Cal Newport on a world without email: "An inbox is like a social torture machine."
Hello Monday host Jessi Hempel is on leave. In her absence, LinkedIn editorial fellow Samantha Roberson brings you this week's newsletter.
Our host today is Hello Monday contributor, Michaela Greer.
Let’s talk about email. Maybe you can’t remember life before it or perhaps you’re a part of the posse that remembers the thrill of the “You’ve Got Mail” ping. Whatever your first memory is, most would say it’s a vital tool for day-to-day communication.?
But can you imagine your life without it? Our guest today definitely can.?
Cal Newport is a computer science professor, a podcast host, and a New York Times bestselling author. The title of his newest bestseller is synonymous with his mission: A world without email.?
If you’ve ever taken a vacation and felt the dread of returning to a full inbox, you might be on board with ditching our current model. But Cal says it’s not really the tool that’s to blame, but rather the way we approach it, and a mindset he calls The Hyperactive Hive Mind.
You can download the episode to hear about it, or listen to it below. Then, please, share your own thoughts and tag them #HelloMonday so we can jump into the conversation.
??Here are some highlights…
On what The Hyperactive Hive Mind is: "The Hyperactive Hive Mind is an approach to work where you say, look, we all have an inbox. We all have a email address tied to our name. Let's just figure things out on the fly ad hoc, unstructured, back and forth messaging."
On changing our mindset, not the platform: "You have to actually go underneath the inbox, rip out The Hyperactive Hive Mind and replace it with other ways of having people work together and collaborate."
On how the pandemic may help the cause: "If that pain gets so acute, this pandemic might actually be the forcing function that gets a lot of companies to say, 'all right we're going to do the hard work of replacing the hive-mind with better ways of doing it because this is not sustainable.'"
On how to set boundaries: "You can, you can set some boundaries implicitly. You can batch when you check things. So there's problems with this as can also cause a lot of anxiety... don't explain your inbox habits in an autoresponder, just execute them."
On how culture impacts The Hyperactive Hive Mind: "There's more messages, more hyperactivity in the U.S. because we put more on each other's plates. I think if you actually took the average American worker and said, 'what are all the things, if we're really clear about it, that's kind of on your plate right now that someone's emailed you or grabbed you or told you to do?' These lists are very, very long."
On how The Hyperactive Hive Mind affects productivity: "It's holding down productivity and I've argued that if we didn't add in the secret second shifts in the morning and the evening, we would probably even see non-industrial productivity falling because of how disaster it is for our cognitive capacity to be constantly tending these back and forth channels."
?? Office Hours: Taking your questions
This week, we'll be taking a break from Office Hours and using this time to recharge, and we hope you can do the same. We're looking forward to chatting with you all again on the 14th.
?? Transcripts: Now available.
Each week we'll be updating these articles with a link to the transcript of the episode. Here's this week's.
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