Edwin Land is famous for co-founding the Polaroid Corporation, but he’s also known as one of the twentieth century’s most innovative inventors. In addition to his famed work on instant film development, his research on polarizing filters led to many breakthroughs.
“What was Land like?…He was a true visionary,” is how his friend Elkan Bout described him.
What interests me most about Land, however, was his work habits. Here he is in a 1975 interview with Forbes magazine talking about his approach to innovation:
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Tom works in marketing for a venture-backed tech start-up in Silicon Valley. After reading Deep Work, he realized that prioritizing uninterrupted concentration would help him excel in his job, which centers on cognitively demanding research and writing.
But he despaired that regular deep work was impossible given his company’s culture.
As he explained:
Our company uses email and Slack as our primary means of communication. I get so many emails and chat messages every day, and there’s this unspoken expectation in my department that if someone emails/messages you, you should respond almost immediately, even if you were in the middle of something. If you didn’t respond quick enough people would assume that you were slacking off (this expectation was especially strong with instant messages).
Communication environments of this type are increasingly common in knowledge work (and near ubiquitous in tech). And they can be quite distressing.
As Tom admitted, he really didn’t get much “actual work done,” as his days were filled with “putting out fires” and “reacting to other people’s needs.”
I want to close my recent series of posts on email with a practical observation that’s often missed:
The main productivity cost of email is not the time you spend reading and replying to messages, but instead the abrupt context shift caused when you switch your attention from the task at hand to the cognitive cacophony of an inbox.
As I write about in Deep Work (see also: this excerpt), when you shift your attention from one target to another, the first target leaves behind an attention residue that can linger for at least 10 to 20 minutes reducing your cognitive capacity.
(One oft-cited study found the impact of these shifts on your mental ability to be comparable to being stoned.)
The neural damage, in other words, is caused during the firstmoments of firing up your inbox. Whether you then go on to spend just a couple of minutes or a half hour wrangling your message doesn’t much change this impact.
Sometimes it’s the simplest productivity hacks that end up returning the greatest benefits over time. Here’s one such strategy I’ve been toying with recently:
The Meeting Margin Method
Assume you have to schedule a meeting that lasts X minutes. Instead of blocking off X minutes on your calendar, block off (1.5)*X minutes.
For example, if you agree to attend a 30 minute meeting starting at 2:00 pm, try to block out 2:00 to 2:45 on your calendar. Similarly, if it was a 60 minute meeting, try to block out 2:00 to 3:30. And so on.
The key is that you’re not extending the time of the meeting itself. That is, you still attend the meeting for the originally proposed time. The extra 50% on your calendar is a meeting margin protected for your own personal use.
In particular, the margin can be used for the following purposes:
I have a friend who runs an investor-backed online education company. He recently made an interesting change to his email setup. When you send a message to his normal address, you now get back an autoresponder that reads (in part):
“I appreciate you reaching out. I’m currently in hermit-mode creating as much value as I can for all of our stakeholders and having fun seeing if I can eliminate email from my life…Of course, if this is important, we’re here to help! Just email <address of a virtual personal assistant> and we’ll use our evolving email-free strategy to communicate.”
This extra step of re-sending your message to the assistant should add, at most, 10 extra seconds to the process of emailing this individual. Rationally speaking, therefore, it should have minimal impact on the number of messages that make it to my friend.
But this is not what happened.
As he reported to me recently, this additional step has “massively” reduced the amount of communication he receives.
Earlier this week, a reader wrote me with a similar tale. A computer programmer by trade, he setup a custom system that responds to incoming emails with a web form in which the sender can describe his or her purpose and needs in a series of text boxes.
Again, the extra effort of re-entering this information is minimal.
But the effect was significant.
His incoming message count reduced by a factor of 40. (He measured.)
“His collected papers are so stupefying in length that it is hard to believe that one man created them in fewer than five decades,” writes Chernow.
But this productivity reached an apex during the period when Hamilton, along with Madison, and to a much lesser extent, John Jay, collaborated to write and publish the Federalist Papers.
During one particularly frenzied two-month stretch, Hamilton “churned out” twenty-one of these now immortal essays.
