In Pursuit of a World Without Email

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’.

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 band-aids 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.