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

by Cal Newport

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen bluntly summarize in their 2016 book, The Distracted Mind: “Our brains do not parallel process information.”

Why is it so hard to do our work? Because our brains were never designed to maintain parallel tracks of attention.

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.

He didn’t run around putting out fires; he instead systematically worked through issues that really mattered, giving each the attention it deserved before moving on to the next.

Speaking of Marshall

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.

In the modern world, knowledge workers now feel under siege by obligations.

If slightly increasing friction drastically reduces the requests made on your time and attention, then most of these requests are not vital to your organization’s operation in the first place; they are instead a side effect of the artificially low resistance created by digital communication tools.

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.

A key property of technological determinism is that the innovation in question alters our behavior in ways that were neither intended nor predicted by those first adopting the tool.

Hive Mind Driver #1: The Hidden Costs of Asynchrony

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.

Hive Mind Driver #2: The Cycle of Responsiveness

Sleeping with Your Smartphone,

Book to check into

the cycle spins: teammates, superiors and subordinates continue to make more requests, and conscientious employees accept these marginal increases in demands on their time, while their expectations of each other (and themselves) rise accordingly.

media theorist Douglas Rushkoff uses the term “collaborative pacing” to describe this tendency for groups of humans to converge toward strict patterns of behavior without ever actually explicitly deciding that the new behaviors make sense.

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

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.

The loafing effect first observed by Ringelmann, for example, seems to still play a role in knowledge work tasks. (Summarized simply: the more people working on a project, the easier it is to get away with putting in less effort.)

Drucker was right to point out that we cannot fully systematize the specialized efforts of knowledge workers, but we shouldn’t apply this to the workflows that surround these efforts.

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.

When Drucker emphasized autonomy, he was thinking about work execution, as these activities are often too complicated to be decomposed into rote procedures.

Workflows, on the other hand, should not be left to individuals to figure out on their own, as the most effective systems are unlikely to arise naturally. They need instead to be explicitly identified as part of an organization’s operating procedures.

seek workflows that (1) minimize mid-task context switches and (2) minimize the sense of communication overload.

when it comes to producing value with your brain, 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.

When you’re at home at night, or relaxing over the weekend, or on vacation, you shouldn’t feel like each moment away from work is a moment in which you’re accumulating deeper communication debt.

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.

Become known as someone who never drops the ball, not someone who thinks a lot about their own productivity.

The better you are at what you do, he explains, the more freedom you earn to be idiosyncratic in how you deliver—no explanation required.

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

you’re brash and disagreeable, or are a favorite of the boss, you can, like the strongest lion in the pride, avoid work you don’t like by staring down those who try to pass it off to you, ignoring their messages, or claiming overload. On the other hand, if you’re more reasonable and agreeable, you’ll end up overloaded with more work than makes sense for one person to handle.

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.

Task Board Practice #1: Cards Should Be Clear and Informative

Task Board Practice #2: When in Doubt, Start with Kanban’s Default Columns

Task Board Practice #3: Hold Regular Review Meetings

Task Board Practice #4: Use Card Conversations to Replace Hive Mind Chatter

Individual Task Board Practice #1: Use More Than One Board

maintain a separate board for every major role in your professional life.

Individual Task Board Practice #2: Schedule Regular Solo Review Meetings

Individual Task Board Practice #3: Add a “To Discuss” Column

Whenever a task arises that requires input from one of these individuals, I sidestep my instinct to shoot them a quick email by instead moving the task to the appropriate to discuss column.

Individual Task Board Practice #4: Add a “Waiting to Hear Back” Column

Once you’ve identified a process that does seem like a good candidate for automation, the following guidelines will help you succeed with the transformation: