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

by Cal Newport

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.3 A team from the University of California, Irvine, ran a similar experiment, tracking the computer behavior of forty employees at a large company over twelve workdays. They found that the workers checked their inboxes an average of seventy-seven times a day, with the heaviest user checking more than four hundred times daily.4 A survey conducted by Adobe revealed that knowledge workers self-report spending more than three hours a day sending and receiving business email.5 The issue, then, is not the tool but the new way of working it introduced. To help us better understand this new workflow, I’ll give it a name and definition:

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.

As I’ll detail, pioneering research in psychology and neuroscience reveals that these context switches, even if brief, induce a heavy cost in terms of mental energy—reducing cognitive performance and creating a sense of exhaustion and reduced efficacy.

As far as these social circuits are concerned, members of your tribe are trying to get your attention and you’re ignoring them: an event that registers as an emergency. The result of this constant state of unease is a low-grade background hum of anxiety that many inbox-bound knowledge workers have come to assume is unavoidable, but is actually an artifact of this unfortunate mismatch between our modern tools and ancient brains.

edge. The future of work is increasingly cognitive. This means that the sooner we take seriously how human brains actually function, and seek out strategies that best complement

these realities, the sooner we’ll realize that the hyperactive hive mind, though convenient, is a disastrously ineffective way to organize our efforts.

“I’m frustrated that I receive so many updates . . . that have

nothing to do with my position,” wrote a teacher named Jay.

“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 per...

computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW), which, as the name suggests, looks at ways that emerging technology can help people work together more productively.

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

It reveals that half these users were checking communication applications like email and Slack every six minutes or less. Indeed, the most common average checking time was once every minute,

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 average user studied had only fifteen such uninterrupted buckets, adding up to no more than an hour and fifteen minutes total of undistracted productive

work per day. To be clear, this is not an hour and fifteen minutes in a row, but instead the total amount of undistracted productive work conducted throughout the entire day.

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.

part of what distinguishes us from our primate ancestors is the ability of our prefrontal cortex to operate as a kind of traffic cop for our attention, amplifying signals from brain networks associated with our current object of focus while suppressing signals from everywhere else.12

As Leroy hypothesizes, when a task is confined to a well-defined block of time and fully completed during this block, it’s easier to move on, mentally speaking, when you’re done.

“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.”

For many different knowledge work positions—if not most—the ability to slow down, tackle things sequentially, and give each task uninterrupted attention is crucial, even if the role doesn’t regularly require hours of continuous deep thinking.

and in many situations make you worse at the big picture goals of management. In the short term, running your team on a hive mind workflow might seem flexible and convenient, but in the long term, your progress toward what’s important will be slowed.

“Boxed In by Your Inbox,” published in 2019 in The Journal of Applied Psychology,

“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.” As the number of these messages increases, the manager becomes more likely to fall back on “tactical” behaviors to maintain a feeling of short-term productivity—tackling small tasks and responding to queries—while avoiding the bigger picture,

As I’ll now argue, managers aren’t the only knowledge workers for whom clear thinking is crucial.

The premise on which this effectiveness is built is that communicating about tasks often gets in the way of executing them—the more you can off-load this communication from the cognitive space of your staff, the more effective they become at actually getting things done.

Nish Acharya’s story from this book’s introduction provides another example of a position where it’s accepted that focused thought is important, but the workflows put in place make these efforts nearly impossible.

Acharya when it comes to makers, moving away from the hive mind workflow isn’t about tweaking productivity habits, but instead about significant boosts to

effectiveness.

many will continue to defend the hyperactive hive mind workflow, even after evidence of its harm is presented. Their counterargument hinges on the claim that this workflow is somehow fundamental. That is, they’ll concede that all this communication might slow down

our brains, but they can’t imagine any other reasonable way to get work done. Sean demonstrates that once you know what pain you’re trying to avoid and what benefits you’re trying to amplify, other approaches emerge.

country: email is making us miserable.1

“The longer one spends on email in [a given] hour the higher is one’s stress for that hour.”2

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).

better—a text analysis program called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count reveals that these anxious emails are more likely to contain words that express anger.3

The researchers found that repeated exposure to “high information and communication technology demands” (translation: a need to be constantly connected) was associated with “suboptimal” health outcomes.

“we become task-oriented, tetchy, terrible at listening as we try to keep up with the computer.”8

This reality is important for practical reasons. When employees are miserable they perform worse. They’re also more likely, as the French labor minister warned, to burn out, leading to increased healthcare costs and expensive employee turnover.

As I’ll argue, this reality is not some incidental side effect that can be cured with clever inbox filters or better company norms; it’s instead fundamental to the various ways in which this highly artificial workflow conflicts with how our human brains naturally operate.

One-on-one conversations are crucial

The drive to interact with others is one of the strongest motivational forces humans experience.

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.

This frenetic approach to professional collaboration generates messages faster than you can keep up—you finish one response only to find three more have arrived in the interim—and while you’re at home at night, or over the weekend, or on vacation, you cannot escape the awareness that the missives in your inbox are piling ever thicker in your absence.

explaining to your brain that the neglected interactions in your overfilled inbox have little to do with your survival doesn’t seem to prevent a corresponding sense of background anxiety.

one particularly devious study, published in 2015 in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication,

During the period when the phone was ringing across the room, indicators of stress and anxiety jumped higher. Similarly, self-reported stress rose and self-reported pleasantness fell. Performance on the word puzzle also decreased during the period of unanswered ringing.

The subjects were bathed

in anxiety, even though their rational minds, if asked, would admit that there was nothing going on in that laboratory that was actually worth worrying about.

The missed connections that necessarily accompany the hyperactive hive mind sound these same Paleo...