More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cal Newport
Started reading
February 5, 2022
if you feel overwhelmed by tools like email or instant messenger, it’s because your personal habits are sloppy: you need to batch your inbox checks, and turn off your notifications, and write clearer subject lines! If inbox overload gets really bad, then maybe your organization as a whole needs to tweak their “norms” around issues like response time expectations. The underlying value of the constant electronic communication that defines modern work, however, is never questioned,
What if email didn’t save knowledge work but instead accidentally traded minor conveniences for a major drag on real productivity (not frantic busyness, but actual results), leading to slower economic growth over the past two decades?
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.
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.
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.
The hyperactive hive mind workflow has become ubiquitous in the knowledge sector.
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.
Rationally, you know that the six hundred unread messages in your inbox are not crucial, and you remind yourself that the senders of these messages have better things to do than wait expectantly, staring at their screens and cursing the latency of your response. But a deeper part of your brain, evolved to tend the careful dance of social dynamics that has allowed our species to thrive so spectacularly since the Paleolithic, remains concerned by what it perceives to be neglected social obligations.
The world without email referenced in the title of this book, therefore, is not a place in which protocols like SMTP and POP3 are banished. It is, however, a place where you spend most of your day actually working on hard things instead of talking about this work, or endlessly bouncing small tasks back and forth in messages.
The future of work is increasingly cognitive.
“I would work until one a.m. every night,” he said, “because that was the only time I felt free from distractions.”
“I’m frustrated that I receive so many updates … that have nothing to do with my position,” wrote a teacher named Jay. “People now confuse answering emails with real work,”
As Mark explained, she would enjoy long meals with her colleagues followed by long walks around the campus—they called these “rounds”—to digest their food and work through interesting thoughts. “It was beautiful,”
Arriving in an American academic job, Mark was immediately struck by how busy everyone seemed. “I had a very difficult time focusing,” she said. “I had all of these projects to work on.” The long lunches she enjoyed in Germany became a distant memory. “I barely had time to grab a sandwich or salad for lunch,” she said, “and when I returned, I could see my colleagues in their offices doing the same thing, eating in front of their computer screens.”
The result was a now famous paper—or infamous, depending on your perspective—presented at a 2004 computer-human interaction conference, with a provocative title that quotes a research subject’s description of her typical workday: “Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness.”
tracking software to monitor the habits of employees in a research division at a large corporation and found that they checked email, on average, over seventy-seven times per day.
Papers measuring the average number of email messages sent and received per day also show a trend toward increasing communication:
The primary purpose of RescueTime is to provide individual users with detailed feedback on their behavior so they can find ways to be more productive.
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 more than a third of people checking their inbox every three minutes or less.
For half the users studied, this longest uninterrupted interval was no more than forty minutes, 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.
One could argue, for example, that this ongoing communication is efficient because it eliminates the overhead required to schedule formal meetings, and it allows people to receive exactly the information they need, exactly when they need it.
We take for granted our ability to pay attention. As foundational results in neuroscience reveal, 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.
only humans can decide to focus on something not actually happening around them at the moment,
“Our brains do not parallel process information.”13 As a result, when you attempt to maintain multiple ongoing electronic conversations while also working on a primary task like writing a report or coding a computer program, your prefrontal cortex must continually jump back and forth between different goals, each requiring the amplification and suppression of different brain networks. Not surprisingly, this network switching is not an instantaneous process; it requires both time and cognitive resources. When you try to do it rapidly, things get messy.
One of the first papers documenting this phenomenon was published by Arthur Jersild in 1927. It introduced what became a basic experimental structure for investigating the costs of attention switching: give the subject two different tasks, measure how long it takes them to do each task in isolation, and then see how much they slow down when they have to alternate back and forth between the tasks.
network switching slows down the mind.
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,
The more the first task remained on the subject’s mind, the worse they did on the subsequent task.
“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.”
Why is it so hard to do our work? Because our brains were never designed to maintain parallel tracks of attention.
“Not everyone does deep work all the time.” The implication of this final quip is that there’s a small group of professions that specifically value uninterrupted hard thinking—writers, programmers, scientists—but for most positions, being in the thick of things is a major part of the job.
“Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.”17 In this piece, Graham notes that for a manager, meetings are a big part of what they do during the day, while for a maker, a single meeting can be “a disaster,” as it breaks up their ability to work continuously on a difficult problem.
The key point that jumps out as you read these notes is that even though Marshall managed more people, had a larger budget, and faced more complexity, more urgency, and higher stakes than just about any manager in the history of management, he rejected the attraction of an always-on, hyperactive hive mind approach to his work.
With “ruthless” efficiency, Marshall took advantage of President Franklin Roosevelt’s recently granted wartime powers to radically restructure the War Department.
Numerous agencies and commands were consolidated into three main divisions, each run by a general. Marshall reduced a bloated staff of over three hundred personnel, operations, and logistics officers down to only twelve.
[The reorganization] provided a smaller, more efficient staff and cut paperwork to a minimum. In addition, it set up clear lines of authority. Lastly, it freed Marshall from the details of training and supply. Marshall delegated responsibility to others while he freed himself to concentrate on the war’s strategy and major operations abroad.
“A man who worked himself to tatters on minor details had no ability to handle the more vital issues of war,” he once said.
The report also emphasizes the attention Marshall invested in “reflection” and big picture planning—trying to stay a step ahead of the complicated landscape of problems presented by global warfare.
Marshall was more effective at his job because of his ability to focus on important issues
“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.”
“Our research suggests the pitfalls of e-mail demands may have been underestimated—in addition to its impact on leaders’ own behavior, the reductions in effective leader behaviors likely trickle down to adversely affect unwitting followers.”
Ticketing systems have become big business because they’ve consistently been shown to reduce IT staffing costs, as focused technicians solve problems faster. They also increase satisfaction, as they provide structure and clarity to the process of resolving technical issues. 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.
When these advantages are made clear, it becomes harder to justify their loss simply for the added convenience of responsiveness.
Sean divided the day into a morning block and an afternoon block. At the beginning of each block, his team gathers in person, with the occasional remote worker joining using videoconferencing software, to discuss the upcoming block. “Each person covers three points: what they did yesterday, what they are doing today, and what issues they’re having or blocks they’re experiencing,” Sean told me. “It lasts fifteen minutes max.” Then everyone does something that has become exceedingly rare in our current age of connectivity: they simply work, for several hours in a row, with no inboxes to check or
...more
not only does it make us less productive; it also makes us miserable—a reality that has massive consequences for both individual well-being and organizational stability.
early 2017, a new French labor law went into effect that attempted to preserve a so-called “right to disconnect.” According to the law, French companies with fifty employees or more are required to negotiate specific policies about email after work hours, with the goal of significantly reducing the time workers spend in their inbox in the evening or over the weekend. Myriam El Khomri, the minister of labor, justified the new law in part as a necessary step to reduce burnout.
email is making us miserable.1
They recorded the subjects’ heart rate variability, a common technique for measuring mental stress. They also monitored the workers’ computer use, allowing them to correlate email checks with stress levels. What they found would not surprise the French: “The longer one spends on email in [a given] hour the higher is one’s stress for that hour.”
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).
when stressed, people answer emails faster, but not 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.
