August 26, 2025 I’ve invested in a new odometer to help my car go faster. Accountability is important, and as a driver I believe the most important thing I can do is set measurable, achievable and inspiring goals for the people pushing my car down the road. I’m never sure what to say to people who… don’t quite seem to realize they sound like this. I think, what chain of reasoning brought us to this? How did we get here? But I think I know how we got here. So, about this link. No disrespect to my old team – hey, team, hey – but… look, the fact that “manager”, “leader” and “culture” are nowhere in this article (are nowhere in so many articles like it about how people struggle to manage their time) is telling. “The underlying message is clear: We’re all just distracted by our devices, victims of shrinking attention spans who could stop multitasking if we’d just exercise more self-control.” … and this is victim-blaming. People multitask because they’ve been assigned multiple unprioritized tasks. People are distracted and unfocused because day to day their managers and leaders value responding to distractions and interruptions over consistency and focus. But for some reason – focus, burnout, you name it – there’s always somebody out there ready to shift the the blame for management and leadership shortcomings to the individual. I can understand the seduction in the reasoning – telling disempowered, demoralized people that they just need to do these few things feels a lot like helping! And for the audience it might even be a relief to find something like agency, to have a direction to move and a sense that somebody hears you. But it’s not real help and it’s not real agency and individual action won’t change systemic problems. Excusing failures of power this way is a kind of participatory gaslighting. If prioritizing interruptions ahead of everything else isn’t just tolerated but valorized where you work – that “ fast paced, dynamic environment” everyone is so proud to put in their job descriptions – then the problem is not one person’s attention span. “I tried Asana, Trello, all the project management tools. It’s just too much.” Those. Aren’t. Productivity. Tools. They’re accountability tools that foist the scut work of management off on the people being managed, one more thing tossed on the multitasking pile. We all know what real productivity tools are; the litmus is simple: if the tool goes away, does the work stop? Take away version control or CI, and we’re in weeds pretty quickly. The bug tracker’s down? Red alert. If editors and compilers go away – R-studio, Excel or Illustrator if those are your creative tools, you know what I mean – you might as well have cut power to the building. Asana’s gone? Enh, it’ll probably be back eventually. We’ll be fine for a week or two. Oh no my epics, said not a single human ever. Helping people and teams work effectively together – defining and fostering the organization’s operational culture – is the responsibility of leadership. It’s unambiguously the most important part of the job. There are a thousand ways to start working on chronic distraction and frantic multitasking and a thousand other real, sand-in-the-gears problems like them, but change for the better in any org only starts when the responsibility and accountability for change lives exactly where it belongs. And wherever that is, I guarantee it’s never in the pants pockets of the people hanging by a thread off the bottom of your orgchart.