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

by Cal Newport

Production processes, by definition, require rules about how work is coordinated. Rules reduce autonomy—creating friction with the belief that knowledge workers “must manage themselves,” as Peter Drucker commanded. This dislike of processes, however, goes beyond a general bias toward autonomy. There’s a belief, implicitly held by many knowledge workers, that the lack of processes in this sector is not just an unavoidable side effect of self-management, but actually a smart way to work. A lack of processes, it’s commonly understood, represents nimbleness and flexibility—a foundation for the type of outside-the-box thinking we’re constantly told is critical. This vision is fundamentally Rousseauian, a reference to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that human nature, before the introduction of political influence, was fundamentally virtuous. It claims that when left alone to work in whatever way seems natural, knowledge workers will adapt seamlessly to the complex conditions they confront, producing original solutions and game-changing innovations. In this worldview, codified work processes are artificial: they corrupt the Edenic creative, leading to bureaucracy and stagnation—a Dilbert comic brought to life.