A world Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

Who’s Doing What and How? Properties of Effective
Processes
Let’s say you’ve accepted the challenge of designing better knowledge
work production processes. What makes a process effective in this
context? Consider the production process used by Brian Johnson’s
Optimize Enterprises for producing daily multimedia content. Once
Johnson enters a new lesson title and subtitle into his team’s shared
spreadsheet, the steps for getting from this initial stage to released
content are all organized in a sequence of predetermined phases. At
each phase, it’s clear what work needs to be accomplished, where the
relevant files can be found, who is supposed to accomplish the work,
and what happens once they’re done.
Optimize’s processes for handling the more varied onetime
projects can’t rely on exact sequences of predetermined phases, as
each of these projects is different. But the overall workflow remains
highly structured. Information about who is working on what, as well
as how it’s going, is captured using the Flow project management
tool. Decisions about what tasks to add and who to assign to them
are made in regularly scheduled meetings. If you’re working on one
of these projects, the rhythm of your work is unambiguous. You

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check in on the task cards assigned to you in Flow, then put your
head down to work on these tasks, updating the cards when done.
Occasionally, you attend meetings when more involved discussion or
decisions are required. The results of these meetings are immediately
reflected back in Flow. This project-focused process similarly
minimizes the time spent communicating about work and maximizes
the time spent actually taking productive action.
These examples of effective production processes share the
following properties:
1. It’s easy to review who is working on what and how it’s going.
2. Work can unfold without significant amounts of unscheduled
communication.
3. There’s a known procedure for updating work assignments as
the process progresses.
For our daily lesson example, the first property is satisfied by the
status field in the shared spreadsheet, which tells the team exactly
where each lesson currently resides in the production pipeline. The
second and third properties are satisfied by the predetermined
sequence of phases, which specifies exactly what you should be doing
when it’s your turn to work on a lesson, where to find the needed
files when you begin, where to put these files when you’re done
working on them, and what comes next once the phase is complete.
For the project process, the first property is satisfied by Flow,
which provides a nice visual interface that displays all the active
tasks for a project. Small headshot icons on each task represent the
people who are assigned to it. When working on one of these
projects, there’s no ambiguity about what you’re supposed to be
doing in the moment. The second property is satisfied by a
combination of Flow’s collaboration tools, built right into the task
cards, and the rhythm of regular short status meetings.
Communication about the project is confined to these narrow
channels. Finally, to satisfy the third property, decisions about who
should be working on new tasks are typically made during meetings
and are then reflected in Flow.

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A good production process, in other words, should minimize
both ambiguity about what’s going on and the amount of
unscheduled communication required to accomplish this work.
Notice, nothing about these properties restricts the knowledge
worker’s autonomy in figuring out how they get their work done; the
focus remains on coordinating this work. Also notice that these
properties are unlikely to lead to stifling bureaucracy, as the
processes they produce are optimized to reduce the overhead—in
terms of both context shifts and time—surrounding the actual act of
producing valuable things. Workers at the highly systematized
Optimize Enterprises likely feel much more empowered and much
less overwhelmed than those shackled to the status quo of the
hyperactive hive mind workflow.
The main issue with production processes in the knowledge work
context is that they often must be custom-built to fit each
circumstance. What works for Optimize, for example, might not
work for a mobile-app development company, and what works for
the app company likely won’t work for a one-person accounting
shop. With this reality in mind, the remainder of this chapter
explores several different best practices that you can deploy when
trying to design the production processes that will work best for your
specific situation.