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

by Cal Newport

Lasse Rheingans and I aren’t the only ones to notice the stakes on the table in this discussion. In the same 1999 article cited earlier, Peter Drucker notes that in terms of productivity thinking, knowledge work was where industrial manufacturing was in 1900—that is, right before the radical experiments that increased productivity by fifty times. We’re poised, in other words, to make similarly massive increases in the economic effectiveness of the knowledge sector, if we’re willing to get serious about questioning how we work. Drucker calls this push to make knowledge work more productive the “central challenge” of our times, writing: “It is on [knowledge work] productivity, above all, that the future prosperity—and indeed the future survival—of the developed economies will increasingly depend.”