UrbanUpdate

A couple of years ago, I decided to liberate myself from my inbox. My personal Gmail had become unusable. For every email containing something useful, there were six from every place I’d ever swiped my credit card through a Square. So I opened a new account, added my middle initial, and set up an auto-reply on my old Gmail that I intend to leave up until the end of time. Everyone who needs to reach me can and every spam robot can’t; I can rest easy in the serenity of being untethered to those 18,000 unread messages. Unfortunately, this inbox nirvana applies only to my personal email. No such workaround is possible for my professional inbox. There, my strategy is neither Inbox Zero nor pure anarchy, with tens of thousands left unread. I use my work inbox as a pseudo to-do list, which means leaving emails unread (26, as of this writing) and even, diabolically, adding to my own clutter by sending myself emails with reminders in the subject line. It feels like playing tennis against Serena Williams, except there are three of her and instead of tennis balls she has marketing emails.

It seems that I am not the only one who feels overwhelmed. In his new book, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload, computer scientist Cal Newport makes the case that the ballooning of our collective inboxes has helped create the perpetually harried state of the modern worker. In the most striking of the studies he cites, researchers found that the average worker had a total of 75 minutes every day that didn’t include a check-in on email or instant messaging—not 75 minutes in a row, just 75 minutes of total uninterrupted work, sprinkled throughout the day. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if humans were good at multitasking. But, as Newport lays out in the beginning of his book, we aren’t. The human brain isn’t wired to jump between “executing work tasks” and “managing an always-present, ongoing, and overloaded electronic conversation about those tasks.” It’s hard for us to constantly divide our attention between those two tracks. Obviously, we can do it, but it leaves our brain operating at reduced capacity—the cognitive equivalent of vaping while running a mile. Newport also argues that even not using email presents a different set of problems. We’re social animals, so even when we’re not in our inbox, we experience the psychological distress of knowing that it’s filling up with requests that we’re ignoring, a type of digital FOMO. Email, Newport says, is bad for business and for our souls.

This type of tech-inspired skepticism isn’t new for Newport. In 2016, he wrote Deep Work: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, about the importance of learning how to focus one task in a world where our attention was becoming increasingly fractured. That book was a hit, especially among tech executives and CEOs and other (less well-paid) people who spend a lot of their time thinking about how to manage their time. (I’m one of them.) It made Newport into something of a thought leader in the tech and personal-productivity world. But when I talk to Newport in mid-February, he says that Deep Work ultimately didn’t go far enough. He says he didn’t show enough interest in why we were so distracted, and that it was “really naive” to think we could just choose to be less so.

“There were these deep systemic reasons why we were so distracted, that could not be easily solved by simply, ‘Oh, we should just try to be better, have better inbox habits, and turn off notifications,’” he says, over the phone. “As I got into it, it just opened these huge, interesting overlapping worlds of research about questions like, why do we spend so much time in emails? Who decided that? What problem is that solving? How fundamental is that? How bad is it, really?”

Turns out that it’s pretty bad. Though, in 2021, it might seem like email is just one of the many (and least nefarious) tools in our well-stocked distraction arsenal, Newport believes it is our inboxes that bear most of the responsibility for creating the extremely busy—and, oftentimes, frustrating—way of working that defines white collar work today. He cites work from Gloria Mark, a UC Irvine professor who studies human-computer interaction. In studying how time was spent in the workplace from 1965 to 2006, Mark found that, as email became more widespread, workers somewhat predictably started spending much less time in meetings and more time at their desk. This shift had an unintended consequence. Whereas communication in a meeting takes place synchronously—employees talk back and forth for however long the meeting lasts—email messaging is asynchronous, and occurs randomly throughout the day. This is more convenient, but it also means that where workers once had uninterrupted stretches of work and uninterrupted stretches of communication, they now have short bursts of both. That staccato pattern of today’s work day—seven minutes of this, four minutes of this, thirteen minutes of that—can create a sense of neverending busyness. If that sounds like your typical schedule, Mark (and Newport) believe you have email to thank.

At the same time, it’s simply undeniable that email is a much more effective communication tool than what came before. (Perhaps you’ve throught “this could have been an email” as a meeting went around in circles.) This leads to what Newport identifies as a particular cognitive dissonance: “Rationally, we know email is a better way to deliver messages than the technologies it superseded: it’s universal, it’s fast, it’s essentially free,” he writes. “For anyone old enough to remember clearing jammed fax machines or struggling to open the red-thread ties of those worn memo folders, there’s no debate that the email elegantly solves real problems that once made office life really annoying. At the same time, however, we’re fed up with our inboxes, which seems to be as much a source of stress and overwork as they are a productivity boon. These dual reactions—admiration and detestation—are confusing and leave many knowledge workers in a state of frustrated resignation.”

Newport says that understanding what’s broken about office work starts with understanding what’s broken about our communication. It’s bigger than email. In fact, as provocatively titled as his book might be, Newport is not actually suggesting we completely get rid of email. Instead, it's about reimagining a world in which we aren’t swimming in communication quicksand. And if there were ever a time to reimagine modern work, Newport says, it’s right now. When Newport was invited to speak to businesses after Deep Work’s success, he was surprised to find that executives thought all they needed to was make a few quick tweaks. “There was this real lack of imagination,” he told me, around thinking critically about how we work, and whether email and Slack might actually be hurting employee productivity on a deeper level. But now we’re one year into being forced to radically reconsider what it looks like—and perhaps more willing to carry that rethinking into a post-pandemic world.

Though a form of limited electronic mail was used as early as the 1960’s, it wasn’t until the early 1990’s that it became ubiquitous in offices. Newport points to 1998's You've Got Mail as something of a watershed: the same year that film portrayed the now-quaint notion of logging into a mostly empty inbox and being excited by the idea of incoming mail, the word "spam" was added to Oxford English Dictionary. By the release of David Allen’s 2001 time-management bible Getting Things Done, people were already falling behind in the Sisyphean scramble up Inbox Mountain. Two decades later, we’re still climbing.

All of this happened largely by accident, according to Newport. Here he draws on a philosophy called technological determinism: the idea that human behavior is shaped by tech, often in unexpected ways. Consider the Facebook Like button. Originally designed by engineers as a way to tidy up the mess of comments saying “cool!” and “congrats!” below a user’s post by replacing it with a Like, it also created a concrete measure of social validation. Once engineers realized this made the platform exponentially more addictive, they began to build manipulation into the platforms’ design. The button didn’t just add more Likes to the world, the theory goes—it helped foment our cultural obsession with being liked.

A similar thing happened with email, Newport says. Email is a useful tool (it’s how I got in touch with him, after all). The problem is the unintended consequences of widespread office email: Employees simply started talking way more than was necessary.

Newport offers IBM in the 1980s as a case study. The company was early to replace phone messages and handwritten notes, and its engineers based their email server size on the amount of analog communication that happened daily. But within a few days, Newport writes, the server blew, because employees were communicating five to six times more than they had before email.

Newport makes a compelling case that this exponential increase in communication was inevitable. One of the main reasons is the asynchronous messaging mentioned earlier. You send an email when it’s convenient for you, and the other person responds when it’s convenient for them, forever ending phone tag. This is a great solution for a simple exchange, and a terrible solution for the nuanced, multi-layered discussions that happened in meetings before they were replaced with drawn out email threads. And that’s not even considering the discussions that don’t need to be had at all. But because it costs nothing to send an email—as opposed to even a low level of friction, like having to walk across the office or pick up a phone—we ask more things of more people. (In his book, Newport calls a version of this “obligation hot potato.”) On top of that, email dissolved the physical boundary of the office. You may not be able to meet with each other at 9 p.m., but you can email each other at 9 p.m. And if your boss emails you at 9 p.m., you should probably respond, because if she’s working, why aren’t you? This convergence of factors has made the last two decades of office work like standing in an increasingly crowded and rowdy bar. Offices might be silent while everyone communicates through their screens, but inside our minds, things have gotten noisier and noisier without anyone stopping to ask why—and when communication about work never ceases, it leaves little time to actually execute the work.

“The issue is that we tend to think of email as additive; that the office of 2021 is like the office of 1991 plus faster messages,” Newport writes. “The office of 2021 is not the office 1991 plus some extra capabilities; it’s instead a different office altogether—one in which work unfolds as a never-ending, ad hoc, unstructured flow of messages, a workflow I named the hyperactive hive mind.”

The pandemic has likely exacerbated this problem. Though email and Slack stay busy whether you’re in the office or not, even the most casual of office encounters—an aside in the hallway or a quick deskside chat to resolve a problem—have now been brought online. By further reducing the friction in what was already a pretty frictionless system, the hyperactive hive mind became even more hyperactive. Newport believes this is why he’s seen a turn against the idea of “productivity” during the pandemic, because people are reacting to a dialed-up hive mind which has us in a seemingly endless chain of Zoom-email-Zoom-Slack-email-Zoom.

“We're naturally associating, oh, this is what work is,” Newport told me. “And so to be more productive is just to do more of this—and this is terrible.”

Newport draws a parallel between this moment and the resistance around the turn of the twentieth century to ideas of hyper-efficiency put forth by engineer Frederick Taylor Winslow. Taylor, who became a leading consultant for manufacturing companies, painted workers as sources of productivity waiting to be wrung dry, ushering in dehumanizing labor practices in the name of efficiency. Newport says something similar could be happening right now, where “the knowledge work ‘factory’ is becoming more and more bleak as the hyperactive hive mind gets turned up.” But he believes it’s only by clearly seeing this hyperactivity as an unintended downstream consequence—something we haphazardly fell into, not something we intentionally designed—that we can take the first step towards a better way to work.

The last three chapters of Newport’s book suggest some potential solutions. Taken together, what they say is that companies need to institute better organizational processes and protocols for how work and communication about work happens; that workers, in general, need to be asked to do fewer administrative tasks in order to focus more intensely on what they’re good at; and that creating the conditions for this will be a pain in the ass in the short-term, but will create outsized returns on productivity and satisfaction in the long-term.

Though Newport includes case studies of a number of different companies, looking at the similarities between them gives a window into what he thinks better work might look like. They usually employ some sort of task board—that could be a literal board, a digital spreadsheet, or, more often, some similar type of project management software (like Asana, Trello, or Flow). These boards—rather than a steady stream of slacks and emails—determine what needs to get done for the day.In some cases, companies will gather in the morning for “review meetings'' to discuss what’s been accomplished since yesterday, what will happen today, and any obstacles standing in the way. The next morning, it begins again.

Newport applies these ideas to his own life. He uses a different physical board for each of his roles, as a researcher, a teacher, and the director of graduate studies. He also employs a separate board for any project that might last longer than a couple of weeks. Each Monday, he reviews the board, updates the cards in his vertical columns, and figures out what he needs to work on. He writes that scheduling, and sticking to, these “solo review meetings” is crucial to keeping the system working. Throughout the week, every email, phone call, or student drop-in that denotes a new task gets a card and onto the board it goes. When things arise that involve collaboration with his colleagues, he puts that in a “to discuss” column, and waits until the next meeting when they can discuss it. If he has five or six things to discuss, those are better served, he believes, with one efficient meeting, rather than five or six drawn out email threads.

This does indeed sound like a much more efficient and sane way to work. It also requires a fair amount of autonomy. As a tenured professor at Georgetown, Newport has it. He is also aware that not everyone else does, and says both in the introduction and the conclusion of the book that what he proposes is not a comprehensive solution that will work for everyone. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, how this might work for an executive assistant, or a breaking news reporter. (After all, the “hyperactive hive mind” might just be a way to describe being alive in an age where information develops at relentless speed and we’re all too online.) Still, Newport’s systems-oriented approach is far more promising than the standard personal productivity fare, which often relies on myopic hacks or strategies. If you’re trying to bail yourself out of an overflowing inbox, updating your inbox management strategy—deciding to pursue Inbox Zero, say—is like giving yourself a bigger bucket. Newport’s ideas are meant to stop the flood altogether.

It makes sense that, as a computer scientist, he believes stopping that flood is a matter of optimization. Better systems will lead to better results. But that might underestimate the complicating factor in all of this—one that Merlin Mann, the inventor of Inbox Zero, touched on back in 2016, after he’d given up on the very system he created. “Email is not a technical problem,” he said. “It’s a people problem. And you can’t fix people.”

Because email is a social platform, any attempt to fix email is going to be complicated by all of the messy social baggage you can’t optimize around. Newport rightly touches on one of these dynamics: the obligation to respond. We take it personally if someone doesn’t respond to our email. And because we take it personally, we also know that other people take it personally. So we carry the guilt of unread emails around like a psychic anvil. But there are other interpersonal complications at play. For instance, using better management software takes universal buy-in. It doesn’t matter how calming an employee finds Trello if they report to a boss whose preferred method of organization involves sending panicked Slacks at 10 p.m. And yes, we’d be better off using one efficient meeting to replace several, time consuming email threads, but we just don’t seem to be very good at knowing when an email thread should be a meeting, or a meeting should be an email.

For those with a lot of autonomy at work, Newport’s book has a number of useful and creative solutions to cut down on back-and-forth chatter. For everyone else, Newport’s call for better company-wide processes feel like the most hopeful path towards collective inbox sanity. But it requires a few rather large leaps of faith by the people with the power to make these decisions—your boss, and your boss's boss. They have to believe changing how their workplace communicates will boost worker productivity (or, less likely, that they care about employee well-being) enough to justify the upfront work of overhauling how everyone works. They themselves have to follow the new norms. And, if these changes do, as Newport predicts, help workers be more productive in less time, they can't then use that as an excuse to further exploit employees by asking them to create more value with that extra time without paying them more. (Somewhat optimistically, Newport thinks recruitment will act as a hedge against this: as companies compete to hire highly-skilled workers, being able to advertise a sane workplace and a healthy work-life balance will outweigh the benefits of wringing employees dry.)

There are a few cases, in addition to the ones in Newport book, that offer hope this might be possible. Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton, told me he worked with a management consultant firm called Vynamic. They employ a “ZZZmail” policy—no emails on nights and weekends. “You can check it and you can send if you want, but they make it clear you’re not going to get credit for it, and people might even make fun of you for not having a life,” says Grant. Another person I spoke to was Jason Fried, the CEO of Basecamp, author of It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, and inventor of a new email platform called HEY. He said that one of the fundamental tenets at Basecamp is that there should never be an expectation of an immediate response to an email, unless there’s an emergency. “An emergency should happen once or twice a year,” he says. An appreciation for the simple act of waiting is a cultural thing, he says, “that we have to preserve and protect in order to keep people sane.”

Patience. Sanity. These are not the hallmarks of modern day work. That it seems naively optimistic that they might be shouldn’t be a criticism of Newport’s ideas so much as a knock against our current work culture. Plus, it’d be just as naive to think that, in the three decades since email became widely used in offices, we’ve figured out the optimal way to engage with it. At the very least, Newport’s book is successful in providing a lens through which we can better examine what many of us sense is a somewhat maddening way to work.

One year ago, it would’ve seemed outrageous to suggest that, in the near future, we’d all be working remotely. And yet here we are, with big companies like Spotify and Microsoft offering remote work as a permanent option. A year from now, who’s to say what work might look like, and how we might better communicate? Well, the people who’ve always had the say: CEOs, executives, and those with power. In other words, here’s to hoping your boss picks up a copy of Newport’s book.

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By Clay Skipper

Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQTechnology