A World Without Email

Key Concepts

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.” (p. xvii)

Email Reduces Productivity

“From the perspective of a frenzied knowledge worker, a serious shortcoming of this process is that the prefrontal cortex can service only one attention target at a time. As Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen bluntly summarize in their 2016 book, The Distracted Mind: “Our brains do not parallel process information.” As a result, when you attempt to maintain multiple ongoing electronic conversations while also working on a primary task like writing a report or coding a computer program, your prefrontal cortex must continually jump back and forth between different goals, each requiring the amplification and suppression of different brain networks. Not surprisingly, this network switching is not an instantaneous process; it requires both time and cognitive resources. When you try to do it rapidly, things get messy.” (p. 15)

“In their original 2004 study on attention fragmentation, Victor M. González and Gloria Mark partitioned the efforts of the employees they observed into distinct working spheres, each representing a different project or objective. They found that on average their subjects worked on ten different spheres per day, spending less than twelve minutes on one before switching to another. A follow-up study in 2005 found the observed employees touching on eleven to twelve different working spheres per day on average. The large number of different spheres these subjects tackled in a given day, combined with the reality that each sphere demands the accomplishment of many smaller tasks and presumably dozens of emails, provides a harried portrayal of modern knowledge work.” (p. 57)

“The key lesson I want to extract from [General of the Army George C.] Marshall’s story is that management is about more than responsiveness. Indeed, as detailed earlier in this chapter, a dedication to responsiveness will likely degrade your ability to make smart decisions and plan for future challenges—the core of Marshall’s success—and in many situations make you worse at the big picture goals of management. In the short term, running your team on a hive mind workflow might seem flexible and convenient, but in the long term, your progress toward what’s important will be slowed.” (p. 23)

Eliminating the hivemind requires shifting the culture of an entire group

“In our shift from industrial to knowledge work, in other words, we gave up automaton status for a burdensome autonomy. It’s in this context that the hyperactive hive mind, once in place, became devilishly difficult to eradicate, as it’s hard to fix a broken workflow when it’s no one’s job to make sure the workflow functions.” (p. 91)

“Once your organization has fallen into the hive mind, it’s in each individual’s immediate interest to stick with this workflow, even if it leads to a bad long-term outcome for the organization as a whole. It makes your life strictly easier in the moment if you can expect quick responses to messages that you shoot off to colleagues. Similarly, if you unilaterally decrease the time you spend checking your inbox in a group that depends on the hive mind, you’ll slow down other people’s efforts, generating annoyance and dissatisfaction that might put your job in jeopardy. At the risk of stretching this analogy beyond comfort, in knowledge work, we’re overgrazing our common collection of time and attention because none of us wants to be the one who lets their cognitive sheep go hungry.” (p. 91)

“The negative consequences of the hyperactive hive mind, in other words, are unlikely to be resolved by small shifts in individual habits. Even good-natured attempts to nudge the behavior of an entire organization, such as promulgating better norms around email responsiveness or attempting one-off experiments like email-free Fridays, are doomed to fail. As 150 years of economic theory has taught us, to solve the tragedy of the commons, you cannot expect substantially better behavior from the herders; you need instead to replace the free-for-all grazing system with something more efficient. The same holds for the hyperactive hive mind: we cannot tame it with minor hacks—we need to replace it with a better workflow.” (p. 92)

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.” (p. 103)

Build Structures Around Autonomy

“Knowledge work is better understood as the combination of two components: work execution and workflow. The first component, work execution, describes the act of actually executing the underlying value-producing activities of knowledge work—the programmer coding, the publicist writing the press release. It’s how you generate value from attention capital. The second component, workflow, is one we defined in the introduction of this book. It describes how these fundamental activities are identified, assigned, coordinated, and reviewed.” (p. 110)

“Differentiating workflows and work execution is crucial if we’re going to continue to improve knowledge sector productivity. To get the full value of attention capital, we must start taking seriously the way we structure work. This doesn’t stifle the autonomy of knowledge workers, but instead sets them up to make even more out of their skill and creativity.” (p. 111)

Minimize Context Switches and Overload

“Drawing on these observations, I 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. These two properties are the knowledge work equivalent of Henry Ford’s obsession with speed.” (p. 112)

When Implementing Changes, Seek Partners, Not Forgiveness

“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.” (p. 126)

“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.” (p. 126)

“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 work done.” (p. 126)

The Process Principle

“Introducing smart production processes to knowledge work can dramatically increase performance and make the work much less draining.” (p. 143)

Properties of Effective Processes

1. “It’s easy to review who is working on what and how it’s going. 

2. “Work can unfold without significant amounts of unscheduled communication.

3. “There’s a known procedure for updating work assignments as the process progresses.” (p. 151)

“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.” (p. 152)

“Notice, nothing about these properties restricts the knowledge worker’s autonomy in figuring out how they get their work done; the focus remains on coordinating 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.” (p. 152)

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.” (p. 187)

“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.” (p. 186)

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.” (p. 220)

A specialized organization

“When you eliminate support staff, the skilled professionals become less intellectually specialized, as they have to spend more time on administrative work that computers made just easy enough for them to handle on their own. As a result, it now requires more of these professionals to produce the same amount of valuable output for the market, as they have fewer mental cycles free to conduct this specialized work. Because the professionals have much higher salaries than the support staff, replacing the latter with more of the former can be expensive. Sassone crunches the numbers and argues that the organizations he studied could immediately reduce their staffing costs by 15 percent by hiring more support staff, allowing their professionals to become more productive.” (p. 218)

“Most modern knowledge work organizations treat individuals as general-purpose computers that execute a turbulent mixture of value-producing and administrative tasks—often unequally distributed, and not at all optimized for any particular big picture objective. In a specialized organization, by contrast, the workforce is more bimodal, with one group focused almost exclusively on producing high-value output—like developers in an XP shop—and another group focused almost exclusively on handling all the other logistical work needed to keep the organization running.” (p. 246)

Quotables

“We didn’t just shift our existing volume of voicemails, faxes, and memos to this new, more convenient electronic medium; we completely transformed the underlying workflow that determines how our daily efforts unfold. We began to talk back and forth much more than we ever had before, smoothing out the once coarse sequence of discrete work activities that defined our day into a more continuous spread of ongoing chatter, blending with and softening the edges of what we used to think of as our actual work.” (p. xvi)

“Rationally, you know that the six hundred unread messages in your inbox are not crucial, and you remind yourself that the senders of these messages have better things to do than wait expectantly, staring at their screens and cursing the latency of your response. But a deeper part of your brain, evolved to tend the careful dance of social dynamics that has allowed our species to thrive so spectacularly since the Paleolithic, remains concerned by what it perceives to be neglected social obligations.” (p. xvii)

“Understanding the arbitrariness behind how we currently work, perhaps more than anything else, should motivate us to seek better options.” (p. xix)

“‘Pre-email, simple communication was largely person-to-person,’ Stone told me. After email, these same conversations now unfolded over long back-and-forth threads including many different people. ‘Thus—in a mere week or so—was gained and blown the potential productivity gain of email,’ he joked.” (p. 70)

“I asked Rheingans how he persuaded his employees to not check email constantly. “The answer is not as easy as you might expect,” he told me. Suggesting they check email less was not enough for many on his team. He ended up hiring external coaches to reinforce “that checking email or social media all the time won’t help them.” The coaches also encouraged employees to embrace stress-reducing mindfulness exercises like meditation and to improve their physical health through practices like yoga. Rheingans’s goal was for everyone to slow down; to approach their work more deliberately and with less frantic action; to realize that they were “running all the time without getting anywhere.” With these changes in place, five hours suddenly proved to be more than enough to accomplish the work that used to require a much longer day.” (p. 102)

“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.” (p. 129)

“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.” (p. 130)

“Near the end of his speech, Neil Postman said: ‘In the past, we experienced technological change in the manner of sleep-walkers. . . . This is a form of stupidity, especially in an age of vast technological change.’ He was absolutely right. Digital-era knowledge work is, on any reasonable historical scale, a recent phenomenon. It’s absurdly ahistorical and shortsighted to assume that the easy workflows we threw together in the immediate aftermath of these tech breakthroughs are somehow the best ways to organize this complicated new type of work. Of course we didn’t get this exactly right on the first try—to have done so would have been exceptional.” (p. 260)