For much of workplace history, collaboration among colleagues was synchronous by default. From Renaissance workshops to the nineteenth-century rooms occupied by Charles Dickens’s Bob Cratchit and Herman Melville’s Bartleby, an office was usually a single space where a few people toiled. Though letter-writing—an asynchronous style of communication—had been a part of commerce for centuries, it was too slow for day-to-day collaboration. For most office work, synchrony ruled.
This status quo was upended by the rise of a new work setting: the large office. In the book “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace,” the critic and New Yorker contributor Nikil Saval writes that this shift took place between 1860, when the U.S. Census counted around seven hundred and fifty thousand people who worked in “professional service,” and 1920, by which time that number had increased to more than four million—a period, Saval writes, in which “business became big business.” The small counting house gave way to edifices such as the Larkin Building, designed in 1903, by Frank Lloyd Wright, which housed eighteen hundred employees, spread over five floors and a basement, and was anchored by a cavernous, light-bathed central atrium. The introduction of office telephone exchanges, in the early twentieth century, helped make such spaces more functional. But coördinating telephone conversations required drawn-out games of secretarial phone tag.
As message slips piled up on office desks, what seemed to be missing was a system of practical asynchronous messaging: a way for me to send you a message when it was convenient for me, and for you to read that message when it was convenient for you, all at speeds less sluggish than that of intra-office mail. If such a system could be built, managers thought, then efficient non-real-time collaboration would become possible: no more missed-call slips, no more waiting for the mail cart. In the emerging age of large offices, practical asynchrony seemed like a productivity silver bullet. This belief motivated investment in projects such as the C.I.A.’s pneumatic-tube network.
Other large office buildings also experimented with pneumatic solutions. But the expense and complexity of these systems rendered them essentially impractical. Then, in the nineteen-eighties, a far more convenient technology arrived, in the form of desktop computers connected through digital networks. As these networks spread, e-mail emerged as the killer app for bringing asynchronous communication to the office. To better understand this shift, I talked to Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the impact that computer technology has had on the workplace. “I can show it to you,” she told me, when I asked about the spread of e-mail. She showed me a data table she had constructed, which summarized the results of office-time-use studies from 1965 to 2006. The studies can be divided into two groups: before e-mail and after. In the studies conducted before e-mail, workers spent around forty per cent of their time in “scheduled meetings,” and twenty per cent engaged in “desk work.” In those conducted after e-mail, the percentages are swapped.