A world Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

Email Creates More Work
In 2012, a research team led by Gloria Mark published one of my
favorite studies on the impact of email.
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Their experiment was
brilliant in its simplicity: they selected thirteen employees at a large
scientific research firm and had them stop using email for five
workdays. The researchers didn’t make elaborate contingency plans
or develop alternative workflows in advance of the experiment: they
simply shut down the subjects’ email addresses and sat back to watch
what happened.
Though the study includes many interesting results, I want to
focus on an observation that was not reported in the published paper
but was instead brought to my attention more recently in a
conversation with Gloria Mark. As she explained to me, one of the
subjects was a research scientist who needed to spend around two
hours each day setting up a laboratory for an experiment. He
reported that he was frequently frustrated because his boss had the
habit of sending him emails during this preparation period, asking
him questions or delegating work. This required the scientist to stop
what he was doing to attend to his boss’s wishes—significantly
slowing down the lab setup. The reason Mark remembers this
scientist’s plight was because during the five days when he was
without email, his boss stopped bothering him during his lab setup.

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What makes this observation remarkable is that the boss’s office was
only two doors down the hall. The small amount of extra difficulty
required to walk a few steps and poke his head through the door was
enough to prevent the boss from handing off extra work to the
scientist. “He was thrilled,” Mark remembers.
This vignette of the frustrated scientist and his distracting boss
underscores an important cost of email that we often miss. 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.
Viewed objectively, this seems like a good thing: less effort equals
more efficiency. As I’ll show, however, the side effect of this
transformation is that knowledge workers began to ask more
questions and delegate more tasks than ever before, leading to a state
of perpetual overload that’s driving us toward despair.
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One way to examine our changing workloads is to look at the systems
we use to keep track of them. As productivity guru David Allen
argues in his canonical 2001 bestseller, Getting Things Done, the
period in which email spread was defined by significant changes in
time management approaches. As late as the 1980s, the “essence of
being organized” involved keeping a pocket-sized Day-Timer (a
paper calendar) and making a daily to-do list to help figure out how
to spend the time in between appointments. Especially organized
workers would use prioritization schemes, such as Alan Lakein’s ABC
Method or Stephen Covey’s Four Quadrants, to help determine the
order in which to complete the handful of tasks they identified as
important for the day.
“The traditional approaches to time management and personal
organization were useful in their time,” Allen notes. But as the 1980s
gave way to the 1990s, the idea that your day could be captured by a
short list of coded tasks became quaint. “More and more people’s
jobs are made up of dozens or even hundreds of e-mails a day, with
no latitude left to ignore a single request, complaint or order,” Allen
writes. “There are few people who can . . . maintain some
predetermined list of to-dos that the first . . . interruption from their
boss won’t totally undo.”
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Allen rose to fame within time management circles at the same
time that the hyperactive hive mind rose toward ubiquity. He sold

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over 1.5 million copies of his book in large part because he was one of
the first business thinkers to take seriously how much this new
workflow was increasing the amount of work dumped on our plates.
He told his newly overwhelmed readers that they needed to capture
every last one of these obligations into a “trusted system,” where they
could be clarified and organized—providing the foundation for a
frenetic work style in which you attempt to execute existing items
faster than new ones arrive.
Getting-things-done rookies are often shocked by the length of
their task lists. As Allen recalls, in his consulting work, he soon found
he needed two full uninterrupted days to help executives go through
and clarify everything they were supposed to be doing. The process
of simply listing tasks for which they were responsible often took “six
hours or more.”
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Gone are the days of the “productive” executive
consulting his Day-Timer, then carefully listing out the six things he
hoped to accomplish. In the modern world, knowledge workers now
feel under siege by obligations.
The relevant research literature also helps clarify this sense of
overload. In their original 2004 study on attention fragmentation,
Victor M. González and Gloria Mark partitioned the efforts of the
employees they observed into distinct working spheres, each
representing a different project or objective. They found that on
average their subjects worked on ten different spheres per day,
spending less than twelve minutes on one before switching to
another.
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 A follow-up study in 2005 found the observed employees
touching on eleven to twelve different working spheres per day on
average.
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 The large number of different spheres these subjects
tackled in a given day, combined with the reality that each sphere
demands the accomplishment of many smaller tasks and presumably
dozens of emails, provides a harried portrayal of modern knowledge
work. “At night, I often wake in a panic about all the things I need to
do or didn’t get done,” writes journalist Brigid Schulte in