id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
www-newyorker-com-9681		The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done | The New Yorker			.html	text/html	4727	262	64	Drucker's emphasis on the autonomy of knowledge workers made sense, as there was no obvious way to deconstruct the efforts required by newly important mid-century jobs—like corporate research and development or advertisement copywriting—into assembly-line-style sequences of optimized steps. Building on the classic productivity idea that an office worker shouldn't touch the same piece of paper more than once, Mann outlined a new method for rapidly processing e-mails. One of the few academics who has seriously explored knowledge-work productivity in recent years is Tom Davenport, a professor of information technology and management at Babson College. Imagine if, through some combination of new management thinking and technology, we could introduce processes that minimize the time required to talk about work or fight off random tasks flung our way by equally harried co-workers, and instead let us organize our days around a small number of discrete objectives. It's ironic that Drucker, the very person who extolled the potential of knowledge-worker productivity, helped plant the ideas that have since held it back.	./cache/www-newyorker-com-9681.html	./txt/www-newyorker-com-9681.txt