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

Do Less, Do Better
In a 2010 essay, Anne Lamott reflected on a particular piece of
advice that distresses her writing students.
7
 She tells them that
creative pursuits can be deeply rewarding, but then she brings up the
bad news: “You have to make time to do this.” As she elaborates, this
requires aspiring writers to understand the harm caused by their
“manic forms of connectivity—cell phone, email, text, and Twitter.”
She then lists other seemingly critical activities that her students
might have to reduce—gym trips, housecleaning, consuming news—if
they really want to produce something important. This advice might
sound straightforward, but Lamott notes that her students often find
it challenging. They lead busy lives, and the thought of reducing that
busyness seems like a step backward. “I know how addictive
busyness [is],” she writes, but this “whirlwind” isn’t compatible with
producing accomplishments that provide lasting meaning and pride.
In rarefied pursuits like professional writing, the importance of
doing fewer minor things so you can do the main things better makes
a lot of sense. We like to imagine our novelists cloistered in sheds,

---

toiling in undisrupted concentration, oblivious to the distractions of
the world. But we also assume that this lifestyle doesn’t generalize to
the less romanticized setting of standard office work. The
specialization principle argues it should. While it’s true that most
knowledge work positions lack both the autonomy and clarity of
purpose found in writing, the same basic dynamic that drives authors
toward a more minimalist set of obligations applies to any cognitive
pursuit where you produce value by focusing your brain. In the world
of computer programming, XP gained this minimalism through a
strict set of rules, enforced by the management, that had been
polished over decades of practice. Here we explore a pair of
strategies for making progress toward this goal in knowledge work
fields where such structures don’t yet exist.
Work Reduction Strategy #1: Outsource What You Don’t Do Well
When I was early in the research process for this book, I received an
email from an entrepreneur I’ll call Scott, who four years earlier had
started a successful home décor company. As Scott explained, soon
after starting the company, he found himself suffering from chronic
overload. “I did all the things most people do with start-ups,” he told
me. “I had a bunch of employees, reached out to lots of people for
marketing and networking, and had a very active Instagram.” He
knew his value was in designing elegant and innovative furniture, but
he was instead “spending [his] days in constant communication.”
At some point, perhaps after one too many phone conferences
with his Instagram consultants, Scott decided he was done with
forced busyness. “I was no longer doing what I set off to do.” In
response, he sought ways to radically pare down his day-to-day
responsibilities. His first move was to sign an exclusive wholesale
agreement with a single national retail chain. Not only did this vastly
simplify distribution, but it removed his company’s need to deal with
marketing, sales, and customer service. He then found a small
number of manufacturing partners with large enough workforces to
easily handle their typical orders.
Scott is “crystal clear and up-front” with these partners about
what he wants, and then empowers them to make their own
decisions to help keep the business moving. “I don’t want to be a

---

linchpin,” he explains. To underscore the importance of this
delegation, he told me the story of a meeting in which he was one of
ten attendees. The objective: to confirm a new black glaze to use on
one of their products. “It was infuriating,” he said. “Trust one person
to make that decision, stop cc’ing everyone on emails, and get to
work!”
Scott reports that he now gets “only a few” emails a day. He
dedicates his reclaimed mental bandwidth to the areas where he
thinks he can bring the most value: “New design projects, big
strategic decisions, and innovation solutions to age-old design
problems.” By outsourcing so much of his business to retail and
manufacturing partners, Scott reduced the profit margin he sees. If
he ran everything in-house, he could, given enough attention,
squeeze out more efficiency and keep more of the revenue. He’s also
given up some control. He no longer individually curates the brand’s
image, as he did in his days of relentless Instagram engagement, and
he has to work with the material limitations of his manufacturing