A World Without Email: Find Focus and Transform the Way You Work Forever (from the NYT bestselling productivity expert)

by Cal Newport

Having spent years studying the nuances of knowledge worker productivity, I believe this understanding is profoundly flawed. To stick with the analogy to Enlightenment philosophy, the reality of knowledge work is much more Hobbesian, a reference to Thomas Hobbes’s belief, originally detailed in Leviathan, that without the constraints of the state, human life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” When you reduce work to a state of nature by allowing processes to unfold informally, the resulting behavior is anything but utopian. Much as is observed in actual natural settings, in the informal process workplace, dominance hierarchies emerge. If you’re brash and disagreeable, or are a favorite of the boss, you can, like the strongest lion in the pride, avoid work you don’t like by staring down those who try to pass it off to you, ignoring their messages, or claiming overload. On the other hand, if you’re more reasonable and agreeable, you’ll end up overloaded with more work than makes sense for one person to handle. These setups are both demoralizing and a staggeringly inefficient deployment of attention capital. But without a countervailing force, these hierarchies are often unavoidable.