So what I want to do is a core idea. I think the series has been going well. These, the core idea videos, which we have been releasing as standalone videos at youtube.com/CalNewportMedia have been some of the most popular videos we've been releasing. When Jesse and I had the original idea for doing a series of core idea segments, I made a list.

Well, here are top of mind, the core ideas I come back to again and again in my writing and on this podcast. We have almost gotten through that entire list, but there is one topic left on that original list, and that is the topic I want to cover today, which is the case against email.

Now, this is the ideas that I fully articulated in my most recent book, "A World Without Email." I also explored a lot of these ideas in my New Yorker writing. So if you look back at my New Yorker archive from before and even after the publication of "A World Without Email," I also explored a lot of these ideas in the pages of the New Yorker as well.

I want to capture them all now in one core idea segment. There's four parts here that I want to tackle. One, I'm going to introduce the notion of the hyperactive hive mind. It's the most important piece of vocabulary that you will come away from this segment having learned. If you listen to one thing, know this term.

Two, I want to get into why the hyperactive hive mind is such a villain in the context of modern knowledge work. Three, I'm going to tackle if it's so bad, why is it so common? And then four, we will briefly touch on, so what should we do about it?

All right, so that's my goal. So let's start with this first point, the hyperactive hive mind. So the name of my book was "A World Without Email," and I got any number of seemingly clever, notes from people, often in response to, let's say a mailing list, mailing from my mailing list, where they would say, "Ha, I'm reading an email from you, and you are saying we should have no email in the world.

Gotcha," right? They're joking, but I would get that comment a lot, like how ironic is this? And this is where I need to clarify that the issue that I come after in that book is not email by itself. No particular beef with email as a technology. The actual villain of that book, the thing I think we should have banished more from our world is what I dubbed the hyperactive hive mind workflow.

Now, this is not an elegant title. I couldn't call the book "A World Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow," but that's probably what I should have named it because that is accurately what the book is really about. So what is this thing, the hyperactive hive mind workflow? It is a means of collaboration in which the bulk of your collaboration occurs with ad hoc, unscheduled digital messages.

So we're trying to figure something out. I'll send you a message, you'll send me one back, I'll bounce it back to you. So maybe it's Jesse and I scrambling over the furor created when we mixed up Brandon Sanderson with Pat Rufus, and maybe I sent him an email, "Hey, what should we do about this?" He sends one back, like, "Well, maybe we should meet about it." And he's like, "Well, what about these times?" You're just sending messages back and forth.

They're ad hoc, so it's not like you had a particular plan. It's just in the moment, let me send this message, and they're unscheduled. So there's not like a particular time when this communication is going to happen. Email made the hyperactive hive mind workflow possible, but two key points here, it doesn't make it inevitable.

So having email around makes it possible for you to do ad hoc back and forth messaging as the main way that you coordinate, but it doesn't mean that's the way you have to. And two, once that became dominant, other tools came along that made it even easier to engage in the hyperactive hive mind workflow.

So you got, for example, instant messenger tools like Slack, like WhatsApp, they all are enabling the same workflow. And it's this hyperactive hive mind workflow that I want to put our attention on. So this brings us to the second point, what's wrong with the hyperactive hive mind workflow? Well, let me start by saying in the abstract, nothing.

It's actually a very natural way to coordinate. It is in a pre-digital age, the primary way that human beings work together. If there was three of you out hunting a mastodon, it's a hundred thousand years ago, you would coordinate using the hyperactive hive mind workflow it'd be ad hoc back and forth, unscheduled messages.

Hey, you come over here, stop there. I think he's over here. You go around that way. It's a natural way to human beings collaborate. So there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it's very natural. It's also quite flexible, right? You have one tool, one communication tool. You figure things out on the fly.

There's very little overhead, very little predetermination required to figure out how to get things done. We just sort of rock and roll and get things done. So abstractly speaking, there's nothing particularly wrong with this mode of collaboration. The issue is that it doesn't scale. So email, the arrival of email made it possible, made it possible for very large groups of people to coordinate with each other on a large number of things, all using this hyperactive hive mind.

Because now with almost no friction, I can shoot off a message to almost anyone in my organization almost any of our clients, any of our contractors. We have this very low friction simplified way of communicating. It is in the scaling that the hyperactive hive mind began to weave its web of negative implications in the modern office.

And here's why. Let's walk through this thought experiment. If I work with one other person and we're working on one thing and we're not in the same room, going back and forth with unscheduled email messages is a perfectly reasonable way for us to coordinate. All right, well, did you get this?

Should we meet? Well, when can you meet? What do you think about this? We could go back and forth. It's a perfectly reasonable way for us to coordinate. So let's say a typical thing, just so we can use round numbers. So we want to coordinate about, it's going to require about 10 back and forth messages.

That's fine. 10 back and forth messages over the course of a day or two, no big deal. Now imagine like the typical knowledge worker, we've now scaled up the number of people we work with and the number of things we work on. And now we have 10 different things that are going on.

A big project over here, a report that has to get to a client, trying to reschedule a visit with a candidate that's coming in to interview. We're trying to figure out a problem, working back and forth with facilities because there's something that has to be repaired. So we have like 10 different things going on.

Each of them are being worked out with the hyperactive hive mind workflow. Each of them on average, maybe it's going to require about 10 back and forth messages to figure out. Each of them on average is relatively time sensitive. We need to get a resolution in the next day or two.

So we have 10 messages for each of these things, each of which needs to be seen, processed, and replied to within the next day or two. Let's multiply these numbers through. 10 things, 10 messages, that's a hundred total messages that have to be seen, received, and replied to all within a day or two.

This is where we begin to get into trouble in the modern workplace, because now if there's going to be a hundred messages, I'm going to have to get through each of them in a relatively timely fashion. In the next day or so, there is no alternative for me, but to constantly check whatever communication channel we're using.

If it's an email firm, I'm always in my inbox. If we're a Slack firm, I have to keep checking Slack. And the reason why I have to do this is not because I'm lazy, not because I'm bad at tools, but because there's a hundred messages that are going to have to be hit back over that virtual ping pong net pretty quickly after they arrive.

So I have to check constantly. And the data on this shows this is exactly what we do. In my book, I talk about a really good comprehensive data set from the software company RescueTime. They studied tens of thousands of knowledge workers and found that they were checking inboxes on average once every six minutes.

It's required. If you have hundreds of messages that are going to have to be seen, each of which is going to have to be responded to relatively quickly, just so progress can be made on the various projects you're working on. All right, so now we have a situation where we have to check an inbox or a chat channel once every six minutes, because this is the only way network is going to unfold.

Every one of those checks induces a cognitive context shift. You see an inbox full of information, different than what you're primarily working on, a lot of which is urgent, all of which is tied to specific individuals that need things from you. That is a arresting context shift. Your brain begins to immediately shift over its context to those things you see in your inbox.

Now, the issue is you're just checking your inbox real quick because you're seeing, hey, did the reply come back yet from Jesse about when we're going to set up our next meeting so you pretty quickly try to bring your attention back to what you're doing, but you've already induced that context shift.

That has a cost. Your cognitive capacity is going to be reduced and for a while after that check, 10, 15 minutes after that check, you're still going to have a reduced cognitive capacity as your brain is now in this intermediate state between what you were focusing on before and what you just saw, and then you stopped looking at that, you tried to go back to the main thing, you have what's called attention residue, cognitive capacity is reduced.

Not only that, but you're going to get a low grade sense of anxiety because you see all of these unresolved tasks in that inbox all tied to people and we take seriously requests from people and you get an overall fatigue. This is this burnout effect that office workers feel whereby two in the afternoon, they're just done trying to do anything hard because they burnt out their brain, shifting those contexts back and forth.

It's the shifts that kill you, the shifts that kill you. So we've created a hyperactive hive mind scaled up, creates this need to have to check inboxes or channels all the time because you have 100 messages a day that you have to hit back over the ping pong fence and you can't wait four hours to do that.

And all those context shifts completely fry our brain. And so it's misery making, it's fatiguing, it's anxiety producing and we get a lot less done. So it's a huge problem that we try to coordinate so much work with the hyperactive hive mind workflow, not because it doesn't make sense, it's very flexible, but because it doesn't scale.

At scale, it requires constant shifts and our brains simply can't do that. So if the hyperactive hive mind is so bad, this brings us to our third point, why is it so common? Well, I looked into this in my book and in my New Yorker reporting, and here's the story I uncovered.

It is largely accidental. No one ever said coordinating all of our work with these rapid back and forth unscheduled messages is gonna make us more productive. No one ever said, look, there's gonna be some sacrifices to this, but it's gonna be the right way to work. It's gonna unlock new levels of production.

No one ever thought that or said that. We stumbled into this way of working and here's how it largely unfolded. In the 1990s, email made a rapid move through the front office. That is when most businesses that have standard computer cubicle style knowledge work adopted email and began to use it extensively.

And the reason they did, again, I went back to the archives, was looking at the New York Times business section, I was looking at articles in other technology magazines, trying to document, look at the documents of how people were talking about email when it first spread in the 90s.

The reason why email spread is not because they said, we will have this utopia where we can communicate with each other all the time. It was because it was replacing three existing tools, fax machines, voicemails, and interoffice memos. It was a better version of those three tools, which were very popularly used in the decades leading up to the arrival of email and email was unquestionably a better way of implementing that communication.

Attaching a file is much better than faxing, sending an email is almost always much better than leaving a voicemail that requires someone to type in a code and listen to you actually talking. Sending a CC message about the new parking policy to the whole office is clearly much more efficient than having to print that out and put it in everyone's mailboxes.

So it was solving a real problem, which was there was asynchronous communication that existed, those three tools implemented it, email was cheaper, had more features and was faster. That's why it spread. Once it was in people's offices though, once people had those addresses, once the friction was removed for any interpersonal communication, the hyperactive Hivemind workflow emerged naturally, not by choice, but naturally.

And why did it emerge? Well, this gets complicated, but here's just a summary of it. It emerged because we had an ethic of autonomy. In the context of knowledge work, we had an ethic that in knowledge work, it's up to individuals to figure out how to organize their work.

Productivity is personal, we said. How you keep track of things, how you choose what you say yes to, no to, how you manage your time during the day, how you manage your tasks, that's up to you as the individual. Buy a Cal Newport book, buy a Stephen Covey book, buy a David Allen book, that's none of our business.

We give you objectives and we motivate you, but you figure out how to do your work. That is the dominant ethic in knowledge work for various reasons. In that context where we leave the organization and execution of work up to the individuals, it is not surprising that when this new tool emerged, we began to use it in the most flexible, easiest way possible.

The hyperactive Hivemind was convenient and flexible, so we all sort of fell into it because there was no one looking down at the organization as a whole and saying, "What's the best way to do this work?" When we make our own decisions, we end up with whatever is easiest in the moment.

And so we stumble backwards in this swamp of autonomy towards a world in which the hyperactive Hivemind was dominant, and we look up, and by the early 2000s found ourselves context shifting every five to six minutes, miserable, barely able to get any real work done. So that brings us to the final point, which is what should we do about this situation?

Well, now that we know that it's largely accidental that we arrived here, now that we know that there's more damage that we may have expected occurring because of all these context shifts, this should embolden us to seek solutions. And in seeking these solutions, I think the first point we have to make is that this is not a game that is going to be one with individual habits.

This has been, up until most recently, the most common way we've tried to deal with the email problem, which is say, well, people are just using email wrong. Don't check it so much. You're addicted to it. We introduced that terminology of addiction. Remember when the hyperactive hive mind first began to emerge, and we first noticed it when people were using early generation blackberries all the time to keep up with the hyperactive hive mind, we introduced the term crackberries and tried to make it seem like these people had some sort of weird addiction to this thing.

They need to get rid of that addiction. It's orthogonal to their actual work, but it wasn't. They're checking the blackberries all the time because there was more work being worked through with ad hoc unscheduled messages, and they had to respond to those messages for work to unfold. It was required, not a flaw.

So we're not gonna solve this problem by saying just check your email less often, or write better subject lines, or have better filters, or if you move from Gmail to superhuman, or from superhuman to hey, that if you just have enough automatic filters and features, you can tame this problem.

You're just not handling email well. But when we recognize that the problem is actually the hyperactive hive mind, we know none of these individual habit fixes will be enough. The reason why we have to keep checking our email, we have to keep checking Slack, is not because we have bad habits or bad setups, but because we have 10 different things that are being organized with unscheduled messages, and we can't ignore those messages.

Each of these things has 10 messages that has to get sent back and forth today because we need to finish this by the end of the day. So I have to keep checking, 'cause if I wait four hours before I answer message number two, we're not gonna get the message number 10 before the day is done, and it's a problem.

We check email all the time because the hyperactive hive mind demands it. If that is the way we coordinate our work, there is no alternative to constantly checking in on these channels and keeping these messages bouncing back and forth. Can't solve it by checking email less often, we can't solve it with better inboxes, we can't solve it by changing norms, we can't solve it with response time expectations changing.

You can say what you want about response time expectations. We have 10 messages that have to get back and forth to schedule this visit tomorrow. That has to happen. Don't tell me our norm is don't expect an answer within 24 hours. These 10 messages have to finish today because that person's coming tomorrow and we have to tell them what time their meeting is.

So how do we solve this problem? You replace the hyperactive hive mind. We need alternative ways of collaborating that do not depend on unscheduled messages that require a response relatively quickly after they arrive in your inbox. That is the only way to solve this problem. And that is gonna require hard work.

It means we're gonna have to identify what are the different things we do again and again in my job in our office. And for each of those things actually work out together alternative systems for collaboration that don't require unscheduled messages. And each different type of thing you do might require a different system.

And each system might require polishing and optimization over time to get right. And it's all a pain, but we have to do it. Because the hyperactive hive mind, though flexible, though convenient, though cheap, is not scaling and it's killing us from a cognitive perspective. And so that is the main argument I make in the end of that book, A World Without Email.

We have to start building from the ground up bespoke, clearly specified systems of collaboration to talk about when and how we communicate to get things done. Unscheduled messages have to play a decreasing role in coordinating work. So when I talk about A World Without Email, I mean a world in which the hyperactive hive mind is rarely used.

Regularly occurring work has clear systems for how we collaborate that don't depend on unscheduled messages. I could care less, by the way, about other uses for email. Your broadcasting information, great. I don't want you to mail it to me, that's fine. You have a non-urgent request or question I can answer in a sentence or two, yeah, email that to me and let me get to it when I wanna get to it.

That's a great use of email. I'm happy with all of that. The thing that's gonna kill us is we're going back and forth about something. We gotta get that out of email. We gotta get that out of Slack. We gotta get that out of WhatsApp. And we have to put in place bespoke systems that say here's when and how we communicate.

Now we're not context shifting. Now we're not exhausted. Now we're not reducing our cognitive capacity. Now we can actually produce work without burning out and be proud of what we produce. So when I'm making my case against email, I'm making my case against the hyperactive hive mind. And when we know that's the villain, we know the solution.

We have to vanquish that particular enemy. And yes, it's a pain because we have to replace him with alternative ways of getting things done. But work is not supposed to be about friction reduction. Work is not supposed to be about what's easiest. It's about what works. By definition, work is resistance against objects at rest.

It's supposed to be hard. So yeah, it's a pain to figure out. For this client memo we produce every month, instead of just rock and rolling on email, let's have a system where drafts go to these shared folders at these times. And we use the comments and the designer knows that at this point he can grab what's in the shared document and design it.

And I'll sign off on it virtually. And I have office hours every day. And if you have questions, you come to my office hours. That's when we discuss it. You have to do stuff like that. More overhead, more annoying, more delays. But it gets rid of the need to have to check an inbox or check a chat channel, look for an unscheduled message and reply.

That is the key. That is the world we need. We have to get past this world where we just rock and roll with communication tools. We have to get more bespoke and more structured. But if we do, we're all gonna be much happier and we're gonna get a lot more done.

All right, so that is my core idea. The last core idea from my original list of ideas I wanted to tackle. There's other core ideas I'll do and feel free to send them suggestions to me. You can send that in the interesting@calnewport.com. Other things you've heard me talk about, you think we should do a core ideas video on, I'm happy to hear it.

But that was the original list. So our playlist will soon be completely up to date. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)