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Part 2
Principles for a World Without
Email
Chapter 4
The Attention Capital Principle
On Model Ts and Knowledge Work
We begin our efforts to unseat the hyperactive hive mind workflow in
a perhaps unexpected place: Henry Ford’s first car factories. During
the early years of the twentieth century, Ford’s newly minted Ford
Motor Company produced its vehicles in much the same way as its
competitors. “We simply started to put a car together at a spot on the
floor,” Ford once explained. “Workmen brought to it the parts as
they were needed in exactly the same way that one builds a house.”
1
These partially assembled cars were raised on wooden sawhorses to
prevent unnecessary stooping as teams of workmen swarmed around
them, shaping and filing the various parts and pieces into tight fits.
The factories deploying this “craft method,” as it became known,
were directly scaling up the same natural approach Karl Benz had
used to assemble the first practical automobile in the late 1800s.
2
After working his way from the Model A, which seated only two
and cost extra if you wanted a roof, through Models B, C, F, K, and N,
Ford finally arrived in 1908 at what would become his masterpiece of
pragmatic conveyance: the Model T. With this new design, Ford set
out to innovate not just the features of the vehicle but also the entire
process by which it was constructed. The first major step in this
innovation was the introduction of interchangeable parts. Drawing
from techniques that had emerged originally from New England
armories around the time of the Civil War, Ford reinvested profits
from the early versions of this popular vehicle to engineer specialized
tools that could produce car parts with enough precision to eliminate
the lengthy process of filing and grinding otherwise needed to get
these parts to fit together.
3
As the company boasted: “You might
travel around the world in a Model T and exchange crankshafts with
any other Model T you met en route, and both engines would work as
perfectly after the exchange as before.”
4
By eliminating grinding, interchangeable parts made faster
assembly feasible, but Ford still had to figure out how to get the
roughly one hundred precisely engineered pieces that made up a
Model T to come together into a working automobile in the shortest
amount of time possible. To accomplish this goal, he tried out many
different ideas. In its standard form, the craft method originally had
teams of fifteen working on a single car. Ford experimented with
having one man dedicated to building each car, with other workers
bringing him the pieces. The need for this single worker to context
switch between all the different assembly steps, however, still caused
delays, so Ford then introduced a system where each worker was
dedicated to a specific single task—say, bolting a bumper to the car—
and would walk the factory floor, from car to car, executing exactly
that step on each vehicle. This was somewhat better, but it was
devilishly difficult to orchestrate these rotating specialists.
It was in 1913, around five years after the introduction of the
Model T, that Ford made the next logical leap in this process
tinkering: What if instead of moving workers between stationary
cars, the cars moved past stationary workers? He began tentatively,
with a mini assembly line designed to speed up the production of the
coiled-wire magnetos that supplied the sparks for the Model T’s
ignition system. It used to take a single worker around twenty
minutes to manufacture a magneto from scratch at his workbench.
After Ford introduced a basic, waist-high conveyor belt and broke
down the construction into five steps, implemented by five workers
standing shoulder to shoulder, a magneto could now come together
in five minutes.
The proverbial light bulb lit up. After the magneto came a new
assembly line for the vehicle’s axle, reducing construction time from
two and a half hours to twenty-six minutes. Then came a moving line
for the vehicle’s three-speed transmission, helping drop the engine
assembly time from ten hours to four. Confidence buoyed, Ford
made the final step toward his new and improved production system
by building the heavy-duty, chain-driven conveyors needed to move
an entire car chassis on a continuous-motion assembly line.
5
In today’s world, we’ve become used to complex manufacturing
processes, but it’s hard to overestimate the magnitude of this
innovation when it was first deployed at a large scale by Ford. It used
to take more than twelve and a half labor hours to produce a Model
T. After the assembly line, this time dropped to ninety-three
minutes. Ford went on to sell 16.5 million units of the iconic vehicle.
At its height, his mammoth Highland Park factory would roll a new
Model T through its doors once every forty seconds.
The clanking chains and sparking welders of an early twentieth-
century automobile factory might seem far removed from our
current moment of knowledge workers tapping out emails on sleek
computer monitors. But as I hinted earlier, Ford’s innovation, and its
subsequent impact on the world of industrial manufacturing, will
provide an immensely useful analogy for understanding what it will
take to escape the miseries of the hyperactive hive mind workflow.
—
In the fall of 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported on a German
entrepreneur named Lasse Rheingans, who had adopted a novel
practice at his sixteen-person technology start-up: a five-hour
workday. Rheingans wasn’t just reducing the time his employees
spent in the office, but the total time they spent working each day.
They arrive at around eight each morning and leave at around one in
the afternoon. During the day, social media is banned, meetings
highly restricted, and email checks constrained. When they’re done
with work, they’re actually done until the next morning—no late-
night sessions at the keyboard, no surreptitious smartphone
messaging during their kids’ sporting events—as professional efforts
are restricted to time spent in the physical office. Rheingans’s bet
was that once you eliminated both distractions and endless
conversations about work, five hours per day would be sufficient for
people to get done the main things that mattered for the company.
Soon after this profile on Rheingans was published, The New
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