When you combine this with the proliferation of smart devices, every employee is now more connected than ever to their work environment and colleagues. At every hour of the day.

The rise of borderless and distributed teams is perpetuating the always-on requirement, and the Fear Of Missing Out is ever-present. We are now seeing the design strategies that led to the rise of behemoth consumer applications — like praying on basic human needs of acceptance and inclusion — leaking into enterprise applications.

The average enterprise (larger than 500 employees) now has 928 cloud services across the business, and efforts to minimize and consolidate have been fruitless. The rise of companies responsible for integrating these applications, such as Zapier, Workato and Tray, are indicators of the proliferation.

Worldwide, we’re seeing people move from major cities that are over-priced and over-trafficked, to technology-enabled regional areas. However, the flexibility and lifestyle gains afforded by quality communication facilities such as Zoom and Slack are being offset by timezone complexities and the cultural movement away from 9–5 towards 24/7.

All the while, email as our foundational asynchronous and written communication method, is now supplemented with synchronous real-time communication methods that result in tremendous distraction and constant demands for our time.

The rise of so many communication channels means we’re now faced with notifications coming at us constantly, from all directions.

Deep thinking and meaningful thought at work is heading towards extinction. Work is no longer getting done at work, and is intruding evermore in the home.

You can see it in coffee shops worldwide. Workers with (predominantly) Macs have one eye on Slack, one eye on email, and no eyes left for the work they came to the coffee shop to get done in the first place. Research shows that it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to recover from each and every interruption.

Mind you, I’m as guilty as anyone. I’ve felt my own productivity decline as we’ve implemented more asynchronous communication methods to our team at