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

Minimize Context Switches and Overload
Henry Ford began experimenting with better ways to make cars in
the early 1900s. A century later, Devesh began experimenting with
better ways to serve marketing clients. In these efforts, we must
admit, Ford had an advantage. When it comes to manufacturing cars,
it’s immediately obvious what makes one process superior to
another: speed. This design principle—faster is better than slower—
drove Ford’s efforts and allowed him to directly connect
improvements in low-level manufacturing processes to the bottom
line. In knowledge work, this equation becomes murkier. When
trying to engineer your workflows to generate a better return from
your attention capital, what are you looking for? What is the
cognitive work equivalent of production speed?
In answering this question, we can build on the insights of part 1
of this book, which documented the problems with the hyperactive
hive mind workflow. In these previous chapters, I argued that there’s
a large cognitive cost to switching your attention from one target to
another. Any workflow that requires you to constantly tend
conversations unfolding in an inbox or chat channel is going to
diminish the quality of your brain’s output. I also argued that
communication overload—the feeling that you can never keep up
with all the different incoming requests for your time and attention—
conflicts with our ancient social wiring, leading to unhappiness in the
short term and burnout in the long term.
Drawing on these observations, I suggest the following design
principle for developing approaches to work that provide better
returns from your personal or organizational attention capital: seek
workflows that (1) minimize mid-task context switches and (2)
minimize the sense of communication overload. These two
properties are the knowledge work equivalent of Henry Ford’s
obsession with speed.
To unpack this claim, let’s start with the first property. A mid-
task context switch is when you have to stop an otherwise self-
contained task and switch your attention to something unrelated

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before returning to the original object of your attention. The classic
example of such switches is the need to continually return to an
email inbox or instant messenger channel to keep up with drawn-out
conversations about unrelated issues. Such switches, however, can
also be analog. In open office settings, for example, you might be
frequently interrupted by people stopping by your seat with
questions, and if your workflow demands constant meetings, then
this, too, will fracture your schedule into slivers too small to support
start-to-finish work on tasks.
Regardless of the source of these interruptions, when it comes to
producing value with your brain, the more you’re able to complete
one thing at a time, sticking with a task until done before moving on
to the next, the more efficiently and effectively you’ll work. As
elaborated in part 1, this holds for many different types of knowledge
work, be it deep thinking, managing, or even support roles. The
optimal way to deploy our human brains is sequentially.
The second property cited above attempts to reduce the cognitive
toll of feeling like everyone needs you at all times. All things being
equal, workflows that minimize this never-ending stream of urgent
communication are superior to those that instead amplify it. When
you’re at home at night, or relaxing over the weekend, or on vacation,
you shouldn’t feel like each moment away from work is a moment in
which you’re accumulating deeper communication debt. In the age of
the hyperactive hive mind, we’ve become used to this despondent
state as a necessary consequence of our high-tech world, but this is
nonsense. Better workflows can tame this sense of overload and, by
doing so, make you not only happier but also more effective and less
likely to burn out over time.
When we return to Devesh’s story, we see these design principles
in action. His new project board–based workflow eliminates mid-
task context switches. Communication about a project now happens
only when you decide to load that project’s board and review the
relevant cards. There’s no general-purpose inbox where you
encounter messages about one project while trying to work on
another. Devesh called this “flipping the script”: you decide when to
communicate about a project; you don’t let the project decide for
you.
Devesh’s new workflow also minimizes communication overload.
When interactions are moved onto task-specific cards associated

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with a project, the sense of requests piling up is diminished. When
you decide to visit a particular project board, you contribute to the
conversation. When you’re not there, there’s no inbox specific to you
that’s growing with impatient requests and notices.
Minimizing context switches and overload is not the whole story
when it comes to engineering better workflows. This should guide
your experiments in the short term, but in the long term, you must
still monitor the key bottom line metric: the quantity and quality of
valuable output you’re producing. For a knowledge work
organization, this means tracking the impact of new workflows on
revenue, while for an individual knowledge worker, this might
describe the rate at which you’re hitting milestones or completing
projects.
Seeing these numbers improve over time will provide the
confidence needed to stick with new ways of working. Equally
important, if your changes lead to these measures degrading, you
have clear evidence you went too far, accidentally impeding activities
crucial to your success. The key is to find ways to minimize context
shifts and overload while still getting done what needs to get done.