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Cal Newport
February 18, 2016
In the early 1980s, IBM decided to deploy an internal email system. In typical
careful IBM fashion, they began by measuring employee communication, so they
could estimate how many messages would be sent on the new system. Based on this
research, IBM provisioned a $10 million mainframe to run their email server
an amount of processing power that should have easily handled the typical
volume of intra-office interaction.
Within a week, the machine was overwhelmed.
As an engineer who worked on this project recently recalled, the email team had
gravely underestimated the load. Instead of employees simply transferring their
normal offline communication to the more convenient online system, they began
to communicate vastly more than they ever had before. Thus in a mere week or
so was gained and blown the potential productivity gain of email, he
lamented.
This story highlights a common misunderstanding about our current tempestuous
relationship with email. Most knowledge workers believe that email is a passive
tool they choose to use to make their real work easier. But as the Big Blue
engineers discovered three decades ago, this technology is not passive; it
instead actively changes what we mean by real work.
Accompanying the rise of this technology was a new, unstructured workflow in
which all tasks be it a small request from HR or collaboration on a key
strategy are now handled in the same manner: you dive in and start sending
quick messages which arrive in a single undifferentiated inbox at their
recipients. These tasks unfold in an ad hoc manner with informal messages sent
back and forth on demand as needed to push things forward.
This unstructured workflow arose from the core properties of email technology
namely, the standard practice of associating addresses with individuals (and
not, say, teams, or request type, or project), and the low marginal cost of
sending a message. It spread for the simple reason that it s easier in the
moment. It takes significantly less effort to shoot off quick messages, for
example, than it is to more carefully plan your work day, figuring out in
advance what you need, from whom, and by when.
But just because this unstructured approach is standard and easy doesn t mean
it s smart. It s important to remember that no blue ribbon committee or
brilliant executive ever sat down and decided that this workflow would make
businesses more productive or employees more satisfied. It instead just emerged
as an instinctual reaction to a disruptive new technology. Like the employees
at 1980s IBM, one day we looked up and noticed that what we meant by real work
had shifted radically under our feet.
The high cost of cheap messages
Given that no one planned the rise of the unstructured approach, it shouldn t
offend anyone when I claim that it s been a disastrous development for the
knowledge work sector. A consequence of this workflow is that an organization s
tasks become entangled in a complicated network of dependencies with
inbox-enslaved individuals sited at each node. The only way to keep productive
energy flowing through this network is for everyone to continually check, send,
and reply to the multitude of messages flowing past all in an attempt to drive
tasks, in an ad hoc manner, toward completion. If you step away from your human
network router duties, the whole apparatus can grind into deadlock. This
reality forces modern knowledge workers to constantly check their inbox and
feel great guilt or unease about the possibility of unanswered communication
awaiting attention. This compulsion is not irrational, as these unrelenting
messages are not supplemental to real work they re instead at the core of
what we now mean by this term.
The negative impacts of this lifestyle are so widely felt that they hardly need
elaboration. But for the sake of this argument, I ll briefly note what I
believe to be the two biggest harms.
First, this incessant communication fragments attention, leaving only small
stretches left in which to attempt to think deeply, apply your skills at a high
level, or otherwise perform well the core activity of knowledge work:
extracting value from information. To make matters worse, cognitive performance
during these stretches is further reduced by the attention residue left from
the frequent context switching required to just check if something important
arrived.
These behaviors are not just annoying; they have a substantial impact on
productivity. I recently wrote a book called Deep Work, which details the
immense professional benefits experienced when you allow people to spend long
periods, without distraction, focused on cognitively demanding tasks. To
eliminate the ability for knowledge workers to perform deep work is like
putting assembly line workers in thick gloves that hamper their ability to
manipulate their tools it s an absurd self-imposed handicap.
The second harm is more personal. As more knowledge workers now acknowledge,
the inbox-bound lifestyle created by an unstructured workflow is exhausting and
anxiety-provoking. Humans are not wired to exist in a constant state of divided
attention, and we need the ability to gain distance from work to reflect and
recharge. Put simply, this workflow, which can transform even the highest
skilled knowledge workers into message-passing automatons, is making an entire
sector of our economy miserable.
The syllogism here is inescapable, leading us to the conclusion that there s
great advantage for those organizations willing to end the reign of the
unstructured workflow and replace it with something designed from scratch with
the specific goal of maximizing value production and employee satisfaction.
Given the tangled relationship between email and our current approach to work,
however, it s also clear that this transformation is almost certainly going to
require a radical first step: to eliminate email.
Tame efforts to curb the worst impacts of this technology be it email-free
Fridays or smarter inbox applications are doomed to failure. Once you assign
each employee a universally accessible address of the form name@company.com, an
unstructured workflow will follow, and this workflow, by its very nature,
demands the excesses that plague the knowledge economy. These problems cannot
be tamed with better etiquette. The email weed, in other words, must be pulled
out by the root.
Replacing the chaos of email with a structured workflow
The natural follow-up question, of course, is what qualifies as a better
workflow. Even the most strident email opponents recognize that we need some
way to coordinate and communicate with colleagues. To validate the idea that
organizations can thrive without this tool, let me offer a concrete alternative
inspired by my own experience in academia: office hours.
The concept is simple. Employees no longer have personalized email addresses.
Instead, each individual posts a schedule of two or three stretches of time
during the day when he or she will be available for communication. During these
office hours, the individual guarantees to be reachable in person, by phone,
and by instant messenger technologies like Slack. Outside of someone s stated
office hours, however, you cannot command their attention. If you need them,
you have to keep track of what you need until they re next available.
On the flipside, when you re between your own scheduled office hours, you have
no inboxes to check or messages demanding response. You re left, in other
words, to simply work. And of course, when you re home in the evening or on
vacation, the fact that there s no inbox slowly filling up with urgent
obligations allows a degree of rest and recharge that s all but lost from the
lives of most knowledge workers today.
Notice that the workflow induced by an office-hours scheme replaces on-demand
messaging with structured communication. People now know exactly when someone
might need their attention and exactly when they can command the attention of
others. This freedom from a constant background hum of interaction will
increase the intensity of concentration achievable when people need to work
deeply, and the efficiency with which shallower tasks can be batched together
and dispatched.
This workflow also replaces asynchronous interactions with synchronous
conversation. This change is crucial. Synchronous conversation is efficient and
nuanced: not only does it allow you to handle in three minutes decisions that
might have otherwise taken three days of attention-snagging messages, but it
tends to also produce more thoughtful conclusions. Imagine, for example, that
Alice and Bob need to work together to write a report. If they use email, the
process would likely unfold in an inefficient manner, as both Alice and Bob,
under the Sisyphean pressure of an ever-filling inbox, keep dashing off quick
responses to each other so as to temporarily clear the issue out of their
psychic space. In the office-hours scenario, however, Alice and Bob would be
forced to talk in real time about the report project. This interaction, though
taking more time than sending a quick message at first, is more likely to lead
to a complete and coherent plan for how the work should best unfold in the days
that follow.
Answers to common objections
There are, of course, issues with replacing email with office hours. Consider,
for example, client communication. I accept that this is an area that an
organization might need to leave untouched. It s perfectly reasonable, in other
words, to keep this office-hours strategy confined to internal communication,
allowing your interactions with clients to still meet their expectation for
your availability. (Though it should be noted that when it comes to external
communication, many issues related to the unstructured workflow are already
solved: there exist many popular client management systems that provide
significant structure to such interactions.)
Another issue is team communication. An advantage of email is that it allows
you to communicate with multiple people at once. It would be a burden to have
to attend multiple office hours to spread the same message to all members of a
team. A solution to this issue is to synchronize office hour slots within teams
creating periods every day where you know you can talk to a whole team at
once, using a Slack chatroom or conference call.
There s also the issue of transferring files, which many now accomplish using
email messages. Fortunately, there are no shortage of shared-folder
technologies, such as Dropbox or Google Drive, that make it simple to pass
files between different users.
Perhaps the biggest concern generated by this proposal is the fear that there
are some situations that really do seem to require the asynchrony provided by
email. I want to emphasize, however, that office hours do not eliminate
asynchrony they just shift the responsibility such interactions generate. In
an email-driven organization, for example, if I have some feedback to give you
on a report draft, I would simply send you these notes when I was done
compiling them. This action places the responsibility for keeping track of the
information falls to the receiver. In an office-hours organization, by
contrast, I would instead hold onto these comments until your next convenient
office hours, at which point I could bring them to your attention in real time.
The responsibility for keeping track of this information now falls to the
sender but the asynchronous nature of the interaction remains.
There will, of course, be some circumstances where the urgency of an issue
dictates that you cannot wait until office hours to interact with someone. In
such cases, however, the best solution is an old one: call. In other words, I
would suspect that an organization using this strategy would have a policy that
you can and should call someone s office or cell phone if there s a truly
urgent matter. I would conjecture that such emergencies would be much rarer
than most might predict.
More generally speaking, when I ve floated this idea in business circles, many
of the complaints that are presented as reasons why this will not work for me
turn out to be reasons why this would make certain situations harder for me.
There s a key difference here. The goal for most organizations is not to make
work as easy as possible; it is, instead, to organize work in a way that allows
it to be effective, productive, and satisfying. The unstructured workflow that
currently dominates satisfies the former, while solutions such as office hours
satisfy the latter.
Office hours might not work for every organization although, as I ve argued,
they would probably apply in more settings than you might at first assume. The
broader goal for this discussion is to illuminate the true depth of the
problems generated by email, and to underscore the feasibility of radical
solutions.
Email, as a technology, is not intrinsically bad. But the unstructured workflow
it engenders is disastrous. We need to fix it and I m doubtful this can be
accomplished while email still plays a core role in our business culture. It s
this reality that brings me back to the modest proposal that titles this essay,
which, if workplace trends continue as they are, might one day soon seem less
like an interesting thought experiment and more like a necessary call to
action.
Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University where he
studies the mathematics of digital networks. He also writes books about the
impact of these technologies. His latest book, Deep Work, argues that the
ability to focus without distraction is becoming one of the most valuable and
rare skills in our economy.