Welcome to the Monthly Newsletter by Amer Kaissi
Edition #17, April 2021
“A World Without Email” is an idea book more than a leadership book, but it has crucial implications for leaders and organizations everywhere. Cal Newport, who previously wrote the two excellent books “Deep Work” and “Digital Minimalism”, argues in this book that our current email-driven work habits have drastically reduced our productivity and are making us miserable.
Newport coins the term “hyperactive hive mind” to describe the current workflow in the majority of organizations. This workflow is centered on ongoing conversations based on unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered at all times through email, slack and other instant messenger tools. The impact of this hive mind is that leaders and employees spend their days (and nights!) responding to emails and messages coming at all time, instead of engaging in deep focused work. They are “talking about work” instead of actually doing the work.
Newport’s alternative to this broken way of working is one where clear processes replace haphazard messaging. These processes define how tasks are identified, assigned and reviewed. Under this system, leaders and employees will work on fewer tasks but with deeper focus. To reduce the burden of administrative tasks such as scheduling meetings for example, a strong investment in administrative support is needed. As a result, instead of answering 200 email messages per day, a leader will only have to attend to five messages, for example. Wouldn’t that be nice?
You may be wondering by now which imaginary world the author lives in! I agree that the idea of a workplace without emails sounds so far-fetched today. However, what I like about this book is that it pushes leaders to take responsibility for the chaos of email messages in their organizations, and to start thinking about ways to reprioritize their times away from responding to email and towards deeper strategic thinking. As we say in executive coaching, leaders need to seriously consider how to get away from continuous “heads-down” time towards more “heads-up” time.
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Dr. Amer Kaissi is a Top Leadership Keynote Speaker. He speaks about leadership, teams and culture.
