Review:
A World Without Email, by Cal Newport
| Publisher: |
Portfolio/Penguin |
| Copyright: |
2021 |
| ISBN: |
0-525-53657-4 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
264 |
A World Without Email is the latest book by computer science
professor and productivity writer Cal Newport. After a detour to comment
on the drawbacks of social media in
Digital Minimalism, Newport is back to writing about focus and
concentration in the vein of
Deep Work.
This time, though, the topic is workplace structure and collaborative
process rather than personal decisions.
This book is a bit hard for me to review because I spoiled myself for the
contents by listening to a lot of Newport's podcast, where he covers the
same material. I therefore didn't enjoy it as much as I otherwise would
have because the ideas were familiar. I recommend the book over the
podcast, though; it's tighter, more coherent, and more comprehensive.
The core contention of this book is that knowledge work (roughly, jobs
where one spends significant time working on a computer processing
information) has stumbled into a superficially tempting but inefficient
and psychologically harmful structure that Newport calls the hyperactive
hive mind. This way of organizing work is a local maxima: it feels
productive, it's flexible and very easy to deploy, and most minor changes
away from it make overall productivity worse. However, the incentive
structure is all wrong. It prioritizes quick responses and coordination
overhead over deep thinking and difficult accomplishments.
The characteristic property of the hyperactive hive mind is free-flowing,
unstructured communication between co-workers. If you need something from
someone else, you ask them for it and they send it to you. The "email" in
the title is not intended literally; Slack and related instant messaging
apps are even more deeply entrenched in the hyperactive hive mind than
email is. The key property of this workflow is that most collaborative
work is done by contacting other people directly via ad hoc, unstructured
messages.
Newport's argument is that this workflow has multiple serious problems,
not the least of which is that it makes us miserable. If you have read
his previous work, you will correctly expect this to tie into his concept
of deep work. Ad hoc, unstructured communication creates a constant
barrage of unimportant small tasks and interrupts, most of which require
several asynchronous exchanges before your brain can stop tracking the
task. This creates constant context-shifting, loss of focus and
competence, and background stress from ever-growing email inboxes, unread
message notifications, and the semi-frantic feeling that you're forgetting
something you need to do.
This is not an original observation, of course. Many authors have
suggested individual ways to improve this workflow: rules about how often
to check one's email, filtering approaches, task managers, and other
personal systems. Newport's argument is that none of these individual
approaches can address the problem due to social effects. It's all well
and good to say that you should unplug from distractions and ignore
requests while you concentrate, but everyone else's workflow assumes that
their co-workers are responsive to ad hoc requests. Ignoring this social
contract makes the job of everyone still stuck in the hyperactive hive
mind harder. They won't appreciate that, and your brain will not be able
to relax knowing that you're not meeting your colleagues' expectations.
In Newport's analysis, the necessary solution is a comprehensive redesign
of how we do knowledge work, akin to the redesign of factory work that
came with the assembly line. It's a collective problem that requires a
collective solution. In other industries, organizing work for efficiency
and quality is central to the job of management, but in knowledge work
(for good historical reasons) employees are mostly left to organize their
work on their own. That self-organization has produced a system that
doesn't require centralized coordination or decisions and provides a lot
of superficial flexibility, but which may be significantly inferior to a
system designed for how people think and work.
Even if you find this convincing (and I think Newport makes a good case),
there are reasons to be suspicious of corporations trying to make people
more productive. The assembly line made manufacturing much more
efficient, but it also increased the misery of workers so much that
Henry Ford had to offer substantial raises to retain workers. As one of
Newport's knowledge workers, I'm not enthused about that happening to my
job.
Newport recognizes this and tries to address it by drawing a distinction
between the workflow (how information moves between workers) and the work
itself (how individual workers solve problems in their area of expertise).
He argues that companies need to redesign the former, but should leave the
latter to each worker. It's a nice idea, and it will probably work in
industries like tech with substantial labor bargaining power. I'm more
cynical about other industries.
The second half of the book is Newport's specific principles and
recommendations for designing better workflows that don't rely on
unstructured email. Some of this will be familiar (and underwhelming) to
anyone who works in tech; Newport recommends ticket systems and thinks
agile, scrum, and kanban are pointed in the right direction. But there
are some other good ideas in here, such as embracing specialization.
Newport argues (with some evidence) that the drastic reduction in
secretarial jobs, on the grounds that workers with computers can do the
same work themselves, was a mistake. Even with new automation, this
approach increased the range of tasks required in every other job. Not
only was this a drain on the time of other workers, it caused more context
switching, which made everyone less efficient and undermined work quality.
He argues for reversing that trend: where the work cannot be automated,
hire more support workers and more specialized workers in general, stop
expecting everyone to be their own generalist admin, and empower support
workers to create better systems rather than using the hyperactive hive
mind model to answer requests.
There's more here, ranging from specifics of how to develop a structured
process for a type of work to the importance of enabling sustained
concentration on a task. It's a less immediately actionable book than
Newport's previous writing, but I welcome the partial shift in focus to
more systemic issues. Newport continues to be relentlessly apolitical,
but here it feels less like he's eliding important analysis and more like
he thinks the interests of workers and good employers are both served by
the approach he's advocating.
I will warn that Newport leans heavily on evolutionary psychology in his
argument that the hyperactive hive mind is bad for us. I think he has
some good arguments about the anxiety that comes with not responding to
requests from others, but I'm not sure intrusive experiments on
spectacularly-unusual remnant hunter-gatherer groups, who are treated like
experimental animals, are the best way of making that case. I realize
this isn't Newport's research, but I think he could have made his point
with more directly relevant experiments.
He also continues his obsession with the superiority of in-person
conversation over written communication, and while he has a few good
arguments, he has a tendency to turn them into sweeping generalizations
that are directly contradicted by, well, my entire life. It would be nice
if he were more willing to acknowledge that it's possible to express deep
emotional nuance and complex social signaling in writing; it simply
requires a level of practice and familiarity (and shared vocabulary)
that's often missing from the workplace.
I was muttering a lot near the start of this book, but thankfully those
sections are short, and I think the rest of his argument sits on a
stronger foundation.
I hope Newport continues moving in the direction of more systemic
analysis. If you enjoyed
Deep Work, you will probably find
A
World Without Email interesting. If you're new to Newport, this is not a
bad place to start, particularly if you have influence on how
communication is organized in your workplace. Those who work in tech will
find some bits of this less interesting, but Newport approaches the topic
from a different angle than most agile books and covers a broader range if
ideas.
Recommended if you like reading this sort of thing.
Rating: 7 out of 10
Release 0.6.29 of the 
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