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

by Cal Newport

To do so, we’ll have to pick up where Drucker left off and clarify exactly where autonomy really matters.

Knowledge work is better understood as the combination of two components: work execution and workflow.

The second component, workflow, is one we defined in the introduction of this book. It describes how these fundamental activities are identified, assigned, coordinated, and reviewed.

When Drucker emphasized autonomy, he was thinking about work execution, as these activities are often too complicated to be decomposed into rote procedures. Workflows, on the other hand, should not be left to individuals to figure out on their own, as the most effective systems are unlikely to arise naturally. They need instead to be explicitly identified as part of an organization’s operating procedures.

To get the full value of attention capital, we must start taking seriously the way we structure work.

Any workflow that requires you to constantly tend conversations unfolding in an inbox or chat channel is going to diminish the quality of your brain’s output. I also argued that communication overload—the feeling that you can never keep up with all the different incoming requests for your time and attention—conflicts with our ancient social wiring, leading to unhappiness in the short term and burnout in the long term.

seek workflows that (1) minimize mid-task context switches and (2) minimize the sense of communication overload.

A mid-task context switch is when you have to stop an otherwise self-contained task and switch your attention to something unrelated before returning to the original object of your attention.

Such switches, however, can also be analog. In open office settings, for example, you might be frequently interrupted by people stopping by your seat with questions, and if your workflow demands constant meetings, then this, too, will fracture your schedule into slivers too small to support start-to-finish work on tasks.

the more you’re able to complete one thing at a time, sticking with a task until done before moving on to the next, the more efficiently and effectively you’ll work.

The optimal way to deploy our human brains is sequentially.

All things being equal, workflows that minimize this never-ending stream of urgent communication are superior to those that instead amplify it. When you’re at home at night, or relaxing over the weekend, or on vacation, you shouldn’t feel like each moment away from work is a moment in which you’re accumulating deeper communication debt. In the age of the hyperactive hive mind, we’ve become used to this despondent state as a necessary consequence of our high-tech world, but this is nonsense. Better workflows can tame this sense of overload and, by doing so, make you not only happier but also more effective and less likely to burn out over time.

Devesh called this “flipping the script”: you decide when to communicate about a project; you don’t let the project decide for you.

When interactions are moved onto task-specific cards associated with a project, the sense of requests piling up is diminished. When you decide to visit a particular project board, you contribute to the conversation. When you’re not there, there’s no inbox specific to you that’s growing with impatient requests and notices.

When I told Devesh’s story to other knowledge workers, they predictably raised concerns. When they imagined shifting their own organizations away from the hyperactive hive mind and toward something more structured, like Devesh’s project board–based workflow, they easily conjured potential issues. Losing the ability to grab people’s attention for anything at any time might lead to deadlines getting missed, or urgent tasks not getting completed, or long delays before you get the answers you need to make progress on key project steps. Leaving behind the simplicity of the hyperactive hive mind, in other words, might create a steady stream of inconveniences for everyone involved.

How can you avoid the inconveniences associated with this experimentation? You can’t. You must instead adjust your mindset so that you no longer fear these annoyances.

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.

In business, good is not the same as easy, and fulfilling is not the same as convenient.

This general understanding that assembly line work is dehumanizing was what prompted my relative’s negative reaction. He was imagining a future of knowledge work in which we end up in a digital-era reboot of Modern Times, with the frantic wrenching now replaced with frantic typing, and the sequence still ending with us mashed by the proverbial machinery of productivity. This is a natural concern to raise about the attention capital principle, but when we consider specific case studies of this principle in action, the feared drudgery doesn’t materialize.

the hyperactive hive mind already has us trapped in a digital Modern Times, futilely trying to keep up with email messages that arrive faster and faster.

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.

Locus of control theory therefore unavoidably applies: it simply won’t work to radically change workflows without the input of those who must use them.

The first is education. It’s important that your team understand the difference between workflows and work execution, and why the hyperactive hive mind is just one workflow among many—and probably not a very good one.

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.

A common method for handling these personal workflow overhauls is to clearly explain the structure of your new approach to your colleagues, perhaps accompanied by an unassailably logical explanation for why you’re making these changes.

The lesson lurking in this case study is that care must be taken in how you publicize changes to your personal work habits.

I’ve come to believe that these experiments are best executed quietly. Don’t share the details of your new approach to work, unless someone specifically asks you out of genuine interest.

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.

If people trust you to handle the work they send your way, then they’re generally fine with not hearing back from you right away.

Adam Grant uses the phrase “idiosyncrasy credits” to describe this reality.25 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.

people don’t like changes they can’t control.

Work is not just about getting things done; it’s a collection of messy human personalities trying to figure out how to successfully collaborate.

production process to talk about this combination of the actual manufacturing work with all the information and decisions that organize this work.

knowledge work. In this sector, we stubbornly reject this insight from industrial management. We largely ignore processes, investing our energy instead in figuring out how to make people faster. We obsess over hiring and promoting stars. We seek leadership consultants to help us motivate people to work longer and harder. We embrace innovations like the smartphone that allow more hours of the day to be punctuated with work. We put dry cleaners on our corporate campuses and wi-fi on our corporate buses, all in the service of finding faster ways to shovel more proverbial slag. Not surprisingly, this hasn’t worked out well at all.

The importance of organizing decisions about who is working on what, and finding systematic ways to check in on this work as it evolves, applies as much to generating computer code or client proposals as it does to casting brass.

In the pages ahead, I’ll argue that if knowledge workers admit that these processes exist, and then clarify and optimize their operation, then they’ll discover the same result as the Pullman brass works: the expense of the extra overhead will be far outweighed by the boosts in productivity.

knowledge workers are used to thinking this way: they focus on people, not processes. As a result, the knowledge sector prefers to leave these processes unspecified, relying instead on the hyperactive hive mind workflow to informally organize their work.

There’s a belief, implicitly held by many knowledge workers, that the lack of processes in this sector is not just an unavoidable side effect of self-management, but actually a smart way to work. A lack of processes, it’s commonly understood, represents nimbleness and flexibility—a foundation for the type of outside-the-box thinking we’re constantly told is critical.

claims that when left alone to work in whatever way seems natural, knowledge workers will adapt seamlessly to the complex conditions they confront, producing original solutions and game-changing innovations. In this worldview, codified work processes are artificial: they corrupt the Edenic creative, leading to bureaucracy and stagnation—a Dilbert comic brought to life.

When you reduce work to a state of nature by allowing processes to unfold informally, the resulting behavior is anything but utopian. Much as is observed in actual natural settings, in the informal process workplace, dominance hierarchies emerge.

A well-designed production process, in other words, isn’t an obstacle to efficient knowledge work, but is instead often a precondition.

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

Every employee of Optimize is expected to spend at least the first ninety minutes of every day in a deep work block, free from inputs (some people, like the manager profiled above, spend much more).

What makes a process effective in this context?

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.

The general idea of posting tasks on boards to organize work is not new. Hospital ERs, for example, have long relied on tracking boards: whiteboards, divided into a grid, that list every patient being treated, including their room, the doctor or nurse assigned, and their triage level.

In this approach, boards are divided into named columns, and work tasks are arranged as vertical stacks of cards under the column that best describes their status. Sometimes, as with the plan column on Alex’s big board, the vertical ordering of cards indicates priority. This is the general setup deployed by Alex, Devesh, and Brian Johnson.