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

Supercharge Support
A key question to ask about any attempted shift toward specialization
is what happens to the leftover work once everyone starts doing less?
Many of these tasks will simply disappear as it becomes clear that
they’re not actually that important to producing valuable output.
Programmers who deploy extreme programming, for example, spend
much less time in meetings and answering emails than their peers,
but their companies seem to do just fine without this extra activity. A
shift toward a more focused workload, however, will inevitably
orphan some administrative chores that cannot be eliminated. One
solution to handling this remaining work is to reverse the trend
toward diminishing intellectual specialization first observed by
Edward Tenner and Peter Sassone, and instead increase support
staff.
Most modern knowledge work organizations treat individuals as
general-purpose computers that execute a turbulent mixture of
value-producing and administrative tasks—often unequally
distributed, and not at all optimized for any particular big picture
objective. In a specialized organization, by contrast, the workforce is
more bimodal, with one group focused almost exclusively on
producing high-value output—like developers in an XP shop—and
another group focused almost exclusively on handling all the other
logistical work needed to keep the organization running. As
Sassone’s research points out, hiring more support staff in this
manner won’t necessarily decrease profitability. When you allow
specialists to work with more focus, they produce more, and this
extra value can more than compensate for the cost of maintaining
dedicated support. Our rush to cut payrolls by having everyone
handle their own administrative work through computer interfaces
provided only the illusion of streamlining. These top-line numbers
obscured the degree to which the cognitive gears that produce value
in knowledge work began to grind and stick under these new
demands.

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Returning to a culture that allows more separation between
specialized and administrative work is crucial to moving past the
hyperactive hive mind and significantly improving productivity. This
doesn’t mean, however, that we must retreat to the lumbering Mad
Men–style support setups that ruled before the office computer
revolution—in which dedicated assistants sat at desks outside every
office, executives dictated memos, and runners pushing mail carts
and delivering coffees were ubiquitous. Technology has advanced
significantly during the intervening decades to enable a much more
sophisticated vision of support. As we return to a state of
specialization, we should be able to supercharge the support roles
that enable this shift in ways that make these roles much more
efficient and satisfying for those involved.
Here are some ideas for how we might accomplish this goal.
Supercharging Idea #1: Structure Support
Veronica used to work as a customer service representative for a
university, responsible for answering inquiries and processing
orders. Her office handled all communication using email. “I would
sort of go to work and ‘finish’ all my emails,” Veronica told me when
I interviewed her for this book. “Sometimes I would sit in my chair
for eight hours straight or more, just so I could clear my inbox.” Her
work, in other words, was an exercise in overload—a constant influx
of varied tasks that she struggled to tame. At the time, she explained,
she thought this was just “normal work.” Like many support staff
members who mainly interact with the world through an inbox, she
had a hard time understanding how else her type of job could be
done.
Then she switched to a public sector position in the local court
system. The general type of work was similar to her university role:
she processed legal fees and updated case files. But the feel of the
work was much different for one important reason: her new job
didn’t use any electronic communication in the office. As Veronica
explained, there was a custom-built case management system where
information about cases was entered and updated. The
communication between support staff, however, was all delivered
physically. The various tasks the staff executed were each associated

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with a specific workflow in which specific pieces of paper would be
passed from one person to another. In some cases, for legal reasons,
these handoffs required signatures or extra copies to be filed to
maintain a paper trail. If you had an informal question, you walked
over to the relevant person and asked them.
One could argue that the individual steps of these old-fashioned
workflows could be made more efficient if implemented using digital
networks. It seems like a waste of time to physically walk a form to
someone’s office when you could instead, for example, attach a PDF
to an email. But having previously worked in an office where