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Zusammenfassung von A World Without Email

Name: A World Without Email
Rating: 4.4 (274 reviews)
Author: Cal Newport

Cal Newport

Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

4.4 (274 Bewertungen)

28 Min.

Themen

Achtsames Arbeiten Routinen & Gewohnheiten Fokus Arbeitskultur Effektivität Stressreduktion

Inhaltsübersicht

A World Without Email
in 8 Kernaussagen verstehen

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Kernaussage 1 von 8

What’s in it for me? Liberate your organization from the tyranny of the inbox.

For many people, a typical workday looks like this: You wake up and head into the office. Then you open up your email inbox and it dictates everything you do for the rest of the day. From that moment on, you’re lucky if you can snag 20 minutes to get some real, substantive work done.

Sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone. Thanks to tools like email and instant messaging, the workplace culture of endless communication has completely taken over, damaging productivity and making employees miserable.

Now, you could patch this situation with quick fixes like writing clearer subject lines and turning off notifications. But if you want to really solve the underlying issue, you need a more radical solution –⁠ one where your inbox is no longer in charge. The blinks that follow will explore this possibility using data, real case studies, and actionable tips.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

that you aren’t as good at multitasking as you think you are;
how email reduces job satisfaction; and
why it can be better to keep your workflows secret.

Email leads to a hyperactive workflow, which⁠ impedes productivity.

When the author first interviewed Sean, the cofounder of a small technology firm, his company was in the midst of a productivity fiasco.

It began with an email fixation – practically every business activity was handled via the employees’ inboxes. Then, once the company adopted an instant-messaging tool called Slack, things got really crazy. Business clients were granted access to the service, which meant they could pop in and ask questions at any time. Soon, Sean was working until 1:00 a.m. every night because he could barely finish anything important during the day.

Sean’s company was deep in what the author calls the hyperactive hive mind workflow. It’s characterized by a constant, ongoing conversation within an organization, in which employees’ activities are determined by the messages in their inboxes.

The key message here is: Email leads to a hyperactive workflow, which⁠ impedes productivity.

The truth is, in workplaces today, the hyperactive hive mind workflow is pretty ubiquitous. That’s no surprise, as nothing fosters it like email. And it’s killing productivity. Why?

On average, modern knowledge workers check their email once every six minutes. In total, they spend over a third of their working hours in their inboxes –⁠ an absolutely incredible amount of time!

These numbers are already staggering, but the problem gets worse. In 2018, a software company called RescueTime monitored the computer habits of 50,000 active users. They ultimately concluded that, all told, the average knowledge worker gets just an hour and 15 minutes of undistracted productive work done per day.

Clearly, the constant focus on email is disastrous for productivity. But why is that the case? Well, because of the human brain –⁠ specifically, a region called the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for attention.

The prefrontal cortex is only capable of focusing on one thing at a time. Yet the hyperactive hive mind workflow encourages us to maintain multiple ongoing electronic conversations, all while completing the difficult aspects of our jobs, like coding computer programs or writing business strategies.

Psychologically, this takes a toll: rapidly switching between tasks takes time and energy. So when we multitask, we end up taking longer to complete each activity than we would if we were executing each one in isolation.

Many people freely admit that email makes them less productive. But they also believe they don’t have a choice –⁠ that responsiveness is more important to their teams than optimized performance. That’s understandable but wrong.

No workplace truly benefits from a constant stream of email.

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.

Email reduces job satisfaction and stresses us out.

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.

Optimizing your company’s workflows boosts productivity and profits.

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.

Create better workflows for your employees and for yourself.

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.

Clear, structured production processes maximize attention capital.

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.

Choose the right coordination protocols by weighing their costs.

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.

Highly skilled workers shouldn’t get bogged down in the administrative weeds.

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.

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Worum geht es in A World Without Email?

A World Without Email (2021) presents a bold reimagining of the workplace, one in which the days of email and instant messaging are a thing of the past. It argues that while email may seem like an integral part of modern knowledge work, it’s actually making everyone less productive and less focused, not to mention miserable. The solution will require a major paradigm shift –⁠ but it will be well worth the effort.

Wer A World Without Email lesen sollte

Business leaders who want to root out inefficiencies in their organizations
Employees frustrated with the workplace culture of constant communication
Freelancers and entrepreneurs looking to improve their workflow

Über den Autor

Cal Newport is an associate computer-science professor at Georgetown University and the New York Times best-selling author of the books Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, among others. He created and runs the popular blog Study Hacks and regularly contributes pieces on technology and culture for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Wired.

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