A World Without Email Summary and Review | Cal Newport

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Introduction

A World Without Email tackles how emails are among the biggest drivers of stress and anxiety in all workplaces. Most businesses argue that being stressed by emails is a sign of poor organization or management.

 A World Without Email aims to challenge this myth and offers research findings that suggest emails go against our evolutionary nature. Newport isn’t claiming that emails must be eradicated from all workplaces, though. He merely believes that a world where we have a healthier relationship with emails would be a happier place.

Cal Newport argues that email is a poor tool for communication in the modern workplace and presents a vision of a world in which it is replaced by more effective methods. He suggests that organizations adopt a “default-off” policy for email, use task-specific communication tools, encourage face-to-face meetings, use asynchronous written communication, and set clear expectations for communication. Newport argues that these principles can help organizations transition to a world without email and improve productivity, communication, and overall well-being.

About Cal Newport

Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to his academic research, he writes articles and blog posts on the intersection of digital technology and culture. Cal has written for the New Yorker and the New York Times. Plus, he has a long-standing blog called Study Hacks, which receives over 3 million visits a year. 

Cal Newport has written several books on these topics, including “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World“, “So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love,” and “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World“.

Newport is known for his unconventional and counterintuitive advice on productivity and technology use. Newport’s work has been featured in a variety of media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.

StoryShot #1: The Case Against Email

Newport starts by describing the emergence of email within the workplace. He explains that IBM decided in the 1980s to install an internal email server. Their motivation for doing so was to combine all their current communications. At that time, they were using memos, voice mails and leaving notes. Email offered the opportunity to combine them and improve efficiency. The issue is that email considerably increased efficiency, which led to five times as much communication in the first week it was introduced. The ease of email as a communication tool meant employees were using it for more back and forth communication than they would have done with the previous communication tools. This experiment highlights one of the greatest issues with email, which is that it’s too fast.

The speed of emails also prevents workers from disconnecting. Newport describes that a French labor law went into effect in 2017 that preserves the “right to disconnect.” This law aimed to encourage companies to create stricter policies surrounding people using email outside of work. The argument made by those proposing this law was that workers were being burned out by the expectation of replying to emails in the evenings or at the weekend. Newport uses this example to highlight that emails are making workers miserable. Scientific research supports this point. Researchers at the University of California hooked up forty office workers to wireless heart-rate monitors for 12 days. Their results showed that the longer the participants spent on email in a given hour, the higher their stress levels (measured by heart rate).

The outcome of this stress and unhappiness is significant. At a business level, increased stress has an impact on team performance. It is also a utilitarian issue if most of the world is being overwhelmed by emails that are harming their health and well-being. Newport challenges the common business view that the negative impacts of emails are attributable to poor habits. He believes our mismatch with emails is due to our evolutionary nature. He compares the social interactions we crave as humans to eating. We have an evolutionary drive to eat, which is why we experience hunger in the absence of food. Newport argues our evolutionary drive to be social leads to a feeling of unease when we neglect these interactions. The speed of emails means we often struggle to keep up with these interactions and are left anxious if we do not respond to them in the evenings or at the weekend. Newport believes this is the core issue with emails.

StoryShot #2: Innovative Solutions to Email Anxiety at Work 

Newport believes our reliance on emails and similar work-based platforms naturally produces anxiety. When no structure is introduced, there will be a huge amount of messages across several tasks that you have to address. To keep on top of this, you have to be constantly monitoring these channels. The issue with this is your lack of focus is reducing your cognitive capacity and you are left miserable. 

Newport offers an innovative example of a company that has sought to tackle the anxiety of emails. Arianna Huffington’s company, Thrive Global, decided to develop what they call Thrive Away. In most companies, an automated vacation email is sent in response to an email when you are away. The issue with this is that while you are on holiday, you still worry about receiving social interactions (emails) and not being able to respond. These emails will also pile up and offer an unmanageable amount when you return. So, Arianna Huffington created a process whereby an automated response is provided and the original email is deleted. This means employees on vacation do not have to worry about any unresolved emails.

This is a solution for when you are on vacation. But, the issue would still remain while you are at work. At work, you will still have low-grade anxiety and have misunderstandings because we express ourselves poorly in written mediums. So, Newport also advocates for shared project-management systems. These systems should simplify the task of identifying who is working on what so that less time is spent communicating. Newport also recommends another innovation he has noticed some companies using. Specifically, shifting away from associating with email addresses with one individual. So, instead of making a specific request to one person, have a combined inbox where multiple employees monitor tasks. This change alone can relieve much of the anxiety associated with emails. This moves back towards our evolutionary drive of synchronous messaging and away from the modern types of asynchronous messaging.

StoryShot #3: Negative Impact of Email Communication on Office Productivity

The research team led by Gloria Mark in 2012 studied the impact of email in a workplace. The study involved 13 employees at a research firm who had their emails shut down for five workdays.

 It was observed that one of the research scientists was often interrupted during his laboratory setups due to requests from his boss. He was made to stop his work and attend to the boss’s requests, slowing down his laboratory setup. But, when the emails were turned off, the boss did not continue to bother him, as the amount of extra effort required to walk two doors down the hall was enough to prevent the boss from handing off extra work.  His enthusiasm at being left to finish his setup was reported by Mark.

This experiment showed how emails create more work, increase communication friction and reduce requests. It emphasizes the need for physical contact instead of relying completely on emails for communication.

Monitoring Email Habits

In 2005, when Mark and González conducted their pioneering research, they found that a group of fourteen Australian telecommunications employees divided their workday into eighty-eight distinct “episodes”, sixty of which were dedicated to communication. 

Eleven years later, Gloria Mark’s team used tracking software to monitor the habits of employees in a research division at a large corporation, finding that they checked email an average of seventy-seven times a day. Reports measuring the average number of emails sent and received daily revealed a trend of increasing communication, rising from fifty emails per day in 2005 to sixty-nine in 2006 and ninety-two by 2011. 

According to a technology research firm called the Radicati Group, the projected figure for 2019 was an average of 126 messages per day.

How Email Diminishes Deep Work

Data from 2018 revealed the damaging effects of email and communication applications on the ability to perform deep work. It showed that, on average, users were checking their inboxes every six minutes or less, and the most common interval was once per minute. Furthermore, the longest uninterrupted time experienced by half of the users studied was no more than forty minutes, with the most common length clocking in at twenty minutes. This demonstrates that email and communication applications are hindering workers’ ability to focus on deep work for more than just a few minutes.

StoryShot #4: Principles for a World Without Email

Newport presents four fundamental principles as antidotes to hyperactive hive mind workflow:

Attention Capital Principle: Deploying Human Brains Sequentially Is Key to Knowledge Work

Newport’s Attention Capital Principle suggests that improved productivity in knowledge work is achieved by utilizing workflows that accommodate the way brains think. This involves adding structure to existing autonomy, with work execution being the actual work, and work flow being the way those work activities are identified, assigned, coordinated, and reviewed.

“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.” – Cal Newport

Process Principle: Use Efficient Processes to Optimize Performance and Reduce Ambiguity

Newport’s Process Principle proposes that incorporating efficient production processes into knowledge work increases performance and reduces the amount of energy required. This does not necessarily mean reducing all creative processes down to step-by-step recipes, but rather adding more structure and organization. Effective production processes require the ability to review work progress, scheduling communications, and reducing ambiguity. Additionally, these processes need to be highly customized for individuals.

“The Process Principle Introducing smart production processes to knowledge work can dramatically increase performance and make the work much less draining.” – Cal Newport

Protocol Principle: Setting up Communication Protocols Optimizes Coordination

Newport’s Protocol Principle states that designing rules in advance to optimize workplace coordination leads to long-term gains. Examples include meetings scheduling, client protocols, communication guidelines, and email protocols. These protocols are designed to reduce the cognitive costs of knowledge work, balancing energy costs with inconvenience.

Specialization Principle: Focusing on a Few Things Increases Productivity.

The Specialization Principle suggests that doing fewer things with higher quality and more accountability can significantly improve productivity. Examples of ways to specialize include outsourcing, giving more autonomy, sprinting, budgeting attention and workloads, and supercharging support staff. On solo teams, this can be mimicked by segmenting time by responsibility.

“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.” – Cal Newport

StoryShot #5: Five Key Principles for Organizations for Transiting to a World without Email

According to Newport, email is a “poor tool” for communication due to its many limitations. It is easy to overload, difficult to keep track of, and prone to misunderstandings. Email also encourages multitasking, leading to shallow work rather than deep work, and it can be a major source of stress and distraction.

Newport suggests that organizations should adopt more effective communication methods, such as face-to-face meetings, task-specific communication tools, and “asynchronous written communication” (e.g. written documents or reports). These methods are more efficient, clearer, and less stressful than email.

In order to transition to a world without email, Newport proposes a set of principles for organizations to follow. These include:

1. Adopt a “default-off” policy for email, where email is used only when necessary and other communication methods are preferred.
2. Use task-specific communication tools for specific projects or tasks, rather than relying on email.
3. Encourage face-to-face meetings whenever possible, as they are more efficient and allow for better communication.
4. Use asynchronous written communication (e.g. documents or reports) for important or complex information.
5. Set clear expectations for communication, including when and how often employees should be available and how to prioritize tasks.

By following these principles, Newport argues, organizations can transition to a world without email and improve productivity, communication, and overall well-being.

Final Summary and Review

In “A World Without Email,” Cal Newport argues that the reliance on email as a primary means of communication in the workplace is damaging to productivity and well-being. He suggests that organizations adopt more effective communication methods, such as face-to-face meetings, task-specific communication tools, and asynchronous written communication, and follow a set of principles including a “default-off” policy for email and clear expectations for communication.

 According to Newport, four principles must be followed:  the Attention Capital Principle, Process Principle, Protocol Principle, and Specialization Principle. Also, physical contact should be used instead of emails, as well as ways to streamline workflows, introduce production processes, optimize coordination, and specialize.

These principles can help organizations transition to a world without email and improve productivity, communication, and overall well-being. 

Rating

We rate A World Without Email 3.9/5.

How would you rate Cal Newport’s book?

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