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

part of coordinating work on specific tasks. People would check in on
these conversations several times each day, reducing the amount of
discussion required at the regular review meetings and eliminating
the need for general-purpose communication tools like email, which
do a poor job of structuring information and quickly become
cluttered.
A fair concern is whether these card conversations might allow
hyperactive hive mind–style unstructured messaging to sneak back
into your organization. Based on what I observed, however, the
experience of card conversation was significantly different from the
experience of hive mind chatter. Devesh, for example, described his
shift from email to card conversations as “flipping the script” on
communication. When you have a general email inbox through
which all discussion flows, you’re forced to continually check this
inbox, which then confronts you with discussions about many
different projects. When you rely on card conversations, on the other
hand, the only way to encounter the discussion surrounding a given
project is to navigate to that project’s board. At this point, you’re
encountering conversation about only this project. This flips the
script because now you decide what project you want to talk about,
as opposed to allowing the projects to decide for you.
Card conversations also come with different communication
expectations. It’s generally assumed that you’ll check in on your
relevant task cards only a few times a day, so there’s no sense of
urgency or any expectation that you’ll deliver rapid responses. The
granularity of work therefore increases and people get used to
tackling one thing at a time, for long periods, before moving on to the
next. On the other hand, when these conversations occur on a
general-purpose communication tool, the awareness that everyone is
checking this tool more frequently leads to heightened expectations
surrounding response time for all communication, leading inevitably
back to a full-speed hyperactive hive mind workflow. (See the
discussion in chapter 3 about the cycle of responsiveness.)
Card conversations are also much more structured than hive
mind chatter, as conversations are attached to specific tasks and are
accompanied by all the relevant files for that task. If I’m running a
project, for example, and I want to check the status of a key task, I
can simply flip the virtual card and quickly review all the relevant
discussion—bringing me up to speed. This contrasts with the hive

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mind workflow, in which all this information exists scattered among
various people’s inboxes or buried in crowded chat channels.
There’s a slower pace and peacefulness that seems to accompany
this shift of discussion toward card conversations. To avoid the need
to wrangle an always-filling inbox is a benefit that shouldn’t be
underestimated.