Summary of Jason Fried? Why work doesn't happen at work?.
Fried begins by discussing the ordinary. Most people go to an office everyday to work, employers expect good work, we have all sorts of different companies and most of those companies have offices fully equipped with supplies for employees, etc. There’s worth in mentioning the ordinary in topics like this because it allows the audience to consider elements of the ordinary that we don’t normally think about. Discussing the ordinary is a good way to introduce a somewhat banal topic.
Fried begins the crux of his talk by discussing he’s gotten when asking people, “Where do you go when you really need to get something done?” Perhaps surprisingly (or not surprisingly) he rarely receives ‘the office’ as a response. Instead, the answers fall into one of three categories: place or location, moving object or time. Fried says they’ll say something like porch, basement, kitchen, or train, plane, or early in the morning or late at night, but rarely do people say the office. Why is that? Fried asks rhetorically. Well, because instead of workdays, people have work . They’ll work for 15 minutes then be interrupted by a coworker, they’ll work for 20 minutes then have to a meeting, they’ll work for 40 minutes then need to jump on a conference call.
Fried is a compelling speaker with his quick yet steady pace, and he does well to employ effective speaking techniques: a good flow, the rule of three and repetition. It is also clear that he has practiced immensely. He speaks sans podium, notecards or papers, and it’s obvious that he’s very familiar with his material, which further strengthens his talk.
Fried continues by arguing that workers, especially creative people, need long of uninterrupted time to think about a problem carefully and creatively. He implores the audience to think of the last time they had 8, 7, 6, 5, 4 or even 3, 2, 1 hours of uninterrupted time at work to themselves. It’s a rare occurrence that much is sure. Fried strengthens his argument further when he compares working to sleeping. “Does anyone here expect to sleep well if they’re interrupted all night? I don’t think anyone would say yes,” Fried says. “Why do we expect people to work well if they’re being interrupted all day at the office?” A good point, indeed. He goes on to compare workers checking Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to modern day smoke breaks– another great , perhaps some employers should be more tolerant of such trivial .
After discussing the negatives of an office-based work environment, Fried transitions nicely to talk about the real problems in the office, which he designates as the M&Ms: managers and meetings. He says that it’s the job of a manager to essentially continually interrupt people, and that meetings are “toxic, terrible, poisonous things” that are expensive and . Fried’s discussion of these problems is because they’re easy for the audience to connect with and relate to. And he continues to follow an intuitive flow by next offering three suggestions to the current situation in workplaces.
First, he tells employers to no talk Thursday once a month. Give employees an entire afternoon or day of complete concentrated, uninterrupted time to think and work. Second, Fried says to switch from using active communication (face to face contact) to using more passive communication (IM, email). While the latter is still a distraction, it’s a distraction on your own terms, on your own time. And thirdly, if you have a meeting coming up, Fried says, cancel it. Don’t it; just cancel it altogether. He says you’ll find everything will be fine if you don’t hold that meeting; everyone will simply have more time to himself or herself.
Ending a talk or presentation with a call to action, as Fried does, is extremely effective, and in general, Fried’s flow throughout the talk is something to be emulated. Begin by discussing a problem, move on to the reasons for the problem and finish by offering a solution to the problem. Easy as pie.
