Knowledge at Work - Episode 4
A World Without Email
In Episode 4 we return to an author we covered earlier. Cal Newport's A World Without Email provides another look at how we can change how we work to become more effective. In the introduction Cal gives us a name for what we all have felt at some point in time.
Hyperactive Hive Mind
A workflow centered around ongoing conversations fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communications tools like email and instant messenger services.
Case Against Email
Cal argues there are three things that make email something to work on as it relates to our work.
Email Reduces Productivity
Email increases the volume of messages and audiences for messages. The result of this is more people needing to do more filtering. It also drives decision making upstream and allows work to flow in less than idea ways.
Email allows management to “quickly” send updates down the chain of command. Small issues that have low importance can easily be solved with a quick message to those potentially impacted. Staff are then flooded with solutions to problems they are not impacted by.
On the flip side staff have an easy way to ask questions and push work up to their managers. It also allows for staff to ask questions to a group thus slowing down the entire group. Historically this would have been done through conversation, which is naturally limited to the people you are near or to a phone call.
One of the challenges is when we see people who can reply and quickly answer questions we think of them as being productive. Meanwhile the person focused on doing the actual work of the organization can seem distant because they are not engaging with the hyperactive hive mind. We also need to recognize that replying to emails can feel good and productive. Fighting these instincts isn’t easy, but it opens the door to greater productivity.
Email Makes Us Miserable
Cal talks about how humans have evolved to depend on each other and to feel bad when we let others down. Email causes this to happen, when we see unread messages we worry that we are letting others down. Ignoring email feeds a feeling of stress we have internalized over thousands of years of depending on each other.
We are also hard wired to read into more than just words when we communicate. Think about an email you received and were convinced the sender was upset with you. Since all you have to go on are their typed words you have no ability to know their mood. This lack of context causes frustration and we often feel that others have a more negative view of us. If these conversations happened in person, we would pick up on the other signals to better understand the communications.
Another way email is making us miserable is that we intrinsically know that answering email is not productive. At the end of the day if you responded to 200 emails but made no real progress on any projects, you will know the day was largely wasted. Especially when email is used to delegate and interrogate. Email makes it easy to pass a task off, but for simple tasks the extra time while small contributes to lack of progress in general. A 2 minute task forwarded to three different people has now cost the added time for each person to read and react to the task which could have simply been done.
Email has a Mind of Its Own
In this section Cal explains the origins of email and the change it introduces. Initially planned as a replacement for other forms of communication, email quickly spiraled into a communications multiplier. Both in number of messages and number of people in each communication.
As a tool we can think that email had the power to replace much of the interoffice memo, telephone, and fax machines. Why call or print memos when you can send an email. Why call and bother someone if you can email them instead. The issue becomes the phone call allows for exchange of information back and forth where email is decidedly one sided. The result of replacing phone calls with emails is threading of conversations. The inherent problem with this is your mind has multiple threads active at any point in time. Constant shifting requires mental energy and creates the opportunity for confusion.
The challenge becomes fighting back against a system that is interwoven into everything that is done. Think about your work and how much of it is driven by information shared through email. As we try to combat the issues created by email we need to think wholistically and create tools to deliberately combat email.
At this point Cal has explained to us the threat we face, next he walks us through a potential solution.
After making his case against email, Cal gives us 4 principles we can apply to craft a world without email.
Principles
The Attention Capital Principle
The productivity of the knowledge sector can be significantly increased if we identify workflows that better optimize the human brain's ability to sustainably add value to information.
The focus is not on the individuals, but instead on the workflow itself. We talked earlier about the hyperactive hive mindset. This is an example of a workflow that does not optimize for our brain’s abilities.
Cal also talks about the split between work execution and workflow. For knowledge workers you want them focused on the execution while minimizing the time spent on their workflow.
The Process Principle
Introducing smart production processes to knowledge work can dramatically increase performance and make the work much less draining.
Now these processes being referenced are NOT step by step guides on how to do the minutia of the work, but rather larger workflows that explain what happens after each knowledge worker applies their knowledge to the project.
The key here is to look at your process and identify the main stages, then map out the order of operation and potential alterations to the process.
In our next episode we will dive into agile methodology and how it can organize processes.
The Protocol Principle
Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.
The process principle gave us a gameplan at a high level. The protocol principle is the individual play. It includes the who and the what so people know when something happens what they do.
Protocols are put in place at the internal and external levels. We talked earlier about office hours and client service levels, these are examples of protocols. We can limit email by compiling and batching our asks to regularly scheduled meetings, instead of sending each as an email.
The Specialization Principle
In the knowledge sector, working on fewer things, but doing each thing with more quality and accountability, can be the foundation for significantly more productivity.
Find the best person for each task, if you are not good at something find someone who is. Look back to your other principles and find where talent fits best. If you are growing talent internally look specifically at how best to develop people that fits with your process and protocols.
Hold the people accountable for their role. Setting expectations and creating protocols for when issues arise allow people to know when to keep working or when to raise a red flag. This also applies to developing talent, managers should be held accountable for expected development and advancement of staff. This should also have clear expectations and protocols.
We need to be deliberate in these activities. Remember the hyperactive hive mind wants to do all these things in a haphazard way that leads to distraction and stagnation. If we concentrate on applying these principles we can do so much more.
Understand your role and position
It is critical to understand your role and position in the organization.
If you are responsible for information that will be critical for someone above you, it is your responsibility to provide that information to meet their expectations.
It is very likely you will encounter a situation where you have saved information in the correct spot, but the leader can’t find it. My advice to you is to get them the information then during your next 1 on 1 meeting with them to discuss the situation and expectations for the future.
A quick note to managers, realize that these things happen, it is human nature, BUT if they happen frequently your talent will notice and act accordingly.
It is also important to remember we are fighting an existing pressure here and while mistakes happen we need to stay focused on getting better.
Experiment
We talked in an earlier episode about experimenting to find the best solution. That same concept applies here.
As we try to manage the role email plays in our work we need to try different things to see how they impact our work and relationships with others.
The most common change people make is to limit the frequency they check email. Many will include an email signature that clearly communicates when they read and reply to messages.
Another option is to quickly reply to messages with an expectation of when you can complete the requested task.
These are just two examples, I encourage you to try different approaches until you find one that works.
Follow the protocols
We talked a moment ago about knowing your role and the responsible way of doing that. Another related aspect of that is when protocols exist to follow them.
It can be easy to frustrated or disenchanted with rules, but part of being part of the organization is following the protocols that are in place. If a protocol doesn’t work well for you talk to your manager about your concerns, but do not stop following the protocol.
Appropriate workloads to avoid the need to email
One of the roles of a manager is to ensure your team has the right amount of work. When people do not have enough work they can get hung up on issues that drive them to email or other tools to try to obtain the missing pieces.
Ensuring people have enough to do so they can move on when they run into an obstruction allows them to remain productive. Then scheduling times for them to bring their obstructions to someone to help reduces the need for interruptions and helps make everybody more productive.
Use email volume as a metric
Most email tools have options to monitor volume. Using this data to monitor the flow could be useful in managing staff.
The difficult aspect of this is evaluating performance without appearing to be spying on your talent. One way to do this is to limit reporting to messages between staff and other staff and with clients. This gives you information on both internal processes and the amount of messages coming from clients.
The metrics do not have to be solely focused on your talent, this is also an option for the organization to evaluate clients.
Try experiments
Experimentation is a constant theme in all of these efforts. The important thing is to clearly document what is being tried and what results are important in evaluating the change.
As a manager your role is to listen to your talent and to work with them to find a better solution. This requires an open mind to listen to concerns. It also requires decisions to be made that balance the different needs of your team. Creating an experiment allows you to try something to see if it works. When talent have conflicting solutions to an issue you can set up multiple experiments to evaluate the different ideas.
I would also suggest you work on the experiment process. It can be difficult and improved. So after experiments talk about what worked and didn’t on the specific issue, but also talk about the process itself.
Consider creating email as a billing code or a job
In your firm does every member of staff go to the post office hourly, daily, weekly? No you likely have a person who completes this task.
Email can be thought of in a similar way. If we know most email is junk or only applicable to specific people or projects, then we should do the same thing we do with physical mail. Have a non-technical staff member gather and distribute the mail. This allows technical staff to focus on the actual work. In a smaller organization this could be time blocked or it could be the role of younger staff.
There is some relationship building that happens in email. Staff can continue to respond and receive messages from clients. BUT for routine tasks staff should have an easy process to ship information to the right place without having to spend the time themselves doing that filing.
It is also critical to measure the impact of email on the organization. Adding a time code for this ensures it will be measured.
Project / client communications tools
In order to escape the hyperactive hive mind your talent and management need the right tools. I am not talking about Outlook or Slack. I am talking about practice management tools that allow for information to be captured and accessed by the right people at the right time.
Most preparation software has project management tools integrated to make this easier. It is the organizations responsibility to make sure these tools are used appropriately. Then to have protocols in place for when something needs to happen outside the normal process.
You will have client priorities shift, it happens. What is the protocol when this happens? You may shift people to the project to make the client happy, but that may cause other projects to fall behind.
If you use email to communicate these things it requires the talent and management to constantly monitor email to see where their priorities lie. This usually causes a drop in productivity and fighting one fire only causes more fires to start on other projects.
The best way to deal with these issues is to discuss the protocols before you need to use them. As an organizations saying priorities will not change doesn’t work. Preparing for when priorities change is a much better solution.
Maximize individual’s skills
If we think about the medical profession, we can see some of this. When you visit their office, you start with an assistant who gets vitals and high-level info. Then a doctor comes to do the most complex work, then you get handed off to a scheduler at the end of the process.
We all know there are also bumps in that process as you have doctors entering information into computers which feels wasteful, but the concept of a group of experts each specializing on their part could be useful for organizations.
As an organization focus needs to be directed towards having the right people do the right jobs as often as possible. The firm where I worked had a very talented tax manager who managed no people. When he started there was pressure that a manager didn’t actually manage any people. For us this was the highest title below partner and the individual operated at a manager’s level technically. He was really good at technical tax work, but had no interest in managing people. We played to his strengths and made it work in our structure.
This relates back to email in that you likely have staff who are not great at emailing. You have a couple of options in this situation. You can provide training and guidance or you could pull email away from their responsibilities. As an organization you have to make evaluations on what is the best solution for the organization.