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

expectations about your own work. This applies when you focus on
upgrading your personal workflow. If, for example, you now check
your inbox only twice a day as part of a larger overhaul of how you
work, your colleagues’ expectations for how quickly you’ll respond to
their messages must shift.
We’ll start by considering the first type of impact, as it’s trickier
to deal with. It’s also the type of impact for which we can learn the
most from Sam Carpenter. A key insight preached in Carpenter’s
book is the need to involve those who are affected by a new work
procedure in the design of that procedure. His staff wrote 98 percent
of the procedures currently in place and had a “heavy hand” in
shaping the remaining 2 percent that Carpenter created himself. As a
result, his employees are “fully vested” in these processes. Perhaps
even more crucial, Carpenter made it easy to instigate further
improvements. “If an employee has a good idea for improving a
procedure, we will make an instant modification—with no
bureaucratic hang-ups,” he explains.
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 He takes this employee
involvement so seriously that he now requires his service
representatives to submit at least a dozen proposed improvements
before they qualify to receive their annual performance bonus.

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Carpenter’s approach makes sense in the context of what’s
known as locus of control theory, a subfield of personality
psychology that argues that motivation is closely connected to
whether people feel like they have control over their ultimate success
in an endeavor. When you have a say in what you’re doing (placing
the locus of control toward the internal end of the spectrum), you’re
much more motivated than when you feel like your actions are
largely controlled by outside forces (placing the locus of control
toward the external end).
This is what goes wrong if you defy Carpenter’s model and
instead attempt to deploy a brand-new workflow on your team by
fiat. Regardless of the workflow’s inherent benefits, you might be
accidentally shifting your team’s sense of control from the internal to
the external, sapping motivation and making it unlikely that they’ll
stick with the changes. On the other hand, if your team members are
involved in the construction of the new workflow and, equally
important, feel like they’re able to improve it as deficiencies arise,
then the control remains internal and the workflow is much more
likely to be embraced.
This concept doesn’t apply as strongly to positions in which there
are no expectations of autonomy. This is why, for example, the
famously autocratic Henry Ford didn’t feel the need to involve his
workers in discussions of the assembly line’s advantages and
disadvantages. This also explains the success of military boot camps
—the epitome of external control—in rapidly producing professional
soldiers for volunteer armies: the new recruits enter the process
trusting the time-tested system to get them where they need to be. As
we’ve known since the forward-thinking theories of Peter Drucker,
however, knowledge work will always be defined by large amounts of
autonomous action. Locus of control theory therefore unavoidably
applies: it simply won’t work to radically change workflows without
the input of those who must use them.
There are three steps necessary to keep these experiments
collaborative. The first is education. It’s important that your team
understand the difference between workflows and work execution,
and why the hyperactive hive mind is just one workflow among many
—and probably not a very good one. For many knowledge workers,
email is synonymous with work, so it’s crucial to break up this

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misunderstanding before you discuss breaking up their comfortable
reliance on the hive mind for getting things done.
The second step is to obtain buy-in on new workflow processes
from those who will actually have to execute them. To accomplish
this goal, these ideas should emerge from discussion. There should
be general agreement that trying the new workflow is a worthwhile
experiment, and following Carpenter’s lead, its details should be
captured with crystal clear specificity so there’s no doubt about what
exactly is being implemented.
The third step is to further follow Carpenter’s lead by putting in
place easy methods for improving the new workflow processes when
issues arise. There’s perhaps no better way to keep the locus of
control internal than to empower your team to change what’s not
working. In practice, you might be surprised by how few changes are
actually suggested. It’s the ability to make changes that matters, as it
provides a psychological emergency steam valve, neutralizing the
fear that you might end up trapped in some unexpected hard edge of
the new workflow, unable to get your work done.
It’s also common for those moving past the universal
accessibility of the hyperactive hive mind to put in place an
emergency backup system that can handle urgent issues that the new
workflow might neglect. For such a system to truly be a backup, and
not just a back door that returns you to the hive mind, it must induce
enough friction that you won’t use it unless the situation is
sufficiently urgent. The classic example is to use phone calls as the
catchall fallback: your colleagues can call your cell phone if
something pops up that’s too urgent for the official workflow to
reliably handle in time. These backup systems provide the peace of
mind that nothing too bad can happen in the time it might take to
recognize and fix flaws with new processes.
—
Let’s now turn our attention to the other type of impact to other
people caused by applying the attention capital principle: changes to
others’ expectations about your own behavior. As explained, this
applies when you transform your personal workflow, moving your
daily rhythms away from the unpredictable back-and-forth of the
hyperactive hive mind. These shifts are likely to create changes that
are visible to your colleagues and clients, with the most notable being

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that you’re no longer always answering emails or instant messages
promptly. Other people will, in other words, need to shift their
expectations about working with you.
A common method for handling these personal workflow
overhauls is to clearly explain the structure of your new approach to
your colleagues, perhaps accompanied by an unassailably logical
explanation for why you’re making these changes. A famous example
of this idea in action is the following email autoresponder that Tim
Ferriss cited in his 2007 mega-bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek:
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Greetings, Friends [or Esteemed Colleagues],
Due to high workload, I am currently checking and responding to e-mail twice daily
at 12:00 P.M. ET [or your time zone] and 4:00 P.M. ET.
If you require urgent assistance (please ensure it is urgent) that cannot wait until
either 12:00 P.M. or 4:00 P.M., please contact me via phone at 555-555-5555.
Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. It
helps me accomplish more to serve you better.
Sincerely,
[Your name]
Due to the success of Ferriss’s book, there was a period of a
couple of years in which tens of thousands of knowledge workers
around the world began receiving some variation of the above
autoresponder from their life-hacking colleagues. From a rational
perspective, this strategy makes complete sense: it resets
expectations so that your correspondents aren’t wondering when
they’ll hear from you, and it provides a rock-solid explanation for the
shift; it’s terse, it’s clear, it’s hard to argue with. This is why so many
people were so excited when they first encountered it. The problem,
however, is that it also turned out to be really annoying for those who
received these automatic replies.
It’s hard to put your finger on what exactly rubbed people the
wrong way—perhaps the cold formality, which has a way of
accidentally bleeding over into the realm of condescension, or the
implication that the author of the autoresponder is trying to
neutralize the receiver’s bad work habits. Whatever the specific

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reasons, Ferriss’s fans came to realize that this particular hack wasn’t
working as well as they had hoped. Anecdotally, it seems that these
autoresponders are now much rarer than they were at their peak, in
the immediate aftermath of Ferriss’s book coming out. They were a
good idea in the abstract but degraded under the friction of real-
world application.
The lesson lurking in this case study is that care must be taken in
how you publicize changes to your personal work habits. Over the
years of observing many different attempts by individuals to push
back against or change their dependence on the hyperactive hive
mind, and having attempted more than a few such changes myself,
I’ve come to believe that these experiments are best executed quietly.
Don’t share the details of your new approach to work, unless
someone specifically asks you out of genuine interest. Be wary of
even providing new expectations, such as “I generally don’t see email
until after 10:00 a.m.” or “I check my inbox only a few times a day.”
These provide hard edges that skeptical colleagues, clients, or bosses
can begin to easily chip away. (“What if I need something urgently
from you earlier? No . . . I don’t like this at all—I think you need to
stay better on top of your messages.”) Similarly, if you get in the
habit of asking for forgiveness—as is often suggested—people around
you will get in the habit of thinking your work strategies must be
broken, because why else would they keep causing you to apologize?
A better strategy for shifting others’ expectations about your
work is to consistently deliver what you promise instead of
consistently explaining how you’re working. Become known as
someone who never drops the ball, not someone who thinks a lot
about their own productivity. If a request comes your way, be it in an
email or hallway chat, make sure it’s handled. Don’t let things fall
through the cracks, and if you commit to doing something by a
certain time, hit the deadline, or explain why you need to shift it. If
people trust you to handle the work they send your way, then they’re
generally fine with not hearing back from you right away. On the
other hand, if you’re flaky, others will demand faster responses, as
they’ll feel they have to stay on you to ensure things get done. The
professor and business writer Adam Grant uses the phrase
“idiosyncrasy credits” to describe this reality.
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 The better you are at
what you do, he explains, the more freedom you earn to be
idiosyncratic in how you deliver—no explanation required.

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Another issue that comes from transforming your personal
workflow concerns system interfaces. If you put in place the types of
advanced workflow systems discussed in the upcoming chapters,
you’ll have to figure out how you want other people, who are used to
just grabbing your attention with a quick message, to interact with
these more structured alternatives.
For guidance in this matter, we can learn from the world of IT
support. As discussed earlier in the book, a couple of decades ago, IT
support staff began internally organizing the technology issues they
were tasked with fixing using so-called ticketing systems. These
systems assign each problem a single ticket. All conversations and
notes about the problem are attached to its ticket, where they can be
easily reviewed.
IT professionals quickly realized the futility in requiring those
they served to interface directly with the ticketing system; for
example, by having them log in to a special support site to create and
track these tickets. This might be the most efficient way to handle
these issues in the abstract, but the concrete reality of many
organizations is that most people wouldn’t put up with the extra
overhead. The solution to this issue was to create a seamless