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

by Cal Newport

“People now confuse answering emails with real work,” wrote an editor named Stephanie. “There is a performative dimension to writing emails and cc’ing everybody, like ‘Look at all the work I’m doing.’ It’s annoying.”

Something like the workload equivalent of the microphone screech is happening in modern knowledge work. When the friction involved in asking someone to do something was removed, the number of these requests spiraled out of control.

We chose to use email because it was a rational solution to the need for practical asynchronous communication in large offices. The hyperactive hive mind, in some sense, subsequently chose us once this tool had spread, at which point we seemed to have all looked up from our newly empowered inboxes, shrugged, and quipped: “I guess this is how we work now.”

By moving project management to Trello boards, Devesh didn’t constrain how his team actually executed the core activities of designing and deploying marketing campaigns. What he did change, however, was the workflows that supported these activities—including how information about these projects was tracked, and how relevant information and questions were communicated. He innovated workflows but left the details of work execution up to his skilled employees.

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.

The professor and business writer 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.

An email arrives that informally represents a new responsibility for you to manage; because there’s no formal process in place to assign the work or track its progress, you seek instead the easiest way to get the responsibility off your plate—even if just temporarily—so you send a quick reply asking for an ambiguous clarification. Thus unfolds a game of obligation hot potato, as messages bounce around, each temporarily shifting responsibility from one inbox to another, until a deadline or irate boss finally stops the music, leading to a last-minute scramble to churn out a barely acceptable result.

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.

“Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential,”

A standard format for these meetings is to have each person briefly summarize what they’re working on, what they need from other people to make progress for the rest of the day, and what happened with the tasks they had committed to working on the day before. It’s during these review meetings that new tasks can be identified and new people assigned to them.

Once you’ve identified a process that does seem like a good candidate for automation, the following guidelines will help you succeed with the transformation: Partitioning: Split the process into a series of well-defined phases that follow one after the other. For each phase, clearly specify what work must be accomplished and who is responsible. Signaling: Put in place a signaling or notification system that tracks the current phase of each output being generated by the process, allowing those involved to know when it’s their turn to take over the work. Channeling: Institute clear channels for delivering the relevant resources and information from one phase to the next (such as files in shared directories).

Our instinct in the knowledge work setting is to obsess about factors like worst-case scenarios—how can we prevent bad things from ever happening?!—or to prefer the convenience of simple (but costly) protocols to more finicky (but optimized) alternatives. The information theory revolution tells us that these instincts shouldn’t be trusted. Take the time to build the protocol that has the best average cost, even if it’s not the most natural option in the moment, as the long-term performance gains can be substantial.

But it’s hard to avoid the underlying economics: to gain something valuable like autonomy means you have to offer something unambiguously valuable in return. You must, in other words, become accountable for what you produce if you want the freedom to improve how you do so.