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

Don’t Fear Inconvenience
When I told Devesh’s story to other knowledge workers, they
predictably raised concerns. When they imagined shifting their own
organizations away from the hyperactive hive mind and toward
something more structured, like Devesh’s project board–based
workflow, they easily conjured potential issues. Losing the ability to
grab people’s attention for anything at any time might lead to
deadlines getting missed, or urgent tasks not getting completed, or
long delays before you get the answers you need to make progress on
key project steps. Leaving behind the simplicity of the hyperactive
hive mind, in other words, might create a steady stream of
inconveniences for everyone involved.
This objection is important because it’s relevant to most
attempts to apply the attention capital principle. As argued, one of
the key explanations for the hyperactive hive mind’s persistence in
the knowledge sector is that it’s really convenient in the moment for
the individuals who use it. There are no systems to learn or rules to

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remember; you simply grab people electronically as you need them.
Almost any alternative to this workflow is going to be less
convenient, in the sense that it will require more effort to follow, and
lead to short-term problems, like missed tasks or occasional long
response delays. This reality helps explain why so many work reform
movements, born out of inbox exhaustion, end up reduced down to
only small tweaks—like promoting better “etiquette” surrounding
messaging—as these toothless suggestions prevent anyone from
having to confront the hardships that follow real changes to the
hyperactive hive mind status quo.
Imagine you want to make a major change to your own or your
organization’s workflow. How can you avoid the inconveniences
associated with this experimentation? You can’t. You must instead
adjust your mindset so that you no longer fear these annoyances. To
support this advice, let’s turn back to the industrial sector, where an
embrace of inconvenience is commonly accepted. Consider, for a
moment, what it must have been like at Henry Ford’s Highland Park
factory during the radical experimentation that occurred between
1908 and 1914. At the beginning of this period, the way Ford was
building cars made perfect sense. Deploying the same craft method
that had dominated for decades, he had workers stand around
stationary vehicles, bolting and filing parts, carrying supplies back
and forth to the machine shop, and generally building the vehicles
the way people had always naturally built complicated things: in
place, one piece at a time.
Ford’s early assembly line, by contrast, must have been a
nightmare for his employees. Nothing about it was natural. For one
thing, it required more complicated machinery that was prone to
breaking down. Carrying a bumper from a pile to a stationary car was
a simple and reliable process. Trying to pull an entire car chassis on a
variable-speed winch system toward a worker who would then bolt
on a bumper as it passed was a much more complicated way to
accomplish this same step.
Then there were the custom tools. Part of what makes
continuous production possible is specialized rigs that can execute
precision tasks quickly. Ford, for example, invented a drilling
machine that could simultaneously bore forty-five holes into an
engine block.
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 The thing about custom tools, however, is that it’s
hard to get them running consistently. It’s a fair guess that during

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these early years there was a lot of frustrated downtime at Highland
Park spent tweaking and repairing these cumbersome rigs.
Another annoying reality of an assembly line is that a snag at any
stage of a process—an installation step taking too long or a part not
making it to where it’s needed in time—can halt production
altogether. Such shutdowns must have been common as the kinks
were being worked out for the early lines. Imagine the frustration of
shifting from the steady reliability of the craft method to a process
that forced you to stop working completely again and again. To make
matters even worse, the assembly line also required the addition of
more managers and engineers to supervise. It was not only more
annoying but also much more expensive to operate!
To summarize, Henry Ford took a reliable and intuitive process
for building cars and replaced it with something that was more
expensive to run, required a lot more management and overhead,
was not at all natural, and frequently broke down, sometimes leading
to major production delays. Nothing about this would have been easy
or obvious. If you were a Ford manager, laborer, or investor during
this period, you probably would have much preferred a safer and less
disruptive focus on making the tried-and-true method slightly more
efficient—the industrial equivalent of promoting better email
etiquette.
We recognize now, of course, that these misgivings were
misguided, as the assembly line ended up making Ford Motor
Company one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the
world. In the context of industrial production, we readily accept
these stories, because when we think about a factory, it makes sense
that the goal is not convenience, or simplicity, or preventing bad
things from occasionally happening—it’s instead manufacturing
products as cost-effectively as possible.
Indeed, if you read twentieth-century management literature,
the idea of achieving more effectiveness through your ability to
tolerate added complexity is celebrated. In his 1959 book,
Landmarks of Tomorrow, Peter Drucker lauds the “steady slugging
away on improvement, adaptation, and application,” led by applied
researchers and engineers, that enabled companies to manufacture
new and improved products faster than ever before.
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 Similarly, in
James McCay’s classic business advice tome The Management of
Time, also written in 1959, McCay connects leadership in the modern

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world to the ability to constantly experiment with how work is
accomplished, while stoically handling the resulting complexity:
The man of the hour is the one who can handle the complex
problems created by the increasing speed of invention. . . .
He is the man of exceptional originality. He is the man who
has disciplined himself to keep acquiring new knowledge
and skills. He has created new production concepts,
marketing concepts, approaches to financing.
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In modern knowledge work, we’ve largely lost interest in moving
boldly ahead, embracing the resulting hardships as the cost of doing
business better than before. We still talk about “innovation,” but this
term now applies almost exclusively to the products and services we
offer, not the means by which we produce them. When it comes to
the latter topic, business thinkers tend to focus on secondary factors,
like better leadership or clearer objectives to help stimulate
productivity. Little attention is dedicated to the actual mechanics of
how work is assigned, executed, and reviewed.
This focus on secondary factors is not due to timidity on the part
of knowledge work leaders. It’s instead largely a result of the
autonomy trap discussed earlier. A natural consequence of leaving
the details of how knowledge workers work up to the individual is an
entrenchment in workflows that prioritize convenience in the
moment above all else. Once we free ourselves from this trap,
however, and start systematically rethinking how we work, we’ll
inevitably create short-term inconvenience on our way to long-term
improvement. As my industrial history hopefully underscores, this
inconvenience shouldn’t be feared. In business, good is not the same
as easy, and fulfilling is not the same as convenient. Deep down,
knowledge workers want to feel as if they’re producing important
output that takes full advantage of their hard-won skills, even if this
means they can’t always get a quick response to their messages.