Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

> everyone got an email address and most lost their assistants

This is important. In the 90s I was working in an office with a half dozen other people, and the director had a secretary who also managed the office. She handled things like everyone's travel bookings, routine administrative stuff, and the like. And she was good at it. Fast forward to today and all but the most senior people spend days dealing with corporate systems to book travel, do expense reports, requisitioning things for our computers and laptops, and other assorted administrivia. In academia even tenured professors do it themselves. And these corporate portals are terrible. Now consider the scenario (set aside pandemic live for now) where a team of programmers working in two or three different offices around the country needs an in-person event. Instead of having one person, who is familiar with the systems and rules and is very good at navigating them, you have half a dozen highly paid professionals blowing half a day or more each wrangling up travel and accommodations. It's such a huge waste of people's time.

People are focusing on the mention of email but that's just a detail. What Newport is really onto here is horrible state of office organization, of which having to deal with email is just a symptom.

The hive mind arises because instead of having 1 or two people handle things like coordinating a meeting, everyone involved has to coordinate with everyone else.

> Rather than strategic thinkers, managers work as human switchboards, answering and forwarding dozens of emails on any and every topic to keep the system from seizing up.

You could take out "email" and replace it with "slack threads" or "text messages", or just about any other tech, and you'd still have the same problem: there's no sane organization any more, just a bunch of people running around trying to connect and work with each other.

>Tony Soprano would say, ay it's fuckin' raining, but whaddyagonnadoo.

"You don't wanna work in the rain, go try out for the Yankees." ~ Season 1 Episode 5, "College"

I love email. It is just text, it is truly asynchronous (as in: nobody expects you to answer within a minute) it is sortable, searchanle, you can create automatic filters, everybody has email.

But the best thing is: you have to write everything into _one_ email. I don't have to follow someones fragmented train of thought and glue the shards together in order to make sense of them. No: they want something from me and so the burden of sorting their thoughts is on them.

I also don't hate chats, or a phone call, however this is for different communications. If you do important stuff everybody should know via chat (or worse: recorded speech messages in a chat) you might be doing it wrong.

I know someone whos boss would send multiple 15 min speech messages a day into a group chat to all employees. To find the information you needed to know you would have to listen through the whole thing, write it down for yourself etc. And this times 40 employees just because one person didn't bother.

My best guess would be a pre-arranged "on call" schedule where a shuffled set of blocks of time are reserved / allocated to each team member