Have We Designed Work to Interrupt Itself?

I recently read A World Without Email by Cal Newport and a couple of ideas have been sticking with me:

“Knowledge work is not an individual activity, it’s a workflow.”

And:

“We’ve accidentally created a way of working that prioritizes responsiveness over results.”

Read that last one again.

I can’t shake the feeling that this explains a lot of what I’m seeing and feeling in workplace strategy.

Is it just me, or have we designed work in a way that makes it harder to actually… work? Have we accidentally created a universal workflow that interrupts work?

We talk a lot about focus, productivity, and even burnout and the default response is usually personal: “manage your time better, protect your calendar, turn off notifications.”

But what if the issue isn’t the person? What if it’s the system?

If knowledge work is a workflow, then constant pings (the unofficial soundtrack of knowledge work), meetings, and status updates aren’t just annoying, they’re structural interruptions. They create friction. Not the obvious kind, but the subtle kind, the gap between what an organization intends and what actually happens in practice. This is behavioural friction and it quietly shapes how we work:

• choosing quick replies over deep thinking

• staying available instead of being effective

• measuring progress by activity, not outcomes 

From a workplace strategy lens, that feels important, because if the problem is structural, then so is the solution.

It’s not only about giving people better spaces to focus or collaborate. It’s also about asking:

• How does work actually flow here?

• Where does it break down?

• What are we unintentionally optimizing for, and how do we start to solve for it?

I’ve found this idea to be a helpful reframe. Less: How do we help people cope with work as it is? More: How do we design work, so it works better?

What I keep coming back to is this: behavioural friction shows up in all the small, built-in ways work pulls us off course, often so ingrained we barely notice them. The constant checking, replying, attending, updating, switching, all the things that make us feel busy without always moving meaningful work forward.

If those patterns are being created by the way work is set up, then maybe they’re not just habits to manage, they’re signals to pay attention to. And maybe that’s part of the opportunity for workplace strategy: not just helping people cope with friction, but getting more curious about where it’s coming from, and how the workplace could better support how work actually happens.

Curious if others are seeing the same thing?