Publisher's summary
"Modern knowledge workers communicate constantly. Their days are defined by a relentless barrage of incoming messages and back-and-forth digital conversations—a state of constant, anxious chatter in which nobody can disconnect, and so nobody has the cognitive bandwidth to perform substantive work. Humans are simply not wired for constant digital communication.
We have become so used to an inbox-driven workday that it’s hard to imagine alternatives. But they do exist. Drawing on years of investigative reporting, author and computer science professor Cal Newport makes the case that our current approach to work is broken, then lays out a series of principles and concrete instructions for fixing it. In A World without Email, he argues for a workplace in which clear processes—not haphazard messaging—define how tasks are identified, assigned and reviewed. Each person works on fewer things (but does them better), and aggressive investment in support reduces the ever-increasing burden of administrative tasks. Above all else, important communication is streamlined, and inboxes and chat channels are no longer central to how work unfolds."
When did you first begin to feel overwhelmed at work? Reader, your mileage may vary; it’s even possible that your answer is that you don’t, personally, feel overwhelmed at work. In which case, lucky you! But many people do feel as if their working lives are a firehose, a hamster wheel, or, at least, a bit much sometimes.
For many of us, that sense of fatigue dates back some years — before recent geopolitical upheavals, before the COVID-19 pandemic and the Zoomification of many jobs, and even before the rise of smartphones and social media. Computer scientist and popular author Cal Newport argues that our pervasive sense of burnout goes further back than that — back to the advent of email. Email made communicating easier. That sounds good, and, in many ways, it is good. But when something gets easier, we do it more. And now, well… We do it a lot.
To review Cal Newport’s A World Without Email (2021) this year, just after Newport released Slow Productivity (2024), is a little like reviewing Taylor Swift’s album Evermore (2020) even as The Tortured Poets Department (2024) only just dropped. The comparison between Cal Newport and Taylor Swift is invoked advisedly; Swift’s global community of fans may be several orders of magnitude larger than Newport’s following, but the latter (shall we call them Newporties?) might well rival the Swifties in passionate devotion. The average Cal Newport reader tends to be positively evangelistic about Newport’s ideas, which help people find not just success, but also sanity, in their work and personal lives, in a technologically complex world. Still, this reviewer (already a steadfast fan of, return reader of, and constant babbler about Newport’s 2016 book Deep Work) decided to read the 2021 Newport work before moving on to this year’s bestseller — partially just to take things in order, but also because the 2021 topic seems more squarely aligned with the interests of Leading Edge. Slow Productivity, like Deep Work, seems oriented most toward the individual, whereas A World Without Email has a lot to say about teams, team culture, and how our communication practices affect the workplace experience.
Here are three key takeaways:
1. Beware the “hyperactive hive mind.”
If we don’t take control of our communications and admin practices, they will take control of us — subjecting us to a never-ending barrage of pings, pop-ups, and interruptions. This always-connected, constantly switching between conversations, rapid-back-and-forth style of communication has become a default environment in knowledge work, and Newport refers to it as “the hyperactive hive mind.”
“To be fair,” writes Newport, “the hyperactive hive mind is not obviously a bad idea. Among the benefits of this workflow is the fact that it's simple and incredibly adaptive.” And yet, “although natural,” he argues, it “has turned out to be spectacularly ineffective… This constant interaction with the hive mind… requires that you frequently switch your attention… [C]ontext switches, even if brief, induce a heavy cost in terms of mental energy—reducing cognitive performance and creating a sense of exhaustion”.
Newport has many ideas for alternatives to the hyperactive hive mind, and he freely admits that all of them are to some degree, inconvenient, unnatural, counterintuitive, complicated, and difficult. Yet, he persuasively argues, the hyperactive hive mind, precisely by means of its ease, lulls us into accepting enormous hidden costs; achieving better mental health (along with better productivity) is a prize for which it’s well worth paying those more obvious costs in terms of convenience, time, and simplicity. “Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term,” Newport notes, “but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.”
2. Distinguish between “work” and “workflow”.
Have you ever finished a long day at work — a day full of Zoom meetings, Slack messages, email, and updating your Asana/ClickUp/Monday/Trello/Notion/calendar/bullet journal/stack of Post-its, only to feel as if you spent eight hours working, but didn’t get any honest-to-goodness work done? You may be right. You may have spent all those hours not working but managing workflow. Both of these activities are important for knowledge work jobs, but they are different tasks.
As Newport observes, the hyperactive hive mind, with its constant interruptions, will never naturally suggest that it is time to stop doing workflow and start working. Time for concentrated, high-value work (“deep work”) needs to be set aside and protected. Yet, Newport argues, workflow management isn’t mere fluff — it is the vital work of coordinating projects across teams and his point isn’t to disparage it; to the contrary, he argues that workflow management can also be done more effectively and efficiently when it is systemized and taken seriously as something worth doing well.
The biggest enemies of good work and good workflow, Newport writes, are mid-context attention switching and communication overload. Minimize these, and we’ll improve our work, our workflows, and our work experience.
3. Workflow change can’t be top-down; teams need buy-in and some measure of control.
Change — even good change — is just hard. “Imagine you want to make a major change to your own or your organization's workflow,” writes Newport. “How can you avoid the inconveniences associated with this experimentation? You can't. You must instead adjust your mindset so that you no longer fear these annoyances.” For one person, a mindset shift can be hard enough. But to lead a mindset shift on a team is a challenge on another level. As Newport observes, “people don’t like changes they can’t control.”
Newport breaks this challenge into three steps:
- Education — Help the team understand why change is needed and why the inconvenience will be worth it.
- Buy-in — Generate specific ideas for new processes from discussion within the team (not by imposing them from the top down).
- Adjustment — Create easy methods for improving the new workflow processes when issues arise. “In practice, you might be surprised by how few changes are actually suggested. It's the ability to make changes that matters…”
The book has far more detail, of course, than this review can capture — including nitty-gritty taskboard tactics; why office hours can be better than asynchronous messaging; why changes to your personal (non-team) workflow habits should be executed quietly, without announcement; and why phone calls are better than text messages to serve as emergency backup systems (texts could be a path to backsliding into hive-mind mode, whereas people will be hesitant to call each other unless truly needed).
Whether you want to work with your team to improve collaboration together, or make personal changes in your workflow that help you perform better and simply breathe again, A World Without Email is worth your time.
About the Author
Seth Chalmer is Senior Director, Communications at Leading Edge.
