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

by Cal Newport

Partitioning: Split the process into a series of well-defined phases that follow one after the other.

Signaling: Put in place a signaling or notification system that tracks the current phase of each output being generated by the process,

Channeling: Institute clear channels for delivering the relevant resources and information from one phase to the next

eliminating unnecessary coordination does not just reduce frustration, but also increases resources to invest in the activities that really matter.

“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.”

30x rule - Rory Vaden

by spending more time in advance setting up the rules by which we coordinate in the office (what I’ll call protocols), we can reduce the effort required to accomplish this coordination in the moment—allowing work to unfold much more efficiently.

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.

consider breaking the convention of associating email addresses with individuals, especially when seeking out efficient communication protocols.

Always keeping emails short is a simple rule, but the effects can be profound. Once you no longer think of email as a general-purpose tool for talking about anything at any time, its stranglehold on your attention will diminish.

professionals paid to do highly specialized work were spending more and more time doing administrative work.

Seeing this with the removal of staff functions

When you’re faced with an overwhelming incoming stream of unrelated tasks, you don’t have enough margin in your schedule to create smarter alternative workflows—there’s just too much bombarding you to individually tame everything with optimized processes.

When you’re overloaded, you’re forced to fall back on the flexibility of the hive mind.

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

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.

Accountability, in other words, can go a long way toward achieving reasonability when it comes to how many obligations we expect knowledge workers to handle.

Most modern knowledge work organizations treat individuals as general-purpose computers that execute a turbulent mixture of value-producing and administrative tasks—often unequally distributed, and not at all optimized for any particular big picture objective.

In a specialized organization, by contrast, the workforce is more bimodal, with one group focused almost exclusively on producing high-value output—like

Supercharging Idea #1: Structure Support

Supercharging Idea #2: Build Smart Interfaces Between Support and Specialists

Supercharging Idea #3: As a Last Resort, Simulate Your Own Support Staff

One way to accomplish this goal is to partition your time into two separate categories: specialist and support.

Another advanced tactic is to assign entire days to these roles.

“Knowledge worker productivity is the moonshot of the twenty-first century.”

Once you accept that the primary capital resource in knowledge work is the human brains you employ (or, more accurately, these brains’ capacity to focus on information and produce new information that’s more valuable), then basic capitalist economics take over and make it obvious that success depends on the details of how you deploy this capital.

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.