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

some emails?—but if you’re like me, you’ll likely be surprised by the
feeling of a burden being lifted when you eliminate all these ongoing
scheduling conversations, which have a way of nibbling at the
borders of your concentration, driving you again and again back into
the hive mind chatter.
Claude Shannon’s framework underscores this reality. Meeting-
scheduling protocols induce a small extra inconvenience cost, as you
have to set up the system, and your correspondents now have to
select times from a website instead of simply shooting back a short
email reply in the moment. But the cognitive cycles saved are so
substantial that there’s no comparison: the average cost of these
meeting-scheduling protocols is significantly lower than what’s
required by the status quo of energy-minimizing email ping-pong.
Office Hour Protocols

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In early 2016, I published an article on the Harvard Business
Review’s website that I gave a purposefully provocative title, “A
Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email.” Though I’d been writing about
the unique miseries of this technology on my blog, this piece was one
of my first mainstream essays on the ideas that would eventually
coalesce into the book you’re currently reading. At the halfway point
of the article, after I’d reviewed the issues caused by the hyperactive
hive mind workflow, I delivered my big conclusion: “There’s great
advantage for those organizations willing to end the reign of the
unstructured workflow and replace it with something designed from
scratch with the specific goal of maximizing value production and
employee satisfaction.”
9
In my original draft, I was happy to leave the argument there. My
editor didn’t agree. He rightly pointed out that the idea of
abandoning email was so novel that there had to be at least some
suggestions about how an organization might function in its absence.
I hadn’t yet worked out the details of attention capital theory at this
early point in my thinking, so I didn’t have a ready answer to my
editor’s question of what replaces email. Grasping for an example, I
found inspiration in an activity common in my own world of
academia: office hours. As I elaborated:
The concept is simple. Employees no longer have
personalized email addresses. Instead, each individual posts
a schedule of two or three stretches of time during the day
when he or she will be available for communication. During
these office hours, the individual guarantees to be reachable
in person, by phone, and by instant messenger technologies
like Slack. Outside of someone’s stated office hours,
however, you cannot command their attention. If you need
them, you have to keep track of what you need until they’re
next available.
Much to my disappointment, this 2016 article didn’t immediately
spark an anti-email revolution. One commenter pointed out,
correctly, that office hours would be a poor fit for organizations with
employees that spanned multiple time zones. Another wrote that
they’d rather have more email than more meetings. “To attempt to

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outlaw email now is like trying to bolt the barn door after the horse
has bolted,” concluded another commenter. “It’s just not gonna
work.” As my research on email continued, I pushed the office hours
concept to the periphery of my thinking. As I later learned, however,
I perhaps shouldn’t have been so hasty in dismissing this solution.
—
Let’s jump ahead to 2018, when Jason Fried and David Heinemeier
Hansson, the iconoclastic cofounders of the software company
Basecamp, published a book titled It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at
Work.
10
The book describes a collection of ideas for cultivating an
effective workplace culture they call “the calm company,” and nestled
among its suggestions is a familiar strategy: office hours. As Fried
and Hansson note, their company contains many subject matter
experts: “people who can answer questions about statistics,
JavaScript event handling, database tipping points.” Accordingly, if
one of their employees has a question about one of these topics, they
can simply “ping” the expert to get an answer. Fried and Hansson
have mixed feelings about this reality: “[It’s] wonderful. And
terrible.”
11
The wonderful aspect is that these experts can help their
coworkers become unstuck or identify more effective solutions to
their problems. The terrible aspect, on the other hand, is that the
experts get sucked into the hyperactive hive mind—devoting more
and more slivers of time throughout the day to fielding these ad hoc
requests. Basecamp’s solution, to my delight, was to introduce office
hours. The experts now publish set hours each week during which
they’re available to answer questions. For some experts, these office
hours might be sparse, such as one hour per week, while for others
they might be frequent, such as one hour every day. The company
trusts the experts to figure out the availability that best matches their
demand. Questions for these experts are then confined to those set
office hours.
“But what if you have a question on Monday and someone’s
office hours aren’t until Thursday?” Fried and Hansson ask. They
provide a blunt answer: “You wait, that’s what you do.” They note
that these constraints might seem overly bureaucratic at first, but
that they’ve ended up a “big hit” at their company. “It turns out that

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waiting is no big deal most of the time,” they elaborate. “But the time
and control regained by our experts is a huge deal.”
12
Further investigation reveals that Basecamp is not the only non-
academic organization to deploy office hours in a limited manner. As
I learned from Scott Kirsner, the Innovation Economy columnist for
The Boston Globe, office hours have long been popular among
venture capitalists. As he explains in a column titled “I’m Joining the
Open Office Hours Movement,” many Boston-area investment
groups, including Flybridge, Spark Capital, and Polaris Partners,
have taken to putting aside regular times each week in which anyone
interested in technology start-ups can show up, “no strings
attached,” to ask for advice, pitch an idea, or just make a
connection.
13
As I learned profiling a Silicon Valley–based venture
capitalist named Mike Jackson for my 2012 book, So Good They
Can’t Ignore You, success in this industry depends on exposing
yourself to lots of different ideas and people, but if this exposure is
delivered through unsolicited email messages, you can accidentally
drown trying to keep up. “It’s so easy to just come in and spend your
whole day on email,” he warned.
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Office hours proved a good way for
investors to balance these competing forces.
Claude Shannon’s framework helps explain why these examples
work so well. For most types of coordination, moving to
predetermined office hours will significantly reduce the cognitive
cycle cost compared with simply bouncing messages back and forth
in an ad hoc fashion. Having to wait until the next scheduled office
hour to communicate, however, can induce an inconvenience cost.
Office hour protocols seem to work best for activities that are not too
negatively impacted by these delays. This is why Basecamp’s experts
and Boston’s venture capitalists embraced office hours: they reduced
the large cognitive cost of distracting messages while introducing
delays that didn’t yield any major impact on daily effectiveness. This
is also why my 2016 suggestion of replacing all communication with
office hours landed with a thud: there are many types of coordination
currently handled over email for which long delays would be
prohibitively costly. The conclusion is that any time you find yourself
involved in a type of coordination activity that’s both frequent and
non-urgent, an office hour protocol might significantly reduce its
cost.

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