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2023 in R!i"

An Exhausting Year in
(and Out of) the
Office
After successive waves of post-pandemic change, worn-
out knowledge workers need a fresh start.

By Cal Newport
December 27, 2023

Illustration by Liam Eisenberg

Save this story

t’s been almost four years since the

I coronavirus pandemic inaugurated a
period of sustained upheaval for knowledge
workers. The !rst wave of change came in
early 2021, with the Great Resignation—a
mass exodus from the workforce that saw, at
its peak, millions of Americans quitting their
jobs each month. Then, in 2022, we got the
Remote-Work Wars, in which bosses who’d
thought of working from home as a
temporary measure were surprised when
employees claimed it as a right. “Stop
treating us like school kids who need to be
told when to be where and what homework
to do,” a group of disgruntled Apple
employees wrote in a letter to management
after their C.E.O., Tim Cook, proposed
repopulating the company’s offices, including
its headquarters, which had opened only !ve
years earlier at a cost of !ve billion dollars.

Eventually, in many organizations, the fervor

of the Remote-Work Wars settled into an
uneasy truce that was based on hybrid
schedules. But then, last summer, a third
wave of disruption emerged. “I recently
learned about this term called quiet quitting,”
the narrator of a viral TikTok video began.
“You’re not outright quitting your job, but
you’re quitting the idea of going above and
beyond.” Many young professionals
embraced the idea, !lling social platforms
with sympathetic declarations before they, in
turn, weathered a derisive backlash. The
over-all impression, throughout these years
of turbulence, was that knowledge work was
broken: somehow, its expectations, rhythms,
and burdens needed to be rede!ned.

Today, at the close of 2023, there no longer

seems to be a revolutionary project roiling
the knowledge sector. The business-news
cycle is dominated by coverage of A.I. or old-
fashioned labor strikes, with little apparent
excitement left for reforming knowledge
work as a whole. Office workers seem to have
retreated into a pervasive atmosphere of
fatigue. “I just feel that I am tired of
working,” a representative post on the
/r/work subreddit reads. “I am tired of
meetings, brainstorming, expectations,
dealing with people, !guring out
neverending problems.” The most notable
change of these tumultuous years, the ability
to spend more time working from home,
hasn’t been a cure-all. Something’s still
wrong, above and beyond the usual
challenges of office life. Everyone’s tired.
What started with the Great Resignation has
become the Great Exhaustion.

ow can we understand this vibe of

H weary disappointment? It’s useful to
start with a simple question: What instigated
these successive waves of knowledge-work
disruption in the !rst place? The obvious
answer is the pandemic, which introduced
signi!cant new strains into professional life,
from the deranging challenges of juggling
child care and work to the dulling ennui of
domestic con!nement. But, even as these
speci!c pressures began to lessen, the mood
of frustration only increased. Something
deeper seemed to be unfolding.

Beyond the showy disruptions generated by

the pandemic’s arrival was a more subtle but
arguably even more important trend: a sharp
increase in how much time the average
knowledge worker engages in digital
communication. A recent report from
Microsoft found that users of its office-
productivity software now spend close to
sixty per cent of their time using digital
communication tools—e-mail, chat, and
videoconferencing—with only the remaining
forty per cent left for “creation” software,
such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. One
in four workers studied was trapped in an
even grimmer communications spiral,
spending the equivalent of a full workday
(almost nine hours) each week on e-mail
alone. Meanwhile, time in online meetings
increased by more than two hundred and
!fty per cent between February, 2020, and
2022.

It’s hardly surprising that the rapid transition

to widespread remote work led to a greater
quantity of digital communication.
Especially in the early weeks of the
pandemic, Zoom and Slack offered a lifeline
of sorts for newly isolated members of the
cubicle diaspora. But it’s striking that, even as
work returned to a more stable rhythm, with
more time spent back in physical offices, the
amount of digital communication has
remained high. (The Microsoft researchers
found that the trend lines measuring
communication volume show a sharp
increase when the pandemic begins, followed
by a continued slow rise.) The problem with
this new reality is that research connects
increased digital communication with
decreased satisfaction. This effect can be
uncovered by broad surveys, such as a 2019
Swedish study that found correlations
between high communication-technology
demands and poor health outcomes. It can
also be seen in narrow experiments: when
researchers at the University of California at
Irvine, M.I.T., and Microsoft connected
forty knowledge workers to heart-rate
monitors for almost two weeks, they
discovered that the subjects’ stress levels rose
higher the longer they spent on e-mail.

A never-ending stream of new messages and

calendars clogged with meetings force us to
constantly switch our attention from one
target to another, creating a debilitating
feeling of mental fatigue and overload, and
leaving little mental space for sustained effort
on important objectives. Seven out of ten
people surveyed by Microsoft complain that
they “don’t have enough uninterrupted focus
time during the workday.” This deluge also
blurs the line between work and home.
When your in-box grows at a rate that’s
faster than you could ever hope to keep up
with, it’s difficult to shut down and recharge.
Work becomes inescapable.

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The bottom line is that the abrupt rise in

digital interaction following the arrival of the
pandemic made knowledge work more
tedious and exhausting, helping to fuel the
waves of disruption that have followed. If we
accept this interpretation of events, however,
we must also accept the necessity of
continuing to seek change. So long as these
new and excessive levels of digital
communication persist, more haphazard
upheavals will inevitably follow. We need to
get serious about reducing digital
communication—not just small tweaks to
corporate norms but signi!cant reductions,
driven by major policy changes.

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There are many ways to make things better.

One possible !rst 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 !fteen 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.”

Where do instant-messaging services, such

as Slack, !t in? The need to constantly
monitor ongoing chats can be even more
disruptive than frequent e-mails and
meetings. These tools can seem unavoidable,
but they don’t have to be. The e-commerce
company Convictional—which employs
around thirty people and offers supply-chain
software—made the bold decision to opt out
of chat services completely. In a 2021
interview with the (now-shuttered) tech
magazine Protocol, Roger Kirkness, the
company’s C.E.O., explained that the move
was a response to the “resentment” expressed
by employees about unending interruptions
from Slack and meetings in their past jobs.
“Most of the most valuable work,” Kirkness
said, “actually happens” when employees are
undistracted.

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

New employees at Convictional sometimes

have difficulty adjusting, Kirkness said, and
often try to use e-mail as a substitute for
Slack, attempting to create rapid-!re
discussions. The company encourages
employees to abandon this “hustle-oriented”
mind-set. Kirkness also planned to introduce
periodic in-person gatherings to
Convictional, which is otherwise fully
remote, to help facilitate the emotional
connections that might be lost in a setting
that relies less on real-time collaboration.
The details of how this particular company
operates without chat, however, are less
important than the general point that major
reforms in how we communicate are possible.
Just because a tool is popular doesn’t make it
inevitable.

n the spring of 2020, during those !rst

I terrible weeks of dislocation and
confusion, I wrote an article about the
pandemic’s emerging impact on knowledge
work. I argued that the abrupt shift into
telecommuting was going to make office-
style jobs harder and less satisfying, owing in
large part to the frustrating inefficiencies of
digital communication. But I also found a
silver lining: perhaps the pain would force
reforms that would make knowledge work
more sustainable and satisfying in the long
term. Over the next several years, only half of
my prediction was realized. Work did get
harder, but leaders and business owners did
little to counter this reality. As a result, we
experienced one ill-fated revolt after another.

But even if we are now mired in a Great

Exhaustion, we shouldn’t give up. In recent
years, we’ve tried dramatic individual
changes, such as quitting and moving to the
country, or publicly declaring an intention to
put in the minimum effort, but lasting
improvements are likely to come from less
romantic reforms. Communication overload
got worse in 2020, and it’s still getting worse
today. This matters. Fortunately, it is a
problem that we can !x, if organizations and
leaders are prepared to make bold changes.
Full in-boxes and endless meetings are not
intrinsic parts of office work in a digital
world; they’re instead a response to an
unexpected crisis that subsequently spiralled
out of control. The turmoil in knowledge
work following the arrival of the pandemic
showed the unsustainability of this state of
affairs. Maybe the year ahead will be the one
in which we start to change it. ♦

2023 in Review
New Yorker writers on cultural milestones of
the past year.

The best books.

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Cal Newport is a contributing writer for The New

Yorker and an associate professor of computer
science at Georgetown University.

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