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

by Cal Newport

The lack of an inbox to check between these meetings opened up cognitive downtime—what Acharya took to calling “whitespace”—to dive more deeply into the research literature and legislation relevant to the topics handled by his office.

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!

in 2016, when I published a book titled Deep Work,

email-free Fridays.

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.

The core product of RescueTime is its eponymous time-tracking tool, which runs in the background on your devices and records how much time you spend using various applications and websites.

once you know what pain you’re trying to avoid and what benefits you’re trying to amplify, other approaches emerge.

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.

“At night, I often wake in a panic about all the things I need to do or didn’t get done,” writes journalist Brigid Schulte in Overwhelmed, her 2014 book on this busyness epidemic.

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

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. I frantically try to grab other people’s time and attention to make up for the time and attention they’ve already grabbed from me. Soon everyone is like Brigid Schulte, up late at night, drowning in the “frantic flotsam of daily stuff.”

My guess is that a lot of these urgent tasks would simply disappear: the vital question I dashed off in a quick Slack message suddenly becomes less vital when asking it requires me to go interrupt what you’re doing and confront that look of annoyance on your face. I might drop it or just handle it myself. Many other tasks would probably get consolidated into more reasonable chunks. What used to unfold over a few dozen ad hoc messages might become a larger discussion at a regular status meeting.

This is slightly more annoying in the moment, as you now have to keep track of things you need help with until the next meeting, but everyone ends up much less distracted.

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).

A more modern example of technological determinism is the introduction of the Like button to Facebook. As revealed by contemporaneous blog posts written by the design team, the original purpose of this feature was to clean up the comments below users’ posts. Facebook engineers noticed that many such comments were simple positive exclamations, like “cool” or “nice.” They figured that if those could instead be captured by clicking Like, the comments that remained would be more substantive. The goal of this tweak, in other words, was a modest improvement, but they soon noticed an unexpected side effect: users began spending more time on the service. As became clear in retrospect, incoming Likes provide users with an uneven stream of social approval indicators—bits of evidence that other people are thinking about you. The idea that every tap of the Facebook app might give you new information about these indicators hijacked ancient social drives in the human brain and made the platform suddenly significantly more appealing. Whereas people used to log on to Facebook occasionally to see what their friends were up to, they were now more likely to check in constantly throughout the day to see how much approval their latest posts had generated. Soon every other major platform introduced similar approval indicator streams—favorites, retweets, auto-tagging photos, streaks—as part of a technological contest played out on the field of what became known as attention engineering, a battle...

the average knowledge worker sends and receives 126 emails per day.19

asynchronous communication complicates attempts to coordinate, and therefore, it’s almost always worth the extra cost required to introduce more synchrony.

People are different from computers, but many of the forces that complicate the design of asynchronous distributed systems loosely apply to humans attempting to collaborate in the office. 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.

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.24 This is a nice example of technological determinism at work. None of these teammates, superiors, and subordinates like the culture of constant connection that this cycle produces. None of them ever suggested it, or made a conscious decision to adopt it.

Indeed, when Perlow later persuaded teams at Boston Consulting Group to schedule protected time away from communication devices, the team members described their efficiency and effectiveness as increasing.

[Knowledge work] demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.35

Want to know how to get things done? Buy a book on how to better organize your tasks (Drucker himself wrote one of the first such books, The Effective Executive), or use a new planner, or, as is more commonly suggested in our culture of “crushing it,” simply work harder.

This type of radical workflow makeover is easy to describe but often tricky to successfully implement. There are many obstacles, from figuring out where to focus your experimental energies, to shifting how you think about issues like inconvenience or extra overhead, to getting everyone on your team on the same page.

If work execution is what generates value, then workflows are what structure these efforts. Once we understand that these components describe two different things, we find a way to escape the autonomy trap. When Drucker emphasized autonomy, he was thinking about work execution, as these activities are often too complicated to be decomposed into rote procedures. Workflows, on the other hand, should not be left to individuals to figure out on their own, as the most effective systems are unlikely to arise naturally. They need instead to be explicitly identified as part of an organization’s operating procedures. If I manage a development team, I shouldn’t tell my computer programmers how to write specific routines. I should, however, think a lot about how many routines they’re asked to write, how these tasks are tracked, how we manage the code base, and even who else in the organization is allowed to bother them, and so on.

Any workflow that requires you to constantly tend conversations unfolding in an inbox or chat channel is going to diminish the quality of your brain’s output. I also argued that communication overload—the feeling that you can never keep up with all the different incoming requests for your time and attention—conflicts with our ancient social wiring, leading to unhappiness in the short term and burnout in the long term.

Regardless of the source of these interruptions, when it comes to producing value with your brain, the more you’re able to complete one thing at a time, sticking with a task until done before moving on to the next, the more efficiently and effectively you’ll work.

The optimal way to deploy our human brains is sequentially.

The second property cited above attempts to reduce the cognitive toll of feeling like everyone needs you at all times. All things being equal, workflows that minimize this never-ending stream of urgent communication are superior to those that instead amplify it. When you’re at home at night, or relaxing over the weekend, or on vacation, you shouldn’t feel like each moment away from work is a moment in which you’re accumulating deeper communication debt. In the age of the hyperactive hive mind, we’ve become used to this despondent state as a necessary consequence of our high-tech world, but this is nonsense. Better workflows can tame this sense of overload and, by doing so, make you not only happier but also more effective and less likely to burn out over time.

Minimizing context switches and overload is not the whole story when it comes to engineering better workflows. This should guide your experiments in the short term, but in the long term, you must still monitor the key bottom line metric: the quantity and quality of valuable output you’re producing.

We still talk about “innovation,” but this term now applies almost exclusively to the products and services we offer, not the means by which we produce them.

When it comes to the latter topic, business thinkers tend to focus on secondary factors, like better leadership or clearer objectives to help stimulate productivity. Little attention is dedicated to the actual mechanics of how work is assigned, executed, and reviewed. This focus on secondary factors is not due to timidity on the part of knowledge work leaders. It’s instead largely a result of the autonomy trap discussed earlier.

In business, good is not the same as easy, and fulfilling is not the same as convenient. Deep down, knowledge workers want to feel as if they’re producing important output that takes full advantage of their hard-won skills, even if this means they can’t always get a quick response to their messages.

In 1936, Charlie Chaplin satirized this grim reality with his landmark film Modern Times, which features his Little Tramp character trying to keep up with an assembly line that runs faster and faster. Wielding two large wrenches, Chaplin turns bolts on each item that passes. As the foreman increases the line’s speed, Chaplin’s actions become more frantic, leading him to eventually leap onto the conveyor belt in a vain last attempt to keep up with the items whizzing past. He’s whisked away through a chute and ends up ground among the plant’s oversized gears. Chaplin made the film soon after visiting one of Henry Ford’s factories.17 This general understanding that assembly line work is dehumanizing was what prompted my relative’s negative reaction. He was imagining a future of knowledge work in which we end up in a digital-era reboot of Modern Times, with the frantic wrenching now replaced with frantic typing, and the sequence still ending with us mashed by the proverbial machinery of productivity.

locus of control theory, a subfield of personality psychology that argues that motivation is closely connected to whether people feel like they have control over their ultimate success in an endeavor. When you have a say in what you’re doing (placing the locus of control toward the internal end of the spectrum), you’re much more motivated than when you feel like your actions are largely controlled by outside forces (placing the locus of control toward the external end).

Locus of control theory therefore unavoidably applies: it simply won’t work to radically change workflows without the input of those who must use them.

There are three steps necessary to keep these experiments collaborative. The first is education. It’s important that your team understand the difference between workflows and work execution, and why the hyperactive hive mind is just one workflow among many—and probably not a very good one. For many knowledge workers, email is synonymous with work, so it’s crucial to break up this misunderstanding before you discuss breaking up their comfortable reliance on the hive mind for getting things done. The second step is to obtain buy-in on new workflow processes from those who will actually have to execute them. To accomplish this goal, these ideas should emerge from discussion. There should be general agreement that trying the new workflow is a worthwhile experiment, and following Carpenter’s lead, its details should be captured with crystal clear specificity so there’s no doubt about what exactly is being 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. There’s perhaps no better way to keep the locus of control internal than to empower your team to change what’s not working. In practice, you might be surprised by how few changes are actually suggested. It’s the ability to make changes that matters, as it provides a psychological emergency steam valve, neutralizing the fear that you might end up trapped in some unexpected hard edge of the new workflow, unable to get your...

that these autoresponders are now much rarer than they were at their peak, in the immediate aftermath of Ferriss’s book coming out. They were a good idea in the abstract but degraded under the friction of real-world application. The lesson lurking in this case study is that care must be taken in how you publicize changes to your personal work habits. Over the years of observing many different attempts by individuals to push back against or change their dependence on the hyperactive hive mind, and having attempted more than a few such changes myself, I’ve come to believe that these experiments are best executed quietly. Don’t share the details of your new approach to work, unless someone specifically asks you out of genuine interest. Be wary of even providing new expectations, such as “I generally don’t see email until after 10:00 a.m.” or “I check my inbox only a few times a day.” These provide hard edges that skeptical colleagues, clients, or bosses can begin to easily chip away. (“What if I need something urgently from you earlier? No … I don’t like this at all—I think you need to stay better on top of your messages.”) Similarly, if you get in the habit of asking for forgiveness—as is often suggested—people around you will get in the habit of thinking your work strategies must be broken, because why else would they keep causing you to apologize?

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 fine with not hearing back from you right away. On the other hand, if you’re flaky, others will demand faster responses, as they’ll feel they have to stay on you to ensure things get done. 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. Another

Work is not just about getting things done; it’s a collection of messy human personalities trying to figure out how to successfully collaborate.

We embrace innovations like the smartphone that allow more hours of the day to be punctuated with work. We put dry cleaners on our corporate campuses and wi-fi on our corporate buses, all in the service of finding faster ways to shovel more proverbial slag. Not surprisingly, this hasn’t worked out well at all.

Production processes, by definition, require rules about how work is coordinated. Rules reduce autonomy—creating friction with the belief that knowledge workers “must manage themselves,” as Peter Drucker commanded. This dislike of processes, however, goes beyond a general bias toward autonomy. There’s a belief, implicitly held by many knowledge workers, that the lack of processes in this sector is not just an unavoidable side effect of self-management, but actually a smart way to work. 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. This vision is fundamentally Rousseauian, a reference to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that human nature, before the introduction of political influence, was fundamentally virtuous. 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.

Having spent years studying the nuances of knowledge worker productivity, I believe this understanding is profoundly flawed. To stick with the analogy to Enlightenment philosophy, the reality of knowledge work is much more Hobbesian, a reference to Thomas Hobbes’s belief, 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.

A well-designed production process, in other words, isn’t an obstacle to efficient knowledge work, but is instead often a precondition.

As Johnson explained, 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.

“digital sunset” for his company: he wants his employees to end their workday at a reasonable hour to spend time with family and recharge.

To handle customer service, Optimize deploys a tool called Intercom

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.

“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.

Information about who is working on what, as well as how it’s going, is captured using the Flow project management tool.

virtual boards implemented by Asana. Optimize Enterprises relies on Flow. Devesh, from the last chapter, uses Trello.