A World Without Email

A natural consequence of leaving the details of how knowledge workers work up to the individual is an entrenchment in workflows that prioritize convenience in the moment above all else. Once we free ourselves from this trap, however, and start systematically rethinking how we work, we’ll inevitably create short-term inconvenience on our way to long

for an individual knowledge worker, this might describe the rate at which you’re hitting milestones or completing projects.

the overhead of arranging synchronous communication becomes onerous, leading to drawn-out games of secretarial phone tag and piles of missed-call message slips.

there’s a large cognitive cost to switching your attention from one target to another. Any workflow that requires you to constantly tend conversations unfolding in an inbox or chat channel is going to diminish the quality of your brain’s output.

The sheer volume of the scheduling required to set up those meetings becomes a major driver of hyperactive inbox checking, and therefore induces a major cognitive cost. When you have to continually return to your inbox to nudge along one of many different meeting-scheduling conversations, your ability to perform valuable cognitive work significantl

A good production process, in other words, should minimize both ambiguity about what’s going on and the amount of unscheduled communication required to accomplish this work.

Don’t require the people you work with to learn about your new systems or change the way they interact with you. Instead, when possible, deploy a seamless interface.

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.

Another useful expansion of the Kanban defaults is to include a column for storing background notes and research generally relevant to a project.