In post-pandemic universities where most people work from home for large periods of time, there’s a tendency towards what we might think of as calendar fragility. If you’ve scheduled a ‘campus day’ based on face-to-face meetings which then get cancelled it’s understandable to rethink whether to come to campus. I feel like there’s a tipping point in which I’m not going to travel for 2.5 hours just to meet someone for an hour. To make it worthwhile, I have to more stuff with other people in person because otherwise the commute just takes too much of a chunk out of my day. Likewise I hate sitting in the office on Zoom when I can do that vastly more comfortably at home so if everything moves online then I too want to move home.
It occurred to me yesterday there’s an escalation dynamic here. If I ask for things to move online and/or reschedule then I change the character of someone else’s calendar for that day, possibly leading them to make the same decision. There’s a cognitive load here in terms of managing and rescheduling, there are opportunity costs involved in changing where you’ll spend the day at the last minute and there’s a diffuse sense of tiredness which I think can be associated with the whole thing. If you could track this empirically I wonder if you’d see cancellations percolate through the workplace network. A snow day is like a calendar earthquake but there was all sorts of other tremors continually taking place, in which the constitution of the organisation’s life gets rocky in small and subtle ways throughout the day.
I’m vaguely complaining about this but I also do it myself constantly. It’s another sense in which hybrid workplaces post-pandemic don’t really work very well. We need some form of organisation to coordinate which doesn’t just rely on autonomous individuals acting autonomously because that just creates unintended consequences in complex organisations which require continuous collaboration.
Mark Carrigan 