Work lives that had once been sequential-two or three blocks of work, broken up by meetings and phone calls-became frantic, improvisational, and impossibly overloaded. Many e-mails brought obligations: to answer a question, look into a lead, arrange a meeting, or provide feedback. With nearly all friction removed from professional communication, anyone could bother anyone else at any time. In the nineteen-nineties, the spread of e-mail had transformed knowledge work. “I was in this batting cage, deluged with information,” he told me recently. He had held similar roles for years, so he knew the ins and outs of the job he was surprised, therefore, to find that he was overwhelmed-not by the intellectual aspects of his work but by the many small administrative tasks, such as scheduling conference calls, that bubbled up from a turbulent stream of e-mail messages. In the early two-thousands, Merlin Mann, a Web designer and avowed Macintosh enthusiast, was working as a freelance project manager for software companies.
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