Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

Why do people hate email so much? (Because they haven't mastered it yet, Grasshopper, but anyway...) The thing is, it's communication. Are we shocked that a big chunk of our work burden is the burden of communication?

"He spent 1/3 of his time at work answering emails!" Outrageous!

vs.

"He spent 1/3 of his time at work communicating with the other workers." Yeah sounds about right, if not a little low.

The other thing nagging at me is that this feels like Cal Newport woke up one day, got annoyed at his inbox and wrote a whole book about it. I'm all for re-thinking and re-designing, but I'm becoming increasingly skeptical of people who hate email or whatever, and want to re-make the world in that image. It's like the people who get all pissy when it's raining out. Tony Soprano would say, ay it's fuckin' raining, but whaddyagonnadoo.

Interruptions, yes, those are harmful. But that's why there's email. I guarantee an email is easier to delay than someone calling, instant-messaging or physically approaching you. It's got "mail" right there in the name; far as I'm concerned that means you have free license to delay for a day or multiple days, just like the postal service. Check it once or twice a day, during times when you're not trying to concentrate, and then close out of it. Anything useful, copy it to where it belongs (task list, calendar, etc.). If it needs action at some point, mark it "Pending." After that, archive that shit and forget it. If you get too much, tell people to stop sending it. Or just take so long replying that they stop. I dunno.

> everyone got an email address and most lost their assistants

This is important. In the 90s I was working in an office with a half dozen other people, and the director had a secretary who also managed the office. She handled things like everyone's travel bookings, routine administrative stuff, and the like. And she was good at it. Fast forward to today and all but the most senior people spend days dealing with corporate systems to book travel, do expense reports, requisitioning things for our computers and laptops, and other assorted administrivia. In academia even tenured professors do it themselves. And these corporate portals are terrible. Now consider the scenario (set aside pandemic live for now) where a team of programmers working in two or three different offices around the country needs an in-person event. Instead of having one person, who is familiar with the systems and rules and is very good at navigating them, you have half a dozen highly paid professionals blowing half a day or more each wrangling up travel and accommodations. It's such a huge waste of people's time.

Doesn't this tie into a lot what's going on currently such as the work from home controversy?

At my previous employer, the definition of a successful employee was someone who did anything anyone asked of him enthusiastically. This included but was not limited to, massive overtime, answering e-mails, texts and phone calls day or night. Being available on weekends and Holidays. Agreeing to arbitrary deadlines, always being on slack. etc.

Once, the VP sent me an email at 4:30am. at 7:30am he called my direct boss to ask why I hadn't answered him. My bosses response, "I assume he is sleeping, like I was."

I also once managed a team in India, it was awful. I would wake up to an inbox full of questions, so I'd start answering their questions, head into work, and do any legwork needed, write them extensive instructions, then start my own work for the day. Just about the time I'd get home, they'd be waking up and stumbling into the office asking for clarification on my first e-mails. I actually physically became sick due to the lack of sleep, stress, etc. Meetings with them were either in the middle of the night for them or myself.

It's only the engineers sometimes myopic viewpoint which assumes everyone is seeking efficiency. I want the efficiency which is most meaningful to me-- to spend the least amount of time at work and produce the most, so I can have a predictable life and spend time doing things that are more meaningful to me.

I think the real answer is that managers in many environments don't actually care about efficiency. I think they view it almost in the opposite way. The more they put on you, the more you may accomplish, the better "value" they're getting from you.

> Fixing the hive-mind is going to be a billion dollar industry

Cal Newport was one of the inspirations for https://inboxwhenready.org. At this point, people have paid me over $100K to make it harder for them to read their email.

I've made some effort to persuade the Gmail and Superhuman teams to take this issue seriously, but to no avail, yet. If anyone here is building an email client or popular Gmail extension, I'm happy to talk about this stuff whenever.

I’m a longtime Thomas Sowell fan but I only just recently started reading his most celebrated work, Knowledge and Decisions, first published in 1980. In one of the early chapters there is a reference to the old physical mailbox systems of pre-networked offices, and how the cost of distracted attention from hundreds of employees never seems to deter managers from dumping all manner of low-value correspondence into said boxes.

Email and Slack may have kicked this problem into overdrive, but managers’ inability to efficiently organize knowledge work appears to be a long-standing open problem.

People are focusing on the mention of email but that's just a detail. What Newport is really onto here is horrible state of office organization, of which having to deal with email is just a symptom.

The hive mind arises because instead of having 1 or two people handle things like coordinating a meeting, everyone involved has to coordinate with everyone else.

> Rather than strategic thinkers, managers work as human switchboards, answering and forwarding dozens of emails on any and every topic to keep the system from seizing up.

You could take out "email" and replace it with "slack threads" or "text messages", or just about any other tech, and you'd still have the same problem: there's no sane organization any more, just a bunch of people running around trying to connect and work with each other.

"And if any individual tries to opt out and focus on one thing for an entire day, they’re throwing a wrench in the ‘hyperactive hive mind’, which explains why calls for individual discipline have done so little to fix the problem."

Another HN thread recently linked the essay "Meditations on Moloch," which among other things talks about multi-polar traps, things like the prisoner's dilemma in which the players are incentivized to defect. I never thought of the email problem this way, but it definitely feels right now that I think about it.

I'm privileged to work somewhere where my bosses specifically tell me to turn off my email and just pair program with someone, but honestly I still leave my chats up and allow myself to be constantly diverted. I've clearly internalized this way of working and the fear of being "rude" or whatever by not instantaneously responding to the point where it's the natural way I work. This is in spite of the fact that it's something I work to break out of.

> Usually after six hours of real actual work they need to go home and rest.

People think I'm nuts when I bring up a 6 hour work day. I do my best work in 6 hours, the rest isn't my best even if I'm still productive. Things I do during my personal time are part of what I bring to the table. When work takes away from fulfillment outside of work then I have less to offer.

Every single communication product that I tried which was meant to replace email, had a worse impact on my productivity than email itself.

If you want to change the rules of communication in the workplace, sure let's have a discussion. But that doesn't have anything to do with email vs. some other tool.

If you think the problem is some protocol (as in email protocol) or some client[1]... Then my BS detector will go off.

[1] I recognise that some email clients are better than others. It should also be noted that email is one of the few communication modes where you are free to choose whatever client you want, so thee argument "email is bad because Client X is bad" doesn't really hold.

I think asynchronous communication (https://blog.doist.com/asynchronous-communication/) moves in the right direction on this.

99% of things are not urgent, and people should not be expected to be available instantaneously. But implementing that requires discipline on the part of the person sending the message.

> By contrast, most knowledge work today operates with no deliberate structure at all. Instead of carefully constructed processes to get the most out of each person, we just hand out tasks and leave people to organise themselves organically in whatever way feels easiest to them.

I've very much felt this pain in a few of my roles. I understand the need for this sort of many-hats-wearing, elbow-greased approach to solving business problems in a startup. But it's infuriating working in late-stage startups (or even mid-sized tech companies) that fail to get away from this 'throw people at the problem' mentality and spend the time and resources to explicitly define what the business' core processes are and how they work.

I know not everyone thinks about problems in terms of process flows, but it still drives me crazy!

I barely use email, I wish we came back to more email and letting me decide when to answer it vs "always on" immediate response Slack.

I love email, ya it takes some control and if your organization is out of control it can suck. But I love the entire concept.

I can email anyone in the world, that is mind blowing. I've gotten amazing responses from authors whose books I love, people I admire, old friends I lost contact with and found, etc...

Here are my shower thoughts on this subject - since I have been bombarded with emails at all times, and been guilty of now having to address them.

In my dream setup, there are 2 kinds of emails, and the onus is set by the sender of the email.

1) The priority email - in which the sender expects a single person receiver to act on specific aspects, as soon as the receiver is able to.

The receiver gets the email asap, and because he receives less emails, he can address it. Like a hot potato, if there is more info he needs, he can pass it around the same way.

Everyone else is on cc or bcc - and these folks get it delivered to them as #2 below.

This email has only 1 person in the 'To' field, and if there are many, then the system makes it so that everyone in the 'To' field get the email as #2 below.

2) The FYI email - this email is sent by the sender, but is kept in a safe place till the receiver pulls for it.

The sender is made aware that the receiver has pulled for it or not, and if the sender is not satisfied with the speed of response, this email can be upgraded into #1.

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I think this does not change too much of the systems, just small tweaks to workflow, and is something that can be achieved if the team puts their mind to it.

> How about just not needing an email address?

Simply don't understand this, I am not person with great writing skills, but I prefer email most of the time, because to me it is more concise communication medium without time pressure, when it is up to me, usually my work pattern is like this ( emails -> chart -> may be meeting ) or ( emails -> meeting(s) ).

'Email' seems to be a trigger word for a lot of people, but I never see Slack or IM mentioned in these discussions. Slack is just as disruptive in my experience.

I long for the days when email was the only medium of electronic communication. Now it's email, Slack, Basecamp, Teams, Jira and Zoom.

These thing’s are highly subjective and being on both ends of the spectrum doesn’t help someone. Email is bad no; email are perfect of course not. As long as it make your life easier and productive it’s a good thing.

Email is just a tool. Unlike powertools it doesn't remove limbs or leave gaping wounds, but you still have to use it safely and in a manner that doesn't destroy your productivity and mental health.

Personally, I don't even have email running all day. I just start the mail client about an hour before I am leaving the office, answer the important emails, delete or forward most others. And I get lots of work done!

Disagree with the host that the net effect of 10x increase on productivity on climate change would be a wash. If production capacity increases that much faster than social consciousness and direction of capital, the result will be catastrophic for climate change. Boosting productivity should be explicitly done in tandem with using that increase in a way that's beneficial to humanity and not just profitable.

Everyone is responding to the email part but in the actual interview Cal claimed pair programming is 10x more productive than non-pair programming.

Anyone have any experience to back that up?

Article discusses the problem, but does not discuss solutions much. About the only concrete statement involves "column based task boards".

He seems to have no sense of how IP law could stifle the benefit to humanity. He assumes that no matter who innovates something very useful, that it will spread to everyone's workflow. I think the host was correct to suggest that the government should fund this research, as you might be able to ensure it's available for public benefit and not "owned" (licensed?) by Atlassian or whoever it may be.

Not to mention he only describes the benefit in terms of dollars of profit to companies. Broaden your scope of the potential benefit to humanity!

> Cal Newport: But this had a huge impact on the ability of those frontline workers to produce the work that actually was measured, the work that actually brings profit into the organization, because now they had to wrangle with word processors and they had to wrangle with email and they had to wrangle, later on, with these intranet forums where they’re trying to enter in their travel reimbursement, and they’re trying to do their conflict of interest declaration in some sort of weird format that makes life really easy for the HR department, but takes up the whole afternoon. And you ended up having to hire more of the frontline workers to get the same amount of work done. Their salaries were more expensive than the support staff. You actually ended up worse off. [emphasis added]

This is one of the big ones. My previous office took a 10-year break from having real support staff. They tallied the numbers (because time entry was detailed enough) and realized that with 1200 or so engineers and scientists each having to do their own training reports, HR paperwork, travel planning and financial reporting, they were costing themselves a huge amount of money. They ended up hiring small support teams for some of this work at a fraction of the previous cost (numbers not coming to mind so I'm not including them, but the support teams totaled to under 20 people, I just can't remember if it was closer to 10 or 20). The savings showed up within the first couple of months as the new staff quickly become experts (from doing it constantly) in the work and people handed off the non-core work to them.

Specialists in mundane "administrivia" (essential but not necessarily interesting) work don't cost a lot, but can save a company a ton of time and money in the end.

> I actually think, and this is a provocative claim, a lot of economists don’t agree with me here, but I think actually in the non-industrial sector, so in knowledge work, productivity has actually been going down. The only reason why it looks stagnant is that we have added a lot of off-the-book hours in the early morning and the evening.

My present team is definitely guilty of this. I, personally, refuse. At 1630, my work day is done. The most I'll respond to (because we support multiple sites) is a text asking if I can be at some specific location the next day. I will not write up a report (official on my work computer or unofficial as an answer to a question over text, if it's actually important I'll have already sent an email during the work day). The rest of the team is not as effective at quitting at the end of the day (as evidenced by the 50 messages I just saw on that muted text thread they have going). They aren't getting paid for this time spent thinking and communicating about work, they're all salaried (by my contract I'm paid by the hour, I'll accept the 1 minute or so every week for the "where can you be" question, but nothing more).

There’s no comments in here yet, but I cant possibly read the article. Guess Ill go check Slack.