Tech has made ops teams' lives harder. We think it can be fixed.

Modern work has become synonymous with disorganization and distraction. We're constantly bouncing between tasks and apps all day long. We're spending time and energy simply hunting for information instead of doing real work. And we're getting bombarded and interrupted every few minutes by a deluge of emails and chat messages. Sound familiar? Cal Newport, a productivity pundit and professor at Georgetown, dubbed this frenetic way of working the “hyperactive hivemind”. And though it might seem highly productive, it’s actually preventing real productivity by getting in the way of focused work. Ironically, instant messaging apps like Slack or Teams, which promised to rescue us from our overflowing inboxes, have only made the problem worse.

Ops teams sit at the center of the organization, working across functions, and as a result feel this pain more than any other department. How did we get ourselves into this mess? And is there anything we can do to get out of it? We present a story in three acts.

Act I: the transition to cloud-based productivity tools

Long ago, before all our software lived in the cloud, teams shared files by accessing a file server on their LAN. To make this work, they had to figure out some way to stay organized. For example, you could have a top-level folder for each department; or one folder per client, each containing folders for projects—whatever made sense for your team. It just had to be intuitive enough that everyone could find what they needed without much trouble, because searching through dozens or hundreds of files wasn’t easy.

The transition to the cloud obliterated this simple, effective system. Because when you adopt cloud-based apps for core productivity tools like word processing, graphic design, or spreadsheets your files become trapped inside them and the various pieces of your work are now scattered across several silos, with nothing tying them together. So we’re constantly bouncing between apps and searching within them (which is annoying), and we’re never quite sure if the files we find are incomplete or old versions (which is disconcerting). By contrast, in the pre-cloud era, the files for a client/project/etc. were tied together naturally, no matter the type of file, because they sat together in a shared folder, and there was never any doubt that these were the right files to be looking at.

Act II: the transition from email to Slack

We all love how frictionless sending Slack messages feels, compared to composing emails. But adopting chat as our go-to means of discussion has brought some pretty enormous and unanticipated downsides.

First, compared to an email inbox, chat’s freewheeling nature makes it much easier for important messages to get lost in the shuffle and for balls to get dropped. Second, chat makes it all too easy to waste time “catching up” on public conversations that don’t actually need our attention. And third, the incessant interruptions from incoming messages (or the nagging compulsion to clear our unreads) make it hard to get into that precious state of flow where we can focus on and actually do real work, the kind that demands concerted mental effort.

Slack makes it so incredibly easy to reach out to a colleague that it’s usually faster to act on our impulse to communicate than to reflect on whether we should. And it makes it so easy to share files, links, and other resources on an ad hoc basis that we can get away with never properly organizing them—at the expense of our future productivity. Because all these quick messages mean less time in productive flow, and more time spent later digging through chat histories trying to find stuff.

So these two modern shifts, from local files to the cloud and from email to Slack, have inadvertently undermined the foundations of knowledge work, namely: our ability to find information, and our ability to focus long enough to get real work done. And there’s no going back—these innovations are definitely here to stay. So what can we do?

Act III: escape from the hyperactive hivemind

Fixing this problem is challenging for two reasons. First, people are lazy! We excel at finding and following the path of least resistance. That means any new approach can’t impose more friction than the status quo, or nobody will adopt it. Second, changing the norms and habits of teams, as opposed to just individuals, is a collective action problem, because everyone’s behavior needs to change at the same time for the change to take hold.

So are we condemned to suffer under the hyperactive hivemind forever? We don’t think so. We think there’s a solution, and we call it a “home base for work”. Here’s the key idea: in your team’s home base, every task or project they’re working on has an unambiguous focal point, like a modern-day reincarnation of the humble index card or file folder. Each of the ideas to discuss, the projects underway, or the tasks in flight has a default place to “live”, a place that captures its context, tracks its status, collects any related resources, and supports async discussions about it. As for all the apps you’re using for spreadsheets, design, etc.? Keep using them! Your home base is what ties all those disparate pieces together and keeps them from getting lost.

Now, there are lots of tools that purport to do this job, but for most teams, they’re way too complicated—adding to the problem they’re supposedly solving. And these tools tend to see the world in terms of project management or knowledge management, both of which are valuable in their own right, but neither of which are a great fit for what teams need: a simple way to stay organized and on the same page.

As a result, lots of teams opt instead for a combination of point solutions: tracking status in a spreadsheet; keeping context in a docs app or wiki; and having discussions in a chat app. But now we’re back to spreading the pieces of our work across silos, with nothing tying them together! These three pieces—context, status, and discussion—desperately want to live together. We think combining them in an extremely simple and user-friendly way will provide an escape from the hyperactive hivemind, and that’s what we’re building at Flat.