A Strategy to Prevent Email From Eating Up Your Workday
Cal Newport’s advice for automating your workflow
Email is a thief disguised as convenience — and its sneaky energy-sucking threatens to ruin our work lives.
Replying to emails and company message threads never feels like it should count as “real” work. After all, have you ever seen a job posting that lists “quick with tonally appropriate Slack emojis” or “a whiz at inbox zero” among a candidate’s ideal skills? Yet, most of us spend upward of a third of our workdays feeding what the author and Georgetown professor Cal Newport calls “the hyperactive hive mind workflow.” That is, we spend almost as much time talking about what we’re going to do — soliciting and offering feedback, delegating tasks, gathering information, providing updates — as we spend actually doing it.
In his new book, A World Without Email, Newport blames the “hyperactive hive mind” for zapping our “cognitive energy.” We’re wasting precious brainpower on administrative minutiae and logistics, he argues, when we could be problem-solving or executing.
But there’s hope. You can free yourself from much of the back-and-forth communication that has you chained to your inbox and wondering where all your time goes. The trick is to automate your process.
