Why is it so hard to do my work? How lawyers are battling email and losing….

A 2019 study showed that the average knowledge worker is now sending and receiving 126 business emails per day, which works out to about one every four minutes. Separately, a company called RescueTime, which provides computer time tracking software, recently calculated that its users were checking email or instant messenger tools like Slack once every six minutes on average.

The legal profession, which prides itself on responsiveness, is at the forefront of this trend.

Modern legal work is now defined by constant electronic communication. The majority of lawyers’ days are overwhelmingly structured around reading and replying to email. Even if the subject matter of a lawyer’s underlying daily tasks are preparing for a trial, negotiating a transaction or reviewing a contract the basic way work is organised is around monitoring spontaneous incoming messages on a vast array of matters.

As Gloria Mark has noted in her research on this topic a knowledge worker’s average day is now incredibly fragmented, with workers having to constantly shift their attention between substantive tasks and messages on an almost minute by minute basis. As most workers have a general email inbox through which all discussion flows they are forced to continually check this source of information for fear of delaying the efforts of someone else’s work, but there is no control over what information confronts them upon each visit, with the effect that email constantly shifts the attention of the knowledge worker hundreds of times a day.  

Further, because now almost all details of the status of a project or matter are recorded in email or instant messenger conversations (which by their nature are often unstructured and hard to follow) there is no choice but to stay plugged in to what can feel like a ‘breaking-news ticker’ of information.

As one productivity expert puts it: ‘Following group chat at work is like being in an all day meeting with random participants and no agenda. It’s completely exhausting’.

There are two notable things about this style of working:

1) this total change, which has completely transformed the underlying workflow that determines how our daily efforts unfold, has occurred in a very short space of time (maybe 10-15 years); and

2) no one ever actively decided that it was a good or optimal way to work, it essentially arose of its own volition.

In his book ‘A World Without Email‘ Cal Newport labels this revolution as: The Hyperactive Hive Mind which is defined as:

‘A workflow centred around ongoing conversation fuelled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services’.

As Newport notes: ‘We’re used to this now, but when viewed in the context of even recent history it represents a shift in our work culture that’s so radical it would be absurd to allow it to escape closer scrutiny’.

How did we get here?

In the 1980s email solved a fundamental problem of what communication experts call ‘synchronous messaging’ (which requires all parties to participate in the interaction at the same time, i.e. a phone call, a meeting etc.), with fast ‘asynchronous messaging’ i.e. with email you don’t need a receiver to be present when the message is sent, it is inexpensive and easy to master.

It was a rational solution to a long term coordination problem. However, the form of frenetic communication that is now reflected in the Hyperactive Hive Mind that followed years later was not a development which was proactively chosen.  

Newport suggests that instead it is an example in history of ‘technological determinism’ where the features of the technology itself drove a radical new way of working without anyone stopping to ask whether it made any sense.

One of these features is that because asynchronous communication is frictionless (i.e. it is incredibly easy to send a quick email) it makes it particularly easy to use email to signal you are contributing to work output with the least amount of effort required. Sending an email and asking a point of clarification or asking someone else to address a point is one of the easiest ways to move an immediate task off your desk while appearing to contribute to a solution. Thus, when we made communication free, we accidentally increased the relative workloads of everyone in an organisation, as every worker can use email to demonstrate their work output or delegate work by sending a message to others rather than dealing with the task themselves.

Second, Newport notes that as email became more widespread a ‘cycle of responsiveness’ gained a momentum of its own where responding to email quickly became an independent marker of perceived competence at a job (even if the speed of response did not meaningfully add to the actual work product). Douglas Rushkoff uses the term “collaborative pacing” to describe this tendency for groups of humans to converge to strict patterns of behaviour without ever actually explicitly deciding if the new behaviours make sense.

Third, as knowledge work began to evolve in the 1950s and 1960s, as distinct from manual and industrial work, it became acknowledged in management theory that office workers unlike factory workers should not be supervised in the same way. In other words, knowledge workers like lawyers generally don’t expect their employers to mandate the exact process of how work gets done like a factory assembly line, they have significant autonomy to determine how they do their work.  

The significance of this for email is that for most knowledge workers in law firms, accountants and banks no one is looking at how an individual’s workflow proceeds throughout the day and prescribing how precisely work should be done, which means as Newport notes:

‘Once your organisation has fallen into the hive mind, it’s in each individual’s immediate interest to stick with the workflow, even if it leads to a bad long term outcome for the organisation as a whole. It makes your life easier in the moment if you can expect quick responses to messages you shoot off to colleagues. Similarly if you unilaterally decrease the time you spend checking your inbox, in a group that depends on the hive mind, you’ll slow down other people’s efforts, generating annoyance and dissatisfaction that might put your job in jeopardy ’.

We have come to see frenetic communication as  being synonymous with hard work and good organisation – but, given that we didn’t proactively choose this method of working,  how often do lawyers stand back and test this assumption and ask whether it is the most productive way to work?

 Why is it a problem for productivity?

The question: ‘Why is it so hard to do my work?’  is the title of a paper by a Professor of Management, Sophie Leroy, who explains the science behind a sensation that many of us increasingly feel as a result of constant connectivity.

The essential problem which Leroy identifies is that our brains are designed for sequential tasks (our prefrontal cortex can service only one attention target at a time) but increasingly our working patterns are parallel in nature with many tasks (or messages) vying for our attention simultaneously. Further, every time we switch tasks there is an ‘attention residue’ left on the previous task which slows down our mental processing.

As Leroy notes: ‘Every time you switch your attention from one task to another you’re basically asking your brain to switch all of these cognitive resources…Unfortunately we aren’t very good at doing this…our brains were never designed to maintain parallel tracks of attention’.

The practical effect of this is that increasingly lawyers find themselves doing their ‘actual’ work early in the morning, late at night or at the weekends because this is the only time when they are actually uninterrupted and able to apply focus to their work. Otherwise trying to complete a substantive piece of work while your focus is fractured is often very inefficient.

Newport notes that we only have a certain number of ‘cognitive cycles’ per day where we can focus on something closely. If we are wasting numerous ‘cognitive cycles’ on following email chains we are not being optimally productive with our finite time.

When email and instant messaging are so central to daily working life it is easy to forget a key point: Email is not a job.  

Even if certain jobs currently heavily rely on email ultimately (good) lawyers are not paid to sustain communication channels and to talk about work. The importance of this fact is made clear by the rise of AI and wider digitisation which will remove many of the low value administrative aspects of the job. The constant back and forth emailing we all engage in daily to arrange the time for a Teams call or meeting is a prime example of a time consuming habit which will surely soon be entirely automated.

In the face of AI, high quality work must be increasingly cognitive to be productive and with that email must assume a lesser focus.

What are the alternatives?

It would be easy when considering alternatives to our current use of email to immediately scoff and splutter that the horse has bolted and it is King Canute’s battle with the tide.

However, a number of thinkers in this space, including Newport, consider that knowledge worker productivity, spurred by the growth of AI, is on the verge of significant disruption and that our current way of working may rapidly change.

As noted earlier, unlike industrial manufacturing where there have been endless experiments to optimise production (starting with Henry Ford’s production line etc.) there have been very few equivalent experiments with the workflow of the modern knowledge worker or lawyer. The general wisdom has been that knowledge workers don’t need to be supervised to do their work, but optimal systems will simply arise if bright people are left to get on with it. However, as explained earlier, actually, left unattended, optimal solutions don’t necessarily arise.

As Newport notes: ‘the productivity of the knowledge sector can be significantly increased if we identify workflows that better optimise the human brain’s ability to sustainably add value to information’.

The short point is: The Hyperactive Hive Mind is clearly not the optimal way to do this.

Newport suggests 4 principles which could be used as an alternative to the informal Hyperactive Hive Mind approach to work. These principles would obviously be best implemented at scale in an organisation, but I also think that individuals could privately implement small versions of these changes to their benefit, even on a micro level.

The Attention Capital Principle

Newport’s basic point is that we would all benefit from periods in our day where we value our attention capital and focus on single tasks more (sequential not parallel thinking), so this means minimising mid-task context switches. This could be achieved by blocking out short periods of time in your diary for focused work or even agreeing as a team that certain periods of the day do not require connectivity. Accepting the minor inconvenience this represents will be more than offset by being more productive at our substantive work.

The Process Principle

The Process Principle Newport summarises as: ‘Introducing smart production processes to knowledge work can dramatically increase performance and make the work much less draining’.

Perhaps the most interesting example of this for law firms would be considering adopting project management systems such as Trello, Flow or Kanban which have become popular amongst software development and marketing companies.

The basic function of these systems is that all tasks for a project are arranged on digital task boards. The major advantage of task boards, where people can easily see the status of all outstanding tasks and workstreams that are ongoing, is that it significantly reduces the need for constant email communication. Further, because people are less reliant on checking their inbox for old information or documents on a project (which are all recorded on the task boards), there is less risk of being distracted by other irrelevant emails when focused.

Newport notes that another way to be less reliant on constant email is to make as many internal processes as possible automatic. Having detailed process rules for when a new piece of work arrives (for example, if a routine case update needs to be sent to the client) may seem initially cumbersome but once the process is established it has the potential to significantly cut down the number of daily ‘cognitive cycles’ we use up on email coordination.

The Protocol Principle

‘Designing rules that optimise when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term’.

The key point here is that coordinating work principally via email has a high cost in terms of the number of cognitive cycles it takes up per day, even if it is the most convenient and simple protocol to follow. Instead Newport’s suggestion is that we can design communication protocols which are more efficient.

One example might be experimenting with daily short update meetings, the aim of which is to quickly address all coordination issues for the day. One ten minute gathering could eliminate dozens of ambiguous messages that would otherwise generate frequent interruptions throughout the day.

Another protocol might be specifying ‘Office Hours’ for when a lawyer is available to respond to ad hoc queries. I.e. a Partner notifies everyone that their open Office Hours for when associates can come and ask any questions (via email or otherwise) are between 9-10 am and 3-5pm, otherwise they shouldn’t be disturbed unless it is crushingly urgent.

You could even design a client facing protocol along the lines of ‘we will provide you with a daily email update at 10 am every day and unless anything is urgent we will not provide another update until the following day’. This would also have the effect of reducing the wasted cognitive cycles and interruptions that the client faces as well.

The Specialisation Principle

The key problem that the Hyperactive Hive Mind has introduced is that for lawyers you have professionals paid to do highly specialised work spending more and more time tending to basic administrative communications.

‘In the knowledge sector, working on fewer things, but doing each thing with more quality and accountability, can be the foundation for significantly more productivity’.

One obvious way to do this is to outsource as many administrative and communication tasks to support staff who are trained to do this type of work, freeing up more ‘cognitive cycles’ each day for lawyers to focus on substantive legal work.

Another way to do this is to budget your own time that you spend on shallow or administrative tasks rather than reacting to them immediately as they arise. With the growth of AI lawyers need more specialisation rather than having their attention diffused over too many tasks.

Conclusion

Widespread use of email and frequent communication is clearly not going anywhere in the immediate future, but given the swelling tide of AI all lawyers should be alive to the real possibility that our ways of working may be about to radically change. The key message is that we can all apply some more critical thought to our use of email, even with small daily changes, and the result might be more productive and focused legal work.