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

by Cal Newport

A good approach to figuring out whether this effort is warranted is to apply the 30x rule. As explained by the management consultant Rory Vaden, in its original form, this rule states: “You should spend 30x the amount of time training someone to do a task than it would take you to do the task yourself one time.”11 We can loosely adapt this rule to automatic process construction: if your team or organization produces a given type of result thirty times a year or more, and it’s possible to transform its production into an automatic process, the transformation is probably worth the effort.

Most organizations default to using a hyperactive hive mind–style protocol for most coordination activities, because it’s simple to set up and persuade people to follow. Its flexibility also often allows organizations to avoid worst-case scenarios. Shannon teaches us, however, that 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 hard work you invest in advance to deploy the optimized protocol will pay off many times over in the lower cost you experience as you subsequently use it.

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.

I introduced Scrum, and agile methodologies more generally, back in chapter 5 as part of our discussion of task boards. Of this strategy’s various elements, the one that most resonated with Hicks and Foster was the discipline of daily scrums.

Hicks and Foster adapted the daily scrum concept to their research group. Instead of holding the meetings every day, they held them on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. They also changed the name to “status meetings.” Otherwise, the details remained largely the same: these gatherings lasted for fifteen minutes, and everyone on the research team answered the traditional three questions. They even experimented with holding the meetings standing up and found that, “surprisingly,” it really did help them stick to the constrained time limit. Hicks and Foster would participate as well, updating the students on their own daily activities. They called their modified system SCORE.

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.

Work Reduction Strategy #1: Outsource What You Don’t Do Well

Work Reduction Strategy #2: Trade Accountability for Autonomy

Amanda’s general strategy of offering accountability to gain autonomy, therefore, is a powerful approach to escaping chronic overload, but it’s also risky. If you’re entrenched in a large organization where chronic overload reigns, and you’ve developed an expertise that obviously makes you valuable, then this strategy may be one of your best moves to gain the breathing room needed to remake your workflow into something more effective. You don’t necessarily have to match Amanda’s boldness when applying this strategy. Sometimes even just volunteering for a large initiative provides you enough cover to ignore messages and turn down meeting invites without annoying people, as you now have an unassailable excuse: “I would, but am swamped trying to handle [big thing].”

The task boards discussed in the process principle chapter also provide a powerful tool for implementing workload budgets. Using a task board to organize work offers two benefits in this context: it makes it easy to determine how much work each person is currently doing, and it has a structured system for how these work assignments are updated, usually in the form of a status meeting attended by everyone. Imagine you’re working on a team that uses task boards. If you’re already tackling a heavy workload, this will be immediately clear on the board—making it much harder for your team leader to overload you, especially if other people have lighter loads. In the situation where overloading you is necessary, the magnitude of what you’re being asked to do is unambiguous, meaning you’ll receive the credit due for your efforts. In a hyperactive hive mind workplace, on the other hand, where these tasks are distributed in an ad hoc manner through emails, you could easily find yourself not only overloaded, but unrecognized for this sacrifice.

As I argued in the opening to chapter 5, when you run an office haphazardly, a Hobbesian dynamic arises in which those who are most brash and disagreeable get away with doing less work, while their more reasonable peers become overloaded.

In both field and laboratory studies, the researchers found that women are more likely to volunteer for “non-promotable” service tasks than men. Women are also asked to do these tasks more frequently than men, and say yes more often when asked. “This can have serious consequences for women,” the researchers note. “If they are disproportionately saddled with work that has little visibility or impact, it will take them much longer to advance in their careers.”

In 1998, the social critic Neil Postman gave an important speech titled “Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change.”1

It’s the fourth of his five ideas, however, that I want to dwell on, as it casts into sharp relief the intellectual framework I’ve attempted to build in this book: 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.

Digital-era knowledge work is, on any reasonable historical scale, a recent phenomenon. It’s absurdly ahistorical and shortsighted to assume that the easy workflows we threw together in the immediate aftermath of these tech breakthroughs are somehow the best ways to organize this complicated new type of work.