Illustration: Guy Shield
My breathing quickened. My right foot tapped faster, an ingrained nervous tic. My eyes darted from one of my 20 open web browser tabs to the next. What was I doing again?
It was not until I was forced to work from home in 2020 that I truly felt the weight of this digital whiplash. Without the mise en scene and score of the shared office, the cordial chatter and relaxed ambience of my organisation’s pleasant culture, I could hear only pings. I beat back the barrage with faster keystrokes.
This hyperactive workflow is common to many knowledge workers. We engage in a daily game of digital whack-a-mole. We rush between competing priorities, but as soon as we smack one down, a new mole emerges, taunting us.
As workplace processes have been integrated with popular tech platforms such as Gmail and Slack, whose business models often prioritise increasing your time on site, our workdays have become fragmented through mounting piles of pings. Our innate responsiveness to new information from others has been hijacked by interfaces competing for our attention.
Our innate responsiveness to new information from others has been hijacked by interfaces competing for our attention.
I lamented how the pandemic had worsened this harried feeling with a family member also working from home, and who is counting the days to retirement for similar reasons. ‘Everything is always coming at me from all angles, and I just can’t get anything real done!’, she sighed.
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‘The modern advertising world is quiet’, said former ad executive Jason Dooris in 2016, lamenting the lost vibrancy of the pre-digital white-collar workplace. He ascribed much of the hushing and stultifying of office life to the move from telephone to email as the dominant mode of professional communication.
So Dooris made a drastic decision: he banned the use of internal emails at the Australian company he then managed, Atomic 212. Staff had to call each other or speak in person. Many would consider this nostalgic Luddism or a managerial gimmick. But remarkably, it worked. Freed from the frenzy of constant alerts, the firm saw an estimated 38–42 per cent increase in productivity in the first month of the ban.
Dooris and Atomic 212 later parted ways, ironically, over allegations of fraudulent emails, after the experiment he initiated was scrapped. But the policy’s initial success begs the question: are work emails, the unassailed pulse of the knowledge sector, the irrepressible outgrowth of the digital revolution, actually a fundamental mistake?
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In 1985, technology critic Neil Postman prophesied, ‘People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think’. Largely dismissed as a moralising determinist in the 2000s amid widespread optimism at Silicon Valley’s expansion, Postman’s concerns about the psychological and sociographic detriments of digital technologies are being increasingly reappraised in popular literature.
Books such as Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing and Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now have garnered wide readership and acclaim for critiquing technology capitalism’s attention-sapping nature. Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma also shocked many with its dire warning about tech platforms’ manipulation of our psychological vulnerabilities.
Drawing on this lineage, American computer scientist Cal Newport’s new book A World Without Email argues that not only is online communication corrupting our social lives, but our professional ones too. Email has never been adored—indeed, ‘email overload’ emerged in the 2000s as a ‘fashionable annoyance’ among high-status professionals. But Newport argues its colonisation of work processes across the economy now renders millions of workers functionally addicted to it.
And by activating our innate sociability whilst unnaturally fragmenting our thought processes, email induces what Newport calls ‘the hyperactive hive mind’. We feel compelled to reply so as not to appear rude or lazy, but pulling our attention in every which direction leaves us exhausted and unfocused. As Postman warned, it unravels our capacity to think.
We feel compelled to reply so as not to appear rude or lazy, but pulling our attention in every which direction leaves us exhausted and unfocused.
Researchers have found the average worker sends approximately 126 business emails per day—that’s one email every 4 minutes. Email has not just moved offline discussions online; it has stoked a massive growth in the volume of messages relative to productive tasks. Newport argues we’ve now reached ‘a saturation point for many, in which their actual productive output is squeezed into the early or evening hours and weekends, while their work days devolve into Sisyphean battles against their inboxes.’
The consequences are thus twofold and compounding—lost productivity for the employer and the ‘perpetually harried state’ of the modern employee. Indeed, the latter is of existential importance. As journalist Brigid Schulte wrote, ‘I worry that I’ll face my death and realise that my life got lost in this frantic flotsam of daily stuff.’
Newport is an established guru on workplace productivity, authoring previous bestsellers including Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, alongside provocative columns including a similar critique of workplace messaging platform Slack. His writing consistently emphasises the need to proactively minimise distractions and aimless busywork, and designate time to focus on important tasks.
But what differentiates Newport’s recent work from his self-help origins is the emphasis on institutional over individual change. He implores organisations to consider drastic action, similar to Atomic 212’s aborted efforts, and explore alternatives such as designated non-contactable hours, project-based platforms such as Trello and better use of meetings and phone calls. Overall, he wants managers to lead a movement away from unstructured bombardment to a discerning cultivation of purposeful communication.
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A World Without Email reads differently in 2021 than if it were published in any previous year. Far more of its readers now work solely or primarily from digital devices, reinforcing the centrality of email to their daily workflow, and thus its pitfalls of hyperactivity and tediousness.
Newport’s work is also denied the appraisal of the intellectual to whose writing it is, perhaps unknowingly, most indebted. Anthropologist David Graeber, who died in late 2020, wrote the viral essay turned book Bullshit Jobs that set the standard for literary excavation of the modern office’s inanity.
The late anarchist argued that, contrary to the market’s supposed efficiency, managerial bluster and short-sightedness and society’s moralisation of the ‘Protestant work ethic’ have led to an endemic of pointless work, which exists to inflate bosses’ egos, needlessly micromanage subordinates, paper over solvable problems and tick boxes.
As I have previously argued in Crikey, this phenomenon often manifests more in ‘bullshit tasks’ than whole jobs. KPMG find the average Australian worker spends 10 hours per week on minimisable administrative tasks—much of which, presumably, is spent responding to pointless emails.
The two writers share palpable frustration with how closely many offices resemble the television satire The Office, where seemingly nothing of consequence ever gets done.
But Newport’s immersion in Silicon Valley ‘thought leadership’ culture leaves him far less critical of corporate managers. The Georgetown professor has plenty of ideas to streamline systems of communication but has little to say on wastefulness derived from inequalities of economic power.
Take Graeber’s example of an administrative worker who, due to a ‘disagreement between managers’, was given the sole 9am-5pm responsibility of ‘watching an inbox that received emails in a certain form…and copy and paste it into a different form.’ The inefficient use of email was merely a symptom; the cause of the inefficient workflow was the inability of subordinate employers to question the whims of their egotistical and incompetent managers.
Newport tells workers that ignoring their inbox pays off, but that doesn’t help those whose performance is measured by the outward trappings of ‘hustle’.
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Not long before the pandemic shortened our commutes to merely a few steps from bed to desk, I bumped into an old university friend on the train, who had since started working for a ‘Big Four’ consulting firm. She detailed how her management team judged young graduates as slacking off if they left the office before 10pm each night, having clocked in at 9am.
Even if they had finished their work, they had to either look busy or ask for more work just to keep up the appearance of dedication. I recalled another Graeber example of an employee whose ‘primary function seemed to be occupying a chair and contributing to the decorum of the office’, who lamented that ‘looking busy when you aren’t is one of the least pleasant office activities imaginable.’ Indeed, at my friend’s company the oppressive culture led to sickness and burnout among staff and, ironically, lowered their productivity.
Newport implores workers to produce quality outputs to assure managers that ignoring their inbox pays off, but that doesn’t help those whose performance is measured by the outward trappings of ‘hustle’. When one’s worth is judged by ‘presenteeism’, abolishing email would merely force staff to play more solitaire.
In her recent book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, writer Anne Helen Petersen traces this culture of grinding (even performatively) beyond the point of exertion, which is particularly expected of and accepted by many Millennials, to ‘panic over their ability to maintain or obtain a spot in the middle class’. While the uptake of digital platforms exacerbates work-induced burnout, the underlying cause is rising economic instability caused by concerted corporate and governmental efforts since the 80s to undermine unions and associated employee benefits.
Newport is relatively subdued on government intervention to bolster workers’ rights. A 2017 French law, which establishes a ‘right to disconnect’ barring employers from encroaching on their workers’ downtime, only rates a passing mention. Worse, the word ‘union’ is not in his vocabulary at all. In Australia, the union representing Victoria Police officers recently negotiated a provision that limits digital communications outside working hours, setting the stage for a push in other industries to enshrine similar rights.
A world without email might relieve some of our chronic stress, but it is only through collective struggle that we will build a world without workplace exploitation.
As the pandemic has accelerated the blurring of our working and personal lives, calls for such measures will only grow. Economist John Quiggin has pondered whether the work from home revolution forced by the pandemic could be the biggest accelerator of workplace productivity this century. But much like John Maynard Keynes’ famously unfulfilled prophecy that we would all be working 15 hours per week by 2000, this prediction is likely to be sullied if the extra time we gain from slashed commutes and diminished grooming routines is squandered chasing a further proliferation of pings. The ACTU has found 40 per cent of Australians working from home are working more hours, and nearly all are not being paid for them. Whilst most who worked from home during the pandemic want to retain the option henceforth, the conditions of remote labour (and digital labour more generally) are overdue for critical discussion.
Streamlining communication processes will not be enough. As Petersen writes, the modern worker’s increasing tendency toward burnout ‘will not be cured by productivity apps or a better email organisation strategy… These are all bandaids on an open wound.’
A world without email might relieve some of our chronic stress, but it is only through collective struggle that we will build a world without workplace exploitation.
A World Without Email and Can’t Even are available now from your local independent bookseller.
