Perhaps online efficiency isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

After the coronavirus pandemic, many people hoped to establish ways of working that would make us more flexible, more productive and happier. Instead, we now find ourselves in a culture of constant distraction and perpetual availability. Digital collaboration has significantly increased; our calendars are filled with calls and meetings from dawn to dusk. We compulsively check work emails and chat threads after hours and on our supposed holidays. Concentration or contemplation is becoming increasingly impossible. The relentless pace of digital processes robs us of every moment of pause and reflection.

Knowledge workers today spend almost 60 per cent of their time using communication tools. The number of meetings that they must sit through has more than doubled since the period before the pandemic. Most employees report lacking sufficient time and energy to complete tasks, and are finding it more difficult to be innovative or to think strategically. Leaders complain that the lack of innovation or groundbreaking ideas within their teams is a problem too.

We are organising and collaborating more and more but creating less and less. We use the most advanced tools available but the quantity and quality of innovation seem to be declining worldwide. At the same time, the promise that technology and self-organisation would allow us to work more efficiently – and thus less – is not being fulfilled. In 2024, German employees logged approximately 1.2 billion overtime hours, more than half of which were unpaid. Work is becoming more tightly scheduled, while also increasing in volume.

It’s all a bit absurd. One of the very companies whose products distract us, keep us in meeting loops and encourage a permanent state of collaboration seems to have suddenly realised that this way of working might not be such a good idea, after all. Microsoft – whose office tools, such as Outlook, bombard us with emails and whose Teams platform enables endless chats and video calls – has said, in effect, “Sorry. It was an oversight. Things aren’t working out so well.”

The Microsoft Work Trend Index, a global, industry-spanning study on the state of our working world, has come to the conclusion that we are “all carrying digital debt”. “The inflow of data, emails, meetings and notifications has outpaced humans’ ability to process it all,” write its authors. “The pace of work is only intensifying. Everything feels important so we spend our workdays trying to get out of the red.”

The leading provider of productivity software is shocked to realise that its tools are making us less productive. Frankly, this has come a little late, as almost all companies have stocked up on such tools and built their workflows around them. So what now? German health-insurance provider IKK Classic recently wanted to find out which types of work bring happiness and which don’t. This topic is central to its business because, as its CEO, Frank Hippler, explains, “Higher job satisfaction has positive effects on mental and physical health.” Since IKK Classic insures many craftspeople, it focused on this sector and commissioned a representative survey. “The results were quite surprising in a positive way,” says Hippler.

It turns out that craftspeople have significantly higher job-satisfaction levels than the average worker. Some 80 per cent of them say that they are happy with their occupation, compared to only 55 per cent in the general population. One reason for this is that craft produces visible results. At a time when other professions are grappling with crises of meaning – leading to phenomena such as “quiet quitting”, in which employees disengage from their job and fulfil only the minimum requirements – these figures raise fundamental questions.

Gallup consultancy has found that the number of people who lack an emotional connection to their employer is at an all-time high. Many are mentally “checking out” of their jobs. Roofers and plumbers, meanwhile, don’t seem to need team-building trips or lofty purpose statements to enjoy their vocation.

To better understand what craftspeople can teach us about job satisfaction, I spoke to Ricarda Rehwaldt, a psychology professor and leading expert on happiness at work. “In craft, you do something that people need,” she says. Before her academic career, Rehwaldt trained as a carpenter. For knowledge workers, she says, the sheer number of digital tools and the density of meetings lead to alienation. “The calendar dictates our life – in essence, we are back to Taylorism,” she says, referring to a division of labour focused on efficiency, from which knowledge workers thought that they had freed themselves.

From crafts, one can learn that such high levels of scheduling are often unnecessary. “In a workshop, you’re not distracted by constant pinging or notifications,” says Rehwaldt. “At most, the foreman would call to say what needs to be done next and then you’d have a drawing showing what you were building.” This allows for a different type of focus. “Standing at the circular saw for an hour can be quite meditative too.”

Today, Rehwaldt has to work with digital ticket systems in her academic environment and finds this exhausting. She believes that it would be better if more tasks were handled by one person who could take responsibility for completing and owning them. Instead, she says, work often requires additional co-ordination and standardisation, and often lacks real purpose. “It all feels rather Kafkaesque,” she adds. By contrast, she fondly recalls the sense of community that she enjoyed in the past when working with others to create something tangible. “It used to generate an energy that I don’t feel when filling out a Jira ticket.”

Author Seth Godin echoes craftspeople’s secret to job satisfaction with a concept that he calls “shipping”. “If it doesn’t ship, it doesn’t count,” he says. “If it’s not creatively productive, it’s not helpful. And if we’re lucky, this is the heart of our work – the work of creation in our chosen medium.” Increasingly, all knowledge work is subject to the relentless monotony of the digital. There’s no beginning and no end, and hardly any climaxes. A new day brings yet another stand-up meeting, the next asset to move along. That’s why we need a different, better narrative of what successful work can look like. It will not come from technology companies – but it just might from roofers and carpenters.