1698: The E-mail Productivity Curve by Cal Newport on Workplace Efficiency

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[00:01:00] This is Optimal Work Daily. The Email Productivity Curve by Cal Newport of calnewport.com A Mixed Response Late last year, Pew Research found that online workers identified email as their most important tool, beating out both phones and the internet by sizable margins. Almost half of the workers surveyed claimed that the technology made them feel more productive.

[00:01:24] As Pew summarized, email continues to be the main digital artery that workers believe is important to their job. Around the same time this research was released, however, Sir Kerry Cooper, a professor of organizational psychology, made waves at the British Psychological Society's annual conference by identifying British workers' macho, always-connected email culture as a factor in the UK's falling productivity. It now has the second lowest productivity in the G7.

[00:01:52] Cooper went so far as to advocate companies shutting down their email servers after work hours and perhaps even banning all internal email communication. This bipolar reaction to email, either it's fundamental to success or terrible, extends beyond research circles and often characterizes popular conversations about the technology. So what explains this oddly mixed reaction? The email productivity curve There's a picture of a curve on this post.

[00:02:21] Email productivity increases as you go from no email towards non-stop email. But you reach a max point and it falls to zero as the curve approaches non-stop email. At the leftmost extreme, in other words, no email use, productivity remains healthily above zero. This captures the obvious reality that even if email and similar digital communication tools were banned, companies could still get stuff done. As they did in the many decades before such technologies were introduced.

[00:02:49] As we begin to move to the right, increasing email use, productivity increases. This point should also be obvious. It's hard to argue against the proposition that email is an immensely useful technology. Universal addressing, instant information transfer, asynchronous storage and retrieval. These are all hard communication problems that email solves elegantly. As we continue to move to the right, however, things get interesting.

[00:03:16] Eventually, we will arrive at a theoretical maximum point on the x-axis where all workers ever do is check and send emails. At this point, no time is left for any actual work. So productivity would be zero. If we step back, we see our three obvious observations tell us the following about any curve that describes a measure of productivity versus increasing email use. The curve will start above zero. It will rise for a while and it will eventually decrease all the way down to zero.

[00:03:43] Any curve matching these criteria will feature two crucial points. One where the productivity produced by email use hits a maximum point and a break-even point after which email use makes users less productive than if they didn't have email at all. I propose that the mixed reaction to email summarized at the beginning of this post can be better understood with respect to the different regions of this curve. In more detail, those who aggressively defend the email, like the workers surveyed by Pew,

[00:04:11] are responding to the reality that much of this productivity curve is about the no email level. That is, they're reacting to the true observation that email can make you more productive than no email. Those who decry email, like Kerry Cooper, are responding to the reality that an increasing number of organizations are further to the right and therefore their email habits are making them less productive than they could be if they were more discerning about their use of this technology.

[00:04:37] It's possible, in other words, for your email use to be both making you more productive as compared to no email and less productive as compared to its optimal use. Holding both these thoughts in one's head at the same time can be confusing, thus explaining to some degree the muddled polarization of email rhetoric. From explanation to opportunity Once we understand this style of productivity curve, however, we can do more than simply demystify our confusion.

[00:05:04] We can also recognize a major management opportunity. With few exceptions, email use arose organically within organizations, with little thought applied to how digital communication might best serve the relevant objectives. The result is that email habits tend to fall somewhat haphazardly on the email productivity curve, with a bias toward the right-hand side, as increased connectivity tends to be more convenient for people in the moment, especially when unchecked by other metrics.

[00:05:32] It's important to note that there's nothing fundamental about these current email habits, an observation which leads to the conclusion that forward-thinking organizations could consider exploring different regions of this curve in search of the optimal point. By thinking in terms of a search for optimality, such organizations could escape the email-is-either-bad-or-good dichotomy that often cripples such initiatives before they get too far, and instead cast the efforts in terms of process optimization.

[00:06:00] To reduce email use, in other words, is not necessarily a repudiation of the technology, but can be instead an embrace of its full potential. You just listened to the post titled The Email Productivity Curve by Cal Newport of calnewport.com And a big thanks to Cal, who wrote this post today. He typically writes about learning hacks and productivity, so you're going to hear him narrated pretty frequently over on Optimal Living Daily,

[00:06:29] so you can check that show out for a lot more from him. Cal is the author of the books Deep Work and A World Without Email, and you can learn more about those books, plus check out his blog, other media, and podcast over on his site calnewport.com. That's calnewport.com. But that's going to do it for today. I hope you have a great rest of your day, and that you'll be back with me here tomorrow, where your optimal life awaits.