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

by Cal Newport

The key lesson I want to extract from Marshall’s story is that management is about more than responsiveness. Indeed, as detailed earlier in this chapter, a dedication to responsiveness will likely degrade your ability to make smart decisions and plan for future challenges—the core of Marshall’s success—and in many situations make you worse at the big picture goals of management. In the short term, running your team on a hive mind workflow might seem flexible and convenient, but in the long term, your progress toward what’s important will be slowed.

Something like the workload equivalent of the microphone screech is happening in modern knowledge work. When the friction involved in asking someone to do something was removed, the number of these requests spiraled out of control. I frantically try to grab other people’s time and attention to make up for the time and attention they’ve already grabbed from me.

New tools open up some new options for behavior while closing off others. When these changes then interact with our inscrutable human brains and the complex social systems in which we operate, the results can be both significant and unpredictable. The technologies in question in these studies are not literally deciding how humans should behave, but their effects can be so surprising and sudden to those involved that a story line of tools determining behavior seems as valid as any for describing what’s going on. (The technology scholar Doug Hill uses the term de facto autonomy to describe this effect.)

People are different from computers, but many of the forces that complicate the design of asynchronous distributed systems loosely apply to humans attempting to collaborate in the office. Synchrony might be expensive to arrange—both in the office setting and in computer systems—but trying to coordinate in its absence is also expensive. This reality summarizes well what many experienced as office communication shifted to email: they traded the pain of phone tag, scribbled notes, and endless meetings for the pain of a surprisingly large volume of ambiguous electronic messages passed back and forth throughout the day.

The Attention Capital Principle The productivity of the knowledge sector can be significantly increased if we identify workflows that better optimize the human brain’s ability to sustainably add value to information.

Differentiating workflows and work execution is crucial if we’re going to continue to improve knowledge sector productivity. To get the full value of attention capital, we must start taking seriously the way we structure work. This doesn’t stifle the autonomy of knowledge workers, but instead sets them up to make even more out of their skill and creativity.

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

Our instinct in the knowledge work setting is to obsess about factors like worst-case scenarios—how can we prevent bad things from ever happening?!—or to prefer the convenience of simple (but costly) protocols to more finicky (but optimized) alternatives. The information theory revolution tells us that these instincts shouldn’t be trusted. 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.

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.

Status meetings, by contrast, are both frequent and structured in the questions they demand of participants: What did you do, what are you going to do, what’s in your way? These two shouldn’t be confused.

If you work in groups on common professional goals, and you find that this work is generating too many distracting messages or aimless meetings, a well-executed status meeting protocol might make a significant difference in your productivity. As Hicks and Foster discovered, it’s surprising how much overwhelming, attention-fracturing, back-and-forth interaction can be compressed into a frequent schedule of very short check-ins.

When you eliminate support staff, the skilled professionals become less intellectually specialized, as they have to spend more time on administrative work that computers made just easy enough for them to handle on their own. As a result, it now requires more of these professionals to produce the same amount of valuable output for the market, as they have fewer mental cycles free to conduct this specialized work.

The Specialization Principle In the knowledge sector, working on fewer things, but doing each thing with more quality and accountability, can be the foundation for significantly more productivity.

Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. . . . A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe.

Once we understand the contours of our frustrations with knowledge work, we recognize that we have the potential to make these efforts not only massively more productive, but also massively more fulfilling and sustainable. This has to be one of the most exciting and impactful challenges that almost no one is talking about . . . yet. “We need to proceed with our eyes wide open,” concluded Postman, “so that we may use technology rather than be used by it.” If you’re one of the many millions exhausted by your inbox, hopeful that there must be a better way to do good work in a culture currently obsessed by constant connectivity, then it’s time to open your eyes.