A World Without Email

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.

An email arrives that informally represents a new responsibility for you to manage; because there’s no formal process in place to assign the work or track its progress, you seek instead the easiest way to get the responsibility off your plate—even if just temporarily—so you send a quick reply asking for an ambiguous clarification. Thus unfolds a ga

seek workflows that (1) minimize mid-task context switches and (2) minimize the sense of communication overload.

It’s no longer accurate to think of communication tools as occasionally interrupting work; the more realistic model is one in which knowledge workers essentially partition their attention into two parallel tracks: one executing work tasks and the other managing an always-present, ongoing, and overloaded electronic conversation about these tasks.

One of the first studies in this area was the now famous work of a nineteenth-century French agricultural engineer, Maximilien Ringelmann, who demonstrated that when you dedicate more people to the task of pulling a rope, the average force exerted by each individual decreases—leading to diminishing returns as group sizes grow. Though the physical t

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.