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

Forgiveness
In late 1984, Sam Carpenter, then thirty-five years old, bought a
struggling telephone answering service.
18
 It had seven employees and
140 clients. It cost him $21,000. Carpenter began boldly announcing
to everyone he knew that “we would someday be the highest-quality
telephone answering service in the United States.” As Carpenter
dryly summarizes in his 2008 book, Work the System: “Events did
not unfold as anticipated.”
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It turns out that the telephone answering service business is
complicated. Clients call constantly, each representing an entirely
new type of problem, from a medical emergency to an urgent
business matter, each placing its own demands on the representative
who takes the call. Like many small business owners, Carpenter
found his life had become a “disorganized nightmare” in which he
worked eighty-hour weeks, constantly putting out fires. He lost his
house and car. He set up bunk beds at the office for his two teenage
kids to sleep in. At one point, Carpenter was answering calls himself
as the sole representative on duty during the midnight to 8:00 a.m.
shift. He would then work from eight to five on the administrative
minutiae generated by the business.
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None of this, of course, was sustainable. After fifteen years,
Carpenter was near ruin, both physically and financially. It was then,
as so often happens in these business memoirs, that he had an
“earthmoving” insight. The acknowledgment that his business was in
its final moments paradoxically gave Carpenter confidence to
experiment with bold new approaches. It was this mindset that
sparked that flash of insight: His company was like a mechanical
device. It was composed of many assemblages that worked together
in predictable ways. His problems, from the constant crises to the
overwhelming amount of frantic administrative work drowning him,
were not inevitable or the whims of circumstance, but instead the
result of flaws in the underlying systems that made up his company’s
operation. If he could clearly identify each of these systems, write
down how it worked, then optimize it as problems arose, he could get
his organization humming without issues, and without requiring his
constant, hands-on-the-controls interventions.

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Carpenter created a master list of all the different activities that
defined his company’s operation, and began working with the
relevant staff on an official system for each. One of the places he
started was the company finances. He used to spend many hours
each week paying bills and cashing checks, including regular trips to
the bank—all of it a major source of stress. He replaced this chaos
with a much more structured system for tracking expenses and
revenue, and empowered his employees to make the bank trips on
his behalf. What used to take hours each week was reduced to one
short session during which he signed checks—a step he admits he
could have also automated, but decided not to so he could maintain a
more tangible understanding of his expenses. Another of these new
systems streamlined customer service by providing clear guidelines
that empowered employees to handle most service issues directly,
without Carpenter’s involvement. The basic operating procedure for
how his call center staff answered calls also became strictly codified,
providing much more consistent service (with fewer performance
issues for Carpenter to address), and even the process for
onboarding new employees was made largely automatic, greatly
reducing the complexities created by staff turnover.
“The logic of it was crystal clear, exquisite,” he writes. “I felt a
quiet joy I had never felt before. To this day, I remember every
moment of it.”
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Carpenter’s optimism was well founded. As he
worked to rebuild his company on a foundation of clear and
optimized systems, profits grew for the first time. “My personal
income is . . . let’s just say, more than I need,” Carpenter writes on
his website. More important, his work obligations fell from eighty or
more hours to less than two hours a week. By some statistical
measures, the company even achieved Carpenter’s original arrogant
goal, ranking number one among the more than 1,500 answering
services still active in the country.
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Sam Carpenter doesn’t run a knowledge work organization. We
shouldn’t, therefore, pay too much attention to the details of the
systems he put in place to improve the operations of his answering
service. What makes him relevant to our discussion is a more general
accomplishment: getting his employees to dramatically change the
way they worked. The chapters that follow provide concrete ideas for
how to put the attention capital principle into action by radically
rethinking workflows. In most cases, the impact of these changes will

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extend beyond your own professional life to affect the daily
experiences of other people—perhaps your employees, colleagues, or
clients. This can create tricky dynamics, which is why before we
move on to detailed suggestions for what to change, we should first
address the question of how to make these general types of workflow
modifications in a way that sticks. Carpenter’s experience can help us
with this goal.
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There are two ways applying the attention capital principle can
impact the people with whom you work. The first is when it alters
workflows in such a way that people are forced to change how they
execute their own work. This is what happened, for example, when
Devesh moved his marketing company’s workflow away from email
and toward project boards. His employees needed to now log in to
Trello and click on the cards to communicate about a given project
instead of simply sending emails.
The second type of impact changes only other people’s