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

In knowledge work more generally, approximating something like my hypothetical service budget could be a powerful strategy for pushing back against overload. There are three keys for a strategy of this type to work. First, it must start from the premise that your time and attention are limited. Second, it must quantify how much of your time and

in the long term, you must still monitor the key bottom line metric: the quantity and quality of valuable output you’re producing.

Ringelmann’s work proved influential, as it introduced the general idea that increasing the size of a team doesn’t necessarily increase its effectiveness in direct proportion.

“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.”

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.

The key is to find ways to minimize context shifts and overload while still getting done what needs to get done.

Short, structured check-ins can be empowering. As soon as you let these gatherings devolve into looser, more standard-style meetings, they become a tedious burden.

What if email didn’t save knowledge work but instead accidentally traded minor conveniences for a major drag on real productivity (not frantic busyness, but actual results), leading to slower economic growth over the past two decades?