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Deep Work is rare 

In 2012, Facebook unveiled the plans for a new headquarters designed by Frank Gehry. At the center of this new building is what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “the largest open floor plan in the world”: More than three thousand employees will work on movable furniture spread over a ten-acre expanse. Facebook, of course, is not the only Silicon Valley heavyweight to embrace the open office concept.

When Jack Dorsey, whom we met at the end of the last chapter, bought the old San Francisco Chronicle building to house Square, he configured the space so that his developers work in common spaces on long shared desks. “We encourage people to stay out in the open because we believe in serendipity—and people walking by each other teaching new things,” Dorsey explained.

Another big business trend in recent years is the rise of instant messaging. A Times article notes that this technology is no longer the “province of chatty teenagers” and is now helping companies benefit from “new productivity gains and improvements in customer response time.” A senior product manager at IBM boasts: “We send 2.5 million I.M.’s within I.B.M. each day.”

One of the more successful recent entrants into the business IM space is Hall, a Silicon Valley start-up that helps employees move beyond just chat and engage in “real-time collaboration.” A San Francisco–based developer I know described to me what it was like to work in a company that uses Hall. The most “efficient” employees, he explained, set up their text editor to flash an alert on their screen when a new question or comment is posted to the company’s Hall account. They can then, with a sequence of practiced keystrokes, jump over to Hall, type in their thoughts, and then jump back to their coding with barely a pause. My friend seemed impressed when

describing their speed.

A third trend is the push for content producers of all types to maintain a social media presence. The New York Times , a bastion of old-world media values, now encourages its employees to tweet—a hint taken by the more than eight hundred writers, editors, and photographers for the paper who now maintain a Twitter account.

This is not outlier behavior; it’s instead the new normal. When the novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote a piece for the Guardian calling Twitter a “coercive development” in the literary world, he was widely ridiculed as out of touch. The online magazine Slate  called Franzen’s complaints a “lonely war on the Internet” and fellow novelist  Jennifer Weiner wrote a response in The New Republic in which she argued, “Franzen’s a category of one, a lonely voice issuing ex cathedra edicts that can only apply to himself.” The sarcastic hashtag #JonathanFranzenhates soon became a fad.

I mention these three business trends because they highlight a paradox. In the last chapter, I argued that deep work is more valuable than ever before in our shifting economy. If this is true, however, you would expect to see this skill promoted not just by ambitious individuals but also by organizations hoping to get the most out of their employees. As the examples provided emphasize, this is not happening. Many other ideas are being prioritized as more important than deep work in the business world, including, as we just encountered, serendipitous collaboration, rapid communication,

and an active presence on social media.