Review: A World Without Email, by Cal Newport

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Tue Nov 30 21:08:47 PST 2021


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

Reviewed: 2021-11-30

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-525-53657-4.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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