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

Clarifying the Misery Mechanisms
Most knowledge workers intuitively feel a sense of unhappiness
emanating from their overflowing inboxes. The reason this reality
hasn’t catalyzed a revolt, however, is that it’s often portrayed as
unavoidable—the sine qua non of work in a hyper-connected, high-
tech age. As a 2018 article from the MIT Sloan Management Review
explains: “The ‘keep everybody busy’ theory remains alive and
well . . . in knowledge work.”
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(The article elaborates that the
manufacturing sector, by contrast, figured out in the 1980s that
relentless busyness was not an optimal way to run things.)
In this chapter, I attempted to push back against this generalized
fatalism by detailing three specific ways in which the hyperactive
hive mind workflow makes us unhappy: the psychological anxiety of
an inbox that fills up faster than we can empty it, the frustrating
ineffectiveness of text-only communication, and the out-of-control
overload that results when friction is eliminated from office
interactions. When we isolate these sources of unease, they no longer
seem unavoidable; rather, they are unfortunate and largely
unexpected clashes between the specific ways we work and the
natural operation of our brains. The solution is not to shrug our
shoulders, but instead to pursue the obvious fix: replace the
hyperactive hive mind with alternative workflows that still get things
done, but sidestep the worst of these misery-inducing side effects. A
world without email, as we’ll explore in part 2, is largely a happier
world. We have one last stop, however, before we begin this
discussion of what works better. The challenge we take up in the next
and final chapter of part 1 is trying to understand how we ended up
wedded to such an unproductive and misery-inducing approach to
work in the first place.

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Chapter 3