A World Without Email

Weekly meetings are too infrequent and vague. They take up too much time and often feature people trying to weasel out of commitments through doublespeak and conversational diversion. Status meetings, by contrast, are both frequent and structured in the questions they demand of participants: What did you do, what are you going to do, what’s in your

A key question to ask about any attempted shift toward specialization is what happens to the leftover work once everyone starts doing less? Many of these tasks will simply disappear as it becomes clear that they’re not actually that important to producing valuable output.

Once you’ve identified a process that does seem like a good candidate for automation, the following guidelines will help you succeed with the transformation: Partitioning: Split the process into a series of well-defined phases that follow one after the other. For each phase, clearly specify what work must be accomplished and who is responsible. Sig

another key factor is the rising complexity of communication.

Reimagining work, therefore, first requires more specialization. Let the knowledge workers with value-producing skills focus on applying those skills, and put in place robust and smartly configured support staff to handle everything else.

Make automatic what you can reasonably make automatic, and only then worry about what to do with what remains.

an effective strategy for becoming more specialized in your work: attempt to outsource the time-consuming things that you don’t do well. The key obstacle to overcome in applying this strategy is that you’ll likely pay a price in the short term before you reap long-term benefits.

New tools open up some new options for behavior while closing off others. When these changes then interact with our inscrutable human brains and the complex social systems in which we operate, the results can be both significant and unpredictable.

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.