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

Budget Attention
As mentioned earlier, in 2019 I published an article in The Chronicle
Review titled “Is Email Making Professors Stupid?” The article
discussed more than just email. I examined the many different ways
in which the haphazardly constructed workflows common in
academia sap professors of their ability to be productive. One of the
topics I tackled was service. At most universities, professors dedicate
some of their time to activities that help the school function, such as
reviewing applications, or sitting on committees, or participating in
self-governance. These obligations are essential to academic life. The
problem, however, is that there are few controls on how these tasks
are assigned. “A typical approach to service is to say ‘yes’ to a fire
hose of incoming requests,” I wrote, “until you become so
overcommitted that you retreat in desperation to catch up.”
In an essay written in response to my Chronicle article, a
philosophy professor named Bruce Janz elaborated on the problem
of overwhelming service obligations in higher education, writing:

---

It comes from the attitudes of many of those administrators,
who think that their new streamlined procedure is the
greatest thing ever and will only require just a little form or a
little input by faculty, or a little something else. It is caused
by . . . other committees [formed] to mentor or help or
strategize or support or brainstorm or any number of other
things, each of which requires just a little more from the
same people. It comes from none of these administrative
committees seeing any incentive to combine or rationalize
anything, so the same work has to be done over and over.
13
As Janz’s analysis points out, a major source of service overload
in academia is the asymmetry inherent in asking for someone’s help.
If you run an administrative unit within a university, or are tasked
with forming a committee, then from your perspective, asking me or
Bruce Janz to attend some meetings or participate in a survey or
review some files seems completely reasonable. You’re not
demanding a huge time commitment, and our minor assistance is
crucial for you to succeed with your major objective. For us to say no
would seem uncivil, if not downright antisocial.
The problem, of course, is that these requests accumulate. If two
dozen other units and committees all make these same reasonable
requests, suddenly we’re desperately overwhelmed by work that has
little to do with our main objectives of research and teaching—a
recipe not just for inefficiency, but outright frustration.
This dynamic extends beyond academia. Knowledge workers in
general are pushed into chronic overload by similar asymmetries. It’s
so easy for the marketing department to shoot over a meeting invite
to solicit your opinion on a new product campaign, or for your boss
to send a quick email asking you to organize a lunch seminar series
for your team. To say no to any one of these requests in isolation
makes you seem curmudgeonly or lazy. But the sum total of many
such “simple” requests leads you to become constantly overwhelmed
by everything that has to get done.
In the extreme programming case study, the solution to this
problem was to essentially forbid people in the company from
directly asking the programmers to do things. Their focus is
supposed to remain locked into implementing the feature at the top

---

of their priority queue. If you need something from them, you can
talk to their project manager, who will figure out what’s actually
reasonable to bother them about, all the while trying to protect their
primary goal of producing code.
Sadly, this model doesn’t necessarily extend to all knowledge
work positions. If professors stopped doing all service, for example,
the university would stop functioning. Similarly, while the
programmers in an XP shop can afford to be isolated, many other
knowledge workers really must be available to field questions and
requests, as this is the essence of collaboration. What’s needed is an
idea that enables these work requests to exist, but prevents any one
person from having to accept too many. In my article, I proposed one
such idea.
“One solution is to directly confront the zero sum trade-off
generated by service obligations,” I wrote. “Professors have a fixed
amount of time. . . . Instead of ignoring this reality, we should clearly
articulate these trade-offs by specifying the exact amount of time a
faculty member is expected to devote to service each year.” As I then
explained, in this plan, professors would not be allowed to exceed
whatever time budget they had agreed on with their department
chair for the semester.
My service budget proposal was meant more as a thought
experiment than a concrete plan, but it highlights a crucial reality
about overload: it’s common, in part, because its magnitude is
hidden. Professors are always vaguely and persistently busy. In this
undifferentiated mass of activity, it’s easy to push just one more
thing onto someone else’s plate. But now imagine, for the sake of
argument, that a new rule was enacted that demanded that service
time was carefully measured and not allowed to exceed a fixed
budget without the explicit permission of your dean. Reaching a state
of extreme service overload would become more difficult in this
scenario. If you’re the dean, for example, and you’ve invested a lot of
money in bringing a top scholar to your university, when you’re
presented with a request to increase her weekly service budget to
thirty hours so she can keep up with all her different service requests,
you’d have a hard time signing that form! When facing stark
numbers, it becomes difficult to justify overload—why bother hiring
a hotshot if the bulk of their time is spent doing administrative work?

---

When these numbers are obfuscated, it’s much easier to just shrug
about the reality that we’re all busy.
In knowledge work more generally, approximating something
like my hypothetical service budget could be a powerful strategy for
pushing back against overload. There are three keys for a strategy of
this type to work. First, it must start from the premise that your time
and attention are limited. Second, it must quantify how much of your
time and attention is currently dedicated to whatever category of
work you’re attempting to budget. And third, whoever is responsible
for determining how much work of this type you have to do must
confront your current commitments when asking you to do more,
even if this person is you.
14
One minor area in academia where strategies of this type are
already prevalent is peer review requests. Academic publishing
depends on peer review by professors in the relevant field.
Accordingly, most professors receive a lot of requests to review
articles. A common strategy to tame these demands is to fix a quota
of how many reviews you do per semester. Once you hit your quota,
you politely decline additional requests, explaining that you’ve hit
your limit. This approach works well because it provides the reason
why you cannot take on more work, meaning that the only way a
requester can pressure you into taking on a review anyway is to
implicitly argue that your reason isn’t good.
If you ask me to review a paper, and I simply say, “I don’t know—
I’m really busy,” it would be easy for you to keep pushing: “I know,
but it’s really important to me. Could you fit this in?” On the other
hand, if I say, “I wish I could, but I already hit my quota of ten paper
reviews per semester,” for you to push back, you would have to
argue: “You should be reviewing more than ten papers a semester.”
Which is not a strong argument, as ten is a lot of papers, and a quota
of that level is quite reasonable.
Moving beyond academia, another budgeting strategy I’ve seen
used with great success is the idea of deep-to-shallow work ratios,
which I first proposed in my book Deep Work. The idea is to agree in
advance with your supervisor how many hours each week should be
spent on the core skilled activities for which you were hired, and how
much on other types of shallower support or administrative work.
The goal is to seek the balance that maximizes your value to your

---

organization. You then measure and categorize your work hours and
report back how close you came to achieving your optimal ratio.
After Deep Work was published, many readers reported success
with this strategy. Crucial to its effectiveness is the way in which it
forces your supervisor to get specific about workloads. Assuming
you’re good at something valuable, your supervisor is not going to
insist on a work ratio made up almost entirely of shallow work, as
this is self-evidently absurd when presented clearly. When you come
back and report that according to your measurements this is what’s
currently happening with your time, it becomes much easier to
authorize changes that will directly ease up the overload you’re
suffering, as the alternative would be for the supervisor to admit that
your skewed ratio is in fact best for the organization (which it almost
certainly is not).
Meeting budgets are also common. The idea is to block off on
your calendar the times you’re available for meetings. These blocks
should add up to the total amount of time you think is reasonable to
spend in meetings in a given week. When meetings are subsequently
requested, you schedule them only in these slots, making meeting
overload impossible. If you use a shared calendar or an online
scheduling tool, you’re saved from even having to say no; the person
trying to set up the meeting will see that all your time slots are filled.
This strategy is especially popular among entrepreneurs who
have great autonomy in their work. One company founder I know
deploys a simple rule for his staff and clients: no meetings before
noon. This allows him to get important work done without
interruption every single day. Another founder I know is even more
extreme: his schedule for meetings with people outside his company
has available slots only on Thursday afternoons. It’s not uncommon
to have to wait weeks until his next available free time. He’s
completely unapologetic; he has a business to build.
The task boards discussed in the process principle chapter also
provide a powerful tool for implementing workload budgets. Using a
task board to organize work offers two benefits in this context: it
makes it easy to determine how much work each person is currently
doing, and it has a structured system for how these work
assignments are updated, usually in the form of a status meeting
attended by everyone. Imagine you’re working on a team that uses
task boards. If you’re already tackling a heavy workload, this will be

---

immediately clear on the board—making it much harder for your
team leader to overload you, especially if other people have lighter
loads. In the situation where overloading you is necessary, the
magnitude of what you’re being asked to do is unambiguous,
meaning you’ll receive the credit due for your efforts. In a
hyperactive hive mind workplace, on the other hand, where these
tasks are distributed in an ad hoc manner through emails, you could
easily find yourself not only overloaded, but unrecognized for this
sacrifice.
This latter point is critical, as it leads to inequities that are often
overlooked. As I argued in the opening to chapter 5, when you run an
office haphazardly, a Hobbesian dynamic arises in which those who
are most brash and disagreeable get away with doing less work, while
their more reasonable peers become overloaded. The late Nobel
Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman famously told an
interviewer that his strategy for minimizing committee work was to
do it really poorly so that people would eventually stop asking him
for help. Few people would be comfortable with such brazen
misanthropy. Do we really want to reward those who are?
An important study on this topic, published by a research team
headed by Linda Babcock of Carnegie Mellon University,
documented how this dynamic disproportionately affects women.
15
In both field and laboratory studies, the researchers found that
women are more likely to volunteer for “non-promotable” service
tasks than men. Women are also asked to do these tasks more
frequently than men, and say yes more often when asked. “This can
have serious consequences for women,” the researchers note. “If they
are disproportionately saddled with work that has little visibility or
impact, it will take them much longer to advance in their careers.”
Shielding our eyes to how work gets allocated can make things
more convenient in the moment. If I’m trying to assign a project, I’d
prefer not to confront the reality of how much work my team
members are already doing—I just want it done! But the convenience
of this obfuscation has real costs. It stymies moves toward
productivity-boosting specialization and can disproportionately
punish some groups over others. When you’re forced to confront the
quantitative realities of how much work is being done, casually
pushing someone’s load to an extreme level becomes itself more of
an extreme act. Accountability, in other words, can go a long way

---

toward achieving reasonability when it comes to how many
obligations we expect knowledge workers to handle.