A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

by Cal Newport

the more you’re able to complete one thing at a time, sticking with a task until done before moving on to the next, the more efficiently and effectively you’ll work.

All things being equal, workflows that minimize this never-ending stream of urgent communication are superior to those that instead amplify it.

When interactions are moved onto task-specific cards associated with a project, the sense of requests piling up is diminished.

Little attention is dedicated to the actual mechanics of how work is assigned, executed, and reviewed.

The goal of these changes is to make it both easier and more sustainable for the knowledge worker to actually accomplish important things, not to coerce them into doing more things, faster—a strategy that’s unlikely to succeed in the long term when dealing with cognitively demanding work.

Knowledge work leaders need to take radical steps to get more out of the human brains they deploy.

In Ford’s world, the workers were dispensable, while in the knowledge world, our brains are the source of all value.

A key insight preached in Carpenter’s book is the need to involve those who are affected by a new work procedure in the design of that procedure.

it simply won’t work to radically change workflows without the input of those who must use them.

The second step is to obtain buy-in on new workflow processes from those who will actually have to execute them.

It’s the ability to make changes that matters,

A common method for handling these personal workflow overhauls is to clearly explain the structure of your new approach to your colleagues, perhaps accompanied by an unassailably logical explanation for why you’re making these changes.

A better strategy for shifting others’ expectations about your work is to consistently deliver what you promise instead of consistently explaining how you’re working.

If people trust you to handle the work they send your way, then they’re generally fine with not hearing back from you right away.

The psychology at play here is perhaps a bit subtle, but also crucial to master if you hope to succeed in maximizing your attention capital.

Work is not just about getting things done; it’s a collection of messy human personalities trying to figure out how to successfully collaborate.

What industrial productivity hackers like John Runnells began to discover in the first decades of the twentieth century is that efficiency extends beyond the actions involved in physically manufacturing something.

Equally important is how you coordinate this work.

magazines like System had increasingly broadened their attention to include the information and decisions that surrounded manual labor.

we’ll use the term production process to talk about this combination of the actual manufacturing work with all the information and decisions that organize this work.

Optimize processes, he urged, not people.3

The core claim of this chapter is that production process thinking applies equally well to knowledge work as it does to industrial manufacturing.

the reality of knowledge work is much more Hobbesian,

in the informal process workplace, dominance hierarchies emerge.

Also as in natural settings, in workplaces without well-defined processes, energy minimization becomes prioritized.

The Process Principle Introducing smart production processes to knowledge work can dramatically increase performance and make the work much less draining.

replacing, in other words, endless back-and-forth hive mind messaging with guidelines that let knowledge workers spend more of their time actually working instead of talking about their work—the cognitive equivalent of John Runnells’s revamped brass foundry.

the process that helps improve the existing processes.

It’s easy to review who is working on what and how it’s going. Work can unfold without significant amounts of unscheduled communication. There’s a known procedure for updating work assignments as the process progresses.

A good production process, in other words, should minimize both ambiguity about what’s going on and the amount of unscheduled communication required to accomplish this work.

The main issue with production processes in the knowledge work context is that they often must be custom-built to fit each circumstance.

This is the third time we’ve encountered a similar pattern: information about knowledge work arranged into columns of cards on a board.

The agile mindset argues that software development should be broken down into smaller chunks that can be released into the wild as quickly as possible.

The key caveat in this belief, however, is that we’re able to effectively apply our planning instinct only if we have a good grasp of all the relevant information

Also critical to successfully deploying this approach is having a clear method to assign cards to individuals.

Finally, there should be an easy method to associate relevant information with each card.

Underlying this framework is a simple but profound idea: by adding complexity to the rules we use to structure our communication, the actual amount of information required by the interactions can be reduced.

In classical information theory, the cost of a given protocol is the average number of bits you need to transmit to complete the task—as

Take the time to build the protocol that has the best average cost, even if it’s not the most natural option in the moment, as the long-term performance gains can be substantial.

A key element of any workflow is the means by which people coordinate their work.

if you’re willing to put in the hard work up front to develop smarter protocols for these tasks, you can often drastically reduce their long-term cost.

The Protocol Principle Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.

The conclusion is that any time you find yourself involved in a type of coordination activity that’s both frequent and non-urgent, an office hour protocol might significantly reduce its cost.

First, when seeking to minimize costs, consider the client’s cost in addition to your own.

Another important point is the need for clarity.

Why did the arrival of personal computers in the workplace fail to make us as productive as we predicted?

“Intellectual non-specialization was the dominant characteristic at most of the organizations in this study,”

“Indeed, in many instances firms have used technology to decrease, rather than to increase, intellectual specialization,” he writes.

there are few things more valuable than someone who consistently produces valuable output, and few approaches to work more satisfying than being given the room to focus on things that really matter.

Given this intensity, another core tenet of XP is “sustainable pace.”