An Exhausting Year in (and Out of) the Office | The New Yorker
There are many ways to make things better. One possible first step would be for business owners to set new ground rules. For instance, they could declare that, from now on, e-mail should be used only for broadcasting information, and for sending questions that can be answered by a single reply. One implication of this system would be that any substantive back-and-forth discussion would need to happen live; to prevent an explosion of new meetings, managers could simultaneously introduce office hours, in which every employee adopts a set period each day during which they’d be available to chat in person, online, or over the phone, with no appointment needed. Discussions that seem likely to take fifteen minutes or less should be conducted during office hours, minimizing the number of intrusive meetings and freeing everyone from endless back-and-forth e-mail threads.
For those used to a culture of immediate responsiveness, the idea of having to wait to get an answer might seem radical—even unworkable. But people who have actually experimented with this approach have found that it can lead to a better allocation of time for everyone. “It turns out that waiting is no big deal most of the time,” the tech founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson explained, discussing their implementation of office hours at their software company, Basecamp. “The time and control regained by our experts is a huge deal.”