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

Short-Message Protocols
In 2017, C. L. Max Nikias, an accomplished academic and then
president of the University of Southern California, wrote a peculiar
op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. He wasn’t discussing the research
accomplishments that had earned him memberships in the National
Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. He also wasn’t writing about the $6 billion capital
campaign he ran, or the new campus he opened, or the addition of
one hundred endowed chairs that he had helped create during the
previous seven years of his presidency at USC.
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His topic was both
more universal and more mundane: email.
As Nikias explains, in his role he received over three hundred
emails a day—and this presented a problem. “The very point of being
a leader is to move an organization in a meaningful direction,” he
writes, “yet email can have the opposite effect, blocking the leader
from accomplishing anything proactive or of lasting substance.” To

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avoid the fate of spending his time “glued to a screen and responding
endlessly,” Nikias came up with a simple solution: “I keep all of my
emails brief—no more than [the length of] an average text message.”
What happens to the emails that demand an interaction more
involved than what can fit into a text-length reply? Nikias calls the
person or asks them to set up a meeting. “The crucial nuances of
human communication don’t translate well into cyberspace anyway,”
he explains.
Nikias is not the only person to experiment with shorter emails.
In 2007, a web designer named Mike Davidson posted an essay on
his personal blog titled “A Low-Fi Solution to E-mail Overload.”
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 In
this post, Davidson describes his frustration with the asymmetric
nature of email communication. “Often times the sender will ask two
or three open-ended one sentence questions which elicit multi-
paragraph answers,” he writes. “In these cases, the sender spends
one minute and the receiver is asked, implicitly, to spend maybe an
hour.” He came up with the same general solution as C. L. Max
Nikias: keep all of his emails short. He similarly identified the 160-
character count of an SMS text message as a reasonable target, but,
recognizing that counting characters would require some sort of
special software plug-in, he instead used a simple approximation: he
would keep all his emails to five sentences or fewer.
To “politely” explain this rule to his correspondents, Davidson
launched a simple website, 
http://five.sentenc.es
, that briefly
explains the policy on a minimalist landing page. He then added the
following signature to the bottom of all his emails:
Q: Why is this email five sentences or less?
A: 
http://five.sentenc.es
As Davidson concludes in this introductory post: “By ensuring
that all e-mails I send out take the same amount of time to send (viz.
‘not a lot’), I am evening the playing field between emails and
attending to many more of them in the end.”
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The idea of strictly limiting email length is more than a gimmick. It
instead represents a step that too few take in our current digital age:
the placing of clear constraints around what email should and should
not be used to accomplish. The hyperactive hive mind workflow

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wants email to be a neutral carrier that supports flexible,
unstructured, ongoing conversations of all types. The short-email
movement pushes back on this commitment. It specifies email as
something useful for short questions, short answers, and short
updates, but demands that anything more complicated be handled
using a different type of communication better suited to the
exchange. This might be a pain in the moment, but from the
perspective of Claude Shannon’s framework, it’s a protocol that will
deliver a lower average cost in the long run.
As Nikias explains in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, for example,
when he was overseeing the largest campus expansion in his
university’s history, he regularly received emails from his
construction managers with design updates or small change requests
that needed quick approvals (“everything from brick samples to
stained glass windows”). This is a great use of email: for the
construction managers to interrupt Nikias with a phone call or
meeting for every one of these approvals would have devoured his
entire schedule. On the other hand, as Nikias elaborates, when a
construction issue seemed to require “substantive” discussion, he
immediately bounced it out of his inbox and would instead initiate a
phone call.
When deployed properly, these short-message policies
implement efficient protocols that use email for the type of
communication for which it’s best suited (quick and asynchronous),
forcing people onto better mediums for everything else. Always
keeping emails short is a simple rule, but the effects can be profound.
Once you no longer think of email as a general-purpose tool for
talking about anything at any time, its stranglehold on your attention
will diminish.