Against the synchronous society
kimonote.com
kimonote.com
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.
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.
People care that they sit in two hours of rush hour traffic per day. There is zero synchronicity when you're staring at the license plates in front of you.
(Sure, there’s places where even that isn’t enough and the public transport pipe is congested. We’ve all seen those videos of trains in some places in asia, for example)
And during rush hour, the highways are a lot more full, and often capacity (number of lanes) is increased to compensate. If people didn't typically commute at the same time, then busses, trains, and car transport would all benefit from a reduction in required peak capacity. This is not in any way specific to cars.
> If people didn't typically commute at the same time...
Absolutely! That would be ideal.
To increase the capacity of trains and busses, you need more trains/busses, larger trains/busses, more train/bus operators, more electricity/gas usage, more storage, more maintenance, and so on. And those same huge trains and busses also become near-empty late at night.
Yes, the baseline efficiency of a train or bus is potentially better, making all the standard tradeoffs. But everyone commuting at the same time causes similar problems with both. I'm not arguing against public transit, here, I'm arguing against the claim upthread that "This is a problem of a car centric society", which is orthogonal to a staggered commute.
That's post hoc reasoning. Individuals don't globally optimize to synchronize everything. In fact, most individuals have good reasons for things to be desynced socially - so that they e.g. don't have to take a day off to visit a doctor or submit paperwork to a bank.
I suspect though that there is a process through which society tends to keep itself in sync. Not sure what it was, though.
> 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.
Does this still happen, given the rise of the torrents, on-demand streaming, and the way TV shows distribution tend to be spread out over time? (Maybe it does, I'm an antisocial engineer, so I might have missed it.)
For super popular stuff like GoT our big sporting events like Superbowl or even bigger like World Cup finale you'll always have it. So maybe we will always need that max toilet fishing capacity of we don't want to not be able to flush once every year or so?
Those are all near instant. They compete with cable TV.
One reason it happens is that right after the broadcast, Facebook will be full with jokes and spoilers. Whether you see that depends on your bubble, and whether you use/visit Facebook. Same could be true with school & work.
I'd love to see what happens if certain stores radically change their hours. Opening hours from 6am-9am & 5am-11am always seemed much more sensible to me. Who goes and buys a TV for example at 11am on a weekday?
If I had enough money to an experiment like this not endangering my future, I'd own a store just to see what would happen.
> Who goes and buys a TV for example at 11am on a weekday?
What happens at say grocery stores is they have less workers at the non-peak times, and workers do different tasks at different times of the day. Instead of being clerk, they for example replenish from the warehouse or throw away items which are past their due date. You'd have only 1 or even 0 clerks, but there's also hardly any customers. Meantime, all these workers can still be productive elsewhere.
In your specific example I can imagine a clerk doing inventory or online orders during downtime. Though it depends also on the size of the store.
As for who buys that, grandpa & grandma, the guy who took a day off to buy a new TV (tho nowadays one can buy TVs online just as well, and why not [1]), or the mom who's a housewife or has a part-time job (latter being very common for females here in The Netherlands).
[1] I'm getting on a tangent here geez but if I'd buy the TV online here in the Netherlands I'd also have 2 weeks to send it back for whatever reason other than warranty. I don't have that right if I buy it in brick & mortar store other than warranty. A good reason to shop online indeed!
People who don't have dayjobs or people who are stepping out of their office to shop on break? Tourists? The stores are rarely empty.
I care about not being stuck in the traffic, not having to wait for a machine at the gym, not having to wait at long checkout lines at costco.
Think about tourist locations. Intense seasonality means we have to build up huge infrastructure for a peak ... Month? Per year. Mainly because kids are off at a certain time of year. Hotels are emptier during the week. Dentist appointments are impossible to get on lunch breaks.
I agree that synchronicity is valuable because a phone call is 10x more information dense than an email sent 3 hours ago. But wouldn't it be interesting to add a bit of flexibility to everyone's work schedule and see what happens?
Aside: lots of industries are shift workers, and most low-income people work off of the Mon-Fri 9-5. It's oddly a pretty solved problem but we decided against adopting that for office work in most cases. I bet kids and school don't help things
But I mean, really, if you're obligated to keep a schedule anyway, don't you want to keep one that allows you to be awake during the day and sleep at night, and to generally be available for other commitments? I've done both and I'd take the 9:00-5:00 over the irregular schedule every time. Convenience scheduling a doctor's appointment or job interview doesn't make up for all the inconveniences.
There's a few more versions of the card which are essentially trying to achieve the same, just assume you travel in higher volume. For example, there's a more expensive version of the card which makes travel completely free in the weekends.
Thing is, people who work get the travel costs reimbursed from their employer so they generally don't care. Its up to the employer to adapt. And given you can game the logging in time I am not sure how effective it is to decrease congestion/pressure.
I've also noticed the effect on my partner's job. She works 4 days a week, and wants one day off. Well, the most popular days to take off are Wednesday (because it is in the middle of the week) and Friday. Same with taking days off. Some days and dates are popular, for social reasons. Someone who is antisocial won't have much understanding for that, just like you put.
The power system is another example. At times, the German electricity grid is operating on a surplus!
Yet another example is getting paid 150% of 200% during holidays such as Christmas (which is how it works in horeca).
Fascinating discussion, but just being against social behaviour won't change these situations. There needs to be incentive. Being antisocial or being OK with that with the benefit of receiving a discount seems like a great way to achieve this in situations where it makes sense. Does anyone know examples where it'd make sense, but where it isn't currently applied? Or where it has been tried locally, but isn't implemented world-wide? If you take the toilet flush example: we're not paying for toilet usage in our households (right..?) but we are paying for water. If the price of water would be dynamic based on current demand, and the current demand is transparent, that could decrease demand during peak times just like the other examples do. At the very least, those who cause the congestion pay for it, and pay for the extra costs attached to the peak's effect. On a side note, the thought of highly fluctuating water prices sends shills down my spine.
Why? Because it tells me that something isn't right. That the company does not fully embrace remote work to it's logical end.
The company I work for has about 40 employees.... no office, many time zones and what appears to be no geographical bias. I fucking love it and would shudder if they started concentrating more employees near each other.
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?
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?
There can be many reasons. I don't claim to know the answers. We can posit some theories, then test them through reasoning.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
Etc etc. The article misses many obvious things, imo.
And lots of people have less choice than you imply. They are working the job that they have and work the hours that they get. This is their "rational, best choice", but it isn't likely the one they would make if better options were particularly available.
Cost and complexity reduction.
These can come down in many areas and probably should to give people their own time back to do other things.
It's going to change slowly but surely. Already now many of the new generations are used to asynchronous structures it will only increase in the future as new generations appear.
We were immigrants and little reason to care about the US holidays Thanksgiving and Independence Day. My mum, a physician always 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.
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)
That's not even taking vendors or customers into account we might be doing business with. Schooling for children currently primarily happening with all children in the same room doing the same thing at the same time also furthers this. Just these few examples already cover huge parts of society.
I have neither kids, nor did my wife actually have fixed working hours somewhere and yet my job is best done if I work the same hours as all the people who have those constraints. So any one of these can have a huge impact.
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.
Economics is much more than simple allocation of money. It's fundamentally about human wants and how to satisfy them.
But yes, many things can and should be done in a far more staggered fashion.
Plenty of places are open outside those hours, but they tend to be shops and services provided by relatively low status workers. Higher-status service workers (dentists, bankers, ...) generally seem to do better at resisting “unsociable” hours.
It’s an annoying situation, but can’t see it drastically improving without a widespread move away from synchrony.
> Why are people doing this to themselves?
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.
The weekend graph might have the same problem, since it ramps up before 0600, which is unlikely.
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?
Office workers spend the vast part of the day at their workstation and sending emails.
Why not do that from home?
Most meetings are useless and we know it, why not do them in chat or video conference?
Open spaces are the worst possible environment to get anything done and everyone knows it.
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.
Most people dream would love working from home.