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

Chapter 2: Email Makes Us Miserable
1
. Harry Cooper, “French Workers Gain ‘Right to Disconnect,’” Politico, December 31, 2016,
www.politico.eu/article/french-workers-gain-right-to-disconnect-workers-rights-
labor-law/
.
2
. Gloria Mark et al., “Email Duration, Batching and Self-Interruption: Patterns of Email
Use on Productivity and Stress,” Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems, May 2016, 1717–28.
3
. Fatema Akbar et al., “Email Makes You Sweat: Examining Email Interruptions and Stress
Using Thermal Imaging,” Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems, May 2019, 1–14.
4
. These concluding remarks come from Mark et al., “Email Duration.”
5
. Magdalena Stadin et al., “Repeated Exposure to High ICT Demands at Work, and
Development of Suboptimal Self-Rated Health: Findings from a 4-Year Follow-Up of
the SLOSH Study,” International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health
92, no. 5 (2019): 717–28.
6
. Leslie A. Perlow, Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and
Change the Way You Work (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), 5.
7
. Perlow, Sleeping with Your Smartphone, 5. We’ll revisit Perlow’s answer to this question
in more detail in the next chapter, but the short version is as follows: no one ever did
decide that this workflow was a good idea; instead, in Perlow’s estimation, it emerged
somewhat haphazardly from an uncontrolled behavioral feedback loop.
8
. John Freeman, The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox
(New York: Scribner, 2011), 12.
9
. Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (New York: Current,
2013), 95.
10
. James Manyika et al., “Disruptive Technologies: Advances That Will Transform Life,
Business, and the Global Economy,” McKinsey Global Institute, May 1, 2013,
www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/disruptive-
technologies
.
11
. This report from the Federal Reserve estimates more than sixty million “nonroutine
cognitive” jobs in 2016: “Job Polarization,” FRED Blog, April 28, 2016,
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/04/job-polarization/
. In 2016, the size of the US
labor force was approximately 156 million: Erin Duffin, “Civilian Labor Force in the
United States from 1990 to 2019,” Statista, January 30, 2020,
www.statista.com/statistics/191750/civilian-labor-force-in-the-us-since-1990/
.
12
. As the researchers who study extant hunter-gatherer groups are careful to emphasize,
it’s a fallacy to portray these tribes as somehow existing unchanged from our
Paleolithic past—these are cognitively modern humans with regular interactions with
modern society. As Yuval Noah Harari points out in the opening of his book Sapiens: A

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Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), it’s also worth
remembering that the very fact that such tribes still exist underscores that there must
be something remarkable about them as compared with the countless other groups that
shifted their lifestyles (e.g., perhaps they exist in environments too harsh to support
farming-based lifestyles). All that being said, they do provide insight into hunter-
gatherer social dynamics. To avoid falling into the trap of evolutionary just so stories,
when I do later extrapolate from those dynamics to forces that affect our modern brain,
I do so with care, marshaling other, more contemporary strains of evidence to support
the claims.
13
. Nikhil Chaudhary et al., “Competition for Cooperation: Variability, Benefits and
Heritability of Relational Wealth in Hunter-Gatherers,” Scientific Reports 6, no. 29120
(July 2016): 1–7.
14
. Abigail E. Page et al., “Hunter-Gatherer Social Networks and Reproductive Success,”