Knowledge work in the Netherlands has a major problem, as Martijn Aslander, Arjan Broere and Mark Meinema conclude in their new book, Our work is broken. “Regardless of the precise function, knowledge workers spend the vast majority of their time receiving, processing and storing digital information,” says Martijn Aslander. ,,The strange thing: nobody teaches us how to work knowledge. No attention is paid to it at school or during the study.”
The computer appears to have moved better with the times than the user. “Computer systems were conceived in the 1970s as a digital representation of the physical desk. With an in and out inbox, and folders where papers were stored. Even today computers still have a ‘desktop’, which many people also use as if it were a real desk on which they ‘place’ all kinds of files. Systems have evolved so much further than that, but their potential often remains untapped.”