A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload - by Cal Newport
Date read: 2021-03-29How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
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Techniques on how to improve communication and productivity and to get out of your email inbox. The book is split up into two sections. Section 1 is all about how the current system is bad for you, with the author introducing the "hyperactive hive mind" syndrome. Section 2 is focused on ways you can combat this and be more productive. Many solutions focus around agile & scrum methodologies and the idea that the computer and email actually required specialists to own a lot more admin tasks than they had previously.
Contents:
My Notes
Constant communication is not something that gets in the way of real work; it has instead become totally intertwined in how this work actually gets done—preventing easy efforts to reduce distractions through better habits or short-lived management stunts like email-free Fridays.
By 2019 the average worker was sending and receiving 126 business emails per day, which works out to about one message every four minutes.
The Hyperactive Hive Mind - A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.
The average user studied had only fifteen such uninterrupted buckets, adding up to no more than an hour and fifteen minutes total of undistracted productive work per day.
Arianna Huffington’s company Thrive Global explored how to free its employees from this anxiety while on vacation (when the knowledge of piling messages becomes particularly acute), it ended up deploying an extreme solution known as Thrive Away: if you send an email to a colleague who’s on vacation, you receive a note informing you that your message has been automatically deleted—you can resend it when they return.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This idea that tools can sometimes drive human behavior became known as technological determinism.
The standard narrative about this invention is that mass-produced pamphlets and books allowed information to spread faster and farther, speeding up the evolution of knowledge that culminated in the Age of Reason. Gutenberg, in other words, thought he was setting information free, but in reality, he was changing fundamentally what information we treated as important.
She further proposed an email server configured such that messages sent after work hours would be automatically held and delivered the next morning (a special flag could be set to bypass this restriction for actual urgent communication).
The media theorist Douglas Rushkoff uses the term “collaborative pacing” to describe this tendency for groups of humans to converge toward strict patterns of behavior without ever actually explicitly deciding that the new behaviors make sense. I notice you’re responding a little quicker to my message, so I begin to do the same. Others follow suit; the pattern of responsiveness emerges, then becomes a new default. The consultants Perlow studied didn’t choose the cycle of responsiveness; in some sense, email chose it for them.
The problem, of course, is that the hyperactive hive mind deployed in an office differs from the hive mind collaboration of a Stone Age elephant hunt in one key property: the office connects many more people. Unstructured coordination is great for a group of six hunters but becomes disastrously ineffective when you connect many dozens, if not hundreds, of employees in a large organization.
The Attention Capital Principle - The productivity of the knowledge sector can be significantly increased if we identify workflows that better optimize the human brain’s ability to sustainably add value to information.
As Devesh explained to me, his company’s efforts now revolve around Trello. If you’re assigned to a project, all of your work, including discussion, delegation, and relevant files, is coordinated on its corresponding board—not in email messages, not in Slack chats.
Suggest the following design principle for developing approaches to work that provide better returns from your personal or organizational attention capital: seek workflows that (1) minimize mid-task context switches and (2) minimize the sense of communication overload.
It’s also common for those moving past the universal accessibility of the hyperactive hive mind to put in place an emergency backup system that can handle urgent issues that the new workflow might neglect. For such a system to truly be a backup, and not just a back door that returns you to the hive mind, it must induce enough friction that you won’t use it unless the situation is sufficiently urgent. The classic example is to use phone calls as the catchall fallback: your colleagues can call your cell phone if something pops up that’s too urgent for the official workflow to reliably handle in time. These backup systems provide the peace of mind that nothing too bad can happen in the time it might take to recognize and fix flaws with new processes.
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 people trust you to handle the work they send your way, then they’re generally fine with not hearing back from you right away.
The Process Principle - Introducing smart production processes to knowledge work can dramatically increase performance and make the work much less draining.
Similar to how Devesh’s marketing firm used Trello in the case study reviewed in the last chapter, these virtual cards arranged on virtual boards are the hub around which work on projects unfolds. Instead of having all communication for all work flow through a general-purpose inbox or channel, you now choose to work on a specific project by navigating to its page and checking in on the tasks to which you’re assigned. This is exactly what our Optimize manager does after his deep work block concludes: he checks in on the projects one by one, joining the card-centric conversations when needed and more generally seeing where things currently stand.
Alex’s team isn’t big on email (or instant messenger for that matter): they see this technology primarily as a tool for interacting with external partners. The information that really matters for their getting things done is all right in front of them, scrawled on cards taped to a chalkboard.
Real-time communication is typically a much more effective means of coordinating individuals than drawn-out back-and-forth messaging. One ten-minute gathering can eliminate dozens of ambiguous messages that would otherwise generate frequent interruptions throughout the day.
When you have a general email inbox through which all discussion flows, you’re forced to continually check this inbox, which then confronts you with discussions about many different projects. When you rely on card conversations, on the other hand, the only way to encounter the discussion surrounding a given project is to navigate to that project’s board. At this point, you’re encountering conversation about only this project. This flips the script because now you decide what project you want to talk about, as opposed to allowing the projects to decide for you.
A regular rhythm of efficient meetings can replace 90 percent of hive mind messaging, if you have a way to keep track of what needs to be discussed in these meetings. The task board makes this simple.
A good approach to figuring out whether this effort is warranted is to apply the 30x rule. As explained by the management consultant Rory Vaden, in its original form, this rule states: “You should spend 30x the amount of time training someone to do a task than it would take you to do the task yourself one time.” We can loosely adapt this rule to automatic process construction: if your team or organization produces a given type of result thirty times a year or more, and it’s possible to transform its production into an automatic process, the transformation is probably worth the effort.
By spending more time in advance setting up the rules by which we coordinate in the office (what I’ll call protocols), we can reduce the effort required to accomplish this coordination in the moment—allowing work to unfold much more efficiently.
The Protocol Principle - Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.
Any time you find yourself involved in a type of coordination activity that’s both frequent and non-urgent, an office hour protocol might significantly reduce its cost.
To avoid the fate of spending his time “glued to a screen and responding endlessly,” Nikias came up with a simple solution: “I keep all of my emails brief—no more than [the length of] an average text message.” What happens to the emails that demand an interaction more involved than what can fit into a text-length reply? Nikias calls the person or asks them to set up a meeting. “The crucial nuances of human communication don’t translate well into cyberspace anyway,” he explains.
During the sprints, the team meets every morning for fifteen minutes, in a gathering called a scrum. During this meeting, each person in the group answers the following three questions:
For many different knowledge work settings, deploying these short meetings, three to five times a week, can significantly reduce ad hoc email or instant message interaction throughout the day, as everyone synchronizes during the regular gathering.
Short, structured check-ins can be empowering. As soon as you let these gatherings devolve into looser, more standard-style meetings, they become a tedious burden.
The Specialization Principle - In the knowledge sector, working on fewer things, but doing each thing with more quality and accountability, can be the foundation for significantly more productivity.
Attempt to outsource the time-consuming things that you don’t do well. The key obstacle to overcome in applying this strategy is that you’ll likely pay a price in the short term before you reap long-term benefits.
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.
A design sprint attempts to compress this work, from the initial debates all the way to receiving market feedback on the resulting decisions, into one highly efficient workweek. On the first day, you figure out the problem you’re trying to solve. On the second day, you sketch out competing solutions. On the third day, you make the tough decision about which solution you want to explore, transforming it into a hypothesis that can be tested. On the fourth day, you throw together a rough prototype that allows you to test the hypothesis, and on the fifth and final day, you put real clients in front of the prototype and learn from their feedback. These sprints have been used to test new products, but they’ve also been used to try out advertising strategies and even to determine whether there’s a reasonable market for a given idea.
The idea of deep-to-shallow work ratios, which I first proposed in my book Deep Work. The idea is to agree in advance with your supervisor how many hours each week should be spent on the core skilled activities for which you were hired, and how much on other types of shallower support or administrative work. The goal is to seek the balance that maximizes your value to your organization. You then measure and categorize your work hours and report back how close you came to achieving your optimal ratio.
Hiring more support staff in this manner won’t necessarily decrease profitability. When you allow specialists to work with more focus, they produce more, and this extra value can more than compensate for the cost of maintaining dedicated support. Our rush to cut payrolls by having everyone handle their own administrative work through computer interfaces provided only the illusion of streamlining. These top-line numbers obscured the degree to which the cognitive gears that produce value in knowledge work began to grind and stick under these new demands.
She described the work in her new office as “transactional.” If someone needed something, they brought it to you in person, and you would deal with it right then until done. It might be literally slower to walk a form down the hall than to email it, but from a productivity perspective, Veronica didn’t feel less effective. When you’re no longer required to fragment your attention by jumping back and forth between what’s in front of you at the moment and any number of asynchronous conversations piling unpredictably in your inbox, each discrete task takes less total time.
If it’s possible, set up a process that allows a support staffer to work on one thing at a time until done, and to deal with issues in person (not through back-and-forth messaging). In the moment, it might seem like the ability to just fire off messages would be a real time-saver, but when everyone is doing the same thing, everyone ends up buried in an inbox, struggling to make reasonable progress on anything.
A better objective for support units would be the following: to effectively fulfill their administrative duties with as small an impact as possible on the specialists’ main work obligations. If taken seriously, this metric might mean a given support unit needs to make its own work less efficient to better serve the organization.
Partition your time into two separate categories: specialist and support. For example, perhaps 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. are support hours. Consider using two separate email addresses.