A World Without Email - Cal Newport
Cal Newport is obsessed with protecting his time and attention. He’s the leading proponent of basing one’s life around deep work, he argues for minimizing our web-connected lives only to what is absolutely essential, and here, he takes on the grand-daddy of them all - email! A World Without Email is structured like his other books - the first half of the book outlines the greater context of the topic at hand while the second half of the book offers practical solutions that we can try to apply directly in our lives.
My central takeaway from this book is the important distinction that our work are actually split into two parts: process and work. Processes are the systems that facilitate our work such as communication and the flow of shared information. True “work” should only include activities that directly contribute to the core mission of an organization. When email was first introduced, it was supposed to create a lightening bolt of productivity. In reality, email took on a life of its own and became the centerpoint of most people’s work day in the worst way possible. Rather than actually facilitating deep and meaningful work that moved the needle on an organization’s bottom line, the ease of email has us, instead, spending all day emailing back and forth about work instead of doing it.
Overall, I think Newport is a little extreme against email here. If it’s managed properly - it can still serve its role of communicating effectively - especially when communicated between departments that don’t often work side by side. I do, however, strongly agree with Newports argument that, by and large, knowledge workers need to better implement processes for the flow of shared information. Individual workers should not be left to their own devices to share information through ad-hoc emails - its too much chatter and threads quickly take on a mind of their own. Rather, knowledge workers need to take a page out of the book of factories that have strict processes and communication channels that all project work should flow through. These types of systems introduce friction at the beginning, but, once adopted, they open up mental bandwidth that workers can devote to work that is directed specifically towards the organization’s bottom line. A transition to this type of workflow should take inspiration from software development world - most notably Kanban Boards, shared project boards that all stakeholders can view, and ticketing systems.