This is classic antisocial engineer thinking. The principal benefits of synchronicity are all social: it enables human contact, live conversations and shared context.<p>No one cares that a million toilets have to flush at the same time. We invent bigger and better sewage pipes, some people get paid to build them, and everything's fine. Lots of people like to watch the new Game of Thrones episode at the same time and then talk about it with their coworkers at the office the next day.<p>It really is a minority of people who think otherwise. I run a heavily asynchronous, remote company, with fully remote customers, and mostly remote employees. I bias toward hiring locally just so I have someone to talk to.
Intriguing blog post, but the analysis appears overly simplistic.<p>I'm going to go with the assumption with that individuals and private companies are rational. Therefore, they do what's best for them. Then the question becomes why a majority of individuals and private companies pick the synchronized schedule?<p>I believe that should be the angle of investigation, rather than creating theories about the grand mistakes the society makes. Everybody has more or less a brain you know :) And they can choose what's best for them. The question is why does the majority of people and firms choose the synchronized schedule?<p>There can be many reasons. I don't claim to know the answers. We can posit some theories, then test them through reasoning.<p>Number one reason might be: society needs a clock so that families can sync up. Drive kids to work. Help them with their homeworks. Cook. Eat family dinner. Both mom and dad go to work at the same time, so that they can be at home at the same time. You cannot delegate your interactions with your spouse or the kids :)<p>Single people and childless people do have more freedom. I remember the days where I used to go to work between 10-12am. Then leave around 7pm. Many of my single and childless friends are on a similar, shifted schedule.<p>So there you go. You can posit many other theories: E.g. market prices may not be dynamic enough for efficient allocation. That too might have a good reason (dynamic prices incur communication costs & may create confusion). So lack of incentives, too, must be a playing a role.<p>Weekday-weekday synchronicity too must have good reasons. Work gets done a lot better when your colleagues are around, you know :) Remote working hasn't caught up with the quality of face to face interaction.<p>Etc etc. The article misses many obvious things, imo.
Depending on your job you can hack the holiday mechanism to your advantage.<p>We were immigrants and little reason to care about the US holidays Thanksgiving and Independence Day. My mum, a physician <i>always</i> offered to cover those days and every other doctor in the (small) hospital took her up on it. Which meant whenever she wanted someone to be on call for her, she always had a huge number of people who owed her a favor.<p>This hack worked for Christmas too even though we did celebrate it (though just pressies and a meal — no family on the continent): people don’t like to get sick at Xmas so she never got called before the end of the day (and as a bonus she left us with all the washing up)
There is an assumption that most work environments are not like factories anymore.
I wonder how true is that, even in "modern" fields such as corporate software development or maybe accounting. It seems these are still overwhelmingly often series of short 2-3 hour tasks that depend on immediate input from others - for task definition, or details needed for implementation.<p>Also, as other comments mention, work is used for socializing. I know many people for whom work today is one of the major forms of social interaction. As a society, we just do not sit on benches in front of the houses, talking to neighbors as they pass by, anymore. That maybe for better of for worse, but it would be good to construct some alternatives, before we remove the synchronous workplace.
Markets have better liquidity when all players are at the same time & place. It's possible that asynchronicity will come at the cost of liquidity - raising transaction costs.
There are a few aspects in which society continues to expect synchronicity. For instance, on average, more people wish to be awake when the sun is up, and asleep in the middle of the night, than vice versa. People expect to be able to reach services on the phone, or occasionally go to a shop in person. And, some services can only be provided in-person with both the service provider and customer present.<p>But yes, many things can and should be done in a far more staggered fashion.
> In the case of the Underground network, there are times on some lines where trains arrive more frequently than every two minutes (pretty much as often as they can, given that the trains have to maintain a safe distance between each other and spend some time on the platform) and yet they still are packed between 8am and 9am. Any incident, however small, like someone holding up the doors, can result in a knock-on effect, delaying the whole line massively.<p>> Why are people doing this to themselves?<p>It is not as though they have any choice in the matter. However, if you've ever worked a job with irregular weekends you'll know that one thing that stinks about it is you can rarely coordinate stuff with friends and family on your days off. Also hard to do stuff like attend church.
In case the author sees this thread: the time labels for the weekday graph are wrong. The morning peak shows at about 0400, when it should be around 0800.<p>The weekend graph might have the same problem, since it ramps up before 0600, which is unlikely.
I would make a different argument about over-provisioning. Using infrastructure at maximum capacity means there's less of a safety margin and it's often unpleasant due to traffic or crowding. Reducing capacity in the name of efficiency doesn't seem like a good thing.<p>Instead I'd argue that using infrastructure at maximum capacity isn't something we necessarily need to do ten times a week. It needs to be tested, but maybe not that often?
What if I want to play recreational soccer or attend church services in fellowship with a few hundred fellow believers? This proposal completely discounts a whole range of non-work mass activities.
Hmmm, maybe file with art critic Mike Pepi's "Asynchronous! On the sublime administration of the everyday"
<a href="http://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59798/asynchronous-on-the-sublime-administration-of-the-everyday/" rel="nofollow">http://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59798/asynchronous-on-the-s...</a>
I haven't read the full article but my immediate criticism is that systems need the spikes and peaks that synchrony provides. If they didn't exist we'd have to simulate them to keep systems from being overly fragile. Yes, there's a power spike when everyone goes to the fridge during a commercial, but the need to handle that variation makes systems more robust.
Yes i agree, synchronicity is environmentally unsustainable. Metro stations and train stations are designed for peak capacity in rush hour.<p>Office workers spend the vast part of the day at their workstation and sending emails.<p>Why not do that from home?<p>Most meetings are useless and we know it, why not do them in chat or video conference?<p>Open spaces are the worst possible environment to get anything done and everyone knows it.<p>But there is this mindset that in person presence is the only way to work and interact, Which is true for some professions, but not all of them.<p>Most people dream would love working from home.