when a task is confined to a well-defined block of time and fully completed during this block, it’s easier to move on, mentally speaking, when you’re done.

The Sequential Brain in a Parallel World

Papers measuring the average number of email messages sent and received per day also show a trend toward increasing communication: from fifty emails per day in 2005,5 to sixty-nine in 2006,6 to ninety-two by 2011.7 A recent report by a technology research firm called the Radicati Group projected that in 2019, the year when I started writing this ch

One study estimates that by 2019 the average worker was sending and receiving 126 business emails per day, which works out to about one message every four minutes.2 A software company called RescueTime recently measured this behavior directly using time-tracking software and calculated that its users were checking email or instant messenger tools l

While the ability to rapidly communicate using digital messages is useful, the frequent disruptions created by this behavior also make it hard to focus, which has a bigger impact on our ability to produce valuable output than we may have realized.

The Specialization Principle In the knowledge sector, working on fewer things, but doing each thing with more quality and accountability, can be the foundation for significantly more productivity.

George Marshall was the US Army chief of staff during World War II, meaning that he essentially ran the entire war effort. His name might not be as well known as Dwight Eisenhower (whom Marshall hand-selected for advancement), but those who were involved in the war credit Marshall as a key figure—if not the key figure—in coordinating the Allies’ tr

A good approach to figuring out whether this effort is warranted is to apply the 30x rule. As explained by the management consultant Rory Vaden, in its original form, this rule states: “You should spend 30x the amount of time training someone to do a task than it would take you to do the task yourself one time.”11 We can loosely adapt this rule to

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.