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

by Cal Newport

Don’t require the people you work with to learn about your new systems or change the way they interact with you. Instead, when possible, deploy a seamless interface.

My general rule is that when I move a card to a new column, I send an email update to the person who brought me that issue.

The key property of this system is that the professors and graduate students in my department know nothing about it.

At first encounter, my advice for applying the attention capital principle to groups seems at odds with my advice for applying the principle to individuals. The former emphasizes the need for clear communication about the workflows replacing the hyperactive hive mind, while the latter suggests you keep these changes largely private. A closer look, however, reveals that both approaches are based on the same principle: people don’t like changes they can’t control.

it became common for workers from other parts of the factory to show up at the brass department and wait around most of the day, bothering employees they knew, until they got the part they needed.

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.”

To implement this more structured workflow, Runnells had to spend more money. There used to be seven administrative staff to help organize the efforts of the 350 brass workers. Now there were forty-seven. “Here is a vast increase in overhead,” the article admits.

“But does it pay?” it asks. “It certainly has done so.” The new process dropped the production cost of each train car by $100, which not only covered the expense of the extra overhead but turned a “substantial profit.”

When the workflow was restructured to largely eliminate this double duty, the same workers could produce much more finished brass in the same amount of time. “The old lack of method never is and never will be conducive to a betterment of standards,” the article concludes. “But systemization promptly showed a surprising rise in quality; workmen concentrated and the product showed the result.”

efficiency extends beyond the actions involved in physically manufacturing something. Equally important is how you coordinate this work.

To be more concrete, we’ll use the term production process to talk about this combination of the actual manufacturing work with all the information and decisions that organize this work.

Optimize processes, he urged, not people.

The core claim of this chapter is that production process thinking applies equally well to knowledge work as it does to industrial manufacturing. Just because you produce things with your brain instead of your hands doesn’t change the fundamental reality that these efforts must still be coordinated.

In knowledge work, any type of valuable result that you or your organization regularly produces can be understood as the output of a production process.

The problem, of course, is that few knowledge workers are used to thinking this way: they focus on people, not processes.

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.

It 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.

originally detailed in Leviathan, that without the constraints of the state, human life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” 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. If you’re brash and disagreeable, or are a favorite of the boss, you can, like the strongest lion in the pride, avoid work you don’t like by staring down those who try to pass it off to you, ignoring their messages, or claiming overload. On the other hand, if you’re more reasonable and agreeable, you’ll end up overloaded with more work than makes sense for one person to handle. These setups are both demoralizing and a staggeringly inefficient deployment of attention capital. But without a countervailing force, these hierarchies are often unavoidable.

if there’s no structure surrounding how hard efforts are coordinated, we default to our instinct to not expend any more energy than is necessary.

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.

we must abandon our Rousseauian optimism that knowledge workers left to a state of nature will thrive. To get the most out of our attention capital, we need processes, and this is true for both organizations and individual knowledge workers.

let knowledge workers spend more of their time actually working instead of talking about their work

Johnson had his team methodically break down their work into processes that could be clearly stated and (appropriately enough) optimized to maximize the time spent doing useful work and minimize the time spent moving back and forth between work and inboxes.

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.

Johnson’s editor doesn’t interact directly with Johnson, but instead monitors the spreadsheet.

When the crew arrives, there’s no ambiguity about what they’ll be filming: all lessons currently in the “ready for filming” status.

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.

and when they’re done working, they’re done working—there’s nothing to check, nothing urgent requiring a reply.

the manager in question has a schedule that begins every day with three hours of uninterrupted deep work before he receives “even a single input.” This is time set aside for the manager to think intensely about his projects—making informed decisions on how to go forward, where to focus next, what to improve, and what to ignore.

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. Finally, these cards can be moved around and arranged into different columns, where each column is labeled to represent a different category of task or status.

these virtual cards arranged on virtual boards are the hub around which work on projects unfolds.

After checking in on these projects in Flow, the manager typically has one-on-one FaceTime meetings with the various team members he supervises. These conversations are used to discuss new initiatives or resolve issues with ongoing tasks. Most projects also have a regular meeting scheduled each week to help synchronize everyone’s efforts and efficiently solve group issues.

Like all Optimize employees, his day ends between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. Johnson is insistent on enforcing a “digital sunset” for his company: he wants his employees to end their workday at a reasonable hour to spend time with family and recharge. Because there are no email inboxes to check, our manager, as with all Optimize employees, will actually be free from work until the next morning.

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 emails from customers.

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. Because the company is virtual, he explained, it’s important to have some outlet for social interaction. Their other use for Slack is to schedule the meetings in which most actual work interaction occurs.

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). One of the key uses of this morning block is to think about processes and how to improve them.

At each phase, it’s clear what work needs to be accomplished, where the relevant files can be found, who is supposed to accomplish the work, and what happens once they’re done.

These examples of 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.

Also notice that these properties are unlikely to lead to stifling bureaucracy, as the processes they produce are optimized to reduce the overhead—in terms of both context shifts and time—surrounding the actual act of producing valuable things.

When a project makes it to the work column, the group of employees assigned to the project will create their own board dedicated to the tasks required to accomplish the project.

these smaller boards are typically implemented in software.

This is the third time we’ve encountered a similar pattern: information about knowledge work arranged into columns of cards on a board.

The source of this approach to organizing work can be found in the software development community, which over the past couple of decades has increasingly embraced so-called agile methodologies for producing software. The basic ideas behind agile were first summarized in a 2001 manifesto penned by a group of seventeen programmers and project managers. The manifesto opens optimistically: “We are uncovering better ways of developing software.” It then lays out twelve principles, each explained in plain language. “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software,” reads one principle. “Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential,” reads another.

The agile mindset argues that software development should be broken down into smaller chunks that can be released into the wild as quickly as possible. As users provide feedback, the information can be quickly integrated into future updates—creating a fluid feedback cycle that evolves useful software instead of trying to build it perfectly all at once before releasing.

Agile by itself is not an organizational system; it instead defines a general approach that is realized by multiple different specific systems. Two of the more popular systems at the moment are Scrum and Kanban,

Generally speaking, Scrum breaks work down into sprints, where a team dedicates itself completely to delivering a particular update before moving on to the next. Kanban, by contrast, emphasizes a more continuous flow of tasks through a fixed set of phases, with a general goal of minimizing the current works in progress at any one phase, preventing bottlenecks.

A key idea driving agile project management is that humans are naturally pretty good at planning. You don’t need complicated project management strategies to figure out what to work on next; it’s usually sufficient to just have a group of informed engineers get together and discuss what makes sense. The key caveat in this belief, however, is that we’re able to effectively apply our planning instinct only if we have a good grasp of all the relevant information—what tasks are already being worked on, what needs to be done, where there are bottlenecks, and so on. Cards stacked on boards turn out to be an amazingly effective method for quickly communicating this information.