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

partners. But Scott doesn’t care. By focusing almost all his energy on
his specialty—designing great products and making big picture
strategic decisions—the long-term profitability of his company is
vastly increased compared with the alternative scenario where all
this thinking gets done in small slivers of time between endless
meetings about glazing decisions.
Scott’s story highlights an effective strategy for becoming more
specialized in your work: attempt to outsource the time-consuming
things that you don’t do well. The key obstacle to overcome in
applying this strategy is that you’ll likely pay a price in the short term
before you reap long-term benefits. Scott, for example, had to give up
profit margin and some control over his business to create a
company that would be massively more successful over time.
In many cases, the price you pay to outsource comes directly out
of your pocket. In 2016, podcaster and entrepreneur Pat Flynn
reached a tipping point with his email inbox. He remembered when
he used to embrace the idea of inbox zero: the objective of reducing
your email inbox back down to empty at the end of each day. At some
point, as demands on his time from partners and listeners increased,
he made inbox 100 his new goal. Then one day he noticed his unread
messages had ballooned to over nine thousand. He was trying to run
a business but had instead become a professional email manager.

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His solution was to hire a full-time executive assistant. As Flynn
details in a podcast episode titled “9000 Unread Emails to Inbox
Zero,” it took him and his assistant several weeks to work out a
system for her to successfully manage his inbox.
8
 They produced a
rule book that allowed her to handle almost every message on her
own, bringing to Flynn’s attention only what required his input. Most
important, Flynn was freed from the sense that if he wasn’t
constantly checking his inbox, elements of his business might suffer.
Hiring a high-end executive assistant is expensive. But Flynn had
come to a similar conclusion as Scott: If he wasn’t able to spend
significant time on the specialized activities on which his business
was built, then what was the point of running that business?
If you run your own business or freelance, once you adopt this
mindset that unskilled activities slow down your growth, you’ll begin
to notice numerous opportunities to reduce non-vital efforts. Other
examples I’ve encountered include hiring a bookkeeper to handle
accounting and invoices, using a virtual assistant to book meetings
and travel, having a web designer on retainer to keep your web
operations humming, using social media consultants to handle your
online branding, or bringing on experienced customer service
representatives, empowered to make decisions without your input.
The productivity writer Laura Vanderkam argues that we should in
general be more aggressive in identifying work that can be delegated.
“For instance, it doesn’t make sense for licensed, experienced
teachers to be grading most worksheets,” she writes. “Automating
this (via technology) or else hiring graders to report back the results
would free up teachers to dream up better lessons and share best
practices.”
9
 Once you start looking for opportunities to off-load
nonessential tasks, you’ll be surprised by how many you find.
All these outsourcing activities cost money, and some take you
out of the loop on issues you might be used to monitoring, but they
all have the potential to allow you to spend more time on the small
number of things that actually move the needle in your professional
context. This strategy is not for everyone. But if you have the luxury
of autonomy over your work life, then realize that you don’t have to
tolerate overload. Outsource what you can so you can excel at what
you can’t.

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Work Reduction Strategy #2: Trade Accountability for Autonomy
The strategy we just discussed is well suited for those who are their
own bosses, but what about those suffering from chronic overload
within large organizations? I learned an interesting solution for this
common scenario from a reader I’ll call Amanda, who has been
working at a global engineering design firm since 2009. As Amanda
explained when she contacted me, during the first six years of her
job, she kept her head down and tried to earn the trust of her bosses
by producing the best work possible. This wasn’t easy given the
culture of chronic overload in her office.
As Amanda elaborated, there are two categories of work possible
at her firm. The first category she calls “reactive, easy, brain-dead
work.” As she explains: “This is where you show up, check your
email, do what the emails tell you to all day, and then go home.” The
second category she calls “intentional, difficult, focused, creative
work,” which is when you “spend time thinking about what’s the
most important, long-term, impactful thing for you to do for your big
projects.” In the office where she works, the first type dominates.
There’s an expectation that you keep up with your inbox—“We use
email a lot”—and once you’re stuck monitoring the constant influx of
random tasks and requests, you never quite make it over to that
second category.
Somehow, amid this scrum of hive mind chatter and chronic
overload, Amanda managed to carve out a valuable niche for herself
within the company. The entire engineering industry was going
through a shift from 2D to 3D information models, and Amanda was
helping her company with this transition—fielding questions and
assisting individual projects. During this period, she read my 2012
book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which suggests among other
things that once you have made yourself valuable to your
organization, you should use this career capital as leverage to
remake your position into something more satisfying. Inspired but
nervous, Amanda proposed to her bosses that she shift into a more
strategic role, where instead of fielding random questions and
helping with individual projects, she would work on technology
strategy for whole regions. In this role, she would be entirely remote,
working on a small number of long-term projects at a time.

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Amanda assumed her bosses would turn down her request, and
she was prepared to leave the company to offer a similar service as a
consultant. To her surprise, they agreed to give the new arrangement
a trial. “Since I’m remote, I can no longer rely on ‘showing up’
functioning as a measure of my value to the company,” Amanda
explained. “It’s all what I produce. So I turn off email, I put my
phone on airplane mode, I give my colleagues emergency contacts,
and then I focus.” She left behind brain-dead work and committed
herself fully to the alternative.
There’s both opportunity and danger in Amanda’s arrangement.
The opportunity, of course, is that the combination of her reduced
portfolio and results-oriented evaluations gives her the ability to
remove herself from the hyperactive hive mind workflow. “Since I
don’t have any supervision over my daily routine,” she said, “I have a
lot of freedom to chart the shortest course to where I think I need to
be to deliver maximum value.” This makes it possible for her to
vastly increase her value to her company, which, in a virtuous cycle,
can gain her even more autonomy.
The danger, of course, is that now she has to produce. Her note
about the comfort of “showing up” to demonstrate value is more than
just a casual dismissal of normal work culture. For many people, this
strategy provides a professional safety net. Busyness is controllable:
if you decide to be visibly busy, you know with certainty that you can
accomplish this goal. Producing high-value results under scrutiny, as
Amanda is now committed to doing, is much more demanding! Just
deciding to produce valuable things is not enough to ensure that
you’ll pull it off. Recall our XP case study, where Greg Woodward
noted that a lot of developers dislike the extreme environment and
end up leaving after a few weeks. The aspect that most distresses
them? The transparency. You’re either producing good code, or
you’re obviously not. Some are simply not comfortable with this
blunt assessment of what they’re actually accomplishing.
Amanda’s general strategy of offering accountability to gain
autonomy, therefore, is a powerful approach to escaping chronic
overload, but it’s also risky. If you’re entrenched in a large
organization where chronic overload reigns, and you’ve developed an
expertise that obviously makes you valuable, then this strategy may
be one of your best moves to gain the breathing room needed to
remake your workflow into something more effective. You don’t

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necessarily have to match Amanda’s boldness when applying this
strategy. Sometimes even just volunteering for a large initiative
provides you enough cover to ignore messages and turn down
meeting invites without annoying people, as you now have an
unassailable excuse: “I would, but am swamped trying to handle [big
thing].” But it’s hard to avoid the underlying economics: to gain
something valuable like autonomy means you have to offer
something unambiguously valuable in return. You must, in other
words, become accountable for what you produce if you want the
freedom to improve how you do so.
—
There are many ways to combat the overload created by diminished
specialization. The strategies explored here get straight to the value
proposition of knowledge work. Not all efforts create the same value
for your organization. If you spend more time on the high-value
activities at the expense of spending less time on the low-value
activities, you’ll produce more value overall. In the short term, of
course, there are other costs, such as up-front expenses, or
inconveniences to your colleagues, or, as in Amanda’s case, reduced
job security. But as Anne Lamott emphasizes to her writing students:
it’s almost always worth it. The rewards of becoming significantly
more effective at the things that really count will swamp the pain of
overcoming the minor obstacles this specialization generates. Less
can be more; the trick is building up the courage to embrace this in
your own work life.