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

Chapter 3: Email Has a Mind of Its Own
1
. The story of the CIA’s pneumatic tubes and the general push for practical asynchrony is
adapted from my 2019 New Yorker article on the history of email: Cal Newport, “Was
E-mail a Mistake?,” Annals of Technology, New Yorker, August 6, 2019,
www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/was-e-mail-a-mistake
.
2
. According to the CIA historians I consulted during my research, office networking
technology was a big part of the reason the tube system was not expanded during the
headquarters renovation. It was clear by the 1980s that pneumatic tubes were quite
old-fashioned compared with the newly arrived ability to communicate with electrons
through wires.
3
. Erik Sandberg-Diment, “Personal Computers: Refinements for ‘E-mail,’” New York
Times, May 26, 1987.

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4
. Anne Thompson, “The Executive Life: Forget Doing Lunch—Hollywood’s on E-mail,”
New York Times, September 6, 1992.
5
. John Markoff, “Computer Mail Gaining a Market,” New York Times, December 26, 1989.
6
. Stephen C. Miller, “Networking: Now Software Giants Are Targeting E-mail,” New York
Times, May 31, 1992.
7
. Peter H. Lewis, “Personal Computers: The Good, the Bad and the Truly Ugly Faces of
Electronic Mail,” New York Times, September 6, 1994.
8
. The value of the fact that email is easy to learn shouldn’t be underestimated. As Gloria
Mark explained to me, during the 1980s and 1990s, as computer networks became
more widespread, there was a lot of academic research on how best to leverage this
technology to support workplace collaboration. Much of this research focused on
advanced multiuser network applications that were customized for specific purposes—
like collaboratively editing a certain type of document. As Mark told me, email
dominated where these bespoke solutions faltered because it was so easy to learn and
could be applied to many different types of work. A onetime investment in an email
server could simplify collaboration in all aspects of your business.
9
. The story and quote come from this Quora thread: 
www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-
work-in-an-office-before-the-birth-of-personal-computers-email-and-fax-machines
. I
also interviewed Stone to confirm and elaborate some of these points.
10
. For a discussion and summary of Brunner’s arguments, including relevant citations, see
Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1966), 3.
11
. White, Medieval Technology, 5.
12
. White, Medieval Technology, 13.
13
. White, Medieval Technology, 13.
14
. As Lynn White Jr. elaborates, though Benedictine monks were trying to stop the
practice, around this period many Frankish warriors were being buried with their
horses, allowing modern archaeologists to dig up evidence about how these horses were
equipped in battle. Also around this time, the words used to describe mounting and
dismounting horses shifted from verbs that captured the action of leaping up on a horse
to verbs that captured more of a stepping behavior.
15
. White, Medieval Technology, 2.
16
. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show
Business (New York: Penguin, 1985), 51.
17
. For more on this history, see chapter 1 of my previous book: Cal Newport, Digital
Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (New York: Portfolio/Penguin,
2019).
18
. Blake Thorne, “Asynchronous Communication Is the Future of Work,” I Done This
(blog), June 30, 2020, 
http://blog.idonethis.com/asynchronous-communication/
.
19
. Radicati Group, Inc., Email Statistics Report, 2015–2019, Palo Alto, CA, March 2015.
20
. Michael J. Fischer, Nancy A. Lynch, and Michael S. Paterson, “Impossibility of
Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process,” Journal of the ACM 32, no. 2 (April
1985): 374–82.
21
. For the interested reader, the high-level summary of this impossibility proof unfolds as
follows. Every consensus algorithm must, at some point, have each machine look at the
messages it has received so far and determine whether to proceed or abort. Regardless
of what rule you use to make this decision, there must be some boundary between
proceed and abort, where changing just a single message pushes you from one decision
to the other. The proof essentially brings a lot of machines right up against this
boundary, then crashes the machine that sends the key message halfway through its

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sending, meaning that some machines receive the message and some don’t—leading to
conflicting decisions. Interestingly, if you’re allowed to flip coins and are satisfied with
an algorithm that solves the problem with high probability, then it is solvable.
Similarly, if you assume any sort of reasonable time-out on how long to wait for a
machine before you know for sure it has crashed, you can also solve the problem.
22
. I was at the ceremony in Paris where Lamport was awarded his prize. In typical French
fashion, the government officials in attendance wore impeccable suits. In typical
computer scientist fashion, Lamport wore shorts and a T-shirt.
23
. 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), 2.
24
. Perlow, Sleeping with Your Smartphone, 8.
25
. Perlow, Sleeping with Your Smartphone, 5.
26
. Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (New York: Current,
2013), 100.
27
. Aviad Agam and Ran Barkai, “Elephant and Mammoth Hunting during the Paleolithic: A
Review of the Relevant Archaeological, Ethnographic and Ethno-historical Records,”
Quaternary 1, no. 3 (February 2018): 1–28.
28
. “Is Your Team Too Big? Too Small? What’s the Right Number?,” Knowledge@Wharton,
June 14, 2006, 
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-your-team-too-big-
too-small-whats-the-right-number-2/
. This article is also the source of the information
about Ringelmann’s research summarized in the discussion that follows.
29
. Information on Drucker’s early life, including his parents’ salons, can be found at the
Drucker Institute’s bio of its namesake: 
www.drucker.institute/perspective/about-
peter-drucker/
.
30
. One of many places where this epithet is bestowed: Steve Denning, “The Best of Peter
Drucker,” Forbes, July 29, 2014,
www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/07/29/the-best-of-peter-drucker
.
31
. Peter F. Drucker, The Future of Industrial Man (Rutgers, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
2011), 13.
32
. For more on Drucker’s GM engagement, see the following account: “How Drucker
‘Invented’ Management at GM,” Drucker Society of Austria, 2009,
www.druckersociety.at/index.php/peterdruckerhome/biography/how-drucker-
invented-management-at-general-motors
.
33
. This quote is reproduced in the Drucker Institute’s timeline of Drucker’s life,
www.drucker.institute/perspective/about-peter-drucker/
. It also appears in the April
14 entry of Peter F. Drucker, The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation
for Getting the Right Things Done (New York: Harper Business, 2004).
34
. Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right
Things Done, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Business, 2006), 4.
35
. Peter F. Drucker, “Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge,” California
Management Review 41, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 79–94. Italics in the original.
36
. Lloyd didn’t use the phrase “tragedy of the commons.” This label was introduced later in
a now famous article that rigorously analyzes the scenario: Garrett Hardin, “The
Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (December 1968): 1243–48.