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

Case Study: Devesh Ditches the Hive Mind

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Let’s start our exploration of the attention capital principle with a
concrete case study: an entrepreneur named Devesh, who applied
these ideas to rethink work in his small marketing firm. Devesh’s
company employs a group of largely remote employees spread out
across the United States and Europe. This geographic diversity,
which covers a wide range of time zones, required a dependence on
asynchronous communication tools like email. Like so many other
firms in similar situations, Devesh’s company soon found itself
tangled up in the hyperactive hive mind workflow, with its activities
unfolding as a never-ending jumble of back-and-forth email
messages. As Devesh explains, this resulted in frustrating days spent
tending an inbox “filled with notes and design files, one-off
messages, and single emails that talked about multiple different
projects.”
Like many business owners feeling overwhelmed by the hive
mind workflow, Devesh first attempted to fix the problem by making
the communication more efficient. Among other steps, he switched
the company to Gmail, which does a better job of automatically
grouping messages into threads and provides a sleek smartphone
app that allows employees to keep up with their conversations while
away from their desks. These bids for efficiency, however, didn’t fix
the underlying sense that there was something fundamentally wrong
with the sheer volume of the frantic communication that drove their
efforts. As Devesh explained to me, he and his employees felt
“bombarded” by messages, which “dictated” how they spent their
time. It became increasingly clear that this couldn’t possibly be the
best way to execute cognitive work. To use our new terminology,
Devesh feared he was getting a weak return from this deployment of
his company’s attention capital.
Taking a page out of Henry Ford’s playbook, Devesh began
experimenting with radical new approaches to organizing his firm’s
work. His core insight was that when his employees relied on the
hive mind, their days were structured by incoming messages, which
dictated what they worked on and kept them jumping back and forth
between many different projects simultaneously, limiting the quality
of attention they devoted to any one objective. Devesh decided to
reverse this dynamic. He wanted his employees to decide what to
work on and then, once they made that decision, limit their attention
to this choice until they were ready to move on to something else. To

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realize this new goal, Devesh abandoned the hive mind model in
which all work passed through each person’s general-purpose inbox.
He rebuilt his company’s workflow around an online project
management tool called Trello.
When you set up a project in Trello, you create a dedicated web
page called a “board” that’s shared with relevant collaborators. You
then add named columns to the board, and under each column you
arrange “cards” in a “stack,” creating a solitaire-style collection of
cards lined up vertically. Each card has a short description on the
front, and when you click on it, you gain access to much more
detailed information on the back, including file attachments, task
lists, notes, and discussion.
At my request, Devesh sent me a screenshot of a Trello board
used for one of their ongoing marketing projects. It contained the
following four named stacks:
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