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

Smartphone, the severity of this problem was brought to her
attention by a series of surveys she conducted between 2006 and
2012—the period in which the hive mind workflow shifted into a new
gear of hyperactivity as smartphones became common. These
surveys targeted over 2,500 managers and professionals who held
what Perlow describes as “high-pressure, demanding jobs.”
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 She
asked respondents about their work habits: how many hours they
worked per week, how often they checked their work accounts
outside work, whether they slept with their phones nearby. The
results were stark: these professionals were almost always “on.”
What makes Perlow’s work particularly relevant to our
discussion is that she then went deeper, talking with her research
subjects to better understand how they ended up in this state of

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constant communication. What she uncovered was a social feedback
loop gone awry—a process she named the cycle of responsiveness.
The cycle begins with legitimate demands on your time. Perhaps it’s
2010, you’ve just started using a smartphone, and you realize it’s
now possible to answer client questions that arrive after work hours
or respond quickly to colleagues in different time zones. These
clients and colleagues now learn that you’re available at these new
times and begin to send more requests and expect faster responses.
Faced with this increased influx, you check your phone more often so
you can keep up with the incoming messages. But now the
expectations for your availability and responsiveness increase
further, and you feel pressured to respond even quicker. As Perlow
summarizes:
And thus the cycle spins: teammates, superiors and
subordinates continue to make more requests, and
conscientious employees accept these marginal increases in
demands on their time, while their expectations of each
other (and themselves) rise accordingly.
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This is a nice example of technological determinism at work.
None of these teammates, superiors, and subordinates like the
culture of constant connection that this cycle produces. None of them
ever suggested it, or made a conscious decision to adopt it. Indeed,
when Perlow later persuaded teams at Boston Consulting Group to
schedule protected time away from communication devices, the team
members described their efficiency and effectiveness as increasing.
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She further proposed an email server configured such that messages
sent after work hours would be automatically held and delivered the
next morning (a special flag could be set to bypass this restriction for
actual urgent communication). This change might sound simple, but
by short-circuiting the cycle of responsiveness, its impact could be
profound.
The important lesson from Perlow’s work is the haphazard and
unplanned manner in which an entirely new way of communicating
emerged. The media theorist Douglas Rushkoff uses the term
“collaborative pacing” to describe this tendency for groups of
humans to converge toward strict patterns of behavior without ever

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actually explicitly deciding that the new behaviors make sense.
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I
notice you’re responding a little quicker to my message, so I begin to
do the same. Others follow suit; the pattern of responsiveness
emerges, then becomes a new default. The consultants Perlow
studied didn’t choose the cycle of responsiveness; in some sense,
email chose it for them.
Hive Mind Driver #3: The Caveman at the Computer Screen
In a paper published in 2018 in the journal Quaternary, Tel Aviv
University archaeologists Aviad Agam and Ran Barkai review the
available “archaeological, ethnographic and ethno-historical records”
to summarize our current understanding of how early humans,
starting in the Lower Paleolithic, hunted elephants and mammoths.
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This paper includes four striking charcoal drawings illustrating the
authors’ best guesses about how these hunts might have transpired.
The first drawing shows a group of seven Paleolithic hunters
charging a rearing elephant, each throwing spears toward vulnerable
organs. The second and third show lone hunters attempting to
surprise an elephant by stealth, landing a critical spear stab before
the animal realizes what is happening. In one case, the hunter
attacks from below, stabbing up through the belly; in the other, the
hunter hides in a tree and stabs downward as the elephant passes. In
the fourth drawing, a group of six hunters rush to finish off with
spears an elephant that has fallen into a pitfall trap.
For our purposes, it’s important to notice the small size of the
groups engaged in each of these hunting scenarios. Throughout our
species’s deep history, this evidence suggests, when we hunted
megafauna we did so either alone or in small groups. This reality
likely also holds for the other activities—hunting small game,
foraging—that made up the “work” that dominates our evolutionary
history. It doesn’t require a large leap of speculative evolutionary
psychology to arrive at the reasonable conclusion that Homo sapiens
are well adapted to small-group collaboration.
To connect this observation of our deep past to our current
discussion of email, consider the dynamics of these collaborations. If
you’re part of a small group of Paleolithic hunters stealthily
approaching an elephant, your communication would be ad hoc and

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unstructured as you adjust on the fly to the unfolding situation
(imagine the following dialogue delivered in some now lost caveman
dialect):
“Careful . . . watch out for those sticks, which might crack
and spook the elephant. . . .”
“Wait, circle around that way. . . .”
“Slowly now, its ears are perking up. . . .”
Even when we leave deep history and return to our more recent
pre-industrial past, for the vast majority of people, the vast majority
of their experience working with others would still involve small
groups—from the farmer and his kids navigating a plow to the
blacksmith working closely with his apprentice at the forge. As with
the Paleolithic hunters, the most natural way for small groups to
coordinate is in a free-form manner. It follows that the mode of
collaboration most instinctually embedded in both our genetics and
our cultural memory shares the main characteristics of the
hyperactive hive mind workflow. We shouldn’t be surprised,
therefore, that when the introduction of low-friction messaging tools
like email made similarly unstructured communication possible in
the modern large office scenario, we were drawn to this mode of
interaction.
The problem, of course, is that the hyperactive hive mind
deployed in an office differs from the hive mind collaboration of a
Stone Age elephant hunt in one key property: the office connects
many more people. Unstructured coordination is great for a group of
six hunters but becomes disastrously ineffective when you connect
many dozens, if not hundreds, of employees in a large organization.
We know this in part because of the robust research literature
studying the optimal group size for working together and solving
professional problems. “The size question has been asked since the
dawn of social psychology,” explains Jennifer Mueller, a
management professor at Wharton.
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One of the first studies in this area was the now famous work of a
nineteenth-century French agricultural engineer, Maximilien

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Ringelmann, who demonstrated that when you dedicate more people
to the task of pulling a rope, the average force exerted by each
individual decreases—leading to diminishing returns as group sizes
grow. Though the physical task of rope pulling is not that relevant to
the modern knowledge sector, Ringelmann’s work proved influential,
as it introduced the general idea that increasing the size of a team
doesn’t necessarily increase its effectiveness in direct proportion.
In the modern era, many management professors have built on
this observation by studying what happens to the effectiveness of
workplace collaboration when you increase team sizes. A 2006
review article published by Wharton summarizes many such
research papers. Though there’s no specific team size that
consistently emerges as optimal, essentially every result falls into a
narrow range of roughly four to twelve people—exactly as we
observed all the way back with the Paleolithic elephant hunters.
There are many proposed reasons for why teams above this
range are less effective. The loafing effect first observed by
Ringelmann, for example, seems to still play a role in knowledge
work tasks. (Summarized simply: the more people working on a
project, the easier it is to get away with putting in less effort.) But
another key factor is the rising complexity of communication. It’s
easy for six elephant hunters to coordinate their attack by just
speaking up when they have something relevant to say. But if you
increase this size to sixty, the effort would devolve into an
incomprehensible scrum of competing voices and misunderstood
ideas, which is why military units of this size almost always feature
strict chains of command.
Pulling together these threads, we can weave a compelling
narrative that helps explain the hyperactive hive mind’s spread.
Throughout most of human history we worked together in small
groups, communicating in an ad hoc fashion without any particular
structure or rules. The rise of the large office in the early twentieth
century completely disrupted these natural modes of collaboration,
requiring us instead to send memos to be carbon-copied in typing
pools, or have secretaries arrange one-on-one phone calls. When
email arrived, we found a way to bring back a more primal mode of
communication to our otherwise alienating office environments—we
could just talk, on the fly, sending messages as the thoughts arrived,
and expect responses promptly: the elephant hunt reenacted over

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network wires. The result was the hyperactive hive mind workflow—
which made sense at an instinctual level, even while at a practical
level it began to drive us toward misery as we misjudged its ability to
scale up to large groups.
Put another way, although the now common tableau of the
frantic business executives furiously typing on their phones might
seem like the personification of our modern moment, it’s perhaps
downright Paleolithic in its origins.