What’s in it for me? Liberate your organization from the tyranny of the inbox.
For many people, a typical workday looks like this: You wake up and head into the office.
Then you open up your email inbox and it dictates everything you do for the rest of the day.
From that moment on, you’re lucky if you can snag 20 minutes to get some real, substantive work done.
Sound familiar?
If so, you’re not alone.
Thanks to tools like email and instant messaging, the workplace culture of endless communication has completely taken over, damaging productivity and making employees miserable.
Now, you could patch this situation with quick fixes like writing clearer subject lines and turning off notifications.
But if you want to really solve the underlying issue, you need a more radical solution – one where your inbox is no longer in charge.
The blinks that follow will explore this possibility using data, real case studies, and actionable tips.
In these blinks, you’ll learn that you aren’t as good at multitasking as you think you are; how email reduces job satisfaction; and why it can be better to keep your workflows secret.
Email leads to a hyperactive workflow, which impedes productivity.
When the author first interviewed Sean, the cofounder of a small technology firm, his company was in the midst of a productivity fiasco.
It began with an email fixation – practically every business activity was handled via the employees’ inboxes.
Then, once the company adopted an instant-messaging tool called Slack, things got really crazy.
Business clients were granted access to the service, which meant they could pop in and ask questions at any time.
Soon, Sean was working until 1:00 a.
m.
every night because he could barely finish anything important during the day.
Sean’s company was deep in what the author calls the hyperactive hive mind workflow.
It’s characterized by a constant, ongoing conversation within an organization, in which employees’ activities are determined by the messages in their inboxes.
The key message here is: Email leads to a hyperactive workflow, which impedes productivity.
The truth is, in workplaces today, the hyperactive hive mind workflow is pretty ubiquitous.
That’s no surprise, as nothing fosters it like email.
And it’s killing productivity.
Why?
On average, modern knowledge workers check their email once every six minutes.
In total, they spend over a third of their working hours in their inboxes – an absolutely incredible amount of time!
These numbers are already staggering, but the problem gets worse.
In 2018, a software company called RescueTime monitored the computer habits of 50,000 active users.
They ultimately concluded that, all told, the average knowledge worker gets just an hour and 15 minutes of undistracted productive work done per day.
Clearly, the constant focus on email is disastrous for productivity.
But why is that the case?
Well, because of the human brain – specifically, a region called the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for attention.
The prefrontal cortex is only capable of focusing on one thing at a time.
Yet the hyperactive hive mind workflow encourages us to maintain multiple ongoing electronic conversations, all while completing the difficult aspects of our jobs, like coding computer programs or writing business strategies.
Psychologically, this takes a toll: rapidly switching between tasks takes time and energy.
So when we multitask, we end up taking longer to complete each activity than we would if we were executing each one in isolation.
Many people freely admit that email makes them less productive.
But they also believe they don’t have a choice – that responsiveness is more important to their teams than optimized performance.
That’s understandable but wrong.
No workplace truly benefits from a constant stream of email.
One day, the author was on a hike with a friend who works as a management consultant.
As they walked, the author mentioned his concerns about email and the hyperactive hive mind.
His friend was quick to insist that the benefits of email outweigh any downsides.
His main argument?
That email is efficient.
If someone on his team gets stuck, he said, they can just shoot him an email.
His response will then help them get unstuck.
As a manager, he believed his value lay in his ability to keep everyone’s activities moving along.
You might feel the same.
You’re worried that without email your team’s efforts will grind to a halt.
But ask yourself, Would they really?
The key message here is: No workplace truly benefits from a constant stream of email.
Regardless of your profession, your work benefits when you have uninterrupted chunks of time for focused, creative thinking.
It’s obvious why this is true for writers, programmers, and scientists.
But the need for distraction-free time is just as great in other professions, even if the reason why isn’t as clear.
Consider people in managerial roles, for instance.
They may not require hours of continuous, deep thinking about a single problem.
But they do have tasks that should be tackled sequentially and with great focus – the big-picture, strategic aspects of management.
By constantly forcing managers to react to the here and now, the hyperactive hive mind causes them to neglect more important long-term goals.
Perhaps even more than managers, minders – employees who provide administrative or logistical support – seem to operate well within the hyperactive hive mind.
Aren’t quick responses a key measure of administrators’ usefulness?
Well .
.
.
no.
That’s because there’s a major difference between communicating about tasks and actually doing them.
Often, these two things are at odds, as we can see from the history of IT support.
In the early days of IT departments, employees would endlessly call and email support staff with their complaints.
But the time that IT staff spent responding to the complaints reduced the time available for addressing them.
Realizing this, IT departments implemented software tools called ticketing systems, which automate the process of requesting tech support.
This freed IT staff up from having to manage complaints, allowing them to focus their efforts on resolving issues.
Email reduces job satisfaction and stresses us out.
In 2016, the informatics expert Gloria Mark and a group of coauthors conducted a revealing study.
In it, they attached heart monitors to 40 knowledge workers and monitored their computer usage throughout the day.
The goal was to measure the workers’ mental stress during particular activities.
Can you guess what Mark and her colleagues discovered?
Spoiler alert: there was a correlation between email and stress.
The longer the workers spent on email within a given hour, the higher their stress was during that hour.
The results of Mark’s study aren’t terribly surprising.
Email is making us miserable, and we know it.
The key message here is: Email reduces job satisfaction and stresses us out.
The mental consequences of the hyperactive hive mind workflow go beyond a bit of stress here and there.
It also has a huge impact on employees’ job satisfaction.
A study done by Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow is a good example of this.
Perlow worked with a group of consultants to implement predictable time off, or PTO for short, at their firm.
PTO gave the employees specific times every week where they were encouraged to work while completely disconnected from all communication channels, including email and even phones.
Prior to introducing PTO, just 27 percent of the consultants reported being excited to start work in the morning.
But with PTO in place, that number jumped to over 50 percent.
Ultimately, the stress of constant communication hurts a company’s bottom line.
Miserable employees don’t perform as well, and they’re also more likely to burn out and quit.
In fact, Perlow’s study found that implementing PTO increased the percentage of employees planning to stay with the company in the long-term from 40 percent to 58 percent.
So why does email induce so much suffering?
Because it hijacks the brain’s innate desire for social connection.
Think about it: In humanity’s hunter-gatherer days, social connections were all-important because they meant greater access to food and support.
When we ignore our emails, our brains think we’re neglecting our social connections and potentially endangering our own survival.
As a result, we become anxious.
In the hyperactive hive mind workflow, this anxiety is a constant presence, even at times when we’re supposed to be relaxing – at night, on weekends, or on vacation.
To our ancient brains, an overloaded inbox feels like a literal matter of life and death.
There simply must be a better solution.
Optimizing your company’s workflows boosts productivity and profits.
Ford Motor Company’s famous Model T was released in 1908.
The new car was innovative in its design, but the process that would eventually be used to construct it was revolutionary.
At first, the Model T was constructed just like other cars at the time: with a group of 15 engineers working together to assemble each car.
But then, in 1913, Henry Ford had an idea.
What if cars could move between workers as they were being assembled, with each employee handling just one part of each car?
This initial idea resulted in an invention, the assembly line, that forever changed the way factories were operated.
To rid ourselves of the hyperactive hive mind, modern workplaces need a radical change like the assembly line.
This will require a major shift in mindset toward workflows optimized for the human brain.
The key message here is: Optimizing your company’s workflows boosts productivity and profits.
In Ford’s day, materials and equipment were the primary capital resources – that is, the parts of the business responsible for creating value.
Because it was so efficient, the assembly line returned far more value from this capital than the original method.
In the knowledge sector, there’s a different primary capital resource.
That resource is attention capital, which refers to the human brains a company employs to generate value.
The hyperactive hive mind workflow generates weak returns from this capital.
Other workflows are much better at amplifying attention capital and generating productivity.
To illustrate this, consider the following case study: Devesh is an entrepreneur interviewed by the author.
He owns a small marketing firm, which, in the past, was firmly rooted in the hyperactive hive mind workflow.
At that time, he wasn’t deploying his attention capital effectively.
But Devesh was able to flip the script by completely abandoning the hive mind.
He replaced it with an entirely new workflow based around an online project management tool.
This tool enabled users to create shared pages called “boards,” each of which corresponded to a single project.
All files, tasks, notes, and discussions attached to a project are collected within that project’s unique board.
This workflow is optimized much better than the hyperactive hive mind for a few reasons.
First, it encourages single-tasking over multitasking – employees can no longer get distracted by a hectic, overwhelming inbox.
And second, the information on the project boards is neatly organized, making the workflow much more efficient.
Devesh’s firm shows how workflows can be optimized for attention capital.
In the next blink, we’ll look at the process of implementing them.
Create better workflows for your employees and for yourself.
Peter Drucker was a highly influential twentieth-century business thinker, widely known as the founder of modern management.
Drucker is responsible for much of how we think of knowledge work today.
One of Drucker’s major contributions was his theory of autonomy.
He argued that knowledge workers couldn’t be treated like highly-supervised robots, as factory workers were.
Instead, they needed the freedom to operate independently and complete their objectives autonomously.
Thanks to Drucker’s theory, modern managers don’t try to tell their employees how to be creative – but they also don’t tell them how to be productive, and that can be a problem.
Left to their own devices, employees often resort to the hyperactive hive mind as their productivity tool.
But you can offer them a better alternative – without restricting their autonomy.
The key message here is: Create better workflows for your employees and for yourself.
When changing an existing workflow, keep in mind that you’re always tweaking one of two things: work execution or expectations.
Work execution involves the ways in which your employees do their jobs.
For example, you might change work execution by replacing email with a project-management service like Trello or Flow.
When you’re altering work execution, it’s crucial to involve your employees in the process.
The reason is the psychological theory of locus of control.
This is the idea that when people feel like they have control over a particular course of action, they’re much more motivated to stick with it.
So if you’re an executive, ensure that your team understands why the hyperactive hive mind is bad for business.
Then encourage them to generate new workflow ideas everyone can agree on.
While execution involves changing an entire team’s behaviors, you alter expectations with the way you do things individually.
For instance, you might implement a policy of only checking your email twice a day.
Changes like this impact people’s attitudes toward your work habits and behaviors; once they’ve noticed a change in how quickly you respond to their messages, your coworkers will adjust their expectations accordingly, whether or not you’ve told them what you’re doing.
And believe it or not, you shouldn’t tell them.
It’s best to keep as quiet as possible about your personal workflows, as your coworkers may feel restricted by your new behaviors – after all, they don’t get a say in them.
Instead, just quietly deliver what you’ve promised to deliver.
There’s no need for you to explain how you’re working if you consistently meet your objectives.
Clear, structured production processes maximize attention capital.
Picture this: A coworker emails you, informally outlining a new responsibility for you to tackle.
But there’s no dedicated process in place for assigning or tracking the work.
So, naturally, you send an email asking for clarification.
This kicks off a game of hot potato, where responsibility bounces from one inbox to another until a manager finally steps in and puts a stop to it.
Sound familiar?
This is a common scenario in the hyperactive hive mind workflow, but it’s deeply inefficient and a waste of your company’s attention capital.
Smart production processes solve the problem by making it clear who should be working on what, and when.
This frees your employees up to do the important work rather than just talk about it.
The key message here is: Clear, structured production processes maximize attention capital.
Production processes can be organized differently depending on the nature of the work in question.
Let’s start with an automatic process, which is best for tasks that are repeated often and are highly structured.
Take Optimize Enterprises, a media company whose workflows the author looked at.
One of Optimize’s major activities is producing daily instructional videos.
This process involves lots of coordinated action, but Optimize doesn’t rely on the hyperactive hive mind for that.
Instead, it uses a shared spreadsheet that meticulously tracks the status of each video.
Team members are responsible for monitoring the spreadsheet and completing their respective tasks when the time comes.
An automatic process like this one works great for media production and similar tasks.
But it wouldn’t necessarily be great for every kind of work.
For a more unstructured process, let’s look at one of Optimize’s high-level managers.
This manager’s duties are more varied, so he doesn’t use an automatic process like a spreadsheet.
But his schedule is still highly structured.
He begins his day with three hours of uninterrupted work, before turning his attention to actively managing.
Using an online collaboration tool, he checks in on each of his team’s projects, joining in on conversations as needed.
Importantly, this communication doesn’t happen through email, but within “cards” attached to each project.
Afterward, he has one-on-one FaceTime meetings with the employees he supervises, discussing new initiatives and resolving any issues.
The spreadsheet process and the manager’s schedule differ, but both provide a solid structure and concrete guidelines about who’s working on what, and when.
The result is that work unfolds without unnecessary communication, allowing everyone to spend more time doing the things that actually matter.
Choose the right coordination protocols by weighing their costs.
In a standard work setting, people need to communicate on a litany of different issues: scheduling meetings, determining next steps in a project, answering queries, offering feedback .
.
.
the list goes on and on.
In the hyperactive hive mind workflow, most people deal with these issues by firing off emails.
That method of resolution, sending an email, is an example of a coordination protocol – that is, a way of structuring communication.
Every coordination protocol has an associated cost that’s worth closely examining and optimizing.
The key message here is: Choose the right coordination protocols by weighing their costs.
In the knowledge sector, you can measure the cost of a coordination protocol by the degree to which it fragments your attention.
This is measured in cognitive cycles.
Let’s say that your attention is divided up into “buckets” of five minutes each.
Counting the number of buckets you devote to a coordination task gives you its cognitive cycle cost.
Consider a hypothetical consulting firm that needs to evaluate potential new clients before pursuing them.
In the hyperactive hive mind, this process might involve a group of employees sending several dozen emails back and forth about each client.
Each message, no matter how quickly it’s written, uses up at least one five-minute bucket – it fragments your attention, after all – so the result is a high cognitive cycle cost.
An alternate protocol for this situation might be a 30-minute meeting held every Friday.
This protocol only uses six buckets per week, making it less costly than the email protocol.
Of course, cognitive cycles aren’t the only relevant metric – so is inconvenience.
Protocols that create long delays, require special effort, or lead to missed opportunities have high inconvenience costs.
When it comes to the client request example, the hive mind protocol scores well on convenience, since firing off and responding to emails is quick.
The meeting protocol, which requires employees to wait until Friday, has a higher inconvenience score.
It may even create an unacceptably long delay for the client, potentially leading to lost business.
It’s important to ensure that your protocols strike the right balance between cognitive cycle and inconvenience costs.
Once you’ve chosen a protocol, don’t be afraid to tweak it.
Let’s say you choose the meeting protocol – you might reduce its inconvenience cost by introducing a standard operating procedure where clients are promised a response within one week.
This will reduce the probability that the client will become annoyed by the delay and, correspondingly, the likelihood that you’ll lose business as a result.
Highly skilled workers shouldn’t get bogged down in the administrative weeds.
When personal computers first arrived in the workplace in the 1980s, nearly everyone expected them to spark a productivity revolution.
As a result, service sector companies invested a great deal of money in advanced technology.
Per worker, their investments worked out to an increase of more than 116 percent!
Yet employees’ output only increased by a measly 2.
2 percent.
What happened?
According to the technology historian Edward Tenner, computers made certain tasks “just easy enough.
” Before, companies would have hired dedicated support staff to deal with things like scheduling and filling out forms.
But now, skilled professionals are expected to handle those tasks, at the cost of real productivity.
The key message here is: Highly skilled workers shouldn’t get bogged down in the administrative weeds.
When you cut support staff from your organization, you might think you’re saving money.
But you’re actually reducing the amount of time that your highly skilled employees have to do more difficult work, which ultimately hurts the bottom line.
To mitigate this effect, keep in mind the specialization principle: the concept that working on fewer things with a higher level of quality ultimately boosts productivity.
On a company-wide level, adopting the specialization principle might involve hiring more support staff.
Now, this is going to cost some money up front, but the upshot will be increased productivity and ultimately, greater profits.
According to economist Peter G.
Sassone, some organizations could immediately reduce their overall staffing costs by 15 percent by hiring more support staff.
How?
By freeing up the time of their highly skilled professionals so they can be more productive.
Of course, hiring additional staff requires you to be in a position of power at your organization.
What if you aren’t?
In this case, it might be worth your time to hire a part-time virtual assistant using a site like Upwork.
Or, as an alternative, last-resort option, you could simulate your own support staff by partitioning your time into two separate categories: specialist and support.
For instance, you might delegate 12:00 to 1:00 p.
m.
and 3:00 to 5:00 p.
m.
as your “support” hours.
During these periods, act as if you’re a full-time support staff member, addressing administrative issues.
And during your specialist hours, focus only on skilled work that directly produces value for the company.
Creating these two separate alter egos might seem heavy-handed.
But, in return, you get increased efficiency, focus, and performance.
An hour dedicated exclusively to a hard project will generate much better quality work than an hour caught up in the endless frenzy of the hyperactive hive mind.
Final summary
The proliferation of email and instant messaging in the knowledge sector has led to an unhealthy workflow called the hyperactive hive mind.
This workflow may feel convenient, but it leads to miserable employees who’re considerably less productive.
Modern work culture should be revolutionized to de-emphasize email and replace it with workflows that encourage single-tasking, efficiency, and focus.
Actionable Advice: Set up nonpersonal email addresses.
We’ve become accustomed to the idea of email addresses belonging to a specific individual – most professional email addresses take the form of “person@organization.
com.
” This personalizes communication, which isn’t always a good thing.
If the receiver takes too long to respond, for instance, the sender might begin to feel like she’s being purposely ignored.
To address this, consider creating nonpersonal email addresses – ones that specify a department, project, or activity rather than an individual.
This can mitigate a sender’s expectations, meaning less stress for everyone involved.