A World Without Email: Find Focus and Transform the Way You Work Forever (from the NYT bestselling productivity expert)

by Cal Newport

We] suggest that organizations make a concerted effort to cut down on email traffic.”

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.

After Perlow introduced a technique called predictable time off (PTO), in which team members were provided set times each week when they could completely disconnect from email and the phone (with the full support of their colleagues), the consultants became markedly happier.

I suspect that people’s language would be much more neutral if we asked them about other workplace technologies, like, say, their word processor or the coffee maker. There’s something uniquely deranging about digital messaging.

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.

Their goal was to measure each individual’s “relational wealth,” a technical term for what we might call popularity within the tribe. To do so, they deployed an established technique called the honey stick gift game, in which participants are each given three honey sticks—a highly prized food—and asked to distribute them among other tribe members. By measuring how many honey sticks each participant ends up receiving, the researchers can approximate their relative standing in the tribe.

Many prior studies have documented what the researchers call “psychological and physiological reinforcement mechanisms encouraging the formation and maintenance of social relationships.”

being popular increased the chance your lineage survived.

Some circles, like busy transit hubs, emanate thick lines in all directions, while others are only sparsely connected; some collections of circles may have very few lines between them, while others are deeply interconnected.

The more robust15 their connection into the network, the higher their reproductive success.

popularity makes a difference in genetic fitness—more popular tribe members got more food and support, making them healthier and therefore more likely to have healthy children.

those who managed these direct interactions properly thrived, while those who didn’t strugg...

One-on-one conversations are crucial to the M...

if you neglect interactions with those around you, they’ll give their metaphorical honey sticks to someone else.

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

Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, 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 experie...

“These social adaptations are central to making us the most successful species on ...

Which brings us back to email. The flip side of a deep evolutionary obsession with one-on-one interaction, as with most hardwired drives, is a corresponding feeling of distress when it’s thwarted.

our instinct to connect is accompanied by an anxious unease when we neglect these interactions.

The problem, of course, is that deeply embedded human drives are not known for responding to rationality.

Similarly, 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.

The missed connections that necessarily accompany the hyperactive hive mind sound these same Paleolithic alarm bells—regardless of our best attempts to convince ourselves that this unanswered communication isn’t critical.

Flowing concurrently alongside the words being said was an unconscious social channel, made up of subtle physical cues in body language and voice tone that painted a richer picture of how decisions were being reached in that room. These “ancient primate signaling mechanisms” had been previously studied in apes, but Pentland’s sociometers were designed to prove that these mechanisms still play a major role in human collaboration.

information is processed largely unconsciously, often using lower-level circuits in our nervous system, which is why it evades our perceived experience. Its impact, however, shouldn’t be underestimated. “These social signals are not just a back channel or complement to our conscious language,” Pentland writes. “They form a separate communication network that powerfully influences our behavior.”

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.

provides a fast and accurate snapshot of power dynamics in a given room.

activity, which describes a person’s physical movements during a conversation.

provide a surprisingly accurate reading of the true intentions of an individual in the interaction.

Their decisions were significantly different from those reached by the group that heard the pitches in person. “The executives [in the group setting] thought they were evaluating the plans based on rational measures,” Pentland explains, “[but] another part of their brain was registering other crucial information, such as: How much does this person believe in this idea? How confident are they when speaking? How determined are they to make it work?”

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,” ...

we often overestimate our correspondents’ ability to understand our messages.

The richer the sender’s subjective experience of what she’s trying to communicate, the bigger the gap grows between her understanding and that of her correspondent—evidence that egocentrism is at the core of the measured overconfidence.

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.”

“Typically, things get into trouble when too much has been done by email,” Victor tells Turkle. He keeps having to convince his team that when problems arise with a client, they need to talk to them in person. “This is not something they would come to themselves,” he explains. “I’m usually facing someone who wants to send twenty-nine emails to fix a problem.” His solution is simpler: “Go talk to them.”

his 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.

they selected thirteen employees at a large scientific research firm and had them stop using email for five workdays.

The small amount of extra difficulty required to walk a few steps and poke his head through the door was enough to prevent the boss from handing off extra work to the scientist.

This vignette of the frustrated scientist and his distracting boss underscores an important cost of email that we often miss. 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.

In the modern world, knowledge workers now feel under siege by obligations.

In their original 2004 study on attention fragmentation, Victor M. González and Gloria Mark partitioned the efforts of the employees they observed into distinct working spheres, each representing a different project or objective. 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.

The large number of different spheres these subjects tackled in a given day, combined with the reality that each sphere demands the accomplishment of many smaller tasks and presumably dozens of emails, provides a harried portrayal of modern knowledge work. “At night, I often wake in a panic about all the things I need to do or didn’t get done,”

“I worry that I’ll face my death and realize that my life got lost in this frantic flotsam of daily stuff.”38

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, as happens when a microphone gets too close to a speaker and the self-amplification recursively explodes into a deafening screech.

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 stress and anxiety that we can diminish if we’re willing to step away from the frenetic back-and-forth that defines the hyperactive hive mind workflow.

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. When we isolate these sources of unease, they no longer seem unavoidable; rather, they are unfortunate and largely unexpected clashes between the specific ways we work and the natural operation of our brains. The solution is not to shrug our shoulders, but instead to pursue the obvious fix: replace the hyperactive hive mind with alternative workflows that still get things done, but sidestep the worst of these misery-inducing side effects.

What the rise of the large office really needed—a productivity silver bullet of sorts—was some way to combine the speed of synchronous communication with the low overhead of asynchronous communication.

“A cornerstone of our business is the quicker you get information, the quicker you can use it,” Simpson says. “E-mail has already given us an edge.”