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

by Cal Newport

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...