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

Participants are allowed to use devices before and after the
sprint sessions, which last from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. They may
also check devices during breaks, but they must do so outside the
room where the sessions occur. Knapp told me that he suspects a

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more extreme approach, in which communication outside the team
is banned altogether throughout the week, could “yield even deeper
focus and better results.” But he thought it might be a “hard sell” to
persuade a group of modern knowledge workers to sign up for five
days of complete disconnection. After a beat, however, he noted that
once they “experienced the benefits” of such disconnection, the idea
might start seeming less extreme.
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Jake Knapp’s design sprint process works great for making high-
stakes decisions about future directions for your business, but there
are many other areas in knowledge work where sprints could prove
effective. I talked with a communication consultant, for example,
who told me that when her firm took on major event-planning
contracts, the partner in charge of the project would schedule an in-
office workshop, sometimes lasting multiple days, in which the team
would sequester itself to work out the best possible game plan for the
event. One could imagine similar sprints being deployed by academic
research teams trying to make progress on a big open problem.
Indeed, in Deep Work, I discuss how Wharton professor Adam Grant
used exactly this strategy to become one of the youngest professors
to earn tenure in Wharton’s history.
Most knowledge workers are so entangled in obligations and
commitments and legacy methods of getting things done that there’s
often no easy way to reduce this load in one bold move. Sprint
processes offer an indirect alternative. If you put in place a culture of
design sprint–style sessions, you don’t eliminate the other work in
the short term, but you do constrain its impact—allowing you to
switch back and forth between a specialized existence and a
hyperactive one (which is better than always being in the latter
state).
Regular sprints also support longer-term changes to your
workload by making it easier for individual knowledge workers to
lobby for fewer obligations overall. In a standard hyperactive hive
mind–style office, asking for less work might come across as laziness
(why do you get to do less?). In a culture where sprints are common,
however, you can point to the massive value these focused pushes are
producing, and frame the minutiae that define chronic overload as
impediments to this value. Once you can establish a clear dichotomy

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between convenient busyness and bottom-line-boosting sprints, it
becomes harder to justify the former as more important.
For any sprint process to succeed requires buy-in from everyone
involved. When you’re in a sprint, you must trust that you really can
step away from your inbox and chat channels, and do this without
generating frustration or annoyance. If you’re self-employed, you
must clearly explain to your clients that your work is fundamentally
bimodal, and during the sprint modes, you cannot be reached. If you
work for a larger organization, enthusiasm for sprints must emanate
from the top. But once this regular specialization is embraced, its
benefits will soon become apparent. As Jake Knapp explained to me,
one of the best things about helping teams run sprints is the
enthusiasm it generates from the participants. Chronic overload
makes us miserable. When we’re given a chance to escape its
frustrating clutches and instead do what we were trained to do, to
apply our skills to produce the best possible results, work transforms
from a chore into something we actually find satisfying.