The Digital Workplace Is Designed to Bring You Down

The right metaphor here is not “Let’s stick with horses, even though automobiles get around,” because automobiles were clearly a more energy- and monetarily efficient way of moving things from A to B, just like email is clearly a more efficient way for me to deliver a memo to you than a fax machine. The metaphor is that it took a while before we f

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We don’t have good notions of productivity. Traditional economic productivity largely requires people working toward a singular measurable output with a transparent process. You have this input-to-output ratio and a process generating it, and you can tweak that and see what it does to the ratio. None of that works in knowledge work. So we fell bac

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So how do you actually work with your mind and create things of value? What I’ve identified is three principles: doing fewer things,  working at a natural pace, 9

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Meaning one with more variability in intensity than the always-on pace to which we’ve become accustomed.

 but obsessing over quality. That trio of properties better hits the

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The problem is that when you make productivity personal, you put the pressure on individuals to figure out the tension between different roles in their life. You’re telling them: You figure out how you organize the work, how you execute it. The more you do, the better. Now you have this tension of: If I spend less time with my family, I could do m

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We’ve been given no shortage of digital tools that should, in theory, help us work better, with more focus and efficiency, and connect us more easily with our colleagues. Instead, email, instant messaging, remote-meeting apps, work-flow and project-management software and so on can feel like so many buckets with holes in the bottom, maddeningly in

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