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

Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, the social networks in our
brains are connected to our pain systems, creating the intense
heartbreak we feel when someone close to us dies, or the total
desolation we experience when isolated from human interaction for
too much time. “These social adaptations are central to making us
the most successful species on earth,” Lieberman writes.
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Long before scientists probed the underlying structures of our
sociality, we were already quite aware and reflective about our
crushing need to properly manage interactions. The Torah explicitly
forbids rechilut (gossip): “Thou shalt not go up and down as a
talebearer among thy people; neither shalt thou stand against the
blood of thy neighbor: I am the LORD,”
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 a biblical recognition of the
power latent in the information moving through a group’s social
graph. Shakespeare also identified friendship as central to the
human experience when he wrote Richard II’s famous lament: “I live
with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends: subjected
thus, / How can you say to me, I am a king?”
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Which brings us back to email. The flip side of a deep
evolutionary obsession with one-on-one interaction, as with most
hardwired drives, is a corresponding feeling of distress when it’s
thwarted. Much in the same way our attraction to food is coupled
with the gnawing sensation of hunger in its absence, our instinct to
connect is accompanied by an anxious unease when we neglect these
interactions. This matters in the office because, as we’ve
documented, an unfortunate side effect of the hyperactive hive mind
workflow is that it constantly exposes you to exactly this form of
distress. This frenetic approach to professional collaboration
generates messages faster than you can keep up—you finish one

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response only to find three more have arrived in the interim—and
while you’re at home at night, or over the weekend, or on vacation,
you cannot escape the awareness that the missives in your inbox are
piling ever thicker in your absence. Not surprisingly, reports of these
forms of stress were common in the responses to my reader survey:
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“I have a constant sense of having missed something.”
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“Psychologically, I can’t leave emails unread, no matter how
insignificant.”
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“I feel like things are piling up, and then I’m becoming
stressed.”
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“My inbox stresses me out because I know how much effort it
takes to PROPERLY communicate via email.”
At this point, however, you might complain that there’s a big
difference between neglecting an email and neglecting a fellow
hunter-gatherer tribe member. The worst-case consequence of the
former is that you might annoy Bob in accounting, while the worst
case for the latter is that you starve to death. In fact, your company
might even have crystal clear norms about how long it is acceptable
to wait before responding to email, meaning that Bob is probably
absolutely fine with your delayed reply. The problem, of course, is
that deeply embedded human drives are not known for responding to
rationality.
When you skip a meal, telling your rumbling stomach that food
is coming later in the day, and therefore it has no reason to fear
starvation, doesn’t alleviate the powerful sensation of hunger.
Similarly, explaining to your brain that the neglected interactions in
your overfilled inbox have little to do with your survival doesn’t seem
to prevent a corresponding sense of background anxiety. To your
entrenched social circuitry, evolved over millennia of food shortages
mitigated through strategic alliances, these unanswered messages
become the psychological equivalent of ignoring a tribe member who
might later prove key to surviving the next drought. From this
perspective, the crowded email inbox is not just frustrating—it’s a
matter of life or death.

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We can actually measure this triumph of the ancient social drives
over the rational modern brain in the laboratory. In one particularly
devious study, published in 2015 in The Journal of Computer-
Mediated Communication, researchers figured out how to discreetly
assess our psychological response to thwarted digital connection.
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Subjects were brought into a room to work on word puzzles. They
were told that as part of the experiment, the researcher also wanted
to test out a wireless blood pressure monitor. After the subject
worked on the puzzle for a few minutes, the researcher returned to
the room and explained that the subject’s smartphone was creating
“interference” with the wireless signal, so they needed to move the
phone to a table twelve feet away—still within earshot, but out of
reach. After the subject worked on the puzzle for a few more minutes,
the researcher covertly called the subject’s phone. At this point, the
subject was trying to solve the word puzzle while hearing their phone
ringing from across the room, but was prevented from answering it
due to a previous warning from the researcher that it was important
not to get up “for any reason.”
Throughout this entire charade, the wireless monitor was
tracking the subject’s physiological state by measuring blood
pressure and heart rate, allowing the researchers to observe the
effect of the phone separation. The results were predictable. During
the period when the phone was ringing across the room, indicators of
stress and anxiety jumped higher. Similarly, self-reported stress rose
and self-reported pleasantness fell. Performance on the word puzzle
also decreased during the period of unanswered ringing.
Rationally speaking, the subjects knew that missing a call was
not a crisis, as people miss calls all the time, and they were clearly
engaged in something more important in the moment. Indeed, in
many cases, the subject’s phone had already been set to Do Not
Disturb mode, which the researchers surreptitiously turned off as
they moved the phone across the room. This means that the subjects
had already planned on missing any calls or messages that arrived
during the experiment. But this rational understanding was no
match for the underlying evolutionary pressures which ingrain the
idea that ignoring a potential connection is really bad! The subjects
were bathed in anxiety, even though their rational minds, if asked,
would admit that there was nothing going on in that laboratory that
was actually worth worrying about.

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The missed connections that necessarily accompany the
hyperactive hive mind sound these same Paleolithic alarm bells—
regardless of our best attempts to convince ourselves that this
unanswered communication isn’t critical. This effect is so strong that
when Arianna Huffington’s company Thrive Global explored how to
free its employees from this anxiety while on vacation (when the
knowledge of piling messages becomes particularly acute), it ended
up deploying an extreme solution known as Thrive Away: if you send
an email to a colleague who’s on vacation, you receive a note
informing you that your message has been automatically deleted—
you can resend it when they return.
In theory, a simple vacation autoresponder should be sufficient—
as it tells people sending you a message not to expect a reply until
you return—but logic is subservient in this situation. No matter what
the expectations, the awareness that there are messages waiting for
you somewhere triggers anxiety, ruining the potential relaxation of
your time off. The only cure is to prevent the messages from arriving
altogether. “The key is not just that the tool is creating a wall
between you and your email,” explained Huffington. “It’s that it frees
you from the mounting anxiety of having a mounting pile of emails
waiting for you on your return—the stress of which mitigates the
benefits of disconnecting in the first place.”
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A tool like Thrive Away might temporarily alleviate the social
stress of the hyperactive hive mind, but we cannot ignore the fifty or
so weeks a year when we’re not on vacation. As long as we remain
committed to a workflow based on constant, ad hoc messaging, our
Paleolithic brain will remain in a state of low-grade anxiety.