Cal Newport is perhaps my favourite author on the topic of work productivity. I first encountered his work a couple of years ago with an article "Is Email Making Professors Stupid?". It opened my eyes to a wide world of how our day-to-day tasks and workflows—particularly those generated and managed by email—were a serious drain on my cognitive resources. Don't get me wrong: I felt this every day, but one mostly tried to hack their way through it. There is a serious amount capital (what Newport calls "attention capital") that organizations are losing out on and which is also making workers miserable. And indeed I was miserable; in no small part thanks to email-based workflows. The deluge of unfiltered, undifferentiated stuff pouring into my inbox each day was unbearable.
A World Without Email is Newport's manifesto on the toxic relationship between knowledge work and constant communication and what we can do about. Newport is a great resource for young academics and other knowledge workers. He writes from the perspective of a busy academic with a family life and interests outside of academia, all while maintaining a stellar publishing career and a normal work-life balance. Up to now, a lot of his writing has been about how we as individuals can successfully do battle with the onslaught of responsibilities and commits in their work life (a thing he calls the 'productivity hydra'. In A World Without Email, Newport simultaneously takes aim at this individual-level focus on ' productivity hacks' and on the responsibilities of organizations and managers to improve communication and workflows so that knowledge workers get more stuff done, lead happier lives, and are more creative. The book's two-part structure is similar to his 2016 book Deep Work: a first part that gives us background and research on why what he's about to tell us is important. The central villain in Newport's World is something he calls The Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow (hereafter we'll just call it the HHM). The HHM is a noisy morass of back-and-forth communication with knowledge workers in a near-constant state of 'on-call' from email, to Teams, Slack or other instant messaging. The HHM is not something workplaces or managers consciously devised and implemented, it evolved on its own—kind of like a virus—and it now infects workplaces around the world. The HHM has now become endemic and many knowledge workplaces have grown numb or indifferent to its pernicious effects. Email (and text communication generally) is a socially unnatural form of communication. Attitudes, tone, and intentions frequently don't transmit, which can leave people feeling irked, frustrated, or like they are on the receiving end of hostility—much of which may have been unintentional. Email can be cognitively draining to compose and can be emotionally distressing to deal with. Part 1 is filled with fascinating anecdotes and studies to back up Newport's thesis that the HHM is a self-installed virus, that email makes us miserable, and that there must be much better ways we can work. One of my particular favourites was the installation of one of the first email servers in a large company in the 1980s. Specced out to simply accommodate existing workflows and on-paper messaging needs, the multi-million-dollar mainframe crashed within the first day, overwhelmed by the unanticipated multiplication of near-instant, effortless communication. It is here that Newport introduces us to a key idea in the book: friction. Emails are relatively easy to send and compose if you're not really faced with the social consequences of face-to-face interaction. It's easy to ask somebody to "do something" for you, but without providing them any resources to get the job started. Your simple request could lead to a world of pain for the person on the other side. At best, such a simple request leads to a painful game of email ping-pong, distraction, and delay. At the other end of the spectrum, Newport introduces us to organizations that have recognized the costly and painful toll of email and the HHM. Some companies even instituting radical email policies for the benefit of their workers. Perhaps my favourite here is the holiday autoresponder policy that automatically informs the sender that the recipient is on holiday, their email has been deleted, and that they should try again upon the recipients return. This isn't simply for the sake of churlishness, but recognizes the fact that even while people may be allowed to ignore their email on holiday, studies show we remain aware of the messages accumulating in our absence, leading to persistent low-level anxiety. Part 2 is the practical end. Armed with the knowledge of the HHM and the toll it takes, we can begin to take steps to improve how we work so that we are less reliant on instant back-and-forth messaging. I'm not going to go into all the details here. This is not meant to be a summary A World Without Email. What I want to highlight here are some really generalizable principles that emerge from reading Part 2. But you really need to read this section in full to get a complete view of how you can improve your own work life and your organisation. Part 2 contains a lot of focus on tools like task boards and scheduling software, all of which are useful but may see different degrees of utility in different kinds of knowledge work. Simply dipping into Part 2 as though it's simply a list of tips will miss the bigger picture. 1. A focus on Workflow. Newport invites us to look at knowledge work from the perspective of workflows. The HHM is a workflow and a poor one because it is chaotic, unscheduled, leaves room for poor accountability ("I sent an email so my job is done!"), and requires cognitively draining task-switching. You can't focus on really important, meaningful brain work if you're constantly switching to your inbox. Workflows need to be designed (often without that much effort) so that the delivery side of the work spares team members the need to be on a constant on-call status. That's why it's important to identify clearly what the tasks are at the outset, identifying the persons responsible, and the target deadlines. Often that person is simply your own self, but it needs to be clear and organized. Once clear workflows are identified, you can... 2. Get communication in context. One of the key strengths of task boards is that they centre any communication directly into the spot where tasks are staged, their relevant data is held, and their status is noted. If you're working with task boards as Newport recommends, then you never need to go into your inbox—which contains an undifferentiated mass of stuff you need to filter—but right where you need to be to start a focussed session of work. If you're using a taskboard and you're just starting your work for the day, you would log in, check the project status, find your action items, and alongside those action items find the relevant threads or communications, ideally without anything else clogging up the pipes. Putting communication in context in turn lets you... 3. Create systems that avoid trips to the inbox. In properly designed workflows, whether using task boards or not, it is imperative that team members can avoid a trip to the inbox to get that one document they need, or check on a date for something. Shared drives, for instance, can provide the necessary remedy here. Increasingly, it is possible to send attachments that aren't attachments but simply linked to data in a shared drive. Putting mission-critical data into shared drives prevents needless trips to the inbox. Another example is how scheduling apps like Calendly work directly with your calendar to help set up and manage appointments. I use Calendly now to set up appointments with students and colleagues. If a conflict emerges after that meeting is set up, it is very easy to reschedule from within your calendar app without needing to open email. If this is a meeting with somebody in your organisation, you can usually see the details of their calendar alongside yours (in Outlook and Teams, this is the Scheduling Assistant). You can drag/drop the meeting to a mutually free time, for instance, without having to compose any emails. Although this process can itself trigger a bit of back-and-forth, it cuts out a key cognitively draining exercise: getting into your inbox and task-switching from inbox, composing, to calendar. Let the tech help you. 4. Keep meetings short. Keep them short and focussed. Newport expands on this pointing to popular systems in software development like agile and scrum. I won't say more, apart from the fact that meetings not focussed on defining and delegating clear actions and accountability are probably wasting time and probably only contain information that could be posted on a company intranet. My only real complaints about this book are perhaps idiosyncratic, or driven by my own experiences with email. In my organization, I wouldn't say we suffer tremendously from the Hyperactive Hive Mind, mostly because I am relatively insulated from it. I don't find task boards to be that useful in my current state, but that may change as my research group grows. To me, what is more problematic is simply the management of workflows and information storage/retrieval through inboxes. University websites are notoriously difficult to find useful information on and I frequently have to search and filter email to find simple information (or indeed, bother somebody else with my request). My organization has a terrible habit of managing important workflows (like grading) through email communications and email attachments. If a workflow is updated, a new email is sent. Email is what I would call a noisy channel and I think Newport would agree. It can often be difficult to find the most up-to-date information on a workflow. Senders could use subtly different subject lines or the info is buried deep in a thread after several irrelevant replies. So I would add rules about attachments to Newport's guidance, and the use of systems that centralise data management so that multiple copies of information are not floating about. In short, Cal Newport's A World Without Email is a timely read and will be of interest to anyone who works in or manages a knowledge workplace. As we become more dependent on technology, particularly as the post-pandemic world approaches (hopefully, anyway), we need to be wary of the self-amplifying footprint this technology can take in our lives. It can drive us away from more meaningful, personally fulfilling pursuits.
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Martin d brazeauPalaeontologist, fieldworker, sometimes phylogenetic programmer. Transplanted Canadian in UK. All views are my own. How to pronounce my name? Rhymes with "bureau" or "chateau". He/him/his. Archives
December 2022
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