What Would A World Without Email Look Like?
A review of Cal Newport’s A World Without Email and reflections on the future of work.
Can you imagine what your job would be like if you weren’t constantly checking your inbox?
Probably not.
For most modern knowledge workers, the idea of getting rid of email is unfathomable. According to data compiled by Microsoft, the average worker spends around 16 hours a week – or two full work days – responding to emails and sitting in meetings.
If you think about it, how else would you fill your time if you didn’t have an inbox to tend to?
Today’s knowledge workers are so busy talking about work that they lose track of the work they were originally hired to do in the first place.
In his book A World Without Email, Cal Newport looks at the way modern knowledge work is structured. He argues that the point of knowledge work isn’t to check your email or sit in pointless meetings– it’s to deploy your time and attention in such a way that you add value to the economy around you.
This article will review the key themes of the book. It will identify some of the central issues plaguing knowledge workers and what you need to know to stay relevant as the future of work evolves around you.
Communicating about how to do a task is different from actually doing the task.
One of the core themes of the book is the distinction between communication and execution. Talking about how you will do something is very different from actually doing the task.
In a 2023 memo, Spotify’s CEO referred to this as “work around the work.” He argued:
“Today, we still have too many people dedicated to supporting work and even doing work around the work rather than contributing to opportunities with real impact. More people need to be focused on delivering for our key stakeholders — creators and consumers. In two words, we have to become relentlessly resourceful.” (Substack)
When human capital is deployed to plan or strategize about work – rather than doing the work that needs to be done – it makes the workforce inefficient. As Newport writes:
“Communicating about tasks often gets in the way of executing them.” (27)
Email was intended to make workers more efficient. The ability to asynchronously communicate with one another about work-related tasks reduced the amount of coordination that needed to be done to convene stakeholders in a central location.
Instead of providing efficiency, however, email created more work. In the book, Newport cites a statistic that knowledge workers send and receive upwards of 126 emails per day.
To understand what this looks like, imagine you’re a lawyer. Lawyers are infamous for billing their time. Typically, they bill in 6-minute increments of 0.1 hours.
If a lawyer processes 126 emails in a given day in six minutes or less, that’s 12.6 hours worth of billable work. But if some of those emails require a carefully crafted response, it would take much longer for them to triage their inbox.
There quite literally aren’t enough hours in the day to manage the flurry of emails you’re probably getting. That’s why workers today are feeling more anxious and burned out than ever before. They spend so much time tending to email it leaves little time left to make progress on real, meaningful work.
Another issue Newport highlights in the book is the cost associated with email – or rather, the lack thereof.
Unlike other forms of communication, there’s no cost associated with sending and receiving emails. (Unless you pay for Outlook or Google Workspace of course). These days email addresses are handed out like candy and it’s likely you manage multiple inboxes at once. There’s no cost to send and receive emails and thus no incentive to reduce the amount of emails being sent in the first place.
By leveraging a free form of communication at work, email essentially gave workers permission to pass work along to someone else. It’s not uncommon to find yourself cc’d on messages that don’t pertain to you but are simply there for your “situational awareness.” If your sole purpose is to collect a paycheck, email gives you cover to make you look busy enough to justify keeping your job. Any work you don’t want to do you can simply pass on to someone else.
In doing so, email has created more work, not less. Workers now spend hours processing mountains of data only to feel like they still don’t have a clear idea of what they’re actually supposed to do with it all.
The thing that was supposed to make workers more efficient, ironically, had the exact opposite effect. Email reduces the amount of time and attention workers can allocate towards the things they were originally hired to do in the first place.
Unstructured and unscheduled communication makes knowledge workers less productive.
The problem with email isn’t just the sheer volume of it and the time you need to carve out every day to keep your inbox at bay. It’s how email fits into the way we get work done.
Work is structured around different workflows. The assembly line, for example, is a type of workflow factories employ to streamline production of things. Workers stand at their stations and, like robots, they are responsible for completing one singular task over and over again.
Workflow represents different processes and parameters that define how work gets done. It provides structure to value-generating activities.
As a writer, I generate value by producing high-quality articles. Sometimes I write articles like this which I publish on my own channels. For freelance work, I pitch ideas to editors or I’m assigned a specific topic to cover by an existing client.
Every part of my workflow has a process. When I receive assignments, for example, I add them to my calendar. I use a kanban board to denote which phase of production an assignment is in. And because I keep track of my time, I know approximately how long an assignment will take and can plan the rest of my work around it.
I also structure my workflow based on my energy level and environment. Writing an article like this is usually done in the mornings at home after I’ve finished my workout. Other types of work – like invoicing or following up on pitches – is usually done at a coffee shop later in the afternoon.
Most knowledge workers don’t have a defined workflow. Newport refers to this in his book as the “hyperactive hive mind.” This workflow is characterized by unstructured and unscheduled communication which in modern knowledge work is the equivalent of anarchy.
In a hyperactive hive mind, anyone can ping you on Slack or walk up to your desk to ask you questions that may or may not have any relevance to the task you’re currently focused on. The constant need to monitor your communication channels to look for “urgent” requests that pop up makes it impossible to focus. Your attention is so fractured, that it’s impossible to complete tasks that produce anything of value.
Without a defined workflow, knowledge workers default to an ad-hoc system of project management rather than project completion. It’s no wonder so much time is spent sending emails and sitting in meetings.
Knowledge workers spend so little time accomplishing valuable tasks that they forget what it is they even need to do in the first place. Emails and status meetings – the work around the work – make workers look busy without actually helping them move the needle on the work they were actually hired to do.
There are four principles to optimize processes to create a new workflow that makes it easier to capitalize on workers’ cognitive skills.
The hyperactive hive mind is a big problem, and according to one tech billionaire referenced in the book:
“Knowledge worker productivity is the moonshot of the twenty-first century.” (259)
This explains why we’re embroiled in an arms race to train artificial intelligence as quickly as possible. More on that later.
In A World Without Email, Newport argues that we need a new way of getting work done. He provides recommendations according to four principles that redefine how knowledge workers should do work.
Principle #1: Attention Capital
The first principle addressed in the book is that of attention capital. Attention capital is the ability to leverage a human brain to add value to information.
If you think about it, without providing access to information the phone or computer you are reading this on would have no real value. And that matters because these digital devices are the gateway into the digital world and the economy that’s been built off it.
Attention is the most valuable currency in today’s economy. It applies not just to the content you consume but also how your attention is deployed in the work you do.
Newport describes knowledge work as the completion of value-producing activities following a process that defines how those activities are to be accomplished.
Knowledge work, then, shouldn’t be thought of as an ad-hoc relay of asynchronous messages – it’s a system.
The attention principle argues that work needs to be restructured in order to take advantage of attention capital. He uses a kanban board as an example of a workflow that restructures knowledge work.
Trello is a project management tool that made kanban popular but now almost every project management tool has a kanban feature built into them. Personally, I use Notion because it allows me to create databases displayed in a kanban while also connecting to my calendar.
Once you are aware of the importance of attention capital and how it’s the fuel behind knowledge work, you can begin thinking about how to change your workflow.
Principle #2: Process
The second principle Newport highlights in the book is process. A process is a combination of the work that needs to be done as well as the information and decisions that need to be considered to coordinate how that work is done.
I’m a writer so I have a production process for completing assignments. I also have a content calendar where I store all of my ideas.
In my content calendar, I have a system for prioritizing my ideas based on three Rs: relevancy, revenue, and research. If it’s not a timely topic, doesn’t generate revenue, and requires a ton of research to complete, it’s going to go to the bottom of my list.
The same logic is applied in manufacturing. It’s not just about producing a widget, there are decisions that have to be made to prioritize which widgets are produced, for which customer, in which order. These decisions could be impacted by the availability of raw materials or not having enough people on the floor to operate the machines.
The goal of a process is to systemize your workflow in order to reduce how much energy you spend. When workers spend less energy completing work one of two things can happen: they can finish more things in the same period of time, or they can produce higher quality things.
A process is necessary if you want to actually get work done and avoid the trap of generating busy work for yourself.
Principle #3: Protocols
The third principle is protocols. It’s fine and dandy to talk about having a process in place to define how your work is done but if you want to be more efficient you actually have to carve out some time to create the rules your process needs to follow.
This gets back to email and communication. Because decisions have to be made around how work gets done, it’s insufficient to only create rules for how the work itself is completed. You also have to create rules for how information is received and how decisions are made.
I didn’t set out to become a writer, it just kind of happened. I naturally developed a process to follow for completing writing assignments but I didn’t establish rules – aka boundaries – with my clients.
When you’re a writer you don’t have one boss, you have several. Every client I’ve worked with has had a different process for communicating with me. Some send assignments via a project management tool like Asana while others just send me an email with a link to a Google Doc. Some added me to Slack while others prefer to iMessage me.
Once I had more clients than I could manage I realized I needed to reign in the madness. If I was constantly monitoring Slack or responding to text messages as they arrived I couldn’t get the work done that they were paying me to do.
So I set up some rules:
I don’t respond to work-related inquiries after 5pm
I don’t take meetings before 12pm
I prioritize email over other forms of communication
I use a calendar scheduling system to schedule meetings
By creating these rules and laying them out in my work agreements, I established expectations for how I want to communicate with others.
Newport offers similar recommendations in the book. He suggests setting up office hours to reduce impromptu questions and non-urgent requests and holding regular, succinct status meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page with a project.
By setting up the parameters for how work is to be accomplished and the logistics of keeping everyone in the loop, you can free up your time and mental energy to focus on what really matters – the work itself.
Principle #4: Specialization
The last principle Newport highlights in the book is specialization. Economics is driven by specialization. Adam Smith devotes a tremendous amount of time talking about specialization in The Wealth of Nations. The more specialized an economy becomes, the more value you can generate from it.
Email and software programs that were intended to make us more efficient ended up creating more work for ourselves. More often than not, that work tends to be more administrative in nature. Instead of leveraging specialized expertise, knowledge work busies people with low-value administrative tasks that provide little if any value.
Before I became a writer I worked as a contractor with the Department of Defense in Washington, DC. Part of my job included traveling overseas. I was given a corporate Amex to cover my expenses when I traveled but if you’ve ever had an Amex you know a lot of places don’t take it.
That meant I had to pay for things out of pocket. To get reimbursed, I had to submit an expense report. Now, if you’ve worked in corporate America you know submitting an expense report isn’t just giving a receipt to accounting and getting paid. An expense report usually requires a narrative justification for your expense, splitting the receipt based on what it was spent on, and getting several levels of approval from various supervisors.
My job was to manage a project and oversee its implementation in our host-partner country. As an Arabic speaker, I also provided a highly specialized skill to my team. Every time I traveled I spent more time completing administrative paperwork than I did doing my actual job.
Software that was intended to make administrative work “easier” for specialized workers actually made those workers less efficient. Instead of working on fewer things at a higher quality, highly skilled and specialized workers have to divert their attention to low-value tasks. They waste their time sending emails to get approvals on things like expense reports.
Newport argues we should look at specialized work separate from administrative work. This isn’t to suggest admin workers are lesser than their specialized counterparts, it’s just to acknowledge that the work is fundamentally different.
For some organizations, the solution might be to bring back support staff. For individual workers, that might mean setting aside blocks of time or specific days to focus on admin work. That way the coordination work gets done without interfering with actual value-generating work.
A recommendation Newport gives in the book is to outsource work that you don’t do well. I’ve done this by working with virtual assistants (and I think everyone should do this too).
Not all work is the same. As a writer, my time is better spent writing. Not chasing down clients to pay their invoices or coordinating meetings.
I personally like working with virtual assistants because by the very nature of introducing someone else into your workflow, you’re forced to establish a process and define the protocols of how work gets done. Then, when you train a virtual assistant on how to follow your process, you get real-time feedback about whether or not it’s working.
This is going to become more important in the years to come as artificial intelligence takes on more and more administrative tasks. If you don’t start building the skills to document and delegate work with a human assistant now, how on earth will you be able to do the same thing with a computer in a year or two from now?
Final takeaway.
Throughout the book, Newport references famed management expert, Peter Drucker. According to Drucker, the survival of developed economies will depend on knowledge work productivity.
This is why tech CEOs think productivity is the moonshot of the 21st century and why Silicon Valley is racing to advance to the development of artificial intelligence.
There’s a general consensus that the economy needs specialization to grow and that under the current workflow, humans aren’t providing the specialized cognitive power that’s needed to grow the economy.
What knowledge workers get wrong is that doing “work around the work” isn’t the same as doing value-added work. Sending emails and attending meetings are an important part of coordinating how work is done, but in today’s workforce, those tasks have become the work itself.
The goal of knowledge workers isn’t to do more work or work longer hours. It’s to get smarter on how to process information and distill value from it.
A World Without Email gives context for how knowledge work evolved and why it exists as it currently does. Newport gives practical recommendations for how workers can be more productive to create a more efficient workflow.
This is more important than ever before. Capital – both financial and attention – are being allocated toward the development of artificial intelligence. It’s not a matter of if your company’s HR department will be replaced by AI agents but when.
You need to start preparing for that future now and A World Without Email is a good resource to help you rethink the way you work.
While the book is arguably most beneficial for self-employed entrepreneurs who have more control over their workflows, Newport gives novel recommendations for how knowledge workers within companies can develop new habits to become more efficient too.
If you’re eager to understand the future of work and how it’s evolving, borrow A World Without Email from your local library or pick up a copy from wherever books are sold.