Speaker 1: It's great to welcome back to the show today, Cal Newport, who's a computer
science professor at Georgetown University, author of several books and most recently,
which I just finished, a world without email, reimagining work in an age of communication
overload. Karl, it's always great to have you on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm happy to be back. Speaker 1: So in the book, A World Without
Email, one of the things you explain is that many jobs, even jobs that don't really have
to do with email in terms of what the main impetus of the job is, have become 20, 30,
40, sometimes even more than half, managing an inbox, responding to emails in a way that
is anywhere from relatively to completely unproductive. You talk about the history of
this, and it's really interesting because when email was introduced to office culture,
you didn't just have office culture and work culture as it existed with the addition of
email. It completely changed the way that work worked, so to speak. Can you talk a little
bit about that first? Speaker 3: This is what caught us off guard
in the world of work that when we brought email into our offices, which we did predominantly
in the first half of the nineteen nineties, that's when it really spread aggressively
through offices. We did so for very narrow, pragmatic reasons. We were replacing fax machines.
We were replacing voicemail. We were replacing memos like, great, this tool is better at
those purposes than the existing technology we were using once email actually got into
office as though it had an unexpected side effect, which is people began using it as
the primary means by which they coordinated or collaborated. We introduced a workflow
in which everything began to be worked out with back and forth informal ad hoc messaging
that didn't scale. And soon we found ourselves overwhelmed with all of the back and forth
messages required to support this workflow where everything happens through back and
forth messages. And so really that workflow, not the tool itself, not the way that it replaced
fax machines, not the way replace voice mail, but this workflow where we began to work everything
out with back and forth messages, that's what created the overload problem that we're all
suffering from today. Speaker 1: To some degree, it seems almost
like it's become background in this particular sense. My mom also is a college professor
and she's been teaching for decades at this point. And I asked her in preparation for
this interview, I'd go back like in the in the 90s before you were so dependent on email
for communication with your department and communication with students and so on. What
consumed your day? Because roughly you're working the same amount of time, but now a
ton of the time is email. Clearly, the email time now was for something else before she
had no idea, like in other words, it's sort of crept in in such a way where she agrees.
I work roughly the same amount. I didn't used to do the email thing. Now I do. I don't remember
what I did before. Is is that surprising to you or does that make sense?
Speaker 3: Well, I think we should not underestimate the degree to which this workflow in which
now we have to tend these inboxes all day is really actually putting its hand down firmly
on economic growth. And looking at a college professor is a it's a good bottle case study
because it's a it's a job that has been basically the same for two hundred years. And in my
book I talked about my grandfather was the great example, a very successful professor,
endowed chair at Rice University that went on to be the provost of a theological seminary,
incredibly productive, such an effective teacher that even to this day I still hear from his
former students. He had such a big impact on his life. He never owned a computer until
after he retired. I'm thinking his objectives are no different than my objectives as a professor
today to do research and the teach well, and he had no email. And yet today we'll spend
like your your mom was talking about 50 to 60 percent of our time on email. It's a real
issue. So what is getting squeezed out here? I think productive output. I think the reason
why non-industrial productivity metrics have been stagnant for decades, even as we put
all of this innovation into very rapid, low friction, communication and computation, technology
is because we are moving more and more of our time and extending this communication.
And I think what we have to do to compensate for that is we're adding extra work off the
books. We're working early in the morning. We're working in the evening. We're basically
trying to just keep productivity stable by adding a lot more hours into the mix. It's
a huge issue and it's one I think we're ignoring Speaker 1: one approach to the issue. And
some of your past writing has sort of dealt with this. And there's many other people who
write about this is about techniques and strategies, train others to expect that you check email
once a day or at the beginning, at the end or three times a week or whatever. And over
time, that's going to help everybody or write your emails in a way where you are providing
the other person everything they need to complete the task rather than communicating the minimum,
which then creates a back and forth over a week for something that a five minute phone
call might be able to fix. That's one approach like the very nitty gritty logistical approach
that that doesn't seem to me like it really gets at the bigger picture issue. What do
you think that we need to be tackling both the big picture and the nitty gritty, or could
the nitty gritty really solve a lot of the problem?
Speaker 3: The nitty gritty alone is not going to solve the problem. And this is why I think
we're stuck as we've been trying to solve the issue of email overload in the inbox itself.
Oh, spend less time checking emails back. Your emails have better subject lines, right?
Have better norms, have better expectations, but we can't solve this problem. This is one
of the sort of the big idea of the new book is we can't solve this problem just in the
inbox. The issue is the underlying workflows so long as implicitly the way that your organization
collaborates is through ad hoc, back and forth unscheduled messages that a man to keep up
with all of these back and forth threads demands that you check your inbox all the time because
that is how your work is actually happening. This is why when we don't change that underlying
workflow but just say have better habits when you personally interact with your inbox, that
fails. So my big push now is to get past this this moment we're in, which we're. Remley
subduing our productivity because of all the constant contact, shifting communication,
we have to fix the underlying workflows, that is the rules and the guidelines and the agreements
we have about how collaboration happens. It can't just be rock and roll and email, rock
and roll and slack rock and roll teams will just figure it out. That does not work. It
is a bad way to build the metaphorical cars, if you know what I mean. And so we have to
fix this at that level before the messages get into the inbox in the first place.
Speaker 1: In the book, you talk about fixing it within an organization in terms of the
communication with coworkers, and it's sort of different at least than fixing it when
it comes to people you interface outside of your organization, like, for example, consultants
working with clients, which include examples of in the book. Does it make sense to first
fix it internally before doing it externally? Speaker 3: Both of these can happen in parallel.
It doesn't quite matter. What really matters is having that mindset shift, which is saying,
OK, our work is made up of processes. We might not call it that, but that's what they are,
the things we do on a regular basis that produce the value for our team, our organization,
our company. OK, how are we implementing these processes? How do we get the information?
Where do we store the information? How do we communicate with each other to actually
accomplish these processes? What are our rules for that? And if you don't have rules written
down, the default answer is probably this hyperactive hive mind approach. We'll just
work it out on the fly once you have that mindset. Yeah. You're going to see those client
communication processes. Let's make those betters their internal processes. How do we
schedule meetings? How do we agree on new copy for ads? You fix those processes. But
the big step here is that mindset shift that even in knowledge work, there's things you
do again and again. And either you have rules about how you want to collaborate to accomplish
those things or you don't. And if you don't, you're probably leaving a huge amount of productivity
on the table. Speaker 1: One of the things you talk about
in the book is that when people in the knowledge workspace are presented with this idea in
almost invariably they react by saying, OK, yeah, that might work in industries ABCDE,
but I'm in a more unique position in my particular job, in my particular field with my particular
company. This really wouldn't work. And and that belief seems to be a very prevalent.
Can you talk a little bit more specifically about the types of changes that probably would
work in just about any knowledge work field? Speaker 3: Well, I think one of the problems
here is that when people think about reforming email, they think about, OK, what if nothing
changed about the underlying workflow and they're imagining it. They're imagining their
work as it happens right now under organization where most things are figured out with back
and forth messaging. And then they say in that context, if I stopped using email, as
much bad things would happen. And they're right. If your organization or team uses this
hyperactive hive mind workflow, it would be a problem if you stopped using it. So getting
people to look below the inbox and say, no, no, no, we want to fix how you collaborate
in the first place, that those messages don't show up in your inbox, that you're not figuring
things out with unscheduled messages and we get down to the roots of it. So what are those
changes look like? It depends on the process, right. So this is why this is not a it's not
a tool discussion. It's a non sequitur. Yes. Question to say. Well, if not email, then
what tool? Completely. It's not the question. The question is, OK, if not this hyperactive
hive mind workflow, how else should we collaborate or communicate? It depends on what you're
doing. So sometimes the solutions are simple. Plug in technology fixes. If you have to schedule
a bunch of meetings, you should absolutely be using a meeting scheduling tool. Having
to go back and forth emails to find a time to meet is surprisingly cognitively taxing.
Fine. Sometimes what you're talking about is a process that's very rigorously defined,
is the same steps one after another. This is what we do to produce our podcast episode
every week at Seven Steps, one follows the others. Those can often be automated in such
a way that no one has to send unscheduled messages back and forth to stuff moves from
place to place. People see it without having to do unscheduled messaging. And sometimes
these fixes are about making information and collaboration more structured. So all the
information for this project is on a shared task board that we can all look at. We have
highly structured status meetings that are 50 minutes long where it's what were you working
on last time? How did it go? What are you working on today? What do you need to get
that done? Great. We'll talk again tomorrow. So very structured check ins, very structured
ways of storing the information. That's sort of the third category of what these process
overhauls look like. So the particular tools or rules or guides depends on what's the specific
process that you're overhauling. But the thing that unifies this all is looking at all the
processes in your work life and saying how do we reduce all of this back and forth on
scheduling, messaging for each of them? Speaker 1: You know, one of the things I was
thinking of as I read the book was that there's a sort of maybe parallel issue or question
here, which is one that's been written about a lot in the last five to seven years of attention
span. And there are very differing views on this issue. I think I've read a lot of near
work where he says he doesn't think that fundamentally there is an attention span issue, but that
the issues are something different. There's others who say no, you know, the mobile phones
and the email and all of these things have conditioned people in some way to for it to
be more and more difficult to spend longer periods of time focused on one thing. Is there
some way in which this entire email thing of 30, 40, 50 percent of your day is dipping
in and out of answering emails quickly to get breaks from the more serious work may
be connected less to systems, but to this attention span issue?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's an important question because I see a clear separation between what's
happening, let's say, with our phones, the attention span issue with social media, online
news, wanting to continually go back to microphone and be distracted. Yeah. Where you have tools
that are engineered to try to distract you. I see. That is very separate from what's happening
with us having checked email all the time. OK, now it has been common to look at email
through the lens of a sort of personal addiction. For example, when the hyperactive hive mind
workflow first took off in the 2000s, we introduced terminology like crack berries to refer to
people checking their blackberries all the time. But I'm convinced, based on my research,
that the reason we're checking email all the time, it's not a failure of personal will.
It is not an escape from work that is difficult. It is because the underlying workflow, what
I call the hyperactive hive mind, demands it. If most of the way that things get worked
out or collaboration occurs in your organization is with unscheduled back and forth messages,
there is no other way to successfully interface with your organization than to constantly
be checking those inboxes, because that's what you need to do to keep knocking these
metaphorical tennis balls back across the net, to keep these ongoing asynchronous ad
hoc conversations going. So when it comes to email, I don't think the issue is that
people have bad habits. I think the issue is that organizations are running and nonsensical
ways, Speaker 1: less, less thing. I want to touch
on you talk in the book about how many of the tasks that are now distributed throughout
the day for a knowledge worker or professional of different kinds at some previous point
might have been handled by either an assistant secretary or a position that now is essentially
no longer needed. To me, that seems like a a huge cost reduction for many companies.
Is that an economic reality that will resist the types of changes you're talking about
because it is so much less expensive? Or is the counter that the last product? Because
a lot of these professionals are doing these things throughout the day, essentially outweighs
the cost savings of not having the assistant or the secretary.
Speaker 3: I think the latter is true, mean. There are some studies that actually quantify
this. One of the studies I talk about in the book was watching the arrival of personal
computers and the collection of Fortune 500 companies. And what they saw and what they
observed in this research is that, yes, they fired a lot of the support staff because technically
the computer made it easy enough to do a lot of the things that the support staff was doing.
Right. Front line executives could do it themselves. But this researcher, he actually tracked the
numbers and found out that they ended up having to hire more of the much higher paid executives
to get the same amount of work done because so much of their day now was spent doing things
like word processors and communication, et cetera, that the salary cost went up. So they
save salary cost by firing support staff, but then increased salary costs by having
to hire more people to get the same amount of work done. And they ended up worse off
because these salaries were higher. I think we missed the mark on the digital productivity
revolution as technology made certain administrative tasks easier. The right move was not to move
all of that work onto the plate of the executives or front line value producers. It should have
been to make it cheaper to have support staff. I think the right application of that of that
technology would be, oh, fewer support staff can now support more of the front line workers.
That was probably the right way to to approach the productivity revolution in terms of maximizing
return. Instead, we said let's fire the support workers and make everyone a part time administrative
assistant and a part time whatever their main job is. We know the way the brain works that
that is that was a bad mix. So I think we really missed the mark on this digital productivity
revolution. It does make us much more productive if we use that to actually empower support
staff to be even more effective, not to put more things on the plate of the people that
you want to thinking about. The ad copy are making the executive decisions or writing
the academic papers or whatever it is you had hired them to do.
Speaker 1: Right, that it's a fascinating book. The book is A World Without Email, Reimagining
Work in an Age of Communication Overload. You know, I find that so often when I talk
to people about this book, other books you've written and another, there's this visceral
reaction like that would never work. We shouldn't even be thinking about that. Do you do you
see is that is that a common reaction from a lot of people?
Speaker 3: Well, I think the key thing with this book is understanding that you're changing
the workflow, because as soon as you say just, you need to spend less time on email. They're
so overwhelmed by this hyperactive hive mind workflow, like, are you kidding me? I would
be dead because everything is happening in the inbox. But the real aha moment for most
people is when you say, yeah, the reason why that's happening is because the underlying
agreement by how work happens is generating all these messages. And it doesn't have to
be that way. And you tell them about companies where they don't use email and they don't
use slack and they don't have an inbox to check and they do one thing at a time and
maybe they work on three things each day. And when you show them those stories, you
can just see the light turn on behind their eyes. So I think that's key. The way we work
today makes it impossible not to check email. I agree. We can fix the underlying way we
work, though. Speaker 1: We've been speaking with Cal Newport,
computer science professor at Georgetown University. We'll link to the latest book, A World Without
Email. Cal, always great having you on. Thanks to. OK, this you really have to see on