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

by Cal Newport

In modern knowledge work, we’ve largely lost interest in moving boldly ahead, embracing the resulting hardships as the cost of doing business better than before. We still talk about “innovation,” but this term now applies almost exclusively to the products and services we offer, not the means by which we produce them. When it comes to the latter topic, business thinkers tend to focus on secondary factors, like better leadership or clearer objectives to help stimulate productivity. Little attention is dedicated to the actual mechanics of how work is assigned, executed, and reviewed.

A natural consequence of leaving the details of how knowledge workers work up to the individual is an entrenchment in workflows that prioritize convenience in the moment above all else.

Once we free ourselves from this trap, however, and start systematically rethinking how we work, we’ll inevitably create short-term inconvenience on our way to long-term improvement.

In business, good is not the same as easy, and fulfilling is not the same as convenient. Deep down, knowledge workers want to feel as if they’re producing important output that takes full advantage of their hard-won skills, even if this ...

Carpenter’s optimism was well founded. As he worked to rebuild his company on a foundation of clear and optimized systems, profits grew for the first time. “My personal income is . . . let’s just say, more than I need,” Carpenter writes on his website.

A key insight preached in Carpenter’s book is the need to involve those who are affected by a new work procedure in the design of that procedure. His staff wrote 98 percent of the procedures currently in place and had a “heavy hand” in shaping the remaining 2 percent that Carpenter created himself. As a result, his employees are “fully vested” in these processes. Perhaps even more crucial, Carpenter made it easy to instigate further improvements. “If an employee has a good idea for improving a procedure, we will make an instant modification—with no bureaucratic hang-ups,” he explains.23 He takes this employee involvement so seriously that he now requires his service representatives to submit at least a dozen proposed improvements before they qualify to receive their annual performance bonus.

putting in place easy methods for improving the new workflow processes when issues arise. There’s perhaps no better way to keep the locus of control internal than to empower your team to change what’s not working. In practice, you might be surprised by how few changes are actually suggested. It’s the ability to make changes that matters, as it provides a psychological emergency steam valve, neutralizing the fear that you might end up trapped in some unexpected hard edge of the new workflow, unable to get your work done.

Greetings, Friends [or Esteemed Colleagues], Due to high workload, I am currently checking and responding to e-mail twice daily at 12:00 P.M. ET [or your time zone] and 4:00 P.M. ET. If you require urgent assistance (please ensure it is urgent) that cannot wait until either 12:00 P.M. or 4:00 P.M., please contact me via phone at 555-555-5555. Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. It helps me accomplish more to serve you better. Sincerely, [Your name]

A better strategy for shifting others’ expectations about your work is to consistently deliver what you promise instead of consistently explaining how you’re working. 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.

I suppose I could try to insist that they all log in to my Trello board to enter new issues or check on the status of old issues. In theory, this might save me a few extra messages, but in reality, no one would actually do this—and I can’t blame them! It takes me about thirty minutes, once a week, to process my board and send update messages. I receive massive benefits from structuring all these issues so clearly, and because I spent a little extra time to make my interface seamless, my colleagues can enjoy these benefits as well.

“We can change the nature of the work performed.” Optimize processes, he urged, not people.3

The Process Principle Introducing smart production processes to knowledge work can dramatically increase performance and make the work much less draining.

One of Optimize’s more intricate processes, for example, involves the production of the daily lesson videos that get delivered to multiple platforms each morning. The work required for this production is substantial. Johnson is responsible for actually coming up with and writing the lessons. He’s also the person who delivers the lessons on camera for the video. But beyond this, other tasks lurk: the text versions of the lessons must be edited, the videos must be filmed, the film clips must be edited, and everything must be launched to multiple platforms at just the right time. Around a half dozen people are involved in executing these varied steps.

Optimize deploys an online collaboration tool called Flow.

Here are a few other odds and ends I learned about Optimize’s processes. Though they forbid internal email, they do use email to communicate with external partners. Their interaction with these inboxes, however, is highly structured. Johnson says those responsible for these external-facing email addresses have “discrete blocks” in which they check for messages, typically once a day. To handle customer service, Optimize deploys a tool called Intercom that streamlines the process of responding to the most common requests and prevents pileups of ambiguous emails from customers. Optimize also hosts a company-wide meeting every Monday (using teleconferencing software) to synchronize efforts.

This tool is mainly used for two purposes. The first is to “celebrate wins”: if someone accomplishes something important, either professionally or personally, they might share it on the company Slack channel. Johnson describes this as a chance to virtually “high-five” one another. Because the company is virtual, he explained, it’s important to have some outlet for social interaction.

As Johnson explained to me, it takes time to figure out how best to structure the crazy inputs and interaction that surround most work processes. He’s diligent in making sure that everyone keeps prioritizing this. “You need time away from inputs to figure out how best to systematize those inputs,” he explained. This is perhaps Optimize’s most important process of all: the process that helps improve the existing processes.

These examples of effective production processes share the following properties: It’s easy to review who is working on what and how it’s going. Work can unfold without significant amounts of unscheduled communication. There’s a known procedure for updating work assignments as the process progresses.

A good production process, in other words, should minimize both ambiguity about what’s going on and the amount of unscheduled communication required to accomplish this work. Notice, nothing about these properties restricts the knowledge worker’s autonomy in figuring out how they get their work done; the focus remains on coordinating this work. Also notice that these properties are unlikely to lead to stifling bureaucracy, as the processes they produce are optimized to reduce the overhead—in terms of both context shifts and time—surrounding the actual act of producing valuable things. Workers at the highly systematized Optimize Enterprises likely feel much more empowered and much less overwhelmed than those shackled to the status quo of the hyperactive hive mind workflow.

I’d be that guy, with his laptop open in every meeting, phone always in hand while rushing across campus, keeping the proverbial plates spinning one frantic reply at a time. Without this system, in other words, my job would be nearly unbearable.

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

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

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

A regular rhythm of efficient meetings can replace 90 percent of hive mind messaging, if you have a way to keep track of what needs to be discussed in these meetings. The task board makes this simple.

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

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.

This is the promise of introducing automatic processes into your individual professional responsibilities. Whether you’re deploying complex automation or just following handcrafted procedures, these processes will reduce your dependence on the hyperactive hive mind workflow and reward you with extra cognitive energy and mental peace. Make automatic what you can reasonably make automatic, and only then worry about what to do with what remains.

that 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 very point of being a leader is to move an organization in a meaningful direction,” he writes, “yet email can have the opposite effect, blocking the leader from accomplishing anything proactive or of lasting substance.”

If you work in groups on common professional goals, and you find that this work is generating too many distracting messages or aimless meetings, a well-executed status meeting protocol might make a significant difference in your productivity. As Hicks and Foster discovered, it’s surprising how much overwhelming, attention-fracturing, back-and-forth interaction can be compressed into a frequent schedule of very short check-ins.

Tenner offers several explanations for this puzzle, but one of his primary arguments is that instead of reducing labor, computers end up creating more work. Some of this extra work is direct. Computer systems are complicated and change every few years as existing technology becomes obsolete. They also break a lot. The result is a large time investment in learning new systems and trying to get them to work.

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.

Sam’s story highlights a truism we easily forget: there are few things more valuable than someone who consistently produces valuable output, and few approaches to work more satisfying than being given the room to focus on things that really matter.

They soon flee for more traditional software companies, where they can hide shortcomings behind bluster, or default to highly visible busyness as an alternative to actually doing the hard but satisfying work of creating valuable output with their brains.

As Amanda elaborated, there are two categories of work possible at her firm. The first category she calls “reactive, easy, brain-dead work.” As she explains: “This is where you show up, check your email, do what the emails tell you to all day, and then go home.” The second category she calls “intentional, difficult, focused, creative work,” which is when you “spend time thinking about what’s the most important, long-term, impactful thing for you to do for your big projects.” In the office where she works, the first type dominates.

The late Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman famously told an interviewer that his strategy for minimizing committee work was to do it really poorly so that people would eventually stop asking him for help. Few people would be comfortable with such brazen misanthropy. Do we really want to reward those who are?

As Sassone’s research points out, hiring more support staff in this manner won’t necessarily decrease profitability. When you allow specialists to work with more focus, they produce more, and this extra value can more than compensate for the cost of maintaining dedicated support. Our rush to cut payrolls by having everyone handle their own administrative work through computer interfaces provided only the illusion of streamlining. These top-line numbers obscured the degree to which the cognitive gears that produce value in knowledge work began to grind and stick under these new demands.

“Knowledge worker productivity is the moonshot of the twenty-first century.” To help structure this massively important endeavor, I introduced attention capital theory. 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. Of course we didn’t get this exactly right on the first try—to have done so would have been exceptional. Once seen in this context, it should be clear that the efforts of this book have nothing to do with a reactionary rejection of technology. The