A World Without Email

A bigger issue with this style of communication protocol is that its effectiveness will rapidly diminish if you allow the status meetings to become longer and less focused.

Knowledge workers with highly trained skills, and the ability to produce high-value output with their brains, spend much of their time wrangling with computer systems, scheduling meetings, filling out forms, fighting with word processors, struggling with PowerPoint, and of course, above all, sending and receiving digital messages from everyone abou

The media theorist Douglas Rushkoff uses the term “collaborative pacing” to describe this tendency for groups of humans to converge toward strict patterns of behavior without ever actually explicitly deciding that the new behaviors make sense.

By reducing the number of different obligations you’re required to tackle, you’ll gain the breathing room needed to then optimize the workflows you deploy to handle what remains—creating a one-two punch of productivity gains that can completely transform your effectiveness or that of your organization.

We still talk about “innovation,” but this term now applies almost exclusively to the products and services we offer, not the means by which we produce them.

When modifying the workflow of an entire team or organization, everyone can be involved in this change and feel empowered to optimize it.

“Often times the sender will ask two or three open-ended one sentence questions which elicit multi-paragraph answers,” he writes. “In these cases, the sender spends one minute and the receiver is asked, implicitly, to spend maybe an hour.” He came up with the same general solution as C. L. Max Nikias: keep all of his emails short. He similarly iden

A problem that might have been solvable in a few minutes of real-time interaction in a meeting room or on the phone might now generate dozens of messages, and even then might still fail to converge on a satisfactory conclusion.

one of his primary arguments is that instead of reducing labor, computers end up creating more work.