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

Chapter 5: The Process Principle
1
. An interesting aside for fans of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology: the
“tickler” file, a mainstay of Allen’s modern system, comes up as a standard tool in these
early twentieth-century industrial productivity discussions.
2
. Joseph Husband, “What a New System of Management Did for Us,” ed. John S. Runnells,
System: The Magazine of Business 29, no. 4 (April 1916).
3
. Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management (New York: Vintage, 2015), 33.
4
. Kent Beck et al., “Manifesto for Agile Software Development,” 2001, agilemanifesto.org.
5
. Modus Cooperandi website, 
https://moduscooperandi.com
, accessed September 22,
2020.
6
. Thrive, the official blog of Personal Kanban, 
http://personalkanban.com/pk/
.
7
. Alexie Zheglov and Gerry Kirk, “Lean Coffee or an Introduction to Personal Kanban,”
Agile Tour Toronto 2012 session, YouTube video, 1:40,
https://youtu.be/aOrfRhcD6ms
.
8
. Bradley Miller, “Personal Kanban Scheduling Board,” March 4, 2018, YouTube video,
7:46, 
https://youtu.be/tTdbcoTlljQ
.
9
. I long ago realized that trying to generate complex numerical grades for my problem sets
—e.g., scoring a problem on a scale of 1 to 15—wasn’t worth the effort, and made it very
hard to grade consistently. I’ve since shifted to a scale with three possibilities (check
plus, check, or zero), which lets me and my TAs quickly and consistently assess the
degree to which the student understands each concept.
10
. If my TAs are undergraduates, I’ll add an extra step in which we have a prescheduled
thirty-minute meeting to look through the problem sets and update the grading notes
together. When I use graduate TAs, however, I trust them to figure this out on their
own, saving me this extra thirty minutes. When Georgetown’s campus was closed due
to COVID-19, we used a software tool called Canvas to make all the paper handling
virtual; students submitted digital copies of their assignments, and the TAs graded
them online. The process was easily adapted to this new fully electronic setup.
11
. Rory Vaden, “The 30x Rule: How Great Managers Multiply Performance,” American
Management Association, February 3, 2015, 
https://playbook.amanet.org/30x-rule-
great-managers-multiply-performance/
.