Task Inflation and Inbox Capture

Cal Newport, April 2020, on a side effect of enforced telework that nobody was planning for.

The underlying condition: knowledge work assigns tasks with great informality — obligations arrive by message, in passing, without anyone tracking the total. That’s survivable in an office where friction limits how much gets thrown at you.

What remote does to it: the friction disappears, assignment inflates, and you can collapse into what he names inbox capture — essentially every moment of the workday dedicated to keeping up with email, Slack and Zoom, with no time left for the work those messages are about.

His proposed fix is organizational, not personal, which is what makes it worth keeping: knowledge-work organizations “might have to finally get more formal about how tasks are identified, assigned and tracked.” No amount of individual discipline fixes an assignment process with no ledger.

Notes

• I’ve spent years studying how knowledge work operates. One thing I’ve noticed about this sector is that it tends to treat the assignment of work tasks with great informality. New obligations arise haphazardly, perhaps in the form of a hastily-composed email or impromptu request during a meeting. If you ask a manager to estimate the current load on each of their team members, they’d likely struggle. If you ask the average knowledge worker to enumerate every obligation currently on their own plate, they’d also likely struggle — the things they need to do exist as a loose assemblage of meeting invites and unread emails.
• This inflation might even collapse into a dismal state I call inbox capture, in which essentially every moment of your workday becomes dedicated to keeping up with email, Slack, and Zoom meetings, with very little work beyond the most logistical and superficial actually accomplished — an incredibly wasteful form of economic activity.
• What’s the solution to this particular issue? Knowledge work organizations might have to finally get more formal about how tasks are identified, assigned, and tracked. This will require inconvenient new rules and systems, but will also, in the long run, probably be a much smarter way to work, even when we can return to our offices.
• Two entries in meetings; default publish:false