My Biggest Strategy Recommendation. For Everyone. (That Will Never Happen)

A Last Strategy Gift for 2022

(Hey readers. Today’s article is something a bit different. Some of my favorite newsletter writers/fellow substackers unlock older articles every so often. I asked my paid subscribers a few weeks back if they’d be okay if I did the same, and they overwhelmingly said it would be.

Today, I’m unlocking my favorite article of 2022. Since my house has been infected by one of the viruses/coughs/sicknesses/colds that’s been going around since November, this week’s normally scheduled Streaming Ratings Report will come out early next week. This article, though, also pairs really well with my buzzy article for The Ankler yesterday, about how Hollywood can sign contracts faster.

Enjoy!)

In 2022, the media coverage certainly took a negative turn. I’m no exception. What started as me pondering “worst case scenarios” at the beginning of March shifted to believing that literally every force buffeting the entertainment industry got worse. (I’ll have a piece on that for the Ankler at the start of the New Year.)

Yikes!

So it’s time for some positivity. Indeed, I think I have a simple recommendation that nearly every company in entertainment (or adjacent to it) could implement, and if they did, could massively improve (dare I say double?) their productivity.

While “disruption” is the most overused word of the 21st century so far, I truly think this will be the most disruptive trend of the 2020s. Very smart people will soon be adopting today’s recommendation.

And it’s my gift to paying subscribers as the year ends. Have a Happy Holidays and Wonderful New Year! We’ll be back next year with tons (and I mean tons) of new content.

An Analogy About A Robot Making Socks

Imagine a fully-automated machine that makes socks. A whole variety of socks: men’s ankle high jogging socks; little kids licensed socks; women’s low-cut dress socks. This machine gets programmed with its deliverables each morning, but its controllers can send updates throughout the day. The catch is that after checking for updates, the machine takes five minutes to reboot before it can start making socks again.

So how often should the machine check its update queue?

The answer is obvious: as rarely as possible!

Sure, every so often, the sock robot will get an urgent request, but as long as the urgent socks simply need to be made by the end of the day, you’d check the queue as rarely as possible. The machine should not check every five minutes. It would spend half it’s time rebooting! Even every half-hour seems like a waste. Hourly might be too much. Call it every 90-120 minutes, right?

To be obvious, you are this robot.

When you switch tasks, it can take five to fifteen minutes for your brain to reset and dive into the next cognitively demanding task. To truly start “deep work”, a person really needs to work uninterrupted for about fifteen minutes to really get into a flow state. For example, say you’re writing a super important business plan. But you also manage a team. If you stop every five minutes to check email, you risk receiving an urgent email that upsets you (say your boss just dropped a huge new task into your lap, or a teammate called you out for a mistake.) That’s the type of email that can leave you fuming for the rest of the hour, thus you never actually get into the flow state needed to truly craft a compelling business strategy.

(And while I keep writing “email”, it’s a synonym for social media, messaging systems, text messages, news websites, you name it. Anything that can activate other cognitive parts of your brain. For the rest of this article, I’m going to write email/slack since those are the two biggest distractions in the modern office.)

So let’s clearly spell out the transformation in business workflows I anticipate:

Companies need to get rid of email. (And Slack, Messenger and so on.)

Of course, it’s drastically easier for me to say, “Radically overhaul your entire communication system” then it will be for leaders to execute. And obviously the details are much more nuanced than the above scenario suggests, so the rest of the article will explain why our current workflows are broken, and how we can fix them.

There’s always growing pains with any new technology, and I believe that, this decade, how we use social media and digital communications is going to change. (Or will change for a significant portion of society.)

The Pitch: Get Rid of Email/Slack (And Move to a Project Planning Based Work Flow)

To be clear, I stand on the shoulder of giants here. Well, one giant: Cal Newport.

I’ve been obsessed with minimizing the impact of email since I first started listening to the Manager-Tools podcast in the 2000s and read Getting Things Done, with their recommendations to check email in batches and achieve zero email inboxes.

But Cal Newport’s 2021 book, A World Without Email, changed the game for me. It’s the sequel to the books Deep Workand Digital Minimalism. The overall thesis of this trilogy is that knowledge workers need to be able to work deeply for long periods of time to deliver value. Being constantly online disrupts that ability, and in A World Without Email, he explains how organizations can apply these principles. (Digital Minimalism focused on reducing digital distractions in your own life, something many people in Hollywood desperately need.)

The key is how Cal Newport defines work. He describes our current workflow as the “hyperactive hive mind”. In this hive mind, employees constantly monitor asynchronous communications like email or Slack, lest they get delegated a task or emergency and can’t respond immediately.  Most offices don’t have plans for how to collectively manage projects, so it’s managed haphazardly by email or Slack.

He doesn’t give the opposite system a name, but I call it the “project planning” system. Newport focuses on having structures, processes and protocols that deliberately structure how teams, organizations and companies communicate and work. He provides examples of smaller companies that have successfully escaped the “hyperactive hive mind” work flow.

The key distinction is how deliberately a company chooses to organize its knowledge work. The current system—ever since digital communication like email started—is completely unplanned. No one sat down and said, “This is how we should work.” It just happened.

And it’s not very good.

Why Should Companies Get Rid of Email/Slack

Companies need to get rid of email/Slack for two main reasons: it will make us more productive and less miserable.

Start here: nearly every knowledge work job in Hollywood requires deep work. This means thinking deeply about a complex topic and executing it at a high level.

Take screenwriters. What is their job? To craft stories. This could be outlining a new script, writing words on the page, or reviewing earlier drafts. But no matter what step they’re on, thinking deeply for long periods of time is how great scripts get written.

What do many writers spend their time doing nowadays? Tweeting or responding to emails, the least value-adding tasks they can do.

They should be writing! Honestly, screenwriters barely need email/Slack. They certainly don’t need to check it throughout the day.

Let’s move up the chain. Say you’re a development exec. How often are you checking email while you’re reading that hypothetical screenwriter’s script? How can you focus on the story if you’re checking your email every five minutes? You need to immerse yourself in the current scripts, video cuts, or potential projects you’re developing! You need to think deeply about what notes you’re going to give and how.

I could go on. Say you work in finance or accounting. If you’re not spending large chunks of time building spreadsheets, you’re not really doing finance. Marketers needs to craft marketing campaigns. Strategic planners need to make strategy decks or reports. Lawyers need to draft contracts, review deal points or review contracts. Managers of all levels need to read, read, read, plan rigorously, and then manage their teams. Email/communication is secondary to all of these actual work tasks.

In short, eliminating the “hyperactive hive mind” enables every knowledge worker to, you know, do knowledge work!

And that knowledge work is what adds value to modern society. In A World Without Email, Newport spends chapter reviewing the research on how distracted workers are by email (spending more time communicating than working), how ineffectively we can multitask (Related: multi-tasking is a myth! The science/research on this is fairly clear…), and how unproductive the hyperactive hive mind is. (Yes, this paragraph alone won’t convince you, but his book has all the footnotes.)

Personally, I know I do my best work when I avoid any communications/internet in the AM, and dive into several hours of long, focused deep work. When I check email (and Twitter), the quality and quantity of my work suffers. I’m not immune to these forces either, but unlike a lot of folks, I’m aware of how dangerous/destructive they are to great writing.

This isn’t just about output though. As the pandemic illustrated, the current system of work—remote or in person—makes us miserable. We work longer hours with less output. A lot of the pressure that workers everywhere feel comes from not having enough time to manage the overwhelming stream of obligations they feel. (Again, A World Without Email has tons of references on this subject that I don’t have time to detail today.)

If This Change Is So Obvious, Why Hasn’t It Happened?

Let me level with you: making this change will be hard, as was the move from individual artisans to factories to assembly lines. Changing the status quo almost always requires pain.

Think about it: for a boss to transform a Fortune 500 company from a “hyperactive hive mind” into a “project planning” work flow will require getting buy-in from potentially tens of thousands of employees. That will be hard!

As Cal Newport has documented extensively, there is a well-worn bias against telling knowledge workers how to do their jobs. This actually started with the guru of management, Peter Drucker. Thinking of great scientists, Drucker recommended letting smart folks figure out the best solutions to their problems. While that worked in the 1950s, when everyone only had physical inboxes and memorandums were copied by hand, in the age of ubiquitous communication, that’s a recipe for gridlock and paralysis.

To get specific to Hollywood (and this applies to the media too, meaning the more news side of the world) is a town built on “relationships”. Since email and social media break down communication barriers, anything standing in the way of that seems like it’s standing in the way of more relationships. Ironically, having more in-depth phone calls and in-person meetings/coffees makes much deeper relationships than texts or emails or social media likes, but that’s not how it feels.

Conclusion: Some Realism

Lastly, some realism: this won’t happen.

I mean, that’s brutal to write 1,800 words pitching you a great idea then tossing cold water on it at the end…but it’s probably the truth. Most executives love getting email all day to seem super busy. Focusing on deep work is actually kinda hard. So executives avoid it as much as the worker bees.

But the most forward thinking executives will embrace this. And that’s my Christmas gift to my (paid) readers.