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

by Cal Newport

“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. “Unfortunately, we aren’t very good at doing this.” She summarizes the current context in which knowledge workers operate as a state of “divided attention,” in which the mind rarely gets closure before switching tasks, creating a muddle of competing activations and inhibitions that all add up to reduce our performance. In other words, Leroy identified a clear answer to the question that titles her paper. Why is it so hard to do our work? Because our brains were never designed to maintain parallel tracks of attention.

This was a simple message to write, but its implications were subtle, involving HR, budgets, and office space allocations, among other impacts. Putting together a plan to properly react to this start date shift would require some careful thought, but I couldn’t help reflecting that the space for such thinking is hard to find when dealing with my request is interrupted by the many other unexpected emails likely demanding our admin’s attention that same morning.

Too often, we think of those with minder roles as automatons, who spend their days cranking through tasks, one after another, as they arrive as input through inboxes and chat channels. But this perspective condescendingly dismisses the cognitively demanding nature of this work. Fixing my postdoc start date issue is no less complicated than pulling together a smart strategy memo or sharp section of computer code. It follows that embedding minders into a concentration-eroding hyperactive hive mind workflow, though superficially convenient in the moment to those who interact with them, reduces their ability to do their job well. As we learned from the example of IT ticketing systems, if we can somehow create space between communication and execution, people in these roles would find the tasks before them more easily dispatched.