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

participates in these meetings, updating the corresponding project
pages as needed to reflect any decisions made about the work. Like
all Optimize employees, his day ends between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m.
Johnson is insistent on enforcing a “digital sunset” for his company:
he wants his employees to end their workday at a reasonable hour to
spend time with family and recharge. Because there are no email
inboxes to check, our manager, as with all Optimize employees, will
actually be free from work until the next morning.
Here are a few other odds and ends I learned about Optimize’s
processes. Though they forbid internal email, they do use email to
communicate with external partners. Their interaction with these
inboxes, however, is highly structured. Johnson says those
responsible for these external-facing email addresses have “discrete
blocks” in which they check for messages, typically once a day. To
handle customer service, Optimize deploys a tool called Intercom
that streamlines the process of responding to the most common
requests and prevents pileups of ambiguous emails from customers.
Optimize also hosts a company-wide meeting every Monday (using
teleconferencing software) to synchronize efforts.
Perhaps most interesting of all—and a real surprise when I first
heard it—Optimize does use Slack. As Johnson explained, however,
its engagement with this tool looks significantly different from the
cliché of constant hive mind chatter. Because almost all the
interactions required for Optimize’s core work efforts are already
captured by well-defined processes, there’s not much left to discuss
on these chat channels. This tool is mainly used for two purposes.
The first is to “celebrate wins”: if someone accomplishes something
important, either professionally or personally, they might share it on
the company Slack channel. Johnson describes this as a chance to
virtually “high-five” one another. Because the company is virtual, he
explained, it’s important to have some outlet for social interaction.
Their other use for Slack is to schedule the meetings in which most
actual work interaction occurs.
Optimize employees truly do use Slack asynchronously—
checking it only once or twice a day in between other tasks. It would
be pointless to check Slack more often, as there is not enough
actually shared on the channel to make it worthwhile. In a typical
day, an Optimize employee might end up using Slack for perhaps a

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handful of minutes—maybe to deliver a virtual high five or provide a
time to a manager trying to set up a meeting.
Finally, to support this process-centric approach to work,
Johnson insists that the whole company take processes seriously. He
sees getting these processes right as the core to their success. Every
employee of Optimize is expected to spend at least the first ninety
minutes of every day in a deep work block, free from inputs (some
people, like the manager profiled above, spend much more). One of
the key uses of this morning block is to think about processes and
how to improve them. As Johnson explained to me, it takes time to
figure out how best to structure the crazy inputs and interaction that
surround most work processes. He’s diligent in making sure that
everyone keeps prioritizing this. “You need time away from inputs to
figure out how best to systematize those inputs,” he explained. This
is perhaps Optimize’s most important process of all: the process that
helps improve the existing processes.