Convenience can be a collective trap
In her book Attention Span, UC Irvine informatics professor Gloria Mark describes a study in which her team shut off email for a group of office workers for a week, then compared their behavior to the previous three weeks. The participants experienced notable benefits, including lower stress (as measured by heart rate) and reduced task switching. They also reported a sense of freedom and a healthier pace to their work.
In her discussion of the results, Dr. Mark points out something interesting: any one employee would have been unable to achieve those benefits through individual changes. It only worked because they all changed their behavior together. From Dr Mark:
Cutting off email should be a no-brainer. However, individuals alone cannot solve the email problem by simply cutting off from it, as then they are unfairly left out of the communication loop. Email is a much bigger problem that needs to be tackled at the organizational and even societal level.
This idea connects to a study1 published a few years ago, in which economics researchers led by Leo Bursztyn at University of Chicago surveyed a sample of students about their social media use, and found that the respondents on average would be willing to pay money to make TikTok and Instagram disappear - even people who actively use those apps! This might sound irrational until you consider that the decision to use a social network is influenced by what your friends and peers decide. These users felt that they were worse off for TikTok’s existence, but that they’d be even worse off choosing not to use TikTok because they’d be missing out. In that way, TikTok and Instagram become collective traps - detrimental situations that each user feels individually powerless to escape.
Dr. Mark’s finding mentioned above seems to show that email can also be a collective trap. The group of employees as a whole was apparently better off abandoning email. But a lone employee choosing to ignore email would be sacrificing too much to get the same benefit. I suspect these findings apply pretty well to modern tools like Slack or Teams, too.
One thing I find particularly striking is that, as far as I know, the technology of email was not designed to trap us. Social media is often rightly criticized for being designed to subvert user goals in favor of the platform’s goals. That’s an important criticism, but apparently a collective trap situation can arise even without such adversarial design. Email was created with no ulterior motive. It was designed simply to be useful, and yet for many groups it seems to become a collective trap, making them worse off in a way no single individual can escape.
To me that’s fascinating. How does that happen? Why do users fall into these traps in the first place? And what can builders do to avoid this? I don’t know the answers, but I think I see the outlines of some possible explanations.
Hidden costs and overestimated benefits
I think a key aspect is that we misunderstand the cost-benefit tradeoffs we’re making when adopting these technologies. Oliver Burkeman makes an incisive point about email in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals:
Email is an unparalleled tool for responding rapidly to a large volume of messages—but then again, if it weren’t for email, you wouldn’t be receiving all those messages in the first place. The technologies we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top.
If you’re a company, team, or even individual choosing to adopt email (a choice that is now long past for most organizations), it’s easy to see the convenience of email and think it’s an absolute win. But inconvenience can be useful sometimes. In the case of communication, inconvenience pushes people to be more selective in what they share and whom they share it with - which seems desirable if you’re an organization trying to operate efficiently, or an individual trying to focus on your priorities.
Put another way, convenience has a flip side. Convenience for the sender is inconvenience for the receiver. Making it easier for Bob to ping Alice instantaneously makes it harder for Alice to not receive messages instantaneously. That difficulty might be effort, social discomfort, or something else, but it’s a natural consequence of reducing difficulty for Bob. I don’t think it’s zero sum, but there is at least a tension there.
A social feedback loop
But I think there’s more to this problem than just misunderstood tradeoffs. If hidden costs were the only issue here, people would eventually realize that the costs outweigh the benefits and Just Stop, one by one. Nobody would be “trapped.” The trap happens when Just Stopping only works when done together, as a group. I suspect communication technology (like email) is naturally susceptible to this kind of trap, because it’s inherently about interactions among the group. If I stop using email or Slack at work, my ability to get work done will suffer, because everyone else expects to collaborate on Slack.
Social media is an even clearer example of this social feedback loop causing a trap. If a teenager decides she doesn’t like the way social media makes them feel, so she decides to just pretend social media doesn’t exist, she won’t be able to actually live as though that were true - because approximately everyone else in her peer group is using social media. The group norms have changed, and one individual changing their mind doesn’t undo the change in social norms.
What can users do about it?
Even though collective traps are traps, in my experience there are ways to escape, or at least ways to reduce the downsides of the technology even if you still participate.
The social aspect of the problem reminds me of the Prisoner’s Dilemma from game theory… which actually gives me hope, because even though the “optimal” strategy in a single game is to act selfishly and play to your short-term interests, cooperation actually wins out over infinite or repeated games.2 So, one possible escape is to find a group of like-minded individuals to “cooperate” with by opting out together. I’ve seen this work well in my own tech use. I pretty much never use social media, but I do have a self-hosted Mattermost instance for chatting with my family members, which has many of the upsides without the ad-revenue-chasing downsides. A less extreme idea is to just talk to your friends/peers/teammates and choose better norms together, even if you still use the technology. Early in my time at Lucid I asked my team for permission to be away from Slack for a couple hours, which helped set reasonable expectations and reduced the demand on my attention (and set a precedent for them to have time for deep work as well). I think a common effect of - and problem with - technological convenience-as-a-service is that people fall into norms and habits by inertia, rather than by intention. Just having a group conversation about it can get you closer to “escaping” than you might expect!
You can also take steps as an individual to be intentional about how you personally use the tool. Interestingly, Dr. Mark’s research into email use found that batching your email-checking wasn’t really correlated with lower stress (in fact, for some people, it causes higher stress!), but the total amount of time spent on email was correlated with stress. So find ways to use it less - specifically ways to need to use it less, not just trying to use it faster. Unsubscribing from emails, setting up some filter rules, or simply excusing yourself from conversations can pay dividends over time; I try to diligently unsubscribe from unhelpful email, and as a result, my inbox isn’t very distracting. Similarly, I try to be thoughtful about what Slack channels I’m in at work, and if I don’t need to read every message, I mute the channel so it only gets “badged” if someone mentions me.
Partitioning can be useful too. Set up email rules and labels, or organize your Slack channels into sections based on what you need to read when. I recently adopted some advice I came across from Anton Zaides3 about grouping channels by urgency, with sections like “read now”, “read every morning”, and “read every Monday.” I really like it so far! Gmail’s category tabs can be similarly helpful - I get push notifications for new emails in “Updates”, but I only check “Promotions” occasionally. (Google’s now-dead “Inbox” service was even better because you could snooze and configure whole categories to only show up on a certain schedule.)
What can builders do about it?
Okay, I know, if you’re selling a technology, maybe you’re thinking you want your users to be “trapped.” But I would argue you actually don’t! You want them to stay because they want to - because your product is actually beneficial for them and they love your product and can’t imagine life without it! A win-win situation, capitalism at its best. It is important to focus your business goals on the real needs of your users. There are ways to help that happen by aligning your incentives (paid subscriptions instead of ad revenue, building on protocols instead of closed platforms, etc.), but much has been written about those already. I’m more interested in the design questions after your incentives are aligned - how do you design a tool to be truly useful instead of an accidental trap?
Ideally, we could avoid the hidden downsides entirely, so there is no user harm and therefore no trap. That’s probably not completely possible in most cases - as mentioned earlier, I think communication technologies are inherently prone to tension and tradeoffs between different user needs - but I’m reminded of something Will Larson once wrote about tradeoffs: “Two-dimensional tradeoffs always disappoint someone, [but] you can usually make a tradeoff that doesn’t disappoint anyone by introducing a new dimension.”4
I think one dimension we can add as builders is to include features to support the kind of partitioning I mentioned earlier. In a communication system, partitioning lets users choose to be responsive to messages they care about but not interrupted by messages they don’t care about. Ideally the whole system can be partitioned, not just the most obvious attention grabbers like notifications. For example, Slack is better than email about this, because you can categorize your channels and then mute/unmute different categories to completely hide channels that are outside your “current” partition.
There are also things builders can do to disrupt the harmful social feedback loop that creates the “trap”. This often means helping users “see” each other in some way - for example, Slack’s personal statuses, out-of-office auto-replies, timezone indicators, and warnings when using @here all help users be more aware of other user’s needs and intentions. In Bitbucket Server (which we used to use at Lucid) there was an interesting feature where it would show you how many PRs are sitting in other users’ inboxes when you’re selecting reviewers for your PR. And in Google Calendar they have helpful indicators if you’re scheduling an event with someone and it’s outside their working hours. These all encourage users to be mindful of the burden their communications might place on others.
Design questions like these are increasingly important
This all may sound like wishful thinking, or trying to “have your cake and eat it too”. Some seem to have accepted that tech is all bad for us and that’s just part of its nature. But in the current zeitgeist, more individuals and communities are looking more thoughtfully at the conveniences they once thoughtlessly adopted. Giving up those conveniences altogether can be a solution for some, but it’s a heavy-handed approach that often has too high a cost. Instead, if we put more thought into the technology of the future, maybe we can find solutions that strike a better balance, designs that that better serve users’ needs, and technology that truly empowers users5 instead of trapping them.