In A World Without Email, computer science professor and productivity expert Cal Newport argues that email, and the relentless requests and distractions it introduces, makes knowledge workers less productive and more unhappy. Rather than dedicating focused time to the work they were hired to do, knowledge workers spend most of their days responding to and checking for unexpected requests which, because they’re part of a team, they feel pressured to fulfill immediately.
Cal Newport has written several other books on productivity and focus, including Deep Work, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and Digital Minimalism. He teaches computer science at Georgetown University and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.
A World Without Email builds on the popularity of his earlier works. In it, he discusses the problems created by what he calls a hyperactive hive mind workflow, in which all members of an organization are in constant, frantic, and often unnecessary communication. The hyperactive hive mind workflow prevents companies from getting the full value of the knowledge worker’s knowledge, because those workers are too busy performing low-value administrative tasks. It also makes knowledge workers miserable and stressed by constant demands on their time.
However, Newport doesn’t believe the workplace must be this way and proposes three changes to the systems that govern how knowledge workers produce work:
In this guide, we’ll first describe how most knowledge-work-producing companies are managed and what the negative implications of this approach are for employees and companies. We’ll then move on to the three changes Newport proposes.
(Shortform note: In this guide, we’ve omitted Newport’s detailed history of email and how it gave rise to the hyperactive hive mind workflow as it’s not integral to his central argument of how the hyperactive hive mind workflow makes workers less productive and happy, or how companies can replace it with better processes and protocols.)
Newport argues that most knowledge workers structure their work days around responding to unscheduled emails and instant messages rather than around the knowledge work they were hired to do. A 2019 study showed that the average employee sent and received 126 emails a day, and another study showed that employees check their instant messenger app once a minute on average and their inboxes 77 times a day. A third study indicated that many knowledge workers can only perform about an hour of uninterrupted knowledge work a day. The rest of their day is spent responding to a barrage of incoming emails and messages.
Don’t Let Urgent Tasks Hinder Important Tasks
One solution to the problem that these studies reveal—the inability to focus because of constant requests for attention—might be to better distinguish important tasks from urgent tasks. Important tasks contribute value to the company, while urgent ones don’t take much time to perform but don’t contribute much value to the company. For example, an important task would be devising a new marketing strategy, which will improve a company’s sales. An urgent task, on the other hand, would be responding to a request from a colleague about where certain files are located—this task is easy to perform but doesn’t contribute much value to the business.
Research shows that workers often devote the majority of their day to urgent tasks, leaving them unable to get to important tasks—the tasks that bring more ultimate value. When this happens, employees often end up addressing important tasks outside of work hours, allowing work to intrude on their personal time. Productivity experts advise that to prevent this, you should block off dedicated time every day for important tasks during which you make yourself unavailable for any other requests.
Newport coined a term to describe this state of work that revolves around responding to impromptu messages: the hyperactive hive mind workflow (we’ll refer to this as HHMW).
(Shortform note: Let’s parse Newport’s term, as it’s multilayered: Hyperactive means excessively or abnormally active—implying more communication than necessary. The “hive mind” is a mode of thinking that makes your individual actions and decisions subservient to your group’s: If the rest of your group communicates more than necessary, you will, too. A workflow is the sequence of steps that move a task from beginning to completion. Newport may be using “workflow” in a tongue-in-cheek way: His point about the hyperactive hive mind is that there isn’t a workflow. Communication and tasks get done chaotically and without a governing structure.)
What factors create and drive the HHMW? Newport points to four catalysts:
Because social connection is evolutionarily critical to human survival, failing to maintain it—even via email—feels terrible. This sense that you’re neglecting someone keeps you glued to your inbox in an effort to not alienate yourself from others.
(Shortform note: In Digital Minimalism, Newport further argues that digital communication—which we feel to be so critical to our social connectivity—not only feeds the HHMW, but isn’t even a rich form of social interaction in the first place. This is because, while in-person interactions require you to be empathetic and allow you to feel understood in return, digital conversations imply none of this. Thus, when you compulsively check your inbox in an effort to be connected, you’re only building superficial connections—you’re not reinforcing meaningful relationships.)
Additionally, Newport writes that most workers think asynchronous communication (communication that doesn’t require both parties to respond in the moment) is easier and more efficient than synchronous (talking in person, for instance), but it’s not: Asynchronous communication extends the time a conversation takes because it requires many more messages to be exchanged. For instance, setting up a meeting verbally might take two minutes, while setting up a meeting via email could require a dozen emails. This reliance on asynchronous communication makes the HHMW almost unavoidable.
(Shortform note: While asynchronous communication can indeed be less efficient than synchronous, others argue that asynchronous communication has the benefit of letting workers set boundaries on communication more easily than synchronous communication. This is because a worker can decide when to respond to an email or message, but it’s harder for them to decide not to answer a call or a visit from a colleague.)
When time-saving technology becomes available, there’s increased pressure for you to use it to respond more quickly and at all hours of the day, thus perpetuating the HHMW, writes Newport. Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow calls this phenomenon the cycle of responsiveness: When the technology to deliver more is available, clients and co-workers expect more of you, and you work more to meet those expectations.
(Shortform note: In an article on the cycle of responsiveness, Perlow adds that once you enter this cycle, you become so entrenched in it—so busy responding to faster-arriving requests—that you don’t have the mental energy to consider better ways to do your work%20continue%20to%20rise.). What’s more, this cycle of responsiveness often causes you to work outside of working hours, thus not only decreasing the quality of your work output, but also the quality of your leisure time.)
According to Newport, the final catalyst of the HHMW is the way we view today’s knowledge worker—a view shaped by famed management consultant Peter Drucker, who coined the term in 1959. He believed that knowledge workers must be left to their own devices to complete the work in which they specialized and which they likely knew how to do better than their superiors.
This means companies give knowledge workers free rein over how to structure their days, thinking this to be most efficient. However, this freedom also means there are no guidelines for how much time knowledge workers must spend performing ancillary tasks, like responding to emails and messages. Because knowledge workers are usually part of a team that relies on their input and, as discussed above, feel an evolutionary need to support that team, they spend a disproportionate amount of time responding to their team’s messages.
Peter Drucker on Managing Your Time as a Knowledge Worker
It seems that we’ve taken only half of Drucker’s advice about knowledge workers—to our detriment. While Drucker does advocate that knowledge workers be autonomous (the advice the business world seems to have heeded), he also advocates that knowledge workers manage their time carefully, analyzing it, eliminating unproductive work, and setting up blocks of time for knowledge work. This is advice companies and knowledge workers haven’t heeded.
Drucker’s advice can help keep workers from slipping into the HHMW, but its effectiveness will be limited if those workers don’t also have support from their organizations in their efforts. Let’s look at how organizations can support workers in their personal quest to manage their time.
Analyze your time: Drucker first advises jotting down what you do all day and how long each task takes. Bringing awareness to how you spend your time could be a logical first step toward tackling the HHMW, which is perpetuated by a lack of intentionality: responding impulsively to whatever request comes up. Companies can support workers in doing this by ensuring they have enough time to perform this analytical work.
Eliminate time-wasting activities: Drucker’s next step is to stop doing tasks that don’t generate the knowledge work you were hired to do. Companies can help workers do this by hiring support staff or allowing workers to redefine their roles to involve less admin work.
Make room for chunks of knowledge work time: Drucker finally recommends scheduling four- to five-hour chunks of uninterrupted time to perform knowledge work. Managers can help workers do this by encouraging knowledge workers to go completely offline during this time or set up out-of-office responses.
Newport writes that there are four drawbacks of the HHMW, both for companies and individuals.
The hyperactive hive mind drive to constantly check email means workers are almost always multitasking: performing their main work function while also responding to messages, asserts Newport. Such multitasking isn’t productive because it takes significant cognitive resources and energy to switch between tasks, which reduces performance on both. It also takes longer to complete two tasks at once than to complete two tasks in succession. This makes multitasking inefficient for the company, which isn’t getting the best output from workers.
(Shortform note: In The One Thing, Gary Keller elaborates on what happens in your brain when you multitask: When you seemingly do two things at once—hold a conversation and shoot off an email, for instance—you shift focus between them, moving one task to the foreground and the other to the background of your mind. This focus shift saps your cognitive energy. Keller also quantifies the cost of constant multitasking: Employees spend a third of their days recovering from interruptions, and cognitive switching can cause a task to take 25% to 100% longer than if you performed that task without interruption.)
Because it’s so easy to email, colleagues are more likely to email a request to a knowledge worker than to figure out and handle the problem themselves, writes Newport. The result of this is that the recipient must spend time dealing with requests that could have been otherwise handled.
(Shortform note: In the same way technology makes it easy to quickly send emails that can cause frustration or excess work for the recipient, technology also makes it easy to quickly send multiple text messages that can be irritating and time-consuming for the recipient. Some texters express a single idea or piece of information across many texts, forcing the recipient to stay on their messenger screen, awaiting the end.)
Written communication fails to convey all the nonverbal information—tone, mode of speech, body language—that’s conveyed through in-person interactions, making it a relatively poor method of communication, claims Newport. This means you must write many emails to communicate what could be said verbally in moments. Additionally, you might worry about whether your meaning comes across appropriately in email or about a message that seems to convey anger (but doesn’t really).
(Shortform note: In Difficult Conversations, the authors provide tips on how to both receive and respond to written digital communication to minimize upsetting ambiguity and time spent on them. When receiving an ambiguous message, they advise always assuming the writer had good rather than bad intentions and to schedule an in-person meeting rather than responding via email if you still feel unsure of their meaning. When sending a message, be as explicit as possible so your recipient doesn’t have to spend time parsing your email or worrying about how you feel.)
The final implication of the HHMW stems from the above implications: Reduced productivity, excess work, and impoverished communication make workers miserable, concludes Newport.
(Shortform note: A workforce of miserable employees hurts companies: Some statistics show that miserable workers cause a loss in productivity of $450 billion to $550 billion per year in the US. Conversely, happy workers are up to 20% more productive than unhappy ones.)
Newport proposes three solutions to HHMW, all of which are predicated on his principle of attention capital. Let’s first explore this principle and then dive into his three solutions.
Newport’s attention capital principle is based on the idea that the most value-generating resource knowledge workers have is their brainpower, or what he calls their attention capital. Companies must extract the value of that brainpower to produce high-quality work. But not all value-extraction systems are equally effective. Therefore, to derive the greatest value from knowledge workers’ brainpower, companies must put in place optimal workflows and systems—this is the attention capital principle.
(Shortform note: In a blog post, Newport acknowledges that he borrowed the term “attention capital” from an article by Dan Nixon, formerly an analyst for the Bank of England. In this article, Nixon discusses the inability to focus on a single task (Newport’s HHMW) in the context of economic productivity, not workplace productivity. He claims productivity growth in advanced economies has slowed since about 2017—the same time that the number of global smartphone shipments started rising significantly. Nixon proposes conducting further research to pinpoint the connection between attention and national productivity, which ideally would reveal how to better extract economic value from knowledge workers’ attention.)
Let’s illustrate the attention capital principle through an example: You’re an architect who possesses knowledge and skill—in other words, attention capital. If you spend most of your day answering emails rather than designing buildings, your company isn’t extracting much value from your expertise in architecture: All it’s getting from you is a bunch of emails. However, if your company sets up a workflow wherein you can work on blueprints for several uninterrupted hours, it extracts far more value from your attention capital.
In this principle, Newport makes an important distinction between attention capital and the systems and workflows that extract value from it. Managers shouldn’t push knowledge workers to produce more or better attention capital—because knowledge workers are experts and know best how to produce attention capital—but managers should develop workflows and systems to derive the most value from the attention capital.
In our architect example, the manager shouldn’t ask the architect to arrive early to work or to work faster to generate more ideas: The architect knows best how to do their job. Instead, the manager could set up a regular meeting with the architect to check on progress and tell colleagues the architect can’t be bothered during set times of the day that the architect identified. These are workflows that let the company get the most value from the architect’s expertise.
(Shortform note: Many HR departments operate under a principle related to the attention capital principle: the belief that you should build upon an employee’s strengths, not compensate for their weaknesses. In other words, you should create systems that derive the most value from workers’ strengths—their attention capital—and not force them to overcome their weaknesses—produce better attention capital. In practice, this means recruiters should look at candidates’ strengths and find positions that use those strengths.)
Now that we’ve covered the attention capital principle, let’s describe Newport’s three solutions for improving the systems companies use to extract the greatest value from their knowledge workers’ brainpower.
The process principle is the idea that companies should institute processes—systems and workflows—that enhance the performance of knowledge workers and make their work more enjoyable.
(Shortform note: Newport’s choice of the word “process” may seem arbitrary because “process” is a loose term that doesn’t in itself communicate much about this idea. However, a formal definition of a “work process” is a system that generates value for a company. This additional context clarifies the principle somewhat—perhaps an alternative, more specific name for it could be the “value-generation principle.”)
Newport feels that many companies fear instituting structured processes for their knowledge workers because these reduce the autonomy and flexibility considered integral to effective knowledge work. In reality, while structures may marginally reduce autonomy and flexibility, they more importantly keep the workplace equitable and efficient: Without formal processes, humans tend to try to do as little work as possible, and influential employees pawn work off on hard-working colleagues.
(Shortform note: The freelancer might be more familiar than anyone with the need to balance autonomy and flexibility with discipline and processes to be optimally productive. Freelancers understand that while autonomy is nice, if you don’t institute certain processes and rules for yourself, you’ll never get anything done. More likely, you’ll abuse your “future self” by procrastinating or forcing yourself to work on weekends to meet deadlines.)
Newport recommends two processes in particular: task board-based and automated. Let’s look at both.
Task boards are digital or physical boards displaying columns that represent stages of a project, with cards that represent tasks in those stages. Newport points to Scrum and Kanban as commonly used processes tracked with task boards. Scrum is a system software developers often use that involves focusing exclusively on one task or project during a two-week “sprint.” Kanban, on the other hand, is a system more appropriate for regular tasks and projects that must move through a series of stages to completion.
(Shortform note: A new type of task board-process has emerged for those for whom neither Scrum nor Kanban works perfectly: Scrumban, which, as the name suggests, is an amalgamation of the Scrum and Kanban approaches. Scrumban uses sprints—periods of time dedicated exclusively to one project—to organize work (like in Scrum) but also uses the boards more common to Kanban to visualize the work and tasks.)
For instance, you might have an “In Progress” column, a “Testing” column, and a “Backlog” column. Adjust these columns to suit your needs and if in doubt, start with standard “To Do,” “Doing,” and “Done” columns and expand from there. Newport also recommends creating a “To Discuss” column in which you can collect items you need to discuss with others and then hold a meeting with them to cover them all at once.
(Shortform note: The philosophy behind the Scrum and Kanban workflows hinges on adaptability: Both flows let you identify the best stages for your project and agilely move tasks between stages. Indeed, Scrum as a process is constantly being updated by its creators, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland. You can see these updates in their Scrum Guide. Newport would likely approve of such periodic improvements to existing processes—his recommendation to add a “To Discuss” column, for instance, bespeaks his eagerness to optimize over time.)
In these stage columns, you’ll place and move task cards. Describe tasks clearly on the cards, note who’s responsible, and attach any additional documents needed. If you’re using a digital task board, hold written conversations about the task in the chat or discussion area of the task card rather than via email. This eliminates the need to review a general inbox (and the potential to become distracted by a myriad of other requests). It further keeps expectations of communication low because, unlike messenger apps and inboxes, which people check almost constantly, no one checks project boards constantly.
(Shortform note: Newport advocates capturing all details of a task—such as a description and additional documents—on cards. But what if you don’t have all the details about the task when you create the card for it? A solution to this might be to follow David Allen’s approach in Getting Things Done: Do a physical and mental sweep for all your outstanding tasks and any information you have about them. Write that information on your task board—perhaps in a column titled “To Act On.” Once you have all task information in one place, you can create each task card and be sure it includes all relevant details.)
Hold short, regular in-person meetings with your team to update a board together. Such meetings allow for everyone to provide updates on the status of their tasks, for new tasks to emerge, and for people to be assigned to them. Such meetings promote accountability to the team, involve everyone in decision-making, and eliminate the ambiguity of written communication.
(Shortform note: Some experts think the brief, in-person meetings that Newport recommends are an idealistic solution, and they don’t work in reality. This is because such meetings tend to become longer and longer over time, and participants become disengaged. However, a counterintuitive alternative to the regular update meeting might work: Holding daily hour-long “meandering” meetings that prioritize social connection over efficiency. According to a company that uses this approach, this makes everyone more efficient during the day and reduces later interruptions.)
If there’s a task you or someone else on your team does frequently (30 or more times a year), automate that task by setting up a flow in which all parties know exactly how to handle each step without further communication, writes Newport. This takes time to optimize but always saves time in the long run. You can automate a process in the following steps:
(Shortform note: While automation can save time, Newport doesn’t say what to do when an automation step fails. What if something goes wrong, but you’re also trying to reduce hyperactive hive mind communication and don’t want to shoot off an email? Elsewhere in the book, Newport proposes devising an emergency communication strategy for clients. Similarly, in breakdowns, employees might be able to call supervisors directly on their cell phones. Importantly, you must clearly state what constitutes an emergency. Otherwise, employees might end up using the strategy too often, thereby diminishing the effectiveness of automation.)
Beyond setting up workflows that efficiently extract value from knowledge work, Newport recommends that companies set up rules for how people communicate to reduce inefficient cognitive switching and unnecessary work. This is the protocol principle. Rules can be challenging to implement in the short term but can result in greater productivity in the long term.
(Shortform note: Like “the process principle,” the “protocol principle” is a slightly vague term, as we use the word protocol loosely across many contexts. We might consider “communication conventions” as a substitute for “protocol,” as this perhaps more pointedly conveys the idea that a workplace must institute standards for communication. )
Newport recommends setting up protocols for several aspects of your work.
Create protocols that dictate how meetings are scheduled, a process that can otherwise be cognitively draining and time-consuming. Newport recommends hiring a full-time or part-time human assistant if possible or otherwise using a digital scheduling service. This lets employees list their availability and allows others to book time slots with them.
(Shortform note: While a digital scheduling service may indeed be more efficient for the employee, do the people making appointments with such services like them? It seems users appreciate the flexibility of being able to schedule appointments at their convenience, but there’s also evidence that, in general, most people usually prefer a human interaction over an impersonal one. Perhaps you might schedule initial meetings via email to establish trust and then ask the other person to use your service thereafter.)
To better answer on-the-fly questions, have employees hold office hours: set times that they’re available during the day or week. Others can thus approach a knowledge worker with questions only when they’re available to answer them. Newport acknowledges this only works for questions that don’t require an immediate response.
(Shortform note: While from a productivity standpoint, reducing interruptions and cognitive switching is superior to a workday punctuated by unscheduled interruptions, from a mental health perspective, unscheduled interruptions can be beneficial. Some argue that interruptions offer the chance to have casual social interactions that create a sense of connection at work.)
In setting up protocols for clients, make it easy for them to follow progress on a project without having to send many emails—a portal or project page can facilitate this, writes Newport. Be clear in the contract with clients about how you’ll communicate with them. Finally, when necessary, implement crisis protocols—ways for the client to reach you in an emergency.
(Shortform note: The prospect of setting the terms of your interactions with clients might seem uncomfortable: Most of us operate under the assumption that the business should adapt to the client’s needs. But others feel that not only should you set the terms of your client interactions, but you should also fire clients who are bad for your business because they take up too much time or don’t listen to your advice.)
Consider strictly limiting email length, advises Newport. This ensures that only the simple communication suited to the email format is handled that way and that any other communication happens in person.
(Shortform note: Writing short emails isn’t easy for many. To write more succinct emails, you may need to spend more time on them to pare down your message to its core meaning. One technique that can help is to make full use of the subject line to explain why you’re writing and what you need from the recipient.)
When it comes to communication with entities outside the company, like clients and vendors, you might ask these entities to email a general inbox rather than individual employees. This decreases the expectation on the part of clients and vendors that your employees will check their accounts frequently and feel a personal obligation to respond. For clients, you might even set up an email account with their name—clientname@yourcompany.com—and ask them to send queries to this address.
(Shortform note: For Newport’s proposed email protocol to work, it’s critical that someone at the company check the client’s email account and action emails. Customer relationship management systems (CRMs) can help with this communication flow and keep employees accountable. CRMs are softwares designed to capture information from the customer or client, transform it into an action item—a task, for instance—and then track the progress on that action item.)
As we discussed in the context of task boards, decide on a brief standing meeting slot one or multiple times a week, asserts Newport. Have everyone provide updates in this meeting. This gets the team on the same page, limits the amount of impromptu written communication that must happen, and frees up time for potential longer meetings that emerge from the status meeting.
(Shortform note: While Newport’s vision for status meetings likely improves efficiency and communication, it may not be optimally engaging. This is what Death by Meeting author Patrick Lencioni feels to be the problem with most meetings: They’re boring and often useless. To counter the monotony and lack of engagement during meetings, Lencioni advises that you find the drama in meetings: a reason for employees to be engaged (what Lencioni refers to as the hook) and sources of disagreement (the conflict).)
Newport’s last solution to optimizing the systems that extract value from knowledge work is to have workers focus on fewer tasks and do them with higher quality and accountability—in other words, to specialize. This means you don’t lose productivity by multitasking, and you don’t waste time answering unimportant questions.
(Shortform note: Other time management specialists agree with Newport that to produce the highest-quality work, you must specialize. In Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy even specifies that there are three tasks at work that let you add the most value, so you should figure out what those three tasks are, and move all other responsibilities off your plate.)
Newport advocates several ways for companies to let knowledge workers specialize.
Let workers hand off ancillary tasks—secondary tasks that support the primary operations of a company or worker—to someone who can do them more efficiently than you. For a business owner, these are things like marketing, customer service, travel booking, and so on, and for a knowledge worker, these are things like scheduling meetings, answering minor queries, and handling speaker requests. This may mean losing some revenue at first, but in the end, it will be more productive than knowledge workers doing everything themselves.
(Shortform note: But what if you can’t delegate work?First, approach the person who assigned the ancillary work in the first place and ask them how to prioritize this task among your existing tasks. This may prompt them to reassign it. If they don’t, still try to find parts of the task you can pass off, even if they’re small. Taking these steps might not even incur a loss of revenue—though they don’t necessarily solve the long-term problem of having too much on your plate.)
If possible, adjust your professional role so it depends more on your ability to perform knowledge work and less on your ability to be responsive and accomplish minor tasks, recommends Newport. This means there’s more pressure to perform that knowledge work well—because there’s no other way to add value to the organization—but it also frees you from the distracting HHMW. For instance, you might propose a new initiative to your boss and request that you be able to work on it to the exclusion of all else.
(Shortform note: Newport recommends adjusting your role within a company to be more knowledge work-specific, but going freelance might be a better way to attain a fully knowledge work-focused work life. As a freelancer, you get to choose the projects you work on and can therefore opt out of work you don’t enjoy. You’re also your own manager, meaning you can determine at what pace you respond to messages, thereby circumventing the hive mind workflow. And as Newport says, your job is contingent on your output: If you perform the work well, people will keep hiring you. If you don’t, you won’t get hired.)
To promote specialization, implement a sprint workflow, advises Newport: Divide the work year into (usually two-week) periods during which a team works toward a single goal with no interruptions or other demands on their time. Communicate this workflow to people outside your team so they set proper expectations of when you can get back to them.
(Shortform note: Others even advocate using sprints in your personal life to execute important tasks. You can make your personal sprints much shorter—90 to 120 minutes—and schedule them at your most productive times of day. Focus exclusively on one task during them, and take a break after. To stay optimally productive, consider telling family and friends about your personal sprints so they know not to bother you.)
To ensure you maintain enough time during the week for knowledge work, Newport says you should set a fixed number of hours each week for various tasks. These can be tasks like helping others, performing administrative duties, attending meetings, and the actual knowledge work you were hired to do.
(Shortform note: While setting a fixed number of hours per task each week can help fend off the HHMW, be aware that the amount of time you must allocate to each task may change over the course of the year. For instance, accountants have a busy season at the beginning of the year, during which they must dedicate most of their time to doing taxes. Pay attention to how your role changes annually and adjust your hours per task accordingly.)
Finally, if your workplace has support staff, optimize their systems, as well, to allow knowledge workers to work with minimal interruption, Newport advises.
(Shortform note: Rather than optimizing support staff systems, more companies are doing away with support staff altogether and replacing them with automated systems and AI.)
To do this, first set up workflows that govern how support staff work—the same thing you did for knowledge workers by implementing task boards, says Newport. This lets them work on one task at a time, thereby enhancing their productivity and happiness and making them greater assets to the company and its knowledge workers. Second, structure their support work with the aim of impacting specialists’ work as minimally as possible. This might mean consolidating multiple emails into one or creating a system in which a specialist can submit a request and a support person physically comes by their office to ask follow-up questions.
(Shortform note: Newport acknowledges that these recommendations, which hinge on making life easier for knowledge workers, can lead to an ethos that holds up knowledge workers as geniuses and sees support staff merely as facilitators of that genius. Newport doesn’t deny that in today’s economy, knowledge work simply is the most valuable output and therefore must be prioritized. But it’s also possible that a positive company culture can mitigate support staff’s feelings of being less important. A strong company culture that makes everyone feel part of a team and mission increases employee engagement, no matter what their role is.)
Applying Newport’s Specialization Principle, think of strategies you could implement in your personal pursuits to minimize multitasking and maximize the quality of your output.
Write down an activity for which you use attention capital—brainpower—in your personal life. (This might be something like drawing, writing, or sports.) Additionally, define the particular type of attention capital that you use in this pursuit. (For drawing, this could be your artistic skill and understanding of color theory. For a sport, this would be your agility and knowledge of strategy.)
Jot down some barriers you currently perceive to specializing in that pursuit—in other words, focusing exclusively on that pursuit and doing it better. (For writing, a barrier might be distracting phone notifications. For a sport, this might be interruptions from other athletes during your practice time.)
Now, write down how you might overcome those barriers to specialization to get more value from your attention capital. Think of Newport’s recommended strategies: passing off ancillary work, working in two-week sprints, dedicating a defined number of hours each week to tasks, and so on. (If you’re a painter, you might seek to finish a piece in two weeks, postponing other chores and duties during that time. If you’re an athlete, you might pass off administrative duties, like booking training space, to a part-time assistant.)