I was offline all day yesterday at the Advisory Board meeting for Affirming Anglican Catholicism. We’ve had some setbacks recently, so the meeting was itself sobering and tiring; I got up early to get to Manhattan, and the meeting took place in the sausage factory (which I find a spiritually wearying place). I don’t have much to say about that, beyond my grateful astonishment at the sumptuous hospitality I was shown. Margaret picked me up in Princeton Junction at 11:30, and I still feel worn out.
Tom asks some apposite questions over at his place, but I don’t have the concentration to answer right now.
Bob pointed to Sarah Milstein’s “Make Life More Like Games” (and Mary interjected a very helpful note too), which mentions Serios, whose economic model for email struck a chord for me. If an organization’s internal communications — requests for action, fulfillments, and so on — were marked in a way that indicated how much was being asked, and how much was being offered, one might learn an awful lot about workflow. Who asks a disproportionate amount from coworkers? Who asks little but provides much? How does a worker’s input/output vary depending on the kind of task? All very provocative and interesting. Next time someone asks me to prepare a memo or an evaluation, I want them to say “Please devote fifteen minutes to. . . .”