Finding on Shared Doc Cursor Fatigue

The document was open. Several cursors were moving inside it. Each cursor had a name attached, rendered in a small floating badge, and each name was a person who was either editing or had left the tab open while doing something else. There was no way to tell which.

Someone watched the cursors and waited.

This is the opening condition of shared doc cursor fatigue: the document is supposed to be a solution, and the cursors that signal collaboration have become a reason to pause work rather than begin it.

The first consequence was procedural. Editing stopped briefly while the cursors settled. When two stopped moving at once, the person waiting decided it was safe to begin. They were wrong once, when a cursor resumed suddenly, but it was fine. The collaboration proceeded.

After the second or third instance, the behavior became systematic. Working in the document now included a cursor-watching phase before the editing phase. This phase was not on any agenda. It was not acknowledged in the team's working agreement. It simply existed, and everyone who worked in the document regularly had developed their own version of it.

The tool was designed to reduce coordination. It added a new layer of coordination instead.

The absurd rule governing this situation is that any digital burden may remain permanent if dismissing it takes less effort than fixing its source. The cure for cursor fatigue would require discussing how the team uses the document. Discussing how the team uses the document is harder than waiting for the cursors to stop. The waiting continues.

After enough repetitions, the unwritten enforcement system arrived. Certain documents developed an informal time-of-day structure. Edits happened in the morning; review happened after lunch; the document was considered unstable in the gap between these windows. No one announced this. It became true anyway.

By 2022, the question of whether a particular collaboration tool reduced friction or added a different kind of friction was not being asked. The tool was already in use. The friction was already familiar. Familiar friction has a different name.

It is called the process.