Telemetry friction
Telemetry friction is a term specific to Sloane's method. It is a single, composite score that summarises how much friction is showing up in a person's working day, drawing on calendar metadata, such as meeting density and back-to-back scheduling, and team-tool metadata, such as message frequency, after-hours activity and response timing across Slack or Microsoft Teams.
The word telemetry refers to the fact that this is drawn from passive, ongoing signals rather than a survey or a self-report. The word friction refers to what the score is trying to capture: how compressed, interrupted and fragmented a working day has become, as distinct from how many hours were worked.
It is important to be precise about what telemetry friction is built from and what it is not. It uses metadata only: who messaged whom, when, how long a meeting lasted, how many attendees it had, whether a message was sent outside normal hours. It never reads the content of a message, document or meeting, and it has no visibility into what was actually said.
Sloane tracks telemetry friction against a person's own rolling baseline, using the same exponentially weighted moving average approach applied to physiological signals, so that a sustained rise against someone's own normal is what triggers attention, not an absolute number that might be entirely ordinary for a different role or team.
Related terms
- Calendar load, A measure of how demanding a person's schedule is, based on meeting density, back-to-back bookings and time actually left free, rather than headcount of meetings alone.
- Context switching, The mental cost of moving between unrelated tasks or topics, which accumulates over a day and reduces the depth and quality of thinking available for any one of them.
- Metadata-only ingestion, The practice of reading structural information about calendar events and messages, such as timing and participants, while never reading their actual content.
- EWMA baseline, An exponentially weighted moving average of a person's own trailing readings, used so that changes are judged against their individual normal rather than a population average.