Transcript of E103: Cal Newport on a world without email

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This episode of Hello Monday, "Cal Newport on a world without email," was released on Monday, April 5, 2021.

Jessi Hempel: From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jessi Hempel, and this is Hello Monday, the show about the changing nature of work and how that work is changing us. Today's show is hosted by Michaela Greer.

Michaela Greer: Let's talk about email. Maybe you can't remember life before it. Perhaps you're 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. I'm talking with Cal Newport. He's a computer science professor, a New York Times bestselling author, and a podcast host. The title of his newest bestseller is synonymous with his mission, the world without email. Now, if you've ever taken a vacation and you 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. Here's Cal to explain.

Cal Newport: Email as a tool is great if you need to asynchronously send information over a digital medium. The thing that really caused all of the trouble is that once email spread as a tool throughout the sort of standard knowledge work workplace, it brought with it this new way of working. Now, you just mentioned it was called the hyperactive hive mind, that's my name for it, and I think that's the real villain in my story. The hyperactive hive mind is an approach to work where you say, "Look, we all have an inbox. We all have email address tied to our name. Let's just figure things out on the fly." Ad hoc, unstructured, back-and-forth messaging, if we need to do something, let's just go back and forth. If you need something from me, just let me know. If I need something from you, I'll grab you. We'll just take this natural way that small groups of people have always coordinated and we'll just make it digital and scale it up for everyone in our organization and all of our clients and all of our vendors, et cetera. And it's this hyperactive-hive-mind way of working that I think has been a real disaster.

Michaela Greer: And one of the visual pictures that you illustrated that it's sticking with me even now is getting these little pings and these messages and these emails. And it feels as though you have a tribe that you have to respond to right away. Why is it that we've been taught we have to respond and it has to happen now? And has hyperactive hive mind contributed to this?

Cal Newport: Well, there's two related effects happening. So there's the human psychology at play here and then there's the workplace culture at play here. And both of them are causing negativity right now. Let's start with the real, the ancient stuff. So, you know, when I use the word tribe here, I actually mean it in the literal sense. I'm looking back 100,000 years, we're talking about nomadic hunter gatherer tribes, the history in which we actually evolved most of the social networks within our brain. And so we have been evolved in that history to take one-on-one communication with our tribe members very seriously. And for good reason.

This type of social cooperation was at the key to our survival. If I am not good in maintaining a social connection with you, then when there's a famine five years from now, you might not share food, I might die, my genes might not get passed on, okay, we take this seriously. The inbox by happenstance really conflicts in a terrible way with this instinct, because even though our prefrontal cortex says, look, those 600 emails that are in our inbox, these are not tribe members who need us, there's complete expectations in our company that we're not going to have fast response times, so a lot of these emails are not even that urgent. Our frontal cortex might be telling us that but there's deeper parts of our brain that says, these seem to me like tribe members tapping me on the shoulder and I'm ignoring them, and that means the famine's going to be a problem. And so an inbox is like a social torture machine that's meant to keep a low level, but consistent, hum of anxiety because of the way it conflicts with our brain. And then we look at the culture of companies, the actual culture that you need to check these inboxes all the time.

And here I think is really important that people think that this is just a malformed culture that we could fix by just changing expectations. But once we recognize that the hyperactive hive mind is how most organizations operate, when you have that workflow in place, you do have to check it all the time. Because that is the only way you have for people in your organization to make progress, to collaborate, to coordinate, to move information, to make things going is ad hoc, back-and-forth unstructured messages. If that is the only thing you have, then when people step away from it, it actually causes problems, which is why my big point is if you're going to solve the miseries of the hyperactive hive mind, you're not going to solve it in the inbox. You're not going to solve it with your habits. You're not going to to solve it with your hacks. You're not going to solve it with new norms. 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. That's going to be the only way to actually solve this problem. And I think that's what we've been missing over the last 20 years when we've really been trying to grapple with this issue of email overload.

Michaela Greer: And this is such a novel idea that I want to just sit in it for a minute, because I believe you would have been writing this book before the pandemic hit. Now we're in the pandemic where Zoom meetings are a norm, emails are flying by, we don't have those one-on-one conversations that maybe would help us kind of deviate from the hive mind. So I'm wondering how the pandemic has had you thinking about your own work.

Cal Newport: ?Yeah, the pandemic has been a really interesting twist to this story. Soon into the pandemic, I took a commission from The New Yorker to write a big piece on remote work and the pandemic's impact and what we should expect from the future of remote work. So it gave me an excuse to actually continue to scrutinize these issues for months into the pandemic and see what's going on. The conclusion I came away with is the pandemic is making the hyperactive hive mind more hyper. So if you are in an organization that already relied more or less on the hyperactive hive mind, things have become notably worse now that you're fully remote, to the point where I think a lot of people are feeling the strain in a way that they could kind of get along with it when they were still in the office and you could still grab people and you could still see people and you can still have a quick conversation to sort things out, and you had commutes on either end of your workday that kind of split off work from non-work. People who you could kind of keep a handle on it, it's spiraling more out of control during the pandemic. Here's my optimistic take: if that pain gets so acute, this pandemic might actually be the forcing function that gets a lot of companies to say, "All right, 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." And so that's my optimism is that this bad event shakes things up enough, makes the problem worse, but also puts people into a mindset of, like, we're ready to experiment, we shut down our offices, like, we're in a mode of trying different things. I'm hoping this will shake people out of this hyperactive hive mind rut that we've fallen into and we'll start to see some innovation and alternative ways to collaborate or coordinate.

Michaela Greer: Do you think we're going to have to get corporate America and Americans in general have to get to the point where we're so burned out before all of this will happen, or should we just start fixing it now before we get to that complete burnout phase?

Cal Newport: I think we're going to see change without necessarily needing the complete burnout, because this is one of those happy situations where the incentives are aligned here. The move away from the hyperactive hive mind makes everyone happier and it makes companies more revenue. Because we are losing a substantial amount of value production by taking people's latent cognitive abilities and dissipating it in this misery-induced, low-productivity, back-and-forth hive mind context switching. We're getting a fraction of the value out of people. And people are producing a fraction of the value they could be producing. We're instead making them in this sort of knowledge work, torture chamber type setup, where we're saying do these things or we're going to set things up so you can't do those things, go! So it's terrible. So because these interests are aligned, we don't need everyone to burn out.?

What we need is one or two companies to do a lot better. And then you're going to have a punctuated equilibrium where everyone follows suit. It's like we saw, we see these trends happen in the world of work, like how fast open offices spread from Silicon Valley to everywhere. Now that's an example of a change that I have some issues with; but the point is in business when a trend comes in, they can spread very fast. So I think what's going to happen here with the hyperactive hive mind, then I'm basing this off of conversations I've had with CEOs and investors who are very keyed into this right now and very keyed into the potential here, I think we're going to see a few large companies go first and make substantial steps away from the hive mind. If it goes well, they can attract more employees, their employees are more happy, and they're producing better products, their revenue is going up, they can grow, et cetera, you're going to see basically overnight company after company after company following suit. So because this is aligned with both worker happiness and revenue generation, the change can happen a lot easier.

Michaela Greer: And what do you say to these CEOs who are coming to you? Because you're saying, well, we should rely less on email and these sort of things, and as a CEO, I might be saying, but I need to hit my goals, what should I start implementing? Because it isn't just the emails, as you've been saying, it is the entire mindset of a workplace. How do we start changing that with practical ways?

Cal Newport: ?Terminology helps here, right? So there there's two things that comprise knowledge work, typically, it's the actual execution, you know. writing the computer code, writing the ad copy, making the decision. And then there's the workflow that goes around it. Like how do we figure out what we should be working on and assign things to people and review who's doing well to make sure they have the right information and that the right coordination is happening? We have these workflows in place. Right now, we're using the hyperactive hive mind as the default workflow. And when the question becomes now, okay, why are you using the hyper mind? What alternative could you use instead? So when you're thinking about just plug-and-play, well, we could take out the hive mind and replace it with another workflow, what workflow might we put in there that might give us better results? It's much more tractable. Most of the obfuscation or obstacles, I think, to changing these issues happen when we exist above those levels and just think about the workflow in place.

?If you take the hyperactive hive mind as a given, this is the main way we organize work, then you're right, any attempt to say we should spend less time on email, any attempt to say this is too distracting or that we should do less slack is going to be met with obstacles and, I think, for good reason, because the workflow depends on you checking email all the time. It's a fundamental property of the underlying workflow. So we have that switch of perspective.?

We're not talking about spending less time on email if you're using the hyperactive hive mind, we're talking about replacing the hyperactive hive mind with something that's going to make people happier and produce more value. That's the language CEOs can better understand, which is why in my book, I introduced this whole attention capital theory framework. I'm basically saying, "Look, I will put this into the capitalist economic terms." And this is about building a better factory, metaphorically speaking. So I actually tried to shape all this advice in a way that if I'm an investor or a CEO, I can say, "Oh, I see, this is being smarter about business, not about dismissible claim of well, work is just hard and don't complain to me about emails, like this is what work is." And so I'm really trying to sidestep that issue and get down to the core.

Michaela Greer: And for people who may not be in these decision-making places but we are reading your book and we're saying, "This sounds really great, I'd love to employ some of this," but if I am to take a vacation, I'm going to really stress out and have some anxiety because I'm going to come back to a full inbox, so how should we start having these discussions within our company if we're interested in seeing this change?

Cal Newport: Well, so the core approach here is that you recognize that your company is actually comprised of many processes, right? You can break down what's done until there's many processes. People collaborate on these processes and it produces things that are useful on the other end. Whether you're doing this for yourself or for a team or for our whole company, the first step is to start actually naming these things. And an easy way to do this just in your own life is as you go through a normal day and you're answering emails, just start asking the question, what process is this email connected to? This email I'm about to send or I'm replying to, like underneath this, what process is this tie to? Oh, this is tied to the answer client question process. Well, this email, I guess, is tied to the workout, you know, technical issue process or something like this. And then just going through your inbox in a typical day and you kind of list out like, "Oh, these are processes I'm regularly involved in." Once you see them, you can say, "All right, most of these are probably being implemented using the hyperactive hive mind, just we work things out with the relevant stakeholders, back-and-forth, ad hoc unstructured messaging." You can ask for each, is there an alternative process or protocol we could put here that would reduce the amount of back-and-forth communication required??

And this is typically the key metric that you actually want to minimize. It's not time, it's not difficulty, it is how many back-and-forth messages does this process require to actually convert input into valuable output? Okay, it's this need to continually check back in on conversations, the context switching, that causes most of the harm of the hive mind. And then you start replacing processes with alternatives that require less back-and-forth communication. Now you can do this in your own life as an employee. You have no autonomy over how your company functions, even just looking at what you can control in each of these processes and seeing is there a way I could do this type of work with less back-and-forth messaging, you even then have a huge amount of control. Don't tell people you're doing this necessarily if you're doing it on your own, but you can just basically draw people into it, right??

You know, you have some report you have to produce, you can just say to the person you're emailing, like, "Okay, here's what we'll do. I'll have this in the Google Drive by noon on Monday. Get any edits you want in there by Tuesday morning, because that's when I'm going to grab it and do my final draft. If there's anything we need to discuss, I have this open Zoom window from 10 to 11, this office hour window on Wednesday morning. And I'll have the final thing up on Thursday." You don't have to tell them that's a process, but in your mind, you're like, "Okay, I've come up with a process that means we can get this report done with zero additional back-and-forth messages, right? And the other person's just happy that like, "Great, this is off my plate. Someone's thought about this. It's not a responsibility I'm juggling in my brain." They don't care. So even if you're just doing this on your own, that alone makes a big difference. But more processes you optimize, the less back-and-forth comes into your inbox, the less hyperactive your interaction becomes, and the more closer you get to a world without email.

Michaela Greer: So then what you're saying is we should have these box of time where, okay, so I'll get to at 5 pm on this time, and that's when we're having all of this discussion. Does that mean then while I'm implementing this I haven't told anyone that when they do message me at 6 pm on the weekend, or whenever, I just don't respond or how does that look and function?

Cal Newport: Yeah, so I tend to think about how can we reduce the back-and-forth in the first place? I think about that more than I think about how can I best deal with an inbox that contains a lot of back-and-forth? An inbox that contains a lot of back-and-forth, there are some things you can do. You can set some boundaries implicitly. You can batch when you check things, so there's problems with this as it can also cause a lot of anxiety. I tend to be a big believer, I talk about in the book, of don't explain your inbox habits in an autoresponder, just execute them. And if someone has an issue, you can talk just to that person. It's better to apologize to people who are actually upset as opposed to preemptively apologizing to people that didn't realize they were supposed to be upset, because you're going to make a lot more people upset. So don't do the Tim Ferriss thing, the "I only check email at nine and 12 to better serve you", just check the email at nine and 12. And if someone complains, then you can explain.?

So I think all of those things can be helpful, but I keep coming back to this underlying message, however, that it is a fundamental reality that processes that require ongoing back-and-forth communication require ongoing back-and-forth communication. Like, there's only so long you cannot service those conversations till it's actually causing a problem, which is why so many well-intentioned attempts to improve email overload that exist at the level of the inbox, they always usually fail. When companies say we're going to do no-email Fridays, why does that not work? Because it means on Friday nothing actually gets done because all of these different processes depend on back-and-forth, ad hoc communication to actually happen. So I always come back to, I would rather not have the message waiting for me in the inbox in the first place, then I would want to have good rules about how often I check to see if that message is there.

Michaela Greer: We're going to take a quick break. When we get back, Cal and I, talk about how culture plays into our email habits.

(Our podcast mid-roll ad plays here.)

And we're back. My guest today is Cal Newport. We're talking about the symptom of email and the cause, the hyperactive hive mind. In the US, it seems like we're always emailing or pinging each other, but that's not necessarily the case in other countries. I asked Cal if culture impacts hyperactive hive mind.

Cal Newport: ?It does. And I don't exactly know why, but there it's cultural for sure. But the hyperactive hive mind gets particularly hyperactive in the US. Now, I don't know if this is partially just the culture of let's move, or is it, which I think might be more accurate, is that we put more work on people's plates here, right? In some sense, we're more exploitative of our labor here than we are in other countries, because other countries have sort of deeper labor politic backgrounds where there's more of a back-and-forth between management and labor.?

And so I think that's really why there's more messages, more hyperactivity in the US is because we put more on each other's plates. 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. And so we just have way more hyperactivity to actually service. We also might just be culturally more willing to do these implicit second shifts, in the morning or in the evenings, that try to compensate for all the lost productivity of the hive mind. Whereas in other countries like, "No, I'm not going to work after five. Come on! That's wine time. What are you talking about?" They're more willing culturally to protect that; we don't, and advantage is taken.

Michaela Greer: How is it that we've found ourself in this situation where we're so dependent on email?

Cal Newport: Well, like, one of the more interesting things I think that came out of the book is that it was basically accidental. A couple of things happened at once. First, the tool arrived, and just the presence of the tool changed people's work habits without anyone telling them to, without anyone saying you should work differently. It was just having this tool, it's very low friction, just the interaction between us as humans and the possibilities of the tool, pushed work into this new place that was not very good. In the philosophy of technology, this is called technological determinism, but it's just the idea that the mere presence of a tool can actually change the way that humans are actually acting and behaving without any intention from the humans themselves. So email, in some sense, pushed us towards this sort of more hyperactive type of communicating. Why didn't we turn around and say, "Oh, this is no good, let's fix it?" Well, this is the related issue, knowledge work, for various historical reasons, really insist on autonomy when it comes to personal productivity, right? It's like how you organize your work, how you get things done is completely up to the individual. We will give you objectives. We will measure your performance. We will encourage you. We'll put up mission statements.

But how you organize your stuff and get things done, that's for the individual. That mindset dominates in knowledge work. So once this hyperactive hive mind kind of emerged, there was really no mechanism in place for teams or organizations to easily come in and say, "No, no, we're going to work in a different way," because we don't do that knowledge work. There are some exceptions, like software development, but most areas of knowledge work, we kind of just leave this up to the workers. So we're stuck with this lowest common denominator style of work, because as an individual, there's no way for me to get out of this trap. It feels like it's difficult for me to, I can't change the whole way my company work, that's the way we feel. And there's no habit of trying to change at the organizational level. Like, how do we identify tasks? How do we assign tasks? How much should each person be working on? We just kind of leave that to work itself out. So we ended up stuck in this really suboptimal way of working.?

And one of my big arguments is, like, well, we can just split execution from workflow. Yeah, don't tell the writer how to write or the computer program how to program. Fine, but we really should think a lot as a team or organization about how we assign things, how we figure out who should be working on what, how we review who's working on what, how we set things up so that they can get the information they need. Those sorts of details that surround the work, that shouldn't just be left up to the individual. We should be thinking what's actually best there. So I feel like we stumbled into the hyperactive hive mind and now we're stuck in this quicksand. And so we're just working terribly, productivity is stagnating, and we can fix this, we just got to recognize that no one decided this was a good idea. It's not a good idea. And it's okay for us to think more radically about different ways of working.

Michaela Greer: After studying this, how are you approaching your inbox?

Cal Newport: Well, I have six inboxes actually. So I have email addresses for specific purposes, which allows me then to sort of set up expectations around each of these addresses. This is what it's for. Here's how you should use it. Here is what you should expect about answers. So my office life, this is how I do it. At Georgetown, I have a different address for my collaborators and people, my department, versus administrative messages and et cetera. More generally, what I do is I think about these things from the perspective of processes. Email is a communication tool I have among many that I can use to help implement processes. I'm constantly thinking about what are my processes and how do I optimize them to minimize back-and-forth communication? And it's an ongoing thing. I'm constantly changing. I'm constantly evolving. Things get out of control and I pull it back, but that's the way I think about it.

Michaela Greer: So we've been talking a lot about email, but messaging services like Slack should also probably be taken into account. These have supplemented or replaced email for a lot of people, especially with the pandemic. So I wanted to get Cal's take on this development. Are these tools helping or hurting?

Cal Newport: My basic premise there is Slack is just a reaction to the hyperactive hive mind. So if the hyperactive hive mind is how you're working in your organization, Slack implements the hyperactive hive mind better. It's like, "Okay, if we're going to figure everything out with back-and-forth, ad hoc communication, well, it's better for that to be on channels than in an inbox; CC is a little clunky, it's better to have group chat, we should probably make this searchable." So this is why people have a love-hate relationship with Slack. It's a better tool for the hyperactive hive mind, so you like that about it, but the hyperactive hive mind is a terrible way to work, so you dislike that about it. So that's my thought on those tools. It's the right tool for the wrong way to work.

And when I talk about a world without email, I really mean a world without the hyperactive hive mind. And whether you're implementing that with Slack or with email or with WhatsApp, it's all the same to me; it's that underlying approach to coordination that I think we need to get rid of. I think the hyperactive hive mind is one of the biggest issues that's actually facing the world of work right now; at the economic level, it's holding down productivity, and I've argued that if we didn't add in the secret second shifts in the morning and in in 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.?

And it's also completely immiserating. It makes people really unhappy. It's not a good way to work. It conflicts with the way that we're wired. I think part of the reason why we see so much coverage in the last four or five years of things like burnout, we see such a pushback with recent books like "The Art of Doing Nothing" and "How to Do Nothing", these sort of pushbacks about even just the notion of productivity in general, a lot of that is being fueled by just how misery-making this approach to work actually is. Just, like, terrible factory conditions eventually led to radical labor politics, right? So it's a huge problem. People just have the wrong expectations. And I felt I was out adrift on a ship in this ocean of business theory, thinking that none of the entire way we're working is broken. It just became such a big story. It took me years to pull it all together, but it became such a big story that it's one of the more important things I think I've worked on.

Michaela Greer: That was Cal Newport. Check out A World Without Email at your local library or wherever you get your books. I haven't yet been able to implement all of Cal's advice but I have made one simple change since our discussion. I disconnected my work email from my phone. Surprisingly, the world hasn't ended as I feared, but it has helped me create clear boundaries while working from home. I'm curious to know what you'll try. Feel free to let us know by posting on LinkedIn with the hashtag #HelloMondayPodcast or send us an email at [email protected]. We're taking a little time to rest this week. Join us next Wednesday for office hours at 3:00 pm Eastern on the LinkedIn News page. If you liked the show, please take a moment to rate us and review us on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Be Well.

Jessi Hempel: Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn. Today's show was produced by Sarah Storm and hosted by Michaela Greer. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Florencia Iriondo is Head of Original Audio and Video. Dave Pond is our Technical Director. Michaela Greer, Samantha Roberson, Carrington York, and Victoria Taylor also supported the show. Our music was composed just for us by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. You also heard music from Podington Bear. Dan Roth is the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. I'm Jessi Hempel. Our show is back next Monday. Thanks for listening.