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

everything transpired in the supposedly more efficient world of
email, Veronica wasn’t so sure. She described the work in her new
office as “transactional.” If someone needed something, they brought
it to you in person, and you would deal with it right then until done.
It might be literally slower to walk a form down the hall than to email
it, but from a productivity perspective, Veronica didn’t feel less
effective. When you’re no longer required to fragment your attention
by jumping back and forth between what’s in front of you at the
moment and any number of asynchronous conversations piling
unpredictably in your inbox, each discrete task takes less total time.
Veronica also reported other, less tangible benefits of an office
without email. “Because we all interact with each other in person
throughout the day, there’s more camaraderie,” she said, unlike the
isolation she felt at the old job, where her days were spent staring at
a screen. There’s also a great psychological benefit to avoiding
inboxes full of obligations arriving faster than you can handle them.
“The best result is that we do all of our work in the office,” she told
me. “There is no way to bring any kind of work home.”
The lesson we should extract from Veronica’s story is not that it’s
smart to revert to paper-based offices. It’s instead that when it comes
to support, workflows matter. Both of Veronica’s jobs involved
roughly the same type of support work, but the first defaulted to the
hyperactive hive mind, while the second structured the efforts more
carefully. The difference was stark: the first job made Veronica feel
unhappy and ineffective, while the second reversed these faults.
In order to build a sustainable specialized organization, support
roles need these types of structured processes. Hiring new support
staff and then simply pointing them to an inbox and saying “Be
useful” is a recipe for misery and high turnover. To succeed in

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reintroducing these roles requires more systematic workflows. The
details of how these processes operate can differ significantly
depending on the specific type of work. Generally speaking, however,
processes should offer clarity about each step. A support staffer
should not be faced with ambiguity about what to do next, as such
uncertainty drains energy and can generate endless and frustrating
ad hoc conversations.
In addition, it’s important to remember that transactional work
typically trumps concurrent efforts. If it’s possible, set up a process
that allows a support staffer to work on one thing at a time until
done, and to deal with issues in person (not through back-and-forth
messaging). In the moment, it might seem like the ability to just fire
off messages would be a real time-saver, but when everyone is doing
the same thing, everyone ends up buried in an inbox, struggling to
make reasonable progress on anything.
Supercharging Idea #2: Build Smart Interfaces Between Support and
Specialists
To help keep my Georgetown University inbox reasonable, I set up a
Gmail filter to automatically move administrative announcements
out of my main inbox and label them for me to review later. My
process for building this filter was simple: every time an
administrative message made it to my main inbox, I would add the
sender’s address to my filter’s rule. I was soon overwhelmed. I
currently have twenty-seven different Georgetown email addresses
included in my filter—each of which is a regular source of
administrative announcements. At some point, I just gave up trying
to update my filter: there were simply too many different entities
vying for a share of my attention.
The issue at my university, which is common in most large
knowledge work organizations, is that each of the support units
operates more or less as a standalone entity, focused on trying to
accomplish its own internal objectives as efficiently as possible. For
the more than twenty-seven units that regularly send me emails, it
makes perfect sense to send those messages. They have information
they need to spread, and putting it in a bulk email is clearly an
efficient way for them to accomplish their goal.

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These same issues occur when interactions go in the opposite
direction. Anyone who works for a large organization is familiar with
the pain of struggling with a complex and ambiguous form that a
support unit requires you to fill out to request some service. Once
again, when we treat each such unit as a mini standalone entity
trying to accomplish its individual objectives as effectively as
possible, these complex forms make sense—if support staff can get
everyone to enter information in a format maximally useful to them,
they’ll be able to process it more easily.
The problem, of course, is that these support units aren’t
standalone entities: they work within a larger organization, and their
internal efficiency doesn’t necessarily impact the bottom line. In
most knowledge work settings, it’s the specialists who directly
produce the valuable output that sustains their organization. Given
this reality, a better objective for support units would be the
following: to effectively fulfill their administrative duties with as