A World Without Email

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.

when playing defense against an onslaught of unpredictable obligations, ad hoc, unstructured messaging soon becomes the only reasonable option to prevent yourself from drowning.

Perhaps Marshall’s most striking habit was his insistence on leaving the office each day at 5:30 p.m. In an age before cell phones and email, Marshall didn’t put in a second shift late into the night once he got home. Having experienced burnout earlier in his career, he felt it was important to relax in the evening. “A man who worked himself to tat

a dedication to responsiveness will likely degrade your ability to make smart decisions and plan for future challenges—the core of Marshall’s success—and in many situations make you worse at the big picture goals of management.

As Leroy hypothesizes, 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.

people don’t like changes they can’t control.

Eisenhower recalls Marshall telling him: “[The War Department] is filled with able men who analyze the problems well but feel compelled always to bring them to me for final solution. I must have assistants who will solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done.”

in knowledge work, we’re overgrazing our common collection of time and attention because none of us wants to be the one who lets their cognitive sheep go hungry.

What the rise of the large office really needed—a productivity silver bullet of sorts—was some way to combine the speed of synchronous communication with the low overhead of asynchronous communication.

Postman uses this concept to argue, among other points, that the impact of the printing press is deeper than we realize. The standard narrative about this invention is that mass-produced pamphlets and books allowed information to spread faster and farther, speeding up the evolution of knowledge that culminated in the Age of Reason. Postman replies