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by
Cal Newport
Read between
September 28 - October 15, 2021
The lack of an inbox to check between these meetings opened up cognitive downtime—what Acharya took to calling “whitespace”—to dive more deeply into the research literature and legislation relevant to the topics handled by his office.
The underlying value of the constant electronic communication that defines modern work, however, is never questioned, as this would be hopelessly reactionary and nostalgic, like pining for the lost days of horse transport or the romance of candlelight.
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?
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.
One study estimates that by 2019 the average worker was sending and receiving 126 business emails per day, which works out to about one message every four minutes.2 A software company called RescueTime recently measured this behavior directly using time-tracking software and calculated that its users were checking email or instant messenger tools like Slack once every six minutes on average.
A survey conducted by Adobe revealed that knowledge workers self-report spending more than three hours a day sending and receiving business email.
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.
In the moment, the ability to quickly delegate tasks or solicit feedback might seem like an act of streamlining, but as I’ll show, in the long run, it’s likely reducing productivity, requiring more time and more expenses to get the same total amount of work accomplished.
Knowledge work does not yet have its Henry Ford, but workflow innovations with impact on the same scale as the assembly line are inevitable. I can’t predict all the details of this future, but I’m convinced it will not involve checking an inbox every six minutes.
“People now confuse answering emails with real work,” wrote an editor named Stephanie. “There is a performative dimension to writing emails and cc’ing everybody, like ‘Look at all the work I’m doing.’ It’s annoying.” As an HR consultant named Andrea put it: “In at least 50% of messages you still have open questions. . . . You get the feeling that the person just shot off an email without caring about how I could answer it.”
Because email counts as “desk work” in these studies, we see time spent on desk work grow as time spent in scheduled meetings falls. Unlike scheduled meetings, however, conversations held through email unfold asynchronously—there’s usually a gap between when a message is sent and ultimately read—meaning that the compacted interactions that once defined synchronous meetings are now spread out into a shattered rhythm of quick checks of inboxes throughout the day. In Mark and González’s study, the average scheduled meeting took close to forty-two minutes. By contrast, the average time spent in an
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Papers measuring the average number of email messages sent and received per day also show a trend toward increasing communication: from fifty emails per day in 2005,5 to sixty-nine in 2006,6 to ninety-two by 2011.7 A recent report by a technology research firm called the Radicati Group projected that in 2019, the year when I started writing this chapter, the average business user would send and receive 126 messages per day.8
To help understand the true scarcity of uninterrupted time, the RescueTime data scientists also calculated the longest interval that each user worked with no inbox checks or instant messaging. For half the users studied, this longest uninterrupted interval was no more than forty minutes, with the most common length clocking in at a meager twenty minutes. More than two thirds of the users never experienced an hour or more of uninterrupted time during the period studied.
The implication of the RescueTime data set is striking: the modern knowledge worker is almost never more than a few minutes away from sending or receiving some sort of electronic communication. To say we check email too often is an understatement; the reality is that we’re using these tools constantly.
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.
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.
“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.”
On the client side, the company now includes a section in their contract that spells out exactly how they will (and implicitly will not) interact with the client. For most clients, this means a regular phone call to provide updates and answer questions that is immediately followed up with a written document that captures everything discussed. Sean’s cofounder, who manages these relationships, was terrified that their clients would be irate to learn that their access was being reduced. This fear was unfounded—the clients turned out to appreciate the clear expectations. “They are absolutely much
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In early 2017, a new French labor law went into effect that attempted to preserve a so-called “right to disconnect.” According to the law, French companies with fifty employees or more are required to negotiate specific policies about email after work hours, with the goal of significantly reducing the time workers spend in their inbox in the evening or over the weekend.
“The longer one spends on email in [a given] hour the higher is one’s stress for that hour.”
They discovered that batching your inbox checks—a commonly suggested “solution” to improving your experience with email—is not necessarily a panacea. In fact, for those who score high in the common personality trait of neuroticism, batching emails actually makes you more stressed (perhaps due to worry about all the urgent messages you’re ignoring).
“[We] suggest that organizations make a concerted effort to cut down on email traffic.”4 Other researchers have found similar connections between email and unhappiness.
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.
Leslie Perlow found that predictable time off from email increased the percentage of employees planning to stay at the firm “for the long term” from 40 percent to 58 percent. Miserable employees, in other words, are bad for the bottom line.
The drive to interact with others is one of the strongest motivational forces humans experience. Indeed, as the psychologist Matthew Lieberman explains in his 2013 book, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, the social networks in our brains are connected to our pain systems, creating the intense heartbreak we feel when someone close to us dies, or the total desolation we experience when isolated from human interaction for too much time. “These social adaptations are central to making us the most successful species on earth,” Lieberman writes.16
Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World, this
Book
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.29 It’s no wonder that our inboxes so often leave us with an unspecified and gnawing sense of annoyance.
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.”
This vignette of the frustrated scientist and his distracting boss underscores an important cost of email that we often miss. 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.
This brings us back to my original contention that we can blame email—or more accurately, the hyperactive hive mind workflow it enabled—for much of this shift toward overload.
To summarize, we often overestimate the rational nature of our workloads. If a task is on our plate, we believe, it’s because it’s important—part of the job. But as I’ve just argued, both the type and quantity of the efforts that make up our day can be strongly influenced by less rational factors, such as the relative cost of asks for someone else’s time and attention.
This brings us back to email. The case study of Adrian Stone and IBM is pure technological determinism: a tool introduced for a simple purpose (to make existing communication practices more efficient) had an unexpected result (a shift toward the hyperactive hive mind style of collaboration). The speed of this transformation, which required less than a week to get rolling, underscores how powerful these forces can be once unleashed.
What she uncovered was a social feedback loop gone awry—a process she named 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
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“The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail,” Drucker wrote in his 1967 book, The Effective Executive. “He must direct himself.”34 This was a radical idea.
It’s in this context that the hyperactive hive mind, once in place, became devilishly difficult to eradicate, as it’s hard to fix a broken workflow when it’s no one’s job to make sure the workflow functions.
As 150 years of economic theory has taught us, to solve the tragedy of the commons, you cannot expect substantially better behavior from the herders; you need instead to replace the free-for-all grazing system with something more efficient. The same holds for the hyperactive hive mind: we cannot tame it with minor hacks—we need to replace it with a better workflow. And to do so, we must soften Peter Drucker’s stigma against engineering office work. 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
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used to take more than twelve and a half labor hours to produce a Model T. After the assembly line, this time dropped to ninety-three minutes. Ford went on to sell 16.5 million units of the iconic vehicle.
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.
As Devesh explained to me, he and his employees felt “bombarded” by messages, which “dictated” how they spent their time.
He wanted his employees to decide what to work on and then, once they made that decision, limit their attention to this choice until they were ready to move on to something else. To realize this new goal, Devesh abandoned the hive mind model in which all work passed through each person’s general-purpose inbox. He rebuilt his company’s workflow around an online project management tool called Trello.
What Drucker realized was that knowledge work was too skilled and creative to be broken down into a series of repetitive tasks that could be prescribed to workers by managers, as was the case with manual labor.
Knowledge work is better understood as the combination of two components: work execution and workflow. The first component, work execution, describes the act of actually executing the underlying value-producing activities of knowledge work—the programmer coding, the publicist writing the press release. It’s how you generate value from attention capital.
workflow, is one we defined in the introduction of this book. It describes how these fundamental activities are identified, assigned, coordinated, and reviewed. The hyperactive hive mind is a workflow, as is Devesh’s project board system. If work execution is what generates value, then workflows are what structure these efforts.
seek workflows that (1) minimize mid-task context switches and (2) minimize the sense of communication overload. These two properties are the knowledge work equivalent of Henry Ford’s obsession with speed.
Ford’s early assembly line, by contrast, must have been a nightmare for his employees. Nothing about it was natural. For one thing, it required more complicated machinery that was prone to breaking down. Carrying a bumper from a pile to a stationary car was a simple and reliable process. Trying to pull an entire car chassis on a variable-speed winch system toward a worker who would then bolt on a bumper as it passed was a much more complicated way to accomplish this same step.
Part of what makes continuous production possible is specialized rigs that can execute precision tasks quickly. Ford, for example, invented a drilling machine that could simultaneously bore forty-five holes into an engine block.12 The thing about custom tools, however, is that it’s hard to get them running consistently. It’s a fair guess that during these early years there was a lot of frustrated downtime at Highland Park spent tweaking and repairing these cumbersome rigs.
Imagine the frustration of shifting from the steady reliability of the craft method to a process that forced you to stop working completely again and again. To make matters even worse, the assembly line also required the addition of more managers and engineers to supervise. It was not only more annoying but also much more expensive to operate!
To summarize, Henry Ford took a reliable and intuitive process for building cars and replaced it with something that was more expensive to run, required a lot more management and overhead, was not at all natural, and frequently broke down, sometimes leading to major production delays. Nothing about this would have been easy or obvious. If you were a Ford manager, laborer, or investor during this period, you probably would have much preferred a safer and less disruptive focus on making the tried-and-true method slightly more efficient—the industrial equivalent of promoting better email
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The man of the hour is the one who can handle the complex problems created by the increasing speed of invention. . . . He is the man of exceptional originality. He is the man who has disciplined himself to keep acquiring new knowledge and skills. He has created new production concepts, marketing concepts, approaches to financing.14
