I’m a longtime Thomas Sowell fan but I only just recently started reading his most celebrated work, Knowledge and Decisions, first published in 1980. In one of

I’m a longtime Thomas Sowell fan but I only just recently started reading his most celebrated work, Knowledge and Decisions, first published in 1980. In one of the early chapters there is a reference to the old physical mailbox systems of pre-networked offices, and how the cost of distracted attention from hundreds of employees never seems to deter managers from dumping all manner of low-value correspondence into said boxes. Email and Slack may have kicked this problem into overdrive, but managers’ inability to efficiently organize knowledge work appears to be a long-standing open problem.