A World Without Email

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.

This move toward less (but better), built on a balance between specialization and support, is fundamental for the evolution of knowledge work from its current inefficient chaos toward something much more organized.

changing your objective from making your own unit as efficient as possible to helping your organization produce as much value as possible doesn’t need to reduce the quality or sustainability of the work involved.

An hour dedicated exclusively to a hard project followed by an hour dedicated exclusively to administrative work will produce more total output than if you instead mix these efforts into two hours of fragmented attention.

If a knowledge work organization is producing valuable cognitive output in a competitive marketplace, then it’s self-evident that having support units prioritize this output will make an organization more successful than if it instead allowed every unit to focus myopically on its own internal objectives.

Supercharging Idea #3: As a Last Resort, Simulate Your Own Support Staff

Once we understand the contours of our frustrations with knowledge work, we recognize that we have the potential to make these efforts not only massively more productive, but also massively more fulfilling and sustainable.

Supercharging Idea #2: Build Smart Interfaces Between Support and Specialists

Another advanced tactic is to assign entire days to these roles. Perhaps Tuesday and Thursday are support days, and Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are specialist days.