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

by Cal Newport

This effect is so strong that when Arianna Huffington’s company Thrive Global explored how to free its employees from this anxiety while on vacation (when the knowledge of piling messages becomes particularly acute), it ended up deploying an extreme solution known as Thrive Away: if you send an email to a colleague who’s on vacation, you receive a note informing you that your message has been automatically deleted—you can resend it when they return.

situation. No matter what the expectations, the awareness that there are messages waiting for you somewhere triggers anxiety, ruining the potential relaxation of your time off.

As long as we remain committed to a workflow based on constant, ad hoc messaging, our Paleolithic brain will remain in a state of low-grade anxiety.

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.

This annoyance is heightened by the fact that we often overestimate our correspondents’ ability to understand our messages.

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.”

It’s not just that we’re less clear than we think, but we’re often completely misunderstood. You were sure that you were sending a nice note, while your receiver is equally sure you were delivering a pointed critique. When you build an entire workflow on exactly this type of ambiguous and misunderstood communication—a workflow that bypasses all the rich, non-linguistic social tools that researchers like Alex Pentland documented as being fundamental to successful human interaction—you shouldn’t be surprised that work messaging is making us miserable.

younger colleagues see electronic communication as a “universal language” that provides a more efficient way to interact.

Increasingly, Victor sees his role as convincing them that this couldn’t be further from the truth: email is not a universal form of interaction, he keeps trying to explain; it is instead an impoverished simulacrum of the types of complex and nuanced behaviors that through most of human history defined our communication.

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.

They found that on average their subjects worked on ten different spheres per day, spending less than twelve minutes on one before switching to another.36

A follow-up study in 2005 found the observed employees touching on eleven to twelve different working spheres per day on average.37

Simply adding a small amount of friction significantly reduced the requests coming the scientist’s way.

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.

Too little friction can lead to feedback loops that spiral out of control,

“The ‘keep everybody busy’ theory remains alive and well . . . in knowledge work.”39

I attempted to push back against this generalized fatalism by detailing three specific ways in which the hyperactive hive mind workflow makes us unhappy: the psychological anxiety of an inbox that fills up faster than we can empty it, the frustrating ineffectiveness of text-only communication, and the out-of-control overload that results when friction is eliminated from office interactions.

maybe the way we work today is much more arbitrary than we realize.

this idea that tools can sometimes drive human behavior became known as technological determinism.

A more modern example of technological determinism is the introduction of the Like button to Facebook. As revealed by contemporaneous blog posts written by the design team, the original purpose of this feature was to clean up the comments below users’ posts. Facebook engineers noticed that many such comments were simple positive exclamations, like “cool” or “nice.” They figured that if those could instead be captured by clicking Like, the comments that remained would be more substantive. The goal of this tweak, in other words, was a modest improvement, but they soon noticed an unexpected side effect: users began spending more time on the service. As became clear in retrospect, incoming Likes provide users with an uneven stream of social approval indicators—bits of evidence that other people are thinking about you. The idea that every tap of the Facebook app might give you new information about these indicators hijacked ancient social drives in the human brain and made the platform suddenly significantly more appealing. Whereas people used to log on to Facebook occasionally to see what their friends were up to, they were now more likely to check in constantly throughout the day to see how much approval their latest posts had generated.

We chose to use email because it was a rational solution to the need for practical asynchronous communication in large offices. The hyperactive hive mind, in some sense, subsequently chose us once this tool had spread, at which point we seemed to have all looked up from our newly empowered inboxes, shrugged, and quipped: “I guess this is how we work now.”

Hive Mind Driver #1: The Hidden Costs of Asynchrony

The problem, of course, is that email didn’t live up to its billing as a productivity silver bullet. The quick phone call, it turns out, cannot always be replaced with a single quick message, but instead often requires dozens of ambiguous digital notes passed back and forth to replicate the interactive nature of conversation.

It made it clear that asynchronous communication complicates attempts to coordinate, and therefore, it’s almost always worth the extra cost required to introduce more synchrony.

While the business world came to see synchrony as an obstacle to overcome, computer theorists began to realize that it was fundamental for effective collaboration.

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

cycle of responsiveness.

And thus 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.24

when Perlow later persuaded teams at Boston Consulting Group to schedule protected time away from communication devices, the team members described their efficiency and effectiveness as increasing.

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.26

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.

Ringelmann’s work proved influential, as it introduced the general idea that increasing the size of a team doesn’t necessarily increase its effectiveness in direct proportion.

Though there’s no specific team size that consistently emerges as optimal, essentially every result falls into a narrow range of roughly four to twelve people—exactly as we observed all the way back with the Paleolithic elephant hunters.

[Knowledge work] demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.35

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.

Once your organization has fallen into the hive mind, it’s in each individual’s immediate interest to stick with this workflow, even if it leads to a bad long-term outcome for the organization as a whole. It makes your life strictly easier in the moment if you can expect quick responses to messages that you shoot off to colleagues.

in knowledge work, we’re overgrazing our common collection of time and attention because none of us wants to be the one who lets their cognitive sheep go hungry.

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.

Rheingans is one of the few business leaders willing to drastically change the fundamental building blocks of work in our age of networked brains. At the moment, most organizations remain stuck in the productivity quicksand of the hyperactive hive mind workflow, content to focus on tweaks meant to compensate for its worst excesses. It’s this mindset that leads to “solutions” like improving expectations around email response times or writing better subject lines. It leads us to embrace text autocomplete in Gmail, so we can write messages faster, or the search feature in Slack, so we can more quickly find what we’re looking for amid the scrum of back-and-forth chatter. These are the knowledge work equivalents of speeding up the craft method of car manufacturing by giving the workers faster shoes. It’s a small victory won in the wrong war.

“central challenge” of our times, writing: “It is on [knowledge work] productivity, above all, that the future prosperity—and indeed the future survival—of the developed economies will increasingly depend.”9

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.

In the knowledge sector, by contrast, the primary capital resources are the human brains you employ to add value to information—what I call attention capital.

As Devesh explained to me, his company’s efforts now revolve around Trello. If you’re assigned to a project, all of your work, including discussion, delegation, and relevant files, is coordinated on its corresponding board—not in email messages, not in Slack chats. When you decide to work on a project, you navigate to its board and work with the cards. As project steps are completed, cards can be moved from backlog to the active columns. As new ideas come up or clients send extra requests, they can be added to the research & notes column. When questions arise or work needs to be delegated, these notes are appended to the discussion on the back of the relevant card, where everyone involved in the project can see them. Before these changes, each employee’s workday was driven by their inbox. They would open it up when they started work in the morning, then answer messages until quitting time. In the new Trello-based workflow, each employee’s effort is now driven by project boards, which they rotate through during the day.

This new workflow encourages single-tasking. When one of Devesh’s employees decides to work on a given project, the only information or discussion they see on its board relates to the project. This allows them to remain focused on one thing until they’re ready to move on. When using a general-purpose inbox, by contrast, they were constantly switching back and forth between many different projects, sometimes even within the same message—a cognitive state that’s both unproductive and misery-inducing.

Another advantage of this workflow is that it clearly structures all the relevant information about a given project. When Devesh’s firm used to rely on the hyperactive hive mind, this information was spread out haphazardly in email messages buried in many different employees’ inboxes. To have it instead neatly arranged in named columns, with the relevant files and discussion attached to clearly marked cards, is a much more efficient way to keep track of this work and effectively plan what needs to be done next.

On the one hand, autonomy is unavoidable in knowledge work due to the complexity of these efforts. On the other hand, autonomy entrenches hive mind–style workflows.