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

The Process Principle
Introducing smart production processes to knowledge work can dramatically
increase performance and make the work much less draining.
To move past the shortcomings of the hyperactive hive mind
workflow, we must abandon our Rousseauian optimism that
knowledge workers left to a state of nature will thrive. To get the
most out of our attention capital, we need processes, and this is true
for both organizations and individual knowledge workers. To
reiterate the obvious, I’m not talking about processes that somehow

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attempt to reduce the skilled and dynamic elements of knowledge
work to step-by-step recipes. As we established in the last chapter,
our reform efforts in this book focus on the workflows that
coordinate knowledge work, not the skilled execution of the work
itself. This holds true for our discussion of production processes,
which help make sense of who is working on what but don’t specify
the details of how this work unfolds; replacing, in other words,
endless back-and-forth hive mind messaging with guidelines that let
knowledge workers spend more of their time actually working
instead of talking about their work—the cognitive equivalent of John
Runnells’s revamped brass foundry.
The remainder of this chapter explores ideas for building smart
production processes in both your knowledge work organization and
your individual professional life. We’ll begin, as is now our habit,
with a concrete case study that we can reference in the discussions
that follow. In this case, we’ll take a close look at a twelve-person
media company that’s pushed its embrace of the process principle to
a profitable extreme.
Case Study: Optimizing the Optimizers
Optimize Enterprises is a media company that focuses on self-
improvement content. Its core product is a subscription service that
provides weekly in-depth book summaries, as well as daily lessons,
delivered as short videos. You can access the service through a
website or a smartphone app. Optimize also recently began a coach
training program, which proved a surprise hit. More than one
thousand coaches signed up for the first round of training, a cycle
that lasts three hundred days. The company employs twelve full-time
team members, who work in tandem with eight to twelve part-time
contractors. There’s no physical headquarters for Optimize, meaning
this team operates entirely remotely. As the president and founder,
Brian Johnson, told me when I interviewed him for this book, the
company is on track for $2.5 million in annual revenue.
The reason Johnson’s company interested me is not its size or
product offerings, but instead the details of how it operates. As
Johnson explained early in our conversation: “We don’t email at all.
Zero. There will never be an email between a team member and

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another team member.” Though he doesn’t use this exact
terminology, Johnson and his team were able to sidestep the
hyperactive hive mind by adopting a production process mindset.
Motivated by his intuitive dislike of interruption and harried
busyness, Johnson had his team methodically break down their work
into processes that could be clearly stated and (appropriately
enough) optimized to maximize the time spent doing useful work
and minimize the time spent moving back and forth between work
and inboxes. “Our team is absolutely committed to single-tasking,”
Johnson told me. “You do one thing at a time.”
One of Optimize’s more intricate processes, for example,
involves the production of the daily lesson videos that get delivered
to multiple platforms each morning. The work required for this
production is substantial. Johnson is responsible for actually coming
up with and writing the lessons. He’s also the person who delivers
the lessons on camera for the video. But beyond this, other tasks
lurk: the text versions of the lessons must be edited, the videos must
be filmed, the film clips must be edited, and everything must be
launched to multiple platforms at just the right time. Around a half
dozen people are involved in executing these varied steps.
In many organizations, the sheer volume of interconnected
action required to keep this content production machinery working
would seem to necessitate endless back-and-forth urgent emails or
hyperactive Slack chattering. But not at Optimize: over the years,
they’ve built a production process for these efforts that eliminates
almost all informal interaction, allowing those involved to focus
nearly 100 percent of their energy on actually performing the skilled
work needed to keep the pipeline of high-quality content filled and
flowing.
The process starts with a shared spreadsheet. When Johnson
comes up with an idea for a lesson, he adds a title and subtitle to the
spreadsheet. Each row has a status column, which Johnson sets to
“idea,” marking the lesson as still in the earliest stages of
development. Once Johnson gets around to writing the lesson, he’ll
upload it to a shared directory in the company’s Dropbox account,
then add a link to this draft to the spreadsheet row for the lesson. At
this point, he’ll change its status to “ready for editing.” Johnson’s
editor doesn’t interact directly with Johnson, but instead monitors
the spreadsheet. When he sees a lesson is ready to be edited, he

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downloads it, puts it into the right format, edits it, and then moves it
into a postproduction Dropbox folder that holds text that’s ready to
go live.
At this point, the editor changes the status of the lesson to “ready
for filming.” Johnson has a studio in his house where he films
lessons. He has a standing schedule with his film crew that specifies
which days each month they come to knock out a chunk of lesson
videos. When the crew arrives, there’s no ambiguity about what
they’ll be filming: all lessons currently in the “ready for filming”
status. After a film day, the crew will upload the raw files to a shared
Dropbox directory dedicated to the editing process. The statuses of
these lessons are now changed on the spreadsheet to indicate they
are ready to be edited. At this point, Optimize’s film editor will
download the clips from the dedicated directory, run them through
the standard processing to get them ready for release, and then
upload them to a shared postproduction folder. The lessons’ statuses
are changed to indicate they are ready for release, and a release date
is chosen and added to each corresponding row.
The final step is the actual release of the written and video
versions of the lessons on their scheduled release dates. Two content
management service (CMS) specialists execute this last step. They
monitor the spreadsheet to see which lessons are scheduled for
which days. They download the content from the postproduction
directories and schedule it for release using the CMS platform. When
the time comes, the lesson that started as just an idea in Johnson’s
mind goes live across the Optimize networks.
Here’s what amazed me about this production process: it
coordinates a fair-sized group of specialists, spread out around the
world, to accomplish the complicated feat of releasing highly
produced multimedia content on a demanding daily schedule—all
without requiring even a single unscheduled email or instant
message. Not one of the skilled knowledge workers involved in this
process ever needs to load up an inbox or glance at a messenger
channel. Almost 100 percent of their time is dedicated to actually
doing the work they’re trained to perform, and when they’re done
working, they’re done working—there’s nothing to check, nothing
urgent requiring a reply.
To be fair, media production is a structured endeavor. Many
knowledge workers deal instead with a more amorphous and

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constantly shifting set of demands. To understand how these latter
efforts can be tamed with processes, I asked Johnson to walk me
through a typical day of one of the higher-level managers in his
company—someone who has to oversee various onetime projects, as
well as produce original strategy on a regular basis. As Johnson
explained, the manager in question has a schedule that begins every
day with three hours of uninterrupted deep work before he receives
“even a single input.” This is time set aside for the manager to think
intensely about his projects—making informed decisions on how to
go forward, where to focus next, what to improve, and what to
ignore.
Only after this morning block ends does the manager turn his
attention to actively managing the projects he runs. To make this
project management more systematic, Optimize deploys an online
collaboration tool called Flow. In its simplest form, Flow allows you
to track tasks associated with projects. Each task is represented as a
card that can be assigned to particular people and given a deadline.
Files and information related to the task can be attached to the card,
and discussion tools allow those working on the task to hold
conversations directly on the virtual card in a forum-style format.
Finally, these cards can be moved around and arranged into different
columns, where each column is labeled to represent a different
category of task or status.
Similar to how Devesh’s marketing firm used Trello in the case
study reviewed in the last chapter, these virtual cards arranged on
virtual boards are the hub around which work on projects unfolds.
Instead of having all communication for all work flow through a
general-purpose inbox or channel, you now choose to work on a
specific project by navigating to its page and checking in on the tasks
to which you’re assigned. This is exactly what our Optimize manager
does after his deep work block concludes: he checks in on the
projects one by one, joining the card-centric conversations when
needed and more generally seeing where things currently stand.
After checking in on these projects in Flow, the manager
typically has one-on-one FaceTime meetings with the various team
members he supervises. These conversations are used to discuss new
initiatives or resolve issues with ongoing tasks. Most projects also
have a regular meeting scheduled each week to help synchronize
everyone’s efforts and efficiently solve group issues. The manager

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