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

by Cal Newport

Introduction The Hyperactive Hive Mind

A widely accepted premise of modern knowledge work is that email saved us: transforming stodgy, old-fashioned offices, filled with secretaries scribbling phone messages and paper memos delivered from mail carts, into something sleeker and more efficient. According to this premise, if you feel overwhelmed by tools like email or instant messenger, it’s because your personal habits are sloppy:

What if email didn’t save knowledge work but instead accidentally traded minor conveniences for a major drag on real productivity (not frantic busyness, but actual results), leading to slower economic growth over the past two decades? What if our problems with these tools don’t come from easily fixable bad habits and loose norms, but instead from the way they dramatically and unexpectedly changed the very nature of how we work?

An important inflection point in this journey was in 2016, when I published a book titled Deep Work, which went on to become a surprise hit. This book argued that the knowledge sector was undervaluing concentration. While the ability to rapidly communicate using digital messages is useful, the frequent disruptions created by this behavior also make it hard to focus, which has a bigger impact on our ability to produce valuable output than we may have realized.

Constant communication is not something that gets in the way of real work; it has instead become totally intertwined in how this work actually gets done—preventing easy efforts to reduce distractions through better habits or short-lived management stunts like email-free Fridays. Real improvement, it became clear, would require fundamental change to how we organize our professional efforts.

The idea of a world without email was radical enough to catch Nish Acharya off guard. But I’ve come to believe it’s not only possible, but actually inevitable, and my goal with this book is to provide a blueprint for this coming revolution.

As email spread through the professional world in the 1980s and 1990s it introduced something novel: low-friction communication at scale.

We didn’t just shift our existing volume of voicemails, faxes, and memos to this new, more convenient electronic medium; we completely transformed the underlying workflow that determines how our daily efforts unfold. We began to talk back and forth much more than we ever had before, smoothing out the once coarse sequence of discrete work activities that defined our day into a more continuous spread of ongoing chatter, blending with and softening the edges of what we used to think of as our actual work.

The Hyperactive Hive Mind A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.

the hyperactive hive mind workflow enabled by email—although natural—has turned out to be spectacularly ineffective. The explanation for this failure can be found in our psychology. Beyond the very small scale (say, two or three people), this style of unstructured collaboration simply doesn’t mesh well with the way the human brain has evolved to operate. If your organization depends on the hive mind, then you cannot neglect your inbox or chat channels for long without slowing down the entire operation. This constant interaction with the hive mind, however, requires that you frequently switch your attention from your work to talking about work, and then back again. As I’ll detail, pioneering research in psychology and neuroscience reveals that these context switches, even if brief, induce a heavy cost in terms of mental energy—reducing cognitive performance and creating a sense of exhaustion and reduced efficacy.

The principles described in part 2 don’t insist that you banish messaging technologies like email and instant messenger. These tools remain a very useful way to communicate, and it would be reactionary to return to older and less convenient technologies just to make a point. But these principles will push you to reduce digital messaging from a constant presence to something that occurs more occasionally.

The future of work is increasingly cognitive. This means that the sooner we take seriously how human brains actually function, and seek out strategies that best complement these realities, the sooner we’ll realize that the hyperactive hive mind, though convenient, is a disastrously ineffective way to organize our efforts. This book, therefore, should not be understood as reactionary or anti-technology. To the contrary, its message is profoundly future-oriented. It recognizes that if we want to extract the full potential of digital networks in professional settings, we must continually and aggressively try to optimize how we use them.

From 1965 to 1984, the employees studied spent around 20 percent of their day engaged in desk work and around 40 percent in scheduled meetings. In the studies since 2002, these percentages roughly swap. What explains this change? As Mark points out, in the gap between the 1984 and 2002 studies, “email became widespread.”2

In Mark and González’s study, the average scheduled meeting took close to forty-two minutes. By contrast, the average time spent in an email inbox before switching to something else was only two minutes and twenty-two seconds. Interaction now occurs in small chunks, fragmenting the other efforts that make up the typical knowledge worker’s day.

In 2016, in another paper co-authored by Gloria Mark, her team used tracking software to monitor the habits of employees in a research division at a large corporation and found that they checked email, on average, over seventy-seven times per day.4

Pulling together these various observations provides us with a clear and disturbing portrait of interaction in the modern office setting. It’s no longer accurate to think of communication tools as occasionally interrupting work; the more realistic model is one in which knowledge workers essentially partition their attention into two parallel tracks: one executing work tasks and the other managing an always-present, ongoing, and overloaded electronic conversation about these tasks.

The modern knowledge work organization truly does operate like a hive mind—a collective intelligence of many different brains tethered electronically into a dynamic ebb and flow of information and concurrent conversations.

As Leroy hypothesizes, when a task is confined to a well-defined block of time and fully completed during this block, it’s easier to move on, mentally speaking, when you’re done. (Unfortunately for our purposes, when switching back and forth from email inboxes or instant messenger channels, we rarely experience well-defined time limits for our tasks or a sense of completion before switching again.)

The more the first task remained on the subject’s mind, the worse they did on the subsequent task. “Every time you switch your attention from one task to another, you’re basically asking your brain to switch all of these cognitive resources,” Leroy explained to me when I asked her about this work.

For many different knowledge work positions—if not most—the ability to slow down, tackle things sequentially, and give each task uninterrupted attention is crucial, even if the role doesn’t regularly require hours of continuous deep thinking. The flip side of this claim is that for most positions, the hyperactive hive mind workflow, which derails attempts at clear cognition, makes you less productive.

People in managerial roles are right to emphasize the importance of constant communication to their job—as it exists right now. If your team currently operates using the hyperactive hive mind workflow, then it’s crucial to monitor your communication channels closely. In the hive mind, managers are often at the center of a web of ad hoc connections—if they step back, the whole clunking contraption grinds to a halt. But given all the different ways we could work, is this hyperactive messaging really the best way to manage teams, or departments, or even whole organizations?

Perhaps Marshall’s most striking habit was his insistence on leaving the office each day at 5:30 p.m. In an age before cell phones and email, Marshall didn’t put in a second shift late into the night once he got home. Having experienced burnout earlier in his career, he felt it was important to relax in the evening. “A man who worked himself to tatters on minor details had no ability to handle the more vital issues of war,” he once said. Marshall focused his energy as a manager on making key decisions that would impact the outcome of the war. This was a task for which he was uniquely suited. He then trusted his team to execute these decisions without involving him in the details. As Eisenhower recalls Marshall telling him: “[The War Department] is filled with able men who analyze the problems well but feel compelled always to bring them to me for final solution. I must have assistants who will solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done.”

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.

“Boxed In by Your Inbox,” published in 2019 in The Journal of Applied Psychology, which used multiple daily surveys to study the impact of email on the effectiveness of a group of forty-eight managers in various industries.21 One of the paper’s authors summarized their findings as follows: “When managers are the ones trying to recover from email interruptions, they fail to meet their goals, they neglect manager-responsibilities and their subordinates don’t have the leadership behavior they need to thrive.”

Another way to measure the harm caused by email is to see what happens when you reduce its presence. This is exactly what Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow explored in an experiment conducted with consultants from Boston Consulting Group. After Perlow introduced a technique called predictable time off (PTO), in which team members were provided set times each week when they could completely disconnect from email and the phone (with the full support of their colleagues), the consultants became markedly happier. Before PTO was introduced, only 27 percent of the consultants reported that they were excited to start work in the morning. After the reduction in communication, this number jumped to over 50 percent. Similarly, the percentage of consultants satisfied with their job jumped from under 50 percent to over 70 percent. Contrary to expectations, this mild reduction in electronic accessibility didn’t make the consultants feel less productive; it instead increased the percentage of those who felt like they were “efficient and effective” by over twenty points.

As research like Alex Pentland’s emphasizes, however, this prioritization of abstract written communication over in-person communication disregarded the immensely complex and finely tuned social circuits that our species evolved to optimize our ability to work cooperatively. By embracing email, we inadvertently crippled the systems that make us so good at working together. “Memos and emails simply don’t work the same way that face-to-face communications work,” Pentland bluntly concludes.

As Newton argued, when the tapper is knocking on the table, they hear in their head all the accompaniment for the song—the singing, the instruments—and have a hard time putting themselves into the mental state of the listener, who has access to none of that information and is instead left grappling with a puzzling jumble of sporadic knocks. Social psychologists call this effect egocentrism, and as a research team led by Justin Kruger of NYU set out to demonstrate in a surprisingly entertaining 2005 paper, appearing in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, it plays a big role in explaining why email drives us crazy.31 Kruger and his collaborators started by studying sarcasm. In their first experiment, they gave a group of participants a list of topics. For each topic, they were asked to write two sentences: one normal and one sarcastic. They then emailed their sentences to participants in another group, who were tasked with identifying which sentences were meant to be sarcastic. “As expected, the participants were overconfident,” the paper explains. The sentence writers predicted that the readers would essentially get every choice right. In reality, they failed nearly 20 percent of the time.

The richer the sender’s subjective experience of what she’s trying to communicate, the bigger the gap grows between her understanding and that of her correspondent—evidence that egocentrism is at the core of the measured overconfidence. The conclusion of this work is that emails are commonly misunderstood because of the “inherent difficulty of moving beyond one’s subjective experience of a stimulus and imagining how the stimulus might be evaluated by someone who does not share one’s privileged perspective.” To make matters even worse, the researchers found that the recipients of these ambiguous messages were as overconfident as the senders. They were confident that they were correctly detecting sarcasm or identifying humor, even when they weren’t doing well at all.

When you build an entire workflow on exactly this type of ambiguous and misunderstood communication—a workflow that bypasses all the rich, non-linguistic social tools that researchers like Alex Pentland documented as being fundamental to successful human interaction—you shouldn’t be surprised that work messaging is making us miserable.

Tools like email almost completely eliminate the effort required—in terms of both time and social capital—to ask a question or delegate a task. Viewed objectively, this seems like a good thing: less effort equals more efficiency. As I’ll show, however, the side effect of this transformation is that knowledge workers began to ask more questions and delegate more tasks than ever before, leading to a state of perpetual overload that’s driving us toward despair.

Too little friction can lead to feedback loops that spiral out of control, as happens when a microphone gets too close to a speaker and the self-amplification recursively explodes into a deafening screech. 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.

So why did this frenetic behavior become universal in the aftermath of email’s arrival, even though, as argued in the preceding chapters, it makes us less productive and more miserable? When you look closer at this question, a nuanced and fascinating collection of answers emerges, all of which point to a surprising conclusion: maybe the way we work today is much more arbitrary than we realize.

In the second half of the twentieth century, many scholars in the field of the philosophy of technology began to research similar case studies of unintended consequences. Over time, this idea that tools can sometimes drive human behavior became known as technological determinism.

One of the better-known determinist books is Neil Postman’s 1985 classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death. In this short treatise, Postman argues that the format through which mass media is delivered can impact the way a culture thinks about the world.

Postman replies that the influence of the resulting “typographic” culture did more than just speed up information flow; it changed the way our brains processed our world. “Print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind,” he writes, “and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content.”

A more modern example of technological determinism is the introduction of the Like button to Facebook. As revealed by contemporaneous blog posts written by the design team, the original purpose of this feature was to clean up the comments below users’ posts.

The goal of this tweak, in other words, was a modest improvement, but they soon noticed an unexpected side effect: users began spending more time on the service. As became clear in retrospect, incoming Likes provide users with an uneven stream of social approval indicators—bits of evidence that other people are thinking about you.

I just argued that more than a millennium later, the introduction of another narrowly useful innovation, electronic messaging, led the modern office to embrace the hyperactive hive mind workflow. To justify this claim, let’s look closer at the types of underlying complex forces that plausibly might have driven us from the rational adoption of email to the less rational embrace of the hive mind approach to work. There are at least three of these hive mind drivers that likely played a role in this unintentional transformation of the office.

Hive Mind Driver #1: The Hidden Costs of Asynchrony

The quick phone call, it turns out, cannot always be replaced with a single quick message, but instead often requires dozens of ambiguous digital notes passed back and forth to replicate the interactive nature of conversation.

The details of this result are technical,21 but its impact on distributed systems was obvious. It made it clear that asynchronous communication complicates attempts to coordinate, and therefore, it’s almost always worth the extra cost required to introduce more synchrony.

As we’ve learned, managers in office settings fixated on eliminating the overhead of synchronous communication—the annoyance of phone tag or taking the elevator to a different floor to chat with someone in person. They believed that eliminating this overhead using tools like email would make collaboration more efficient. Computer scientists, meanwhile, came to the opposite conclusion. Investigating asynchronous communication from the perspective of algorithm theory, they discovered that spreading out communication with unpredictable delays introduced tricky new complexities. While the business world came to see synchrony as an obstacle to overcome, computer theorists began to realize that it was fundamental for effective collaboration.

As the engineers discovered when they tried to coax their networked computers into reaching a consensus, asynchrony is not just synchrony spread out; it instead introduces its own difficulties. A problem that might have been solvable in a few minutes of real-time interaction in a meeting room or on the phone might now generate dozens of messages, and even then might still fail to converge on a satisfactory conclusion. It’s possible, in other words, that once you move your workplace toward this style of communication, the hyperactive property of the hyperactive hive mind workflow becomes unavoidable.

Hive Mind Driver #2: The Cycle of Responsiveness

The cycle begins with legitimate demands on your time. Perhaps it’s 2010, you’ve just started using a smartphone, and you realize it’s now possible to answer client questions that arrive after work hours or respond quickly to colleagues in different time zones. These clients and colleagues now learn that you’re available at these new times and begin to send more requests and expect faster responses. Faced with this increased influx, you check your phone more often so you can keep up with the incoming messages. But now the expectations for your availability and responsiveness increase further, and you feel pressured to respond even quicker.

This is a nice example of technological determinism at work. None of these teammates, superiors, and subordinates like the culture of constant connection that this cycle produces. None of them ever suggested it, or made a conscious decision to adopt it.

I notice you’re responding a little quicker to my message, so I begin to do the same. Others follow suit; the pattern of responsiveness emerges, then becomes a new default. The consultants Perlow studied didn’t choose the cycle of responsiveness; in some sense, email chose it for them.

Hive Mind Driver #3: The Caveman at the Computer Screen

It doesn’t require a large leap of speculative evolutionary psychology to arrive at the reasonable conclusion that Homo sapiens are well adapted to small-group collaboration.

Unstructured coordination is great for a group of six hunters but becomes disastrously ineffective when you connect many dozens, if not hundreds, of employees in a large organization. We know this in part because of the robust research literature studying the optimal group size for working together and solving professional problems.