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Acharya’s reaction was not surprising. A widely accepted premise of modern knowledge work is that email saved us:
The underlying value of the constant electronic communication that defines modern work, however, is never questioned,
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.
it has recently advanced into a much more serious problem, reaching a saturation point for many in which their actual productive output gets squeezed into the early morning, or evenings and weekends, while their workdays devolve into Sisyphean battles against their inboxes—a uniquely misery-inducing approach to getting things done.
As I’ll show, driven by the ideas of the immensely influential business thinker Peter Drucker, we tend to think of knowledge workers as autonomous black boxes—ignoring the details of how they get their work done and focusing instead on providing them with clear objectives and motivational leadership. This is a mistake.
But I firmly believe that any individual or organization who starts to think critically about the hyperactive hive mind workflow, then systematically replaces elements of it with processes that are more compatible with the realities of the human brain, will generate a substantial competitive 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
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Knowledge work does not yet have its Henry Ford, but workflow innovations with impact on the same scale as the assembly line are inevitable.
communicate, but with the hyperactive hive mind–style workflows they enable. One thread of these responses concerned the sheer volume of communication generated by this workflow. “Every day it’s a barrage of emails regarding scheduling, deadlines, and they’re not used very effectively,” wrote a lawyer named Art. George, also a lawyer, described his inbox as containing “an avalanche of messages” in which important things get lost. Another thread focused on the inefficiency of stretching out conversations into endless back-and-forth messaging.
One such signal delivered through this unconscious network is called, aptly enough, influence. It describes the degree to which one person can cause another to match their speaking pattern. This information, which is processed in our brain through subcortical structures centered on the tectum, provides a fast and accurate snapshot of power dynamics in a given room. Another such signal is activity, which describes a person’s physical movements during a conversation. Shifting in your seat, leaning forward, demonstrative gesticulating—these behaviors, which are mediated largely through the
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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.
Getting-things-done rookies are often shocked by the length of their task lists. As Allen recalls, in his consulting work, he soon found he needed two full uninterrupted days to help executives go through and clarify everything they were supposed to be doing. The process of simply listing tasks for which they were responsible often took “six hours or more.”35 Gone are the days of the “productive” executive consulting his Day-Timer, then carefully listing out the six things he hoped to accomplish. In the modern world, knowledge workers now feel under siege by obligations.
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. When we made communication free, we accidentally triggered a massive increase in our relative workloads. There’s nothing fundamental about these newly increased workloads; they’re instead an unintended side effect—a source of
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paper notes with runners. He insisted his new colleagues adopt email. We also learn that at Disney, Jeffrey Katzenberg set up a private email network connecting twenty high-level executives. “We had to love e-mail because Jeffrey loves it,” explains the vice president of feature publicity at Disney, before helpfully clarifying: “You communicate by computer instead of by phone.”
The article also notes that at this point, most motion picture studios still depended on a primitive communication device called the Amtel, a combination of screen and keyboard that was used to send short text messages. (A common use of the Amtel in Hollywood was to allow assistants to inform executives, without interrupting their closed-door meetings, about who was holding on various phone lines.)
The footnote implied that the force that drove Charles Martel to develop feudalism was the arrival in western Europe of a basic technology: the horse stirrup. In his now classic 1962 book that fills out this hypothesis, Medieval Technology and Social Change, White meticulously draws from both archaeology and linguistics to show that the introduction of the stirrup does indeed explain well Martel’s sudden shift toward mounted troops.14
In a medieval version of the nuclear arms race that would follow more than a millennium later, Charles Martel realized that the advantage provided by the stirrup was so “immense” that he had to do whatever it took to get it before his enemies did—even if that meant upending centuries of tradition and creating a brand-new form of government. In Lynn White Jr.’s study of the stirrup we find a classic example of a technology introduced for a simple reason (to make riding horses easier) leading to vast and complicated consequences never imagined by its inventors (the rise of medieval feudalism).
In Lynn White Jr.’s study of the stirrup we find a classic example of a technology introduced for a simple reason (to make riding horses easier) leading to vast and complicated consequences never imagined by its inventors (the rise of medieval feudalism).
What’s striking about these technical results on asynchrony versus synchrony is how much they diverge from the conclusions of the business thinkers tackling these same issues in the workplace. As we’ve learned, managers in office settings fixated on eliminating the overhead of synchronous communication—the annoyance of phone tag or taking the elevator to a different floor to chat with someone in person. They believed that eliminating this overhead using tools like email would make collaboration more efficient. Computer scientists, meanwhile, came to the opposite conclusion. Investigating
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Investigating asynchronous communication from the perspective of algorithm theory, they discovered that spreading out communication with unpredictable delays introduced tricky new complexities. 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.
Synchrony might be expensive to arrange—both in the office setting and in computer systems—but trying to coordinate in its absence is also expensive. This reality summarizes well what many experienced as office communication shifted to email: they traded the pain of phone tag, scribbled notes, and endless meetings for the pain of a surprisingly large volume of ambiguous electronic messages passed back and forth throughout the day.
What she uncovered was a social feedback loop gone awry—a process she named the 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.
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.
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 workflows that surround these efforts. A manager can’t tell a copywriter how to come up with a brilliant ad, but she can have something to say about how these commissions are assigned, or about what other obligations are allowed onto the copywriter’s plate, or about how client requests are handled.
This goal of putting into place smarter workflows that sidestep the worst impacts of the hyperactive hive mind is of course a substantial endeavor—one that will require trial and error and many annoyances.
Rheingans’s bet was that once you eliminated both distractions and endless conversations about work, five hours per day would be sufficient for people to get done the main things that mattered for the company.
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.
When I saw Devesh’s Trello boards, my reaction was likely similar to that of rival automakers who first encountered a fully functioning assembly line at Henry Ford’s Highland Park factory: a gut realization that this was simply a better way to organize work. Devesh agrees.
the hyperactive hive mind workflow. In these previous chapters, I argued that there’s a large cognitive cost to switching your attention from one target to another.
Drawing on these observations, I suggest the following design principle for developing approaches to work that provide better returns from your personal or organizational attention capital: 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.
communicate about a project; you don’t let the project decide for you. Devesh’s new workflow also minimizes communication overload. 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,
This objection is important because it’s relevant to most attempts to apply the attention capital principle. As argued, one of the key explanations for the hyperactive hive mind’s persistence in the knowledge sector is that it’s really convenient in the moment for the individuals who use it. There are no systems to learn or rules to remember; you simply grab people electronically as you need them.
This reality helps explain why so many work reform movements, born out of inbox exhaustion, end up reduced down to only small tweaks—like promoting better “etiquette” surrounding messaging—as these toothless suggestions
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.
This is what happened, for example, when Devesh moved his marketing company’s workflow away from email and toward project boards. His employees needed to now log in to Trello and click on the cards to communicate about a given project instead of simply sending emails.
implemented. The third step is to further follow Carpenter’s lead by putting in place easy methods for improving the new workflow processes when issues arise.
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. If a request comes your way, be it in an email or hallway chat, make sure it’s handled. Don’t let things fall through the cracks, and if you commit to doing something by a certain time, hit the deadline, or explain why you need to shift it. If people trust you to handle the work they send your way, then they’re generally
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Don’t require the people you work with to learn about your new systems or change the way they interact with you.
When someone sends me an email or stops by my office with an issue concerning the graduate program, I immediately transform it into a card and place it in the applicable column on the Trello board.
engineering. I came across a collection of articles from a now defunct, early twentieth-century business magazine called System, a publication dedicated to case studies about the then new “scientific” approach to management. These articles were almost universally breathless with excitement about how much more money could be made by industrial organizations once they began to think more systematically about how their work was actually conducted.
To make the brass department more efficient, Pullman’s executive team did something counterintuitive: they made its operation more complicated. If you needed some brass work done, you now had to submit an official form that contained all the relevant information. To prevent employees from circumventing this process and reverting to the more convenient status quo of informally bothering workers, they literally locked the door and screened the windows. You now had no choice but to use the newly enforced “regular channel.” Once a request was submitted through a slot dedicated to this purpose, it
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To move past the shortcomings of the hyperactive hive mind workflow, we must abandon our Rousseauian optimism that knowledge workers left to a state of nature will thrive.
over the years, they’ve built a production process for these efforts that eliminates almost all informal interaction, allowing those involved to focus nearly 100 percent of their energy on actually performing the skilled work needed to keep the pipeline of high-quality content filled and flowing. The process starts with a shared spreadsheet. When Johnson comes up with an idea for a lesson, he adds a title and subtitle to the spreadsheet. Each row has a status column, which Johnson sets to “idea,” marking the lesson as still in the earliest stages of development.
add a link to this draft to the spreadsheet row for the lesson. At this point, he’ll change its status to “ready for editing.” Johnson’s editor doesn’t interact directly with Johnson, but instead monitors the spreadsheet. When he sees a lesson is ready to be edited, he downloads it, puts it into the right format, edits it, and then moves it into a postproduction Dropbox folder that holds text that’s ready to go live.
Here’s what amazed me about this production process: it coordinates a fair-sized group of specialists, spread out around the world, to accomplish the complicated feat of releasing highly produced multimedia content on a demanding daily schedule—all without requiring even a single unscheduled email or instant message.
Only after this morning block ends does the manager turn his attention to actively managing the projects he runs. To make this project management more systematic, Optimize deploys an online collaboration tool called Flow. In its simplest form, Flow allows you to track tasks associated with projects. Each task is represented as a card that can be assigned to particular people and given a deadline. Files and information related to the task can be attached to the card, and discussion tools allow those working on the task to hold conversations directly on the virtual card in a forum-style format.
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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
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.
One of the key uses of this morning block is to think about processes and how to improve them. 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.
structured. Information about who is working on what, as well as how it’s going, is captured using the Flow project management tool.
