A World Without Email summary

One day, the author was on a hike with a friend who works as a management consultant. As they walked, the author mentioned his concerns about email and the hyperactive hive mind. His friend was quick to insist that the benefits of email outweigh any downsides.

His main argument? That email is efficient. If someone on his team gets stuck, he said, they can just shoot him an email. His response will then help them get unstuck. As a manager, he believed his value lay in his ability to keep everyone’s activities moving along.

In 2016, the informatics expert Gloria Mark and a group of coauthors conducted a revealing study. In it, they attached heart monitors to 40 knowledge workers and monitored their computer usage throughout the day. The goal was to measure the workers’ mental stress during particular activities.

Can you guess what Mark and her colleagues discovered? Spoiler alert: there was a correlation between email and stress. The longer the workers spent on email within a given hour, the higher their stress was during that hour.

Ford Motor Company’s famous Model T was released in 1908. The new car was innovative in its design,⁠ but the process that would eventually be used to construct it was revolutionary.

At first, the Model T was constructed just like other cars at the time: with a group of 15 engineers working together to assemble each car. But then, in 1913, Henry Ford had an idea. What if cars could move between workers as they were being assembled, with each employee handling just one part of each car? This initial idea resulted in an invention, the assembly line, that forever changed the way factories were operated.

Peter Drucker was a highly influential twentieth-century business thinker, widely known as the founder of modern management. Drucker is responsible for much of how we think of knowledge work today.

One of Drucker’s major contributions was his theory of autonomy. He argued that knowledge workers couldn’t be treated like highly-supervised robots, as factory workers were. Instead, they needed the freedom to operate independently and complete their objectives autonomously.

Picture this: A coworker emails you, informally outlining a new responsibility for you to tackle. But there’s no dedicated process in place for assigning or tracking the work. So, naturally, you send an email asking for clarification. This kicks off a game of hot potato, where responsibility bounces from one inbox to another until a manager finally steps in and puts a stop to it. 

Sound familiar? This is a common scenario in the hyperactive hive mind workflow, but it’s deeply inefficient and a waste of your company’s attention capital. Smart production processes solve the problem by making it clear who should be working on what, and when. This frees your employees up to do the important work rather than just talk about it.

In a standard work setting, people need to communicate on a litany of different issues: scheduling meetings, determining next steps in a project, answering queries, offering feedback . . . the list goes on and on.

In the hyperactive hive mind workflow, most people deal with these issues by firing off emails. That method of resolution,⁠ sending an email, is an example of a coordination protocol – that is, a way of structuring communication. Every coordination protocol has an associated cost that’s worth closely examining and optimizing.

When personal computers first arrived in the workplace in the 1980s, nearly everyone expected them to spark a productivity revolution. As a result, service sector companies invested a great deal of money in advanced technology. Per worker, their investments worked out to an increase of more than 116 percent! Yet employees’ output only increased by a measly 2.2 percent. What happened? 

According to the technology historian Edward Tenner, computers made certain tasks “just easy enough.” Before, companies would have hired dedicated support staff to deal with things like scheduling and filling out forms. But now, skilled professionals are expected to handle those tasks, at the cost of real productivity.