In this post, I’ll talk about the concepts inside Cal Newport’s book, A World Without Email.

I’ll discuss these ideas in the book:

• Why constant communication / emails are bad.
• What the anecdote for this plight is.

You Can’t Multitask

It’s very important for you to understand this: you can’t multitask. It’s not possible; it’s not how our brains our built.

Don’t believe me? Try listening to 2 podcasts at the same time. You’ll find that the best you can do is that you’re focusing on one podcast for a few seconds, and then the other podcast for a few seconds, and trying to piece together what was said. That’s not multitasking. That’s just switching tasks every few seconds.

The book talks about an experiment where: 1) subjects were given enough time to solve a puzzle. And 2) subjects were not given enough time to solve a puzzle. Both groups of subjects were then given a subsequent task (reviewing resumes and recalling the details in them).

The second group did significantly worse than the first group. This is because once we ‘finish’ a puzzle, we’re mentally done with it and can focus on the next task. When subjects don’t finish the puzzle, part of their brain is still working on the puzzle, consciously or subconsciously. They get distracted and they underperform on the subsequent task.

In other words: brains don’t work properly when there’s no mental closure of what it was doing before.

Emails, instant messages, and other tech that enables constant communications (distractions) puts your mind in a never-ending cycle of handicapped thinking exhibited in the second group.

The Hyperactive Hive Mind

In the distant past, the internet didn’t exist, and communication was slow.

Once the internet did exist, we invented email. In theory, email is great, because it allowed for instantaneous communication. Additionally, email is great because it doesn’t require both people to be available at the same time to send a communication (like a call would).

I could send Alice or Bob 100 emails, and then they can reply to all 100 of them at their convenience.

Except…it isn’t convenient to have to reply to 100 emails.

Emails have enabled a couple things:

1. The ability to communicate at an extremely high frequency.
2. The ability to contact many people at the same time, with the same message, hoping that one of them will answer your message.

Large volume of communication + simultaneously communication with tons of people creates what the author calls a hyperactive hive mind. A “hive mind” because tons of people will read/write the same email messages. Ergo, all the minds are ‘in sync’, like a beehive. And “hyperactive” due to immense ease of high volume communication.

We created email in hopes to increase productivity. But counterintuitively, nothing is more detrimental to productivity because the convenience of communication is exchanged for focus.

And focus is where real productivity comes. As you’ll see, a world without email is a world without 80% of the BS that normally comes in a workplace.

A World Without Email = A Thoughtful, Relaxed World

Thoughtfulness is more valuable than responsiveness.

The obligation to be responsive to every single little thing is very stressful and tiring. It creates a background anxiety akin to ‘did I miss a message while I was on vacation’?

Emails’ content tend to be low quality in nature. Even if you cooperate and write the most efficient emails, you’ll converge to writing crappy emails because nobody else will.

And if most of your work is just writing / responding to emails, it really means your work mostly consists of hand-crafting spam. This is not fulfilling work.

A world without email means more time to be actually thoughtful and conquer difficult intellectual challenges by your sheer will and focus. Things that require focus and intellect / novel solutions are actually valuable because it’s very hard to automate.

Sending emails provide 0 value to the world, because sPaM is eAsY to autoMATe.

So, the next time you need to have a trade-off between thoughtfulness vs. interrupting your train of thought and being ‘responsive’ to a shitty co-worker asking a very stupid question, choose the former. It’s more fulfilling that way.

You’ll waste less time at work as you’ll be much more productive than your co-workers. Let your lazy dumbass co-workers can work themselves to death and be burnt out. And you can achieve more output than them, while stopping work at a reasonable time every day.

Case study 1: The book talks about George Marshall, who basically ran World War 2 operations for the US. Seems like a stressful job.

Did he have to work overtime? Nope.

He’d always leave office at 5:30PM because he thought it’s more important to recover/relax than to grind himself into dust. And he can only be productive and think deeply on how to conduct the war by not wasting time / being distracted being responsive to requests.

In summary: Emails = high volume of low quality information = a lot of artificial work writing them / responding to them = great way to permanently overwork yourself while delivering very poor quality work. In an endless, vicious cycle. It’s basically the least effective way to work.

Conversely: A world without email = low volume of high quality information = focused, yet not an overwhelming amount of work = great way to do work that’s fulfilling and meaningful. In an endless, upward spiral. It’s one of the most satisfying ways of doing work.

A Case Study Of A Company Living In A World Without Email

These excerpts are from the book, and show that it’s possible for a company to operate (and much more effectively) when they nix email and slack (a direct messaging service).

This forced me to take a step back and ask what we’re actually doing,” he said. “To ask, is this communicating doing more harm than good?” Sean and his cofounder decided to make some radical changes. They shut down their Slack servers for good and relegated email to a tool used mainly to coordinate with entities outside the company.

Sean divided the day into a morning block and an afternoon block. At the beginning of each block, his team gathers … [and] “covers three points: what they did yesterday, what they are doing today, and what issues they’re having or blocks they’re experiencing,” Sean told me. “It lasts fifteen minutes max.”

On the client side, the company now includes a section in their contract that spells out exactly how they will (and implicitly will not) interact with the client. For most clients, this means a regular phone call to provide updates and answer questions that is immediately followed up with a written document that captures everything discussed. Sean’s cofounder, who manages these relationships, was terrified that their clients would be irate to learn that their access was being reduced. This fear was unfounded—the clients turned out to appreciate the clear expectations. “They are absolutely much happier,” Sean said.

In other words: They got rid of all the distracting software (slack and internal facing email), and substituted inferior communication with chunks of 15 minute meetings, twice a day. Then they got to work.

Since clients want to know things, they substituted constant back-and-forth tagging with clients, with again, batched communication. They just have regular Q&A phone calls with clients and sends a recap of the meeting in written form. This is sufficient and their clients are much happier too (and I’d assume the employees are more fulfilled as well).

A World With Email Is A World Without Happiness

The book quotes a bunch of studies where the conclusion is simple: email rapes your mental and physical health. Here’s one of them:

“high information and communication technology demands” (translation: a need to be constantly connected) was associated with “suboptimal” health outcomes. This trend persisted even after they adjusted the statistics for many potentially confounding factors, including age, sex, socioeconomic status, health behavior, BMI, job strain, and social support.”

A missed email triggers a primitive stress response that can’t be rationally reasoned away. You can logically understand most emails are pointless, but having tons of unread emails will trigger a stress response you can’t control. Over time, accumulated unnecessary stress will be bad for you.

TL;DR: Emails creates a lot of background / unnecessary, and uncontrollable social anxiety.

Emails Make People Lazy

Tools like email almost completely eliminate the effort required—in terms of both time and social capital—to ask a question or delegate a task.

I believe this wholeheartedly. A lot of my coworkers don’t bother googling things before asking. For them, it’s OK not to read the documentation and just ‘ask a coworker’ because ‘there are no stupid questions’. But I disagree 100%. There are stupid questions. And they’re questions you can easily research and figure out the answer yourself.

Stupid questions is just a symptom of lazy thinking. And things like Slack, MS Teams, and emails enable lazy thinking because it’s so easy to just ask a question. And the counterparty is socially obligated to answer you. It’s the culture in the company I’m currently working at to tattle on the person, to the person’s manager, if they’re not responding to you quick enough.

There are a couple ways to counter this type of laziness, and that’s to add both time and social friction to the equation. This way, only questions that are sincerely important and well thought out will make it to you.

One way to add time to the equation is to batch communications, like in the case study above. Simply have office hours, which limits the downside on your time for answering stupid questions.

Office hours creates less stress because there’s definitive mental closure on the communication. You won’t be afraid that you missed something or have to deal with some consequences of missing a message, because the office hours / window of communication was agreed upon ahead of time.

Batched communication also allows you to be productive for most of your day, allowing you to actually finish your work (i.e. meet deadlines) on time, resulting is even less stress.

If you work at a company like mine, where proposing office hours is pushed back heavily from the higher ups, you should look for a different company immediately. The culture will indirectly have a detrimental effect on your health (see quotes above to see why).

The second thing you can do is add friction to communication. For example, force the stupid question to be asked in the status sync-up instead of an ad-hoc message. Or have them book a separate, in-person meeting with you to go through all the questions. This’ll help you you’re your sanity and add such a barrier that they might just drop the question.

…the vital question I dashed off in a quick Slack message suddenly becomes less vital when asking it requires me to go interrupt what you’re doing and confront that look of annoyance on your face. I might drop it or just handle it myself. Many other tasks would probably get consolidated into more reasonable chunks. What used to unfold over a few dozen ad hoc messages might become a larger discussion at a regular status meeting. This is slightly more annoying in the moment, as you now have to keep track of things you need help with until the next meeting, but everyone ends up much less distracted.

Personally, I try to just delay answering any questions for at least a few hours. Most of the time, people resolve it themselves. For example:

• 1:13PM from stupid co-worker: <low-value question>
• 1:25PM I read the message, and ignore it. I’ll only respond if they annoy me again with the question.
• 1:38PM from stupid co-worker: nvm I figured it out.

Other words: adding time / friction to the comms process forces your coworkers to also start living in a world without email.

Constant Communication Is Misery

One of the first studies in this area was the now famous work of a nineteenth-century French agricultural engineer, Maximilien Ringelmann, who demonstrated that when you dedicate more people to the task of pulling a rope, the average force exerted by each individual decreases—leading to diminishing returns as group sizes grow. Though the physical task of rope pulling is not that relevant to the modern knowledge sector, Ringelmann’s work proved influential, as it introduced the general idea that increasing the size of a team doesn’t necessarily increase its effectiveness in direct proportion.

Email is a communication device where one punts the responsibility to everyone else in the email thread. It’s very easy to ‘hide effort’ in plain sight when you have 30 people in a thread, unless someone tags you specifically.

Email enables a bad actor to be lazy, and makes everyone else miserable because either 1) the work is punted onto them, or 2) they have a constant stream of irrelevant information they can’t miss out on, causing undue stress.

Question “standard practices.” Slavery was a standard practice. Doesn’t meant it’s good. Likewise, email / MS Teams / Slack is ‘de facto’ communication. Conforming is a very strong primal instinct. And conforming means you won’t come up with better workflows. Ergo, you’re naturally inclined to use tools that encourage you to be lazy, because you can hide behind feigned confusion when you can actually figure shit out for yourself.

And maybe you’re one of the good ones. And you start out by wanting to do good work and figuring things out for yourself, and thinking deeply.

But who in their right mind would do good work in the long term? Emails + Instant Messaging is a huge game of Prisoner’s Dilemma. The people who ‘cooperate’ by being helpful will get overloaded with work and responsibility while being paid the same. They’ll also get more pressure and stress from their managers for never delivering enough. Because you’re one of the few people who are productive, they’ll extract every ounce of effort from you until you stop being productive, or switch jobs (in which case the vicious cycle will begin again).

So, why not be the lazy guy who blames everyone else when people can’t ‘answer your doubts’? In a team of many people, the game theory equilibrium devolves into everyone spamming each other with shallow, pointless questions. It’s a circle jerk of ineffectiveness, shallow thinking, and laziness.

A World Without Email: Systematic Solutions

Above, the book proposed a couple of manual solutions:

• Add friction / time to communications.
• Use office hours to batch communications.

Here, we’ll go through some systematic solutions so people are enabled by design to do good work, as opposed to being a de facto spammer.

Task / Communications Management

Trello or some task tracker like Jira, or Asana, or ClickUp is great to avoid shallow communications.

You create new ‘boards’ or ‘topics’ per task. And new developments on tasks can be updated on the task’s threads with comments. Someone working on the task can just check any updates on comments when they feel like it. Unlike email, it isn’t a constant stream of irrelevant messages. All messages in the task is specifically relevant to the task, because that’s how the task trackers are designed.

This decouples having to respond to emails / messages constantly and allows the worker to pick and choose 1) what to work on, 2) what to respond to, and 3) when they even want to read comments / respond to things.

A Kanban board works as well. A Kanban board is basically Trello. You can drag/drop tasks from one column to the next, indicating its status. This allows you to visually grasp all that you have to do, everything you’ve committed to doing right now. It’s very satisfying to use a Kanban board because:

1. You’ve captured everything you need to do, so you won’t be afraid you’re missing anything.
2. You’ll have clear mental clarity (and therefore mental “closure”) of what’s high priority vs. low priority.
3. You’ll be clear on what you’re committed to doing currently, and more importantly, what you’ll punt / avoid / do later / abandon. This prevents overwhelm (more on this later).

There’s many ways to organize a Kanban board. You can have a column per priority (i.e. low, medium, high, urgent). You can have tiered boards where a set of boards describe very high level objects, and they link to a bunch of boards that describe more details.

It’s up to your preference, and you should pick one that works for you. Starting out simple is better though.

Here’s an example of a Kanban format that could increase your productivity massively while keeping you sane:

The Personal Kanban solution to this problem is to organize this mess of expectations with a personal task board. Benson suggests using three columns. The first is labeled options, and it’s where you arrange all your obligations into neat stacks of Post-it notes: one note per task. “Now we’ve taken that horrible mass of work and turned it into a very cognitively pleasing rectangle.” The second column is labeled doing. This is where you move the Post-its corresponding to the tasks that you’re actually working on right now. The key to this column—and a big part of the secret sauce of Kanban systems in general—is that you should maintain a strict limit on how many tasks you’re allowed to be doing at any given time. In Kanban-speak, this is called the works in progress (WIP) limit. In the video, Benson sets this limit to three.

The most important takeaway here is to set a ‘work in progress’ limit. This prevents overwhelm and gives you a realistic way of actually completing your tasks. Juggling a dozen tasks is not a good way to do good quality work, and creates unnecessary stress: you’ll work slower, and more ineffectively. In other words, limiting the tasks at hand allows you to increase the quality and quantity of your work.

Another huge must-do: when you Kanban or have some task management system, you must maintain it if you want to live in a world without email.

Spend 5 minutes a week reviewing it so that you have 100% clarity on what you need to do, and what can be discarded. Avoiding this simple upkeep makes you distrust the task management system, and you’ll revert back to email/spam world.

These tools allow you to streamline and make your own internal workflow more efficient. Below are some suggestions on how to handle external factors more efficiently.

Automation And Pareto’s Principle

Automating things is a high leverage activity. Example:

• Suppose you ran a business selling tangible goods. Instead of responding to every refund request, just have them fill out a self-service return form, where upon completion they’ll automatically get a return label. Boom. No more stress dealing with frustrated customers. And the customer will be happier to with a streamlined return process as opposed to having to wait for an email reply. If the returned package arrives damaged, take a picture for evidence and don’t refund them.
• Suppose you work in a corporate environment. Add an autoresponder saying you only check emails between X and Y hours of the day, and they should not expect a response until those ‘office hours.’ This sets the expectation correctly and your manager won’t breathe down your neck, thinking you’re not doing any work (except if you have my manager who prioritizes pointless communication above all else).

Seemingly complicated to implement, you might already be ‘automating’ some thing in your work already. For example, batching meetings is a way to ‘automate’ communication and schedule.

Having regular 15 minute (maximum) scrum meetings and office hours organizes what was previously chaotic communication into something ordered and predictable. Also: automating your schedule like this means your schedule won’t be frantic and you’ll be 100% confident that you’ll have some time slot to do real, important work.

Ask yourself: what are some other things you could inconvenience yourself with upfront to automate, so that you save yourself a lot of chronic pain down the line?

Speaking of pain, you should also ask yourself: what’s causing you 80% of your pain but only accounting for 20% of your productivity? An example could be a group of clients that are only responsible for 20% of your revenue, but causing 80% of your business headaches and taking up 80% of your time. Get rid of them. You’ll survive, and be happier.

Shedding the “80% pain” is good for 2 things:

1. Frees up roughly 80% of your time so you can produce roughly the same results, with a lot less stress.
2. Gives you the optionality to reinvest that time to find higher-leverage things to do so you can keep expanding your business / health / etc.

Dealing With The Worst Case: Not Being Able To Avoid A World Without Email

The world’s not perfect and no matter how much of the above you do, you’ll still need to do some useless / shallow work. Your company culture (like mine) might just not allow you to live in a world without email, or constant distractions.

And there’s no way for you to avoid them.

The solution’s simple: just batch it, as alluded to from the office hours above. You might also batch time in terms of days, instead. As an example:

Do those useless / mundane things to keep your shit manager happy on Mondays/Wednesdays and do good work the rest of the week.

It’s up to you whether you want to carve out some days to do useless things, or whether you want to carve out some hours per day to do so. Some find the former’s more effective for them, and some find that the latter’s more effective.

Wrapping Up A World Without Email

I’ll paraphrase some quotes from the book. But the following sums up my thoughts on why I think emails and spamming is a very bad way to work, and to live life.

In business and in life, good isn’t the same as easy. And fulfilling work isn’t the same as convenient work. Most people want to feel like they’re creating something important. And if most of your hours are spent responding to dumb questions, or asking dumb questions like ‘I have doubts about this’ – you’re optimizing only for easiness and convenience.

Spamming people and responding to spam is a very bad way to work, and to live life. You won’t learn anything. And you won’t be challenged intellectually. Constant, low effort communication is unfulfilling. It’s a great way to atrophy your mind and disengage with life in general. You’re essentially doing something that a very dumb computer program can do: repetitive, menial, pointless actions.

This endless repetition of low-effort communication generally leads to severe mental anguish, but it’s not the same type of mental anguish where you know you’re marching towards a goal – it’s the type of mental anguish where you feel like you’re wasting your life away and you’re trapped in an endless, unproductive loop and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s a very shallow, sad way to live life.

All these ~4000 words to say: Go live a world without email. Go read the docs or Google it before asking me stupid questions and then telling my manager when I don’t respond within 2 hours – get a life, you fuck.