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

Part 1 of this book was my attempt to elaborate this dynamic. In
addition to defining the hyperactive hive mind workflow and
explaining the various ways in which it diminishes our work lives, I
looked closer at the complicated forces that made it ubiquitous
(which turn out to have a lot to do with management theorist Peter
Drucker’s early insistence on knowledge worker autonomy). As I
argued: email made the hive mind workflow possible, but it didn’t
make it inevitable. We’re not, in other words, stuck working this way.
The title of this book, A World Without Email, turns out to be just an
approachable shorthand for the more accurate portrayal of my
vision: A World Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow.
With this reality established, in part 2 of this book I shifted my
attention from the negative aspects of this workflow to the positive
opportunities that arise once we recognize that we can replace it.
Perhaps the most important observation I made in the second half of
the book came in its first chapter, where I noted that the productivity
of the average manual laborer increased by more than fifty times
between 1900 and 2000. The reason this is important is that near
the end of his life, Peter Drucker, the man who coined the term
knowledge work, assessed the productivity of knowledge workers to

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be where manual labor was in 1900. In other words, we haven’t even
scratched the surface of how best to operate in this new economic
sector. It follows that the potential productivity gains of breaking the
stranglehold of the hyperactive hive mind workflow are staggering—
on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars of increased GDP, if
not more. As one prominent billionaire Silicon Valley CEO told me
when we recently discussed our mutual obsession with this issue:
“Knowledge worker productivity is the moonshot of the twenty-first
century.”
To help structure this massively important endeavor, I
introduced attention capital theory. Once you accept that the
primary capital resource in knowledge work is the human brains you
employ (or, more accurately, these brains’ capacity to focus on
information and produce new information that’s more valuable),
then basic capitalist economics take over and make it obvious that
success depends on the details of how you deploy this capital. When
viewed through the lens of this theory, the hyperactive hive mind
becomes just one of many ways to execute this deployment. This
workflow has the advantage of being easy and flexible, but it also has
the disadvantage of producing a low rate of return from your capital.
This should sound familiar, as this story of starting with simple
capital deployments before advancing to options that are more
complex but also more profitable is one that, as I showed, was
repeated many times during an earlier disruptive collision of
technology and commerce: the industrial revolution.
The remainder of part 2 then explored different principles for
designing smarter workflows—that is, ways to perform knowledge
work that are more effective than simply hooking everyone up to an
inbox and letting them rock and roll. The ideas in these latter
chapters aren’t meant to be a comprehensive playbook, as I’m an
academic, not a business expert, but I hope that their specificity will
be useful in sparking the development of new strategies custom-fit to
the particular circumstances that define your organization or
individual professional life.
—
Near the end of his speech, Neil Postman said: “In the past, we
experienced technological change in the manner of sleep-walkers. . . .
This is a form of stupidity, especially in an age of vast technological

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change.” He was absolutely right. Digital-era knowledge work is, on
any reasonable historical scale, a recent phenomenon. It’s absurdly
ahistorical and shortsighted to assume that the easy workflows we
threw together in the immediate aftermath of these tech
breakthroughs are somehow the best ways to organize this
complicated new type of work. Of course we didn’t get this exactly
right on the first try—to have done so would have been exceptional.
Once seen in this context, it should be clear that the efforts of this
book have nothing to do with a reactionary rejection of technology.
The Luddites in this current moment are those who nostalgically
cling to the hyperactive hive mind, claiming that there’s no need to
keep striving to improve how we work in an increasingly high-tech
world.
Once we understand the contours of our frustrations with
knowledge work, we recognize that we have the potential to make
these efforts not only massively more productive, but also massively
more fulfilling and sustainable. This has to be one of the most
exciting and impactful challenges that almost no one is talking
about . . . yet. “We need to proceed with our eyes wide open,”
concluded Postman, “so that we may use technology rather than be
used by it.” If you’re one of the many millions exhausted by your
inbox, hopeful that there must be a better way to do good work in a
culture currently obsessed by constant connectivity, then it’s time to
open your eyes.

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Acknowledgments
I began working on this book almost immediately after finishing the
manuscript for Deep Work. At the time, I knew I had only scratched
the surface of the complex landscape of issues afflicting knowledge
work in an age of digital networks, but I was struggling to cohere
these lingering thoughts into a useful framework. In the fall of 2015,
as Deep Work was being prepared for printing, and my thinking was
moving on to what would come next, I found myself browsing
paperback displays at a Barnes & Noble in Bethesda, Maryland (now,
unfortunately, closed), when I came across a copy of Jaron Lanier’s
book Who Owns the Future? I was impressed by how he
complemented his criticism on the economic impacts of the
internet’s architecture with a bold and clear proposal for an
alternative. Standing there in the aisle, holding the book, a revelation
hit me that all at once seemed to clarify the muddled mass of
research and intuitions with which I’d been battling: What if work
didn’t require email?
The first person to whom I pitched this vision was my wife, Julie,
who has been helping me assess and mold book concepts since I
signed my first contract with Random House at the age of twenty-
one. She’s the key filter through which I run all early-stage book
ideas, so her positivity set the whole process in motion. The second
person to hear the pitch was my longtime literary agent and
publishing mentor Laurie Abkemeier, who, improbably enough, has
also been working with me since I was twenty-one. She, too,
encouraged me to develop the concept, and so began a long,
circuitous, intellectually exhilarating research process that ultimately
led to my taking this book to the market, where my editor at
Portfolio, Niki Papadopoulos, as well as the imprint publisher,
Adrian Zackheim, were enthusiastic, and bought this book along with
Digital Minimalism (which I ended up publishing first, in 2019).

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Niki went on to play an integral role in the shaping of this book, as
well as the polishing of my tone and approach in tackling these topics
more generally—efforts for which I’m endlessly grateful. I must also
thank the publicity team at Portfolio, including Margot Stamas and
Lillian Ball, with whom I worked closely on Digital Minimalism and
am fortunate enough to work with again on this release, as well as
Mary Kate Skehan, who coordinated the marketing, and Kimberly
Meilun, who managed the publishing details.
The number of writing colleagues, friends, family members, and
neighbors who have heard me talk about this book concept over the
years, and in turn offered smart advice, are too numerous to
appropriately list, but their generosity in providing this feedback
undoubtedly played a major role in sharpening my ideas. Finally, I
want to highlight the contributions of my editor at The New Yorker,
Joshua Rothman, who commissioned me to write two articles during
this period on topics also covered in this book. These overlapping
efforts helped accelerate the pace at which I was able to gather
relevant research, and his editorial guidance helped improve both
my thinking and writing on these topics.

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Notes