A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

How can you avoid the inconveniences associated with this experimentation? You can’t. You must instead adjust your mindset so that you no longer fear these annoyances.

Supercharging Idea #2: Build Smart Interfaces Between Support and Specialists

The sheer quantity and variety of tasks in a non-specialized work environment make the hive mind workflow unavoidable. When you’re faced with an overwhelming incoming stream of unrelated tasks, you don’t have enough margin in your schedule to create smarter alternative workflows—there’s just too much bombarding you to individually tame everything w

The Protocol Principle Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.

The sheer volume of the scheduling required to set up those meetings becomes a major driver of hyperactive inbox checking, and therefore induces a major cognitive cost. When you have to continually return to your inbox to nudge along one of many different meeting-scheduling conversations, your ability to perform valuable cognitive work significantl

If a knowledge work organization is producing valuable cognitive output in a competitive marketplace, then it’s self-evident that having support units prioritize this output will make an organization more successful than if it instead allowed every unit to focus myopically on its own internal objectives.

I suggest the following design principle for developing approaches to work that provide better returns from your personal or organizational attention capital: seek workflows that (1) minimize mid-task context switches and (2) minimize the sense of communication overload.

Meeting budgets are also common. The idea is to block off on your calendar the times you’re available for meetings. These blocks should add up to the total amount of time you think is reasonable to spend in meetings in a given week.

Returning to a culture that allows more separation between specialized and administrative work is crucial to moving past the hyperactive hive mind and significantly improving productivity.

When you alter your personal workflow, by contrast, those you work with didn’t really have a say in what you decided to do. If they’re then presented with a new system that will impact their own work, but for which they had no input, the locus of control moves toward the external, creating irritation and a tendency to try to push back and reassert