A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

by Cal Newport

Drucker helped the business world understand the emergence of knowledge work as a major economic sector. One of his central messages was the importance of autonomy. “The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail,” he wrote in 1967. “He must direct himself.”11 What Drucker realized was that knowledge work was too skilled and creative to be broken down into a series of repetitive tasks that could be prescribed to workers by managers, as was the case with manual labor. There was simply no easy way to take something as abstract as coming up with a new business strategy, or innovating a new scientific industrial process, and reduce it down to a clear series of optimized steps to be followed unthinkingly. This emphasis on autonomy proved influential, and it goes a long way toward explaining the stubborn persistence of the hive mind. As I argued, when you delegate productivity decisions to the individual, it’s not surprising that you end up stuck with a simple, flexible, lowest common denominator–style workflow like the hyperactive hive mind. It’s here that we arrive at an impasse. On the one hand, autonomy is unavoidable in knowledge work due to the complexity of these efforts. On the other hand, autonomy entrenches hive mind–style workflows. To succeed with applying the attention capital principle, we must somehow escape this trap.