or so before lower cost competitors will come in and eat your lunch.

189 points by SQL2219 9y ago

He presents a silly argument ("computers encourage generalists but Adam Smith said specialisation was the way forwards") and I'm pretty sure he's aware its silly, its more of a hook to build the rest of the musings around.

leoedin 9y ago

The big barrier to outsourcing anything has always been information transfer. It's all very well handing a presentation over to a designer, but if they don't know what it should contain then they can't design it. In the end the spec document for the presentation ends up looking almost like the presentation itself. Likewise, the office typing pool would probably be typing up a manager's hand writing. Ubiquitous typing skills now (at least in theory) should mean that the manager today spends no longer writing their document than they used to, but it comes out of that process already typed. Ultimately something like MS Office essentially act as captured knowledge. They know how to lay out a presentation to your company standards, so you don't have to. The ideal (although nobody has quite got there yet) is that the tool is so seamless that the user can only spend their time worrying about the important bits - information transfer, in the case of a presentation. Flight booking tools are now also so easy to use that the overhead for the person actually taking the flight is fairly minimal. That's not to say they couldn't be better, but we're almost at the point where you tell Sky Scanner that you want to travel from A to B on a certain date and it allows you to seamlessly book it. It's taken the place of the administrative assistant, who would still have had to consult you on where and when you wanted to go anyway. (Saying that, having an admin handle flight bookings is still easier than doing it yourself, so we do have some way to come here).

skybrian 9y ago
Information transfer happens better when you're both in the same room talking. One idea would be to have a designer who is an expert in the presentation software essentially take dictation from the person who wants the presentation done, saving the time needed for a non-expert to fumble around with the software. But I don't know if this would save much time?
dkarl 9y ago
This strikes me as the answer, too, especially with the PowerPoint example in mind. Working with somebody who is only an expert at communication to get them to communicate on your behalf about a topic you're expert on requires a lot of laborious back and forth, which reduces quality because the subject matter expert spends most of their time trying to make sure that the composer's "improvements" don't accidentally mean something opposite or orthogonal to what is intended. If a manager and a PowerPoint design expert worked together at the same computer, with the manager dictating content and the PowerPoint expert performing the edits and suggesting design improvements, you would get a better end product, but I doubt it would amount to a productivity gain.
mwcampbell 9y ago
Case in point on the subject of information transfer: I prefer to book my own flight, directly with the airline, so I can make sure the "Blind or low vision" checkbox gets checked. Then, maybe, they won't tell me to get in a wheelchair, assuming the correct information gets transferred all the way to the person helping me through the airport.
gpsx 9y ago
I agree with you here and think Microsoft Office does not make us les productive, for the reason you give. It would be nice if the OP actually did some measurements to test his idea or at least the extent to which it is a factor. Maybe he linked to it and I missed it. At the same time, this could be an opportunity. Maybe there is some way tools and workflow could be designed to better allow experts to help. For example, the manager is driving power point and the presentation expert is virtually over his shoulder, waiting to help out where needed. And I am thinking of having a real person as the helper, along with any software assistance built into the program.

frou_dh 9y ago

You don't need the mentioned smartphone to be exposed to Candy Crush. Last time I clean-installed Windows 10, there it was in the Start Menu by default. And, even after using the Settings app to uninstall it, it would go on to reappear multiple times. The message I took from that is that the PC is no longer something of an intellectual space, and Microsoft want to forcibly assimilate you into mainstream garbage.

titanix2 9y ago
Yeah Windows 10 Start Menu is awful in part because of that. It’s like after the Windows 8 debacle Microsoft is telling us: "oh you like this Menu that much? Ok, here is your menu..." and give us one so bad no one dare to use it anymore as a revenge. And it works. I almost never use it because it cannot find what I want. And that’s when is shows anything at all, because on my VM it’s broken 1/4 of the time (no problem with 7 & 8.1 in the same configuration).
- red75prime 9y ago
  > because on my VM it’s broken 1/4 of the time Have you sent bug report? There's "Feedback Hub" app for that. Sending bug report to the VM team isn't unthinkable too.
  - titanix2 9y ago
    No I didn’t. It took a screenshot so I’ll do that some day.
- walterbell 9y ago
  Have you tried Start10, which helped to bring the menu back? It’s modelled on Win7 start menu. https://www.stardock.com/products/start10/ https://www.stardock.com/products/start10/
  - petepete 9y ago
    While this is nice I shouldn't need to install extra software for such basic functionality. Was Windows 7's start menu really so bad? On personal machines, whatever, but games ads shouldn't be forcefully appearing on a tool I want to use for work.

ryz 9y ago

Seems like he lacks the self-control, willpower and confidence to set boundaries for himself and others. These are definitely skills which are needed in a modern office environment and they especially apply to "senior staff". I get what he's trying to say, but it's really a matter identifying the critical skills needed for your line of work, then building productive habits and killing inproductive ones - nobody said you HAVE to have funny memes in your presentation and in turn waste 20 minutes searching for them. So don't do it and voilà, one distraction less. This is the information age and being able to filter out superfluous information is a valuable (and neccesary) skill - don't blame external factors, they won't go away. If anything, this is "survival of the fittest" in the modern world.

coliveira 9y ago
I understand your point, but the goal of technology should be to help us be more productive, not to try to separate the ones that have strong willpower from the rest. The clear trend here is that technology companies want people to become slaves to whatever process they setup, instead of working to improve our lives.
- watwut 9y ago
  I agree with you in abstract, but examples in this article are quite odd. Leaving aside typing, which is faster if you do it by yourself once you learned it, they just don't take that much time. Neither travel booking nor filling expenses nor work related supermarket shopping. Even normal power point presentations are done very fast with company template. Preparing speech and content when presentation mattered a lot seemed to take way more time then layout. Even candy crush is an odd example, middle management is not main audience and I doubt they play it all that much in work. And then again in larger corporations, middle management (the ones that are not part of teams that produce) are what used to be administration. They have zero decision power, know nothing about projects they are assigned to and they are there to produce reports so that programmers don't have to.
  - coliveira 9y ago

thesumofall 9y ago

In consulting it’s typical that consultants draw the layout of their sides on paper and send it to a center specialized on PowerPoint to produce it. Or they dummy it in PowerPoint and the specialists take it from there. For Word, at least my firm blocks most of the layouting stuff so that you can only use the official styles. Works for me

hectormalot 9y ago
We probably work for the same firm. I think it works well for basic formatting, but information transfer already becomes time intensive when you’re looking to create something high-end (eg where Message and conceptual design are closely linked) That said, yes, I see many clients spend significant chunks of their time on creating the ppt compared to how long they need to write down their ideas on paper. (And off topic: the other major corporate timesink i see is time spent in meetings, often because it’s unclear who has the mandate to make decisions, and as a result everyone gets invited)

rubidium 9y ago

The biggest point is more administrative staff would help productivity. I'm flummoxed by the lack of admins at the large, successful company I work for. Many senior managers and staff could be x2-3 more effective. One marketing manager spent all week doing ppt layout for a 10 minute slide deck for the president. Another BU lead spends hours resolving a shipping and receiving fiasco for _one_ package. When these people do what they're paid for they are really good. But when they get absorbed into administrative tasks they're terribly inefficient.

maxxxxx 9y ago
Totally agree. I have spent months last year parsing corporate documentation rules. if we had more tech writers whose job is to make sure the docs are in the right form we could free up years of engineering time. Same for booking travel. We have to do it ourselves but still follow a ton of rules you always forget if you do it only once or twice a year. If we had one person that could book travel and get visas a lot of time could be saved.
jen729w 9y ago
The “administration” role has disappeared. Now we have “business analysts” who, in many cases, do basically the same thing: they just get paid $600/day to do it. (Context: Australian IT projects, particularly those for the large banks.)

greggarious 9y ago

I would have thought removing clippy would raise those numbers ;) (Who among us didn't spend an embarrassing amount of time interacting with that little rascal?)

jccalhoun 9y ago
Honestly, I think Clippy might be due for a comeback. Of course I don't think actual Clippy will come back but I think that some actual intelligent AI could help with office tasks if it worked (which is a big if). In the same way that Word knows I want an outline if I type "I." I think it might be useful if Word could know I want to type a letter if I start with an address or something.
- tempodox 9y ago
  > I think Clippy might be due for a comeback. I suspect so. Just a few days ago I found an ASCII version of that troll in a frigging code editor (http://kakoune.org/img/screenshots/screenshot-i3.gif http://kakoune.org/img/screenshots/screenshot-i3.gif)
- greggarious 9y ago
  My main memory is one of the animations in the 2D version looked vaguely like he's giving the finger, and we'd right click -> animate to cycle through looking for it.
- contextfree 9y ago
  Both Office and Google Docs have been recently adding features that try to do this sort of thing, sans anthropomorphic paper clip.

pacaro 9y ago

In 1989 I worked at a pharmaceutical firm that still had a secretarial pool. As a lab technician if I was writing a document (typically a Standard Opening Procedure or SOP) I was expected to write it by hand and leave a copy in my outbox (literally one of two trays on my desk) with the correct request form. The next day I’d receive a draft, and then I’d painstakingly provide corrections (typically every technical term and chemical name was wrong) and repeat as needed, after about a week we’d be good and it could be signed off and filed. While this felt inefficient, and probably was, part of that process also included review from my boss, so done was reviewed and done. When someone wanted to call a meeting, that was another form, then invitations in inboxes (again physical trays on desks) replies, room assigned. Meetings were scheduled at least a week out. The flip side is that you could and did request secretarial support for meetings — someone in the room whose only purpose is to take notes, and who will go back and type up detailed minutes.

styfle 9y ago
That sounds glorious. I've had plenty of meetings where 15 min in I have to ask "What's the purpose of this meeting?" Or at the end of the meeting, "Ok who was taking notes? No one?"
- stctgion 9y ago
  Another good question to ask is "Did we all really need to be here?" after someone adds a mailer to the invite..
- pacaro 9y ago
  Having professional minutes was amazing, maybe we’ll be able to automate it at some point. I would assume that an automated transcript isn’t so far away.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Having good secretarial staff is under appreciated. Yeah, I can do my own time (I bill by the hour), book my flights, find open meeting times, etc. But if an administrative assistant can support 3 professionals saving them just 5 hours a month, they can pay for themselves.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dmix 9y ago

The chart he linked to shows a very weak correlation between smartphones/productivity, even as a single data point... https://bankunderground.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/chart.png https://bankunderground.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/chart.pn... There was an even larger drop in the late 1970s (what caused that?) and the dip started around the time of the recession in 2008 as well which must have had a large impact. There were very likely many causes to productivity and I'd be curious to see what the major historical drivers predating the modern smartphone/financial crisis era dip.

cma 9y ago
> There was an even larger drop in the late 1970s Women began entering the labor force en masse. Way more employees available = less productivity unless you can invent a bunch of new needs immediately.

zxcb1 9y ago

Should one understand this as a productivity tool that contributes more as a distraction than something actually designed to distract? Or maybe, that the productivity tool no longer is employed as a productivity tool?

vignesh_m 9y ago

Contrary to what the title may imply, he doesnt shit on Office and say its a bad product.

makecheck 9y ago

What drives me the most crazy is that after decades these tools can’t get the basics right, like text editing. That has to be the single biggest waste of time. I always prepare my material in a real text editor, until I’m completely satisfied with the content, before I risk dumping it into PowerPoint or another terrible editing environment. I mean, 99.9% of presentations contain bullet points and it’s still a mystery what will happen the next time I type a key: will there even be a bullet in front of the next line of text, will it just invent a new line spacing different from the previous bullet, etc.? Then, as if to punish me for having the audacity to save time composing text outside of Office, its Paste mechanism utterly destroys text in ways that almost seem malicious. I end up having to find and disable so many settings just to restore a reasonable set of behaviors for stuff like Paste (bad defaults).

DuncanKeith 9y ago
Try using beamer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX)) as an alternative to PowerPoint.
- maksimum 9y ago
  Having made multiple presentations in beamer, it's definitely not better at everything than WYSWYG presentation editors; some things like non-standard slide layouts are more laborious than they need to be. I think the take-away is that it would be useful if a presentation WYSWYG editor (or any other power-user-oriented program) produced unique and invertible human-editable source code that corresponds to the document. Then the editor would just be a visual programming environment that complements the text programming environment. And it would be up to the user to decide what is more convenient to do in each environment. For example I would like to typeset equations in the text environment, but draw diagrams or play with the layout in the visual environment.
  - tomsmeding 9y ago
    Having a visual frontend for a textual format sounds nice but is always dangerous, in my experience. Before you know, you have some subtle features in the textual format that the GUI can't represent, and as a result, any modifications in the GUI will break your usage of the feature.

crazygringo 9y ago

> Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to produce ugly slides that nobody wants to look at. They also file their own expenses, book their own travel and, for that matter, do their own shopping in the supermarket. ...it is partly bad organisational design: sacking the administrative assistants and telling senior staff to do their own expenses can look, superficially, like a cost saving. Not just superficially -- it is a cost savings, and a net benefit to society. It's the realization that slides can be ugly and still get the point across just as well. And doing my own expenses when everything's charged to a company card takes all of 5 minutes for a weeklong trip. This means we can free up talented designers to improve mobile apps used by millions instead of presentations seen by ten, or administrative assistants to work where they're most needed, such as in health care. I also don't know where the author gets his claim that average productivity growth has been negative since 2007 -- a chart here [1] for the US shows it's been positive for 18 of the past 21 years, and the average is clearly positive too. And while there are certainly plenty of theories as to why productivity growth might be decreasing, the idea that it comes from ugly presentations not only has zero supporting evidence, but seems almost laughable. [1] https://qz.com/946675/us-productivity-growth-was-negative-in-2016-and-economists-arent-sure-why/ https://qz.com/946675/us-productivity-growth-was-negative-in...

timthorn 9y ago
The author is writing for a UK audience, where productivity is an issue.
- majormajor 9y ago
  If the UK trend is so wildly different than the US trend, then that alone looks like a pretty big flag that technologies shared by both the US and UK (computers and phones!) aren't to blame, no?
mmcconnell1618 9y ago
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft but have nothing to do with Office. PowerPoint has a feature that suggests design ideas based on the content of your slides. This is to solve the specific problem of non-designers spending too much time trying to make slides look better: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/About-PowerPoint-Designer-53c77d7b-dc40-45c2-b684-81415eac0617 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/About-PowerPoint-De...

spicymaki 9y ago

Companies want generalists so they can easily replace employees. Employees with specialized skills can command higher wages and can be difficult to source and replace. You need to understand the business, be an admin, handle shipping, book your own travel (at the lowest price), manage your work hours, train yourself, and do your day job. Would be great skills as an independent consultant, but this is happening as a full time employee at a fortune 500 company.

weinzierl 9y ago

> Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to produce ugly slides that nobody wants to look at. So true. Nowadays, whenever I can, I slap something together using impress.js and call it day. I‘m faster and the result is much nicer.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago

FWIW Tim Harford's "More of Less" programme is one of my favourite radio programmes - it's based on statistics relevant to popular media and news stories.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Doh, should be "More or Less".

essayist 9y ago

So on the one end, you have the manager who wrestles with Powerpoint, Project, Word, Kayak.com etc.and spends only 20% of her time working as a systems designer, her real area of expertise. On the other, you have the manager who dictates his email to be typed up by a secretary, and who reads only printouts of incoming email. Where is the sweet spot, DIY where it makes sense, and delegating to others where that makes sense?

e_b 9y ago
Only reading print outs and dictating emails sounds like a sweet mechanism for managing your time.

agumonkey 9y ago

The spreading of capabilities often fails because of this, you don't have the experience. And since you're not in it deep, you don't build real skills. Spreading one self thin. The argument often came in the last decade. Everybody could be <foo>. And technically yes, the average smartphone of today has the potential to be EMI + Warner Bros + ... Yet it doesn't scale with the number of users. People did as much if not better with old sequencers or vintage paint programs. It's rarely the tool that matters. I regularly think that the world would lose by being flat. You need peak and valleys so you can master and enjoy the complexity of a domain. Having access to everything is akin to the paradox of choice. It's seducive but only on a short term basis.

tvanantwerp 9y ago

I've definitely seen and done what is described here. I always justified it to myself as doing the things that keep me sane long enough to do the things I actually have to do.

majormajor 9y ago

The author confuses short term efficiency with true desirability, I think - economically, too, not just in the "extreme efficiency is hell for us as people," sense. What happens to your super-efficient workforce of people doing exactly one thing over and over when the industry shifts? It's very similar to code, here: highly optimized processes are hard to refactor. The world is full of not-sufficiently-explored market spaces, hence the ability of small companies to disrupt large ones, and the growing desire to be agile and use MVPs even at large companies. Specializing to extremes is the opposite, and it will get you eaten in many, many businesses.

xtrapolate 9y ago

In a modern office there are no specialist typists; we all need to be able to pick our way around a keyboard. PowerPoint has made amateur slide designers of everyone. Once a slide would be produced by a professional, because no one else had the necessary equipment or training. Now anyone can have a go — and they do. I'm struggling to follow. Putting your thoughts down on a piece of paper is something we all need to be able to do. Do people waste time doing it? Sure, some people will waste some time. A myriad of reasons to it. Boredom, clumsiness, a strong need to let out your creative sides, just to name a few. Perhaps this entire piece comes down to being more aware of the things that distract you. The side quests that often start small, but end up consuming large portions of your time. In a modern office there are no specialist typists Sure, in a modern office you won't come across many such people (amongst other esoteric examples). But there's a counter argument here - forcefully introducing additional bureaucracy by proxies is just as hurtful, if not more.

fsloth 9y ago
"Sure, in a modern office you won't come across many such people (amongst other esoteric examples). But there's a counter argument here - forcefully introducing additional bureaucracy by proxies is just as hurtful, if not more." Who said anything about bureaucracy? It all could be lean and agile - but with tasks such that people could concentrate on the value adding tasks. It seems more efficient to hire less people to do n amount of tasks but what happens when the productivity of those people plunge? As an extreme example, we in finland use the public health services a lot. Every time I go there, the doctor fiddles about on his computer doing this adminsterial task and that. It would be much more efficient if the doctor had some secretary who could manage the bureaucratic fiddly bits and let the doctor focus on medicine.
- xtrapolate 9y ago
  The doctor example is great, but where do we draw the line exactly? Offloading some aspects of your work by utilising other people and their expertise is surely the way to go, but there's a balance to be kept. Sticking to your example, good secretaries (much like good engineers) are expensive, and are hard to come by - isn't that enough to explain why public health services skimp on those? You could argue that in an ideal world/society, everyone would just do those few specific things they're really good at/love, and nothing else.

fsloth 9y ago

Top down management. People who have no understanding of the process dictating how many people are supposed to do it. And adding useless tasks that secretaries could handle to the professionals task list, because "computers can now do it". Which, what anyone who has worked with computers, can tell that is horseshit. A menial task is a menial task and will cause interruption of flow no matter what. And, since the expert is not so good at the typist thing, it will actually take a lot more time for him to do the typing. So, we have, the time the expert uses t_e, the time of the secretary t_s, and the multiple of time that the expert will spend on the secretaries task. At high enough multiple of cost it would always be cheaper to have a secretary to do the typing. And, it's not only the wage difference. There is also the cost to the organization for not implementing all of the workload that they could implement, if all of the experts were firing on all cylinders. Especially in public health care these negative externalities can be considerable (I imagine).

matthiasware 9y ago

when i see what people try to swat with excel, i pretty much agree.

erikpukinskis 9y ago

Office is a productivity drain because they successfully pivoted away from the "productivity" market to the "job protection" market. The former was a product Microsoft sold to employees on behalf of the company. The latter is a product Microsoft sells to employees on behalf of the employee (although on the company dime) and which the employees use to protect their job title, against the interests of the company. These kinds of pivots are inevitable as these core software markets become commoditized. You can only make money off a software product for a decade or so before lower cost competitors will come in and eat your lunch.