One of the biggest things lost in remote work is chance meetings. These are very important, but hard to quantify. If you measure productivity on individual projects, everything will seem fine. Yet when you read stories of how things happened, chance meetings were often crucial.
— Paul Graham (@paulg) June 10, 2020
I am feeling this Tweet (and the responses) on the loss of chance meetings by going remote. I personally thrive on the unstructured, serendipitous meetings. Trying to figure out how to create them in a remote context, some folks seem to believe it’s possible.
This is very true. I have also noticed with the decline of home land lines, we have lost many of the possibilities for chance interactions with friends and family over the phone. I miss hearing the news of the day from the partner / roommate / parent of the person with whom I am trying to reach before the phone is passed along. We learn so much from these incidental encounters.
Jun 11th, 2020 / 6:47 pm
A neighboring design office likes to keep Zoom open all day, rather than block out particular meetings. Folks are of course free to turn off their cameras or mute their microphones, but many keep the acoustics live. For the ambiance, for the over-the-desk small talk, and for this type of spontaneity. I’m not convinced the serendipitous is lost, but simply translated in new ways.
Jun 12th, 2020 / 12:08 pm