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A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload Hardcover – March 2, 2021
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From New York Times bestselling author Cal Newport comes a bold vision for liberating workers from the tyranny of the inbox--and unleashing a new era of productivity.
Modern knowledge workers communicate constantly. Their days are defined by a relentless barrage of incoming messages and back-and-forth digital conversations--a state of constant, anxious chatter in which nobody can disconnect, and so nobody has the cognitive bandwidth to perform substantive work. There was a time when tools like email felt cutting edge, but a thorough review of current evidence reveals that the "hyperactive hive mind" workflow they helped create has become a productivity disaster, reducing profitability and perhaps even slowing overall economic growth. Equally worrisome, it makes us miserable. Humans are simply not wired for constant digital communication.
We have become so used to an inbox-driven workday that it's hard to imagine alternatives. But they do exist. Drawing on years of investigative reporting, author and computer science professor Cal Newport makes the case that our current approach to work is broken, then lays out a series of principles and concrete instructions for fixing it. In A World without Email, he argues for a workplace in which clear processes--not haphazard messaging--define how tasks are identified, assigned and reviewed. Each person works on fewer things (but does them better), and aggressive investment in support reduces the ever-increasing burden of administrative tasks. Above all else, important communication is streamlined, and inboxes and chat channels are no longer central to how work unfolds.
The knowledge sector's evolution beyond the hyperactive hive mind is inevitable. The question is not whether a world without email is coming (it is), but whether you'll be ahead of this trend. If you're a CEO seeking a competitive edge, an entrepreneur convinced your productivity could be higher, or an employee exhausted by your inbox, A World Without Email will convince you that the time has come for bold changes, and will walk you through exactly how to make them happen.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPortfolio
- Publication dateMarch 2, 2021
- Dimensions5.7 x 1.09 x 8.51 inches
- ISBN-100525536558
- ISBN-13978-0525536550
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
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From the Publisher
Digital Minimalism | The Time-Block Planner 2nd Edition | Slow Productivity | |
Customer Reviews |
4.5 out of 5 stars
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4.4 out of 5 stars
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4.3 out of 5 stars
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Price | $16.59$16.59 | $14.75$14.75 | $12.12$12.12 |
Other Books by Cal Newport | Timely and enlightening, Digital Minimalism introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives. | A daily planner that deploys the power of time blocking to help you focus on what's important and get significantly more done. | A groundbreaking philosophy for pursuing meaningful accomplishment while avoiding overload |
Editorial Reviews
Review
--Drew Houston, cofounder and CEO of Dropbox
“The future of work demands new tools of collaboration. Cal Newport is on a quest to uncover better ways for knowledge workers to collaborate. Out of this will come the new work space.”
--Kevin Kelly, senior maverick for Wired
“This new work from Cal Newport goes beyond hacking at the branches of the email problem and strikes right at the root of it. This is a bold, visionary, almost prophetic book that challenges the status quo. If you want to peer into what the future of work could look like, read this book now.”
--Greg McKeown, New York Times bestselling author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
“When a Cal Newport book appears, I drop everything and read. With evidence and examples from the cutting edge of programming to the factory floors of a century ago, Newport makes a compelling argument that we can and will do much, much better than email. Read this superb book. It might just change your life; it’s changing mine.”
--Tim Harford, author of The Data Detective
“This book is a call to action. Newport suggests that now is the time to reimagine work with the specific goal of optimizing our brain’s ability to sustainably add value. Don’t let your teams and organizations lose out any further—read this book to help you get started.”
--Leslie A. Perlow, author of Sleeping with Your Smartphone and professor of leadership at Harvard Business School
"This book defines the scale of a problem too few of us knew existed...it’s a profound insight."
--The Financial Times
"Ford studied how to improve productivity and organize the factory floor. Now, Newport is doing the same for knowledge work."
--Fortune
"A surprisingly zippy history of email that notes how suddenly email changed the way workers worked…This book has smart recommendations for individuals and organizations."
--Laura Vanderkam for the Wall Street Journal
"Newport’s systems-oriented approach is far more promising than the standard personal productivity fare. His ideas are meant to stop the flood altogether."
--GQ
"For knowledge workers in any organization, this analysis and recommendations will resonate."
--Forbes
"This book is a step forward...Newport makes the radical argument that companies that obsess about efficiency are utterly failing to question their own workflows. They are making their products worse, and they are just contributing to an overall degradation of society. It’s a pretty stunning indictment."
--Ezra Klein for the Ezra Klein Show
"This book provides a lens through which we can better examine what many of us sense is a somewhat maddening way to work…here’s to hoping your boss picks up a copy."
--GQ
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
The Hyperactive Hive Mind
In late 2010, Nish Acharya arrived in Washington, DC, ready to work. President Barack Obama had appointed Nish to be his director of innovation and entrepreneurship and a senior adviser to the secretary of commerce. Nish was asked to coordinate with twenty-six different federal agencies and over five hundred universities to dispense $100 million in funding, meaning that he was about to become the prototypical DC power player: smartphone always in hand, messages flying back and forth at all hours. But then the network broke.
On a Tuesday morning, just a couple of months into his new role, Nish received an email from his CTO explaining that they had to temporarily shut down their office’s network due to a computer virus. “We all expected that this would be fixed in a couple of days,” Nish told me when I later interviewed him about the incident. But this prediction proved wildly optimistic. The following week, an undersecretary of commerce convened a meeting. She explained that they suspected the virus infecting their network came from a foreign power, and that Homeland Security was recommending that the network stay down while they traced the attack. Just to be safe, they were also going to destroy all the computers, laptops, printers—anything with a chip—in the office.
One of the biggest impacts of this network shutdown was that the office lost the ability to send or receive emails. For security purposes, it was illegal for them to use personal email addresses to perform their government work, and bureaucratic hurdles kept them from setting up temporary accounts using other agencies’ networks. Nish and his team were effectively cut off from the frenetic ping-pong of digital chatter that defines most high-level work within the federal government. The blackout lasted six weeks. With a touch of gallows humor, they took to calling the fateful day when it all began “Dark Tuesday.”
Not surprisingly, the sudden and unexpected loss of email made certain parts of Nish’s work “quite hellish.” Because the rest of the government continued to rely heavily on this tool, he often worried about missing important meetings or requests. “There was an existing information pipeline,” he explained, “and I was out of the loop.” Another hardship was logistics. Nish’s job required him to set up many meetings, and this task was made substantially more annoying without the ability to coordinate over email.
Perhaps less expected, however, was that Nish’s work didn’t grind to a halt during these six weeks. He instead began to notice that he was actually getting better at his job. Lacking the ability to simply send a quick email when he had a question, he took to leaving his office to meet with people in person. Because these appointments were a pain to arrange, he scheduled longer blocks of time, allowing him to really get to know the people he was meeting and understand the nuances of their issues. As Nish explained, these extended sessions proved “very valuable” for a new political appointee trying to learn the subtle dynamics of the federal government.
The lack of an inbox to check between these meetings opened up cognitive downtime—what Nish took to calling “whitespace”—to dive more deeply into the research literature and legislation relevant to the topics handled by his office. This slower and more thoughtful approach to thinking yielded a pair of breakthrough ideas that ended up setting the agenda for Nish’s agency for the entire year that followed. “In the Washington politic environment, no one gives themselves that space,” he told me. “It’s all neurotic looking at your phone, checking email—it hurts ingenuity.”
As I talked to Nish about Dark Tuesday and its aftermath, it occurred to me that many of the hardships that made the blackout “hellish” seemed solvable. Nish admitted, for example, that his concern about being out of the loop was largely alleviated by the simple habit of calling the White House each day to learn if there were any meetings he needed to know about. Presumably, a dedicated assistant or junior team member could handle this call. The other issue was the annoyance of scheduling meetings, but this could also be handled by an assistant or some sort of automated scheduling system. It seemed, in other words, that it might be possible to preserve the profound benefits of the email blackout while avoiding many of the accompanying annoyances.
“What would you think of this way of working?” I asked after explaining my proposed fixes. The phone line went silent for a moment. I had pitched an idea so preposterous—permanently working without email—that Nish’s mind had temporarily frozen.
* * * * *
Nish’s reaction was not surprising. A widely accepted premise of modern knowledge work is that email saved us: transforming stodgy, old-fashioned offices, filled with secretaries scribbling phone messages and paper memos delivered from mail carts, into something sleeker and more efficient. According to this premise, if you feel overwhelmed by tools like email or instant messenger, it’s because your personal habits are sloppy: you need to batch your inbox checks, and turn off your notifications, and write clearer subject lines! If inbox overload gets really bad, then maybe your organization as a whole needs to tweak their “norms” around issues like response time expectations. The underlying value of the constant electronic communication that defines modern work, however, is never questioned, as this would be hopelessly reactionary and nostalgic, like pining for the lost days of horse transport or the romance of candlelight.
From this perspective, Nish’s Dark Tuesday experience was a disaster. But what if we have this exactly backward? What if email didn’t save knowledge work but instead accidentally traded minor conveniences for a major drag on real productivity (not frantic busyness, but actual results), leading to slower economic growth over the past two decades? What if our problems with these tools don’t come from easily fixable bad habits and loose norms, but instead from the way they dramatically and unexpectedly changed the very nature of how we work? What if Dark Tuesday, in other words, was not a disaster, but instead a preview of how the most innovative executives and entrepreneurs will be organizing their work in the very near future?
* * * * *
I’ve been obsessed with studying how email broke work for at least the past half decade. An important inflection point in this journey was in 2016, when I published a book titled Deep Work, which went on to become a surprise hit. This book argued that the knowledge sector was undervaluing concentration. While the ability to rapidly communicate using digital messages is useful, the frequent disruptions created by this behavior also make it hard to focus, which has a bigger impact on our ability to produce valuable output than we may have realized. I didn’t spend much time in Deep Work trying to understand how we ended up drowning in our inboxes, or suggesting systemic changes. I thought this problem was largely one of insufficient information. Once organizations realized the importance of focus, I reasoned, they could easily correct their operations to make it a priority.
I discovered that I was overly optimistic. As I toured the country talking about my book, meeting with both executives and employees, and writing more about these topics on my blog, as well as in the pages of publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker, I encountered a grimmer and more nuanced understanding of the current state of the knowledge sector. Constant communication is not something that gets in the way of real work; it has instead become totally intertwined in how this work actually gets done—preventing easy efforts to reduce distractions through better habits or short-lived management stunts like email-free Fridays. Real improvement, it became clear, would require fundamental change to how we organize our professional efforts. It also became clear that these changes can’t come too soon: whereas email overload emerged as a fashionable annoyance in the early 2000s, it has recently advanced into a much more serious problem, reaching a saturation point for many in which their actual productive output gets squeezed into the early morning, or evenings and weekends, while their workdays devolve into Sisyphean battles against their inboxes—a uniquely misery-inducing approach to getting things done.
This book is my attempt to tackle this crisis. To pull together—for the first time—everything we now know about how we ended up in a culture of constant communication, and the effects it’s having on both our productivity and mental health, as well as to explore our most compelling visions for what alternative forms of work might look like. The idea of a world without email was radical enough to catch Nish Acharya off guard. But I’ve come to believe it’s not only possible, but actually inevitable, and my goal with this book is to provide a blueprint for this coming revolution. Before I can better summarize what to expect in the pages ahead, we must start with a clearer understanding of the problem we currently face.
* * * * *
As email spread through the professional world in the 1980s and ’90s, it introduced something novel: low-friction communication at scale. With this new tool, the cost in terms of time and social capital to communicate with anyone related to your job plummeted from significant to almost nothing. As the writer Chris Anderson notes in his 2009 book Free, the dynamics of reducing a cost to zero can be “deeply mysterious,”[1] which helps explain why few predicted the changes unleashed by this arrival of free communication. We didn’t just shift our existing volume of voicemails, faxes, and memos to this new, more convenient electronic medium; we completely transformed the underlying workflow that determines how our daily efforts unfold. We began to talk back and forth much more than we ever had before, smoothing out the once coarse sequence of discrete work activities that defined our day into a more continuous spread of ongoing chatter, blending with and softening what we used to think of as our actual work.
One study estimates that by 2019 the average worker was sending and receiving 126 business emails per day, which works out to about one message every four minutes.[2] A software company called RescueTime recently measured this behavior directly using time tracking software and calculated that their users were checking email or instant messenger tools like Slack once every six minutes on average.[3] A team from the University of California, Irvine ran a similar experiment, tracking the computer behavior of forty employees at a large company over twelve workdays. They found that the workers checked their inboxes an average of seventy-seven times a day, with the heaviest user checking more than four hundred times daily.[4] A survey conducted by Adobe revealed that knowledge workers self-report spending more than three hours a day sending and receiving business email.[5]
The issue, then, is not the tool but the new way of working it introduced. To help us better understand this new workflow, I’ll give it a name and definition:
The Hyperactive Hive Mind
A workflow centered on ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.
The hyperactive hive mind workflow has become ubiquitous in the knowledge sector. Whether you’re a computer programmer, marketing consultant, manager, newspaper editor, or professor, your day is now largely structured around tending your organization’s ongoing hive mind conversation. It’s this workflow that causes us to spend over a third of our working hours in our inbox, checking for new messages every six minutes. 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.
To be fair, the hyperactive hive mind is not obviously a bad idea. Among the benefits of this workflow is the fact that it’s simple and incredibly adaptive. As one researcher explained to me, part of email’s appeal was that this one easy tool could be applied to almost every type of knowledge work—a much smaller learning curve than needing to master a separate bespoke digital system for each type of work. Unstructured conversation is also an effective method for identifying unexpected challenges and quickly coordinating responses.
But as I’ll argue in part 1 of this book, the hyperactive hive mind workflow enabled by email—although natural—has turned out to be spectacularly ineffective. The explanation for this failure can be found in our psychology. Beyond the very small scale (say, two or three people), this style of unstructured collaboration simply doesn’t mesh well with the way the human brain has evolved to operate. If your organization depends on the hive mind, then you cannot neglect your inbox or chat channels for long without slowing down the entire operation. This constant interaction with the hive mind, however, requires that you frequently switch your attention from your work to talking about work, and then back again. As I’ll detail, pioneering research in psychology and neuroscience reveals that these context switches, even if brief, induce a heavy cost in terms of mental energy—reducing cognitive performance and creating a sense of exhaustion and reduced efficacy. In the moment, the ability to quickly delegate tasks or solicit feedback might seem like an act of streamlining, but as I’ll show, in the long run, it’s likely reducing productivity, requiring more time and more expenses to get the same total amount of work accomplished.
In this first part of the book, I’ll also detail how the social element of the hive mind workflow clashes with the social circuits in our brains. Rationally, you know that the six hundred unread messages in your inbox are not crucial, and you remind yourself that the senders of these messages have better things to do than wait expectantly, staring at their screens and cursing the latency of your response. But a deeper part of your brain, evolved to tend the careful dance of social dynamics that has allowed our species to thrive so spectacularly since the Paleolithic, remains concerned by what it perceives to be neglected social obligations. As far as these social circuits are concerned, members of your tribe are trying to get your attention and you’re ignoring them: an event that registers as an emergency. The result of this constant state of unease is a low-grade background hum of anxiety that many inbox-bound knowledge workers have come to assume is unavoidable, but is actually an artifact of this unfortunate mismatch between our modern tools and ancient brains.
The obvious question is why we would ever adopt a workflow that comes with so many negative features. As I explain at the end of part 1, the story behind the rise of the hyperactive hive mind is complicated. No one really decided that it was a good idea; it instead arose, in some sense, of its own volition. Our belief that frenetic communication is somehow synonymous with work is largely a backfilled narrative we tell ourselves to make sense of sudden changes driven by complex dynamics.
Understanding the arbitrariness behind how we currently work, perhaps more than anything else, should motivate us to seek better options. This is exactly the goal I take on in part 2 of the book. In this second part, I introduce a framework I call attention capital theory that argues for creating workflows built around processes specifically designed to help us get the most out of our human brains while minimizing unnecessary miseries. This might sound obvious, but it actually contradicts the standard way of thinking about knowledge work management. As I’ll show, driven by the ideas of the immensely influential business thinker Peter Drucker, we tend to think of knowledge workers as autonomous black boxes—ignoring the details of how they get their work done and focusing instead on providing them clear objectives and motivational leadership. This is a mistake. There is massive potential productivity currently latent in the knowledge sector. To unlock it will require much more systematic thinking about how best to organize the fundamental objective of getting a collection of human brains hooked together in networks to produce the most possible valuable output in the most sustainable way. Hint: the right answer is unlikely to involve checking email once every six minutes.
The bulk of part 2 explores a collection of principles for applying attention capital theory to rebuild the workflows that drive organizational, team, and individual work in this direction—moving us away from the hyperactive hive mind and toward more structured approaches that avoid the problems of constant communication detailed in part 1. Some of the ideas supporting these principles come from cutting-edge examples of organizations experimenting with novel workflows that minimize unscheduled communication. Other ideas are drawn from the practices that enabled complex knowledge organizations to function effectively in an age before digital networks.
The principles described in part 2 don’t insist that you banish messaging technologies like email or instant messenger. These tools remain a very useful way to communicate, and it would be reactionary to return to older and less convenient technologies just to make a point. But these principles will push you to reduce digital messaging from a constant presence to something that occurs more occasionally. The world without email referenced in the title of this book, therefore, is not a place in which protocols like SMTP and POP3 are banished. It is, however, a place where you spend most of your day actually working on hard things instead of talking about this work, or endlessly bouncing small tasks back and forth in messages.
This advice is designed to apply to many audiences. This includes business leaders looking to overhaul their company’s operation, teams looking to function more efficiently, solo entrepreneurs and freelancers looking to maximize their value production, and even individual employees looking to get more out of their individual communication habits by viewing them through the perspective of attention capital. Accordingly, my examples span from the large scale, such as CEOs making drastic changes to their company’s culture, to the small scale, such as my own experiments with using systems borrowed from software development to move my academic administrative tasks out of my inbox and into a more organized format.
Not every suggestion in part 2 applies to every situation. If you’re an employee of a company that still worships at the altar of the hyperactive hive mind, for example, there are only so many changes you can make on your own without infuriating your coworkers. Some care will therefore be needed in picking and choosing the strategies you implement. (I attempt to help you in this selection by highlighting examples of how the various principles have applied in the individual context.) Similarly, if you’re a start-up entrepreneur, you’re better able to experiment with radical new work processes than if you’re the CEO of a large company.
But I firmly believe that any individual or organization who starts to think critically about the hyperactive hive mind workflow, then systematically replaces elements of it with processes that are more compatible with the realities of the human brain, will generate a substantial competitive edge. The future of work is increasingly cognitive. This means that the sooner we take seriously how human brains actually function, and seek out strategies that best complement these realities, the sooner we’ll realize that the hyperactive hive mind, though convenient, is a disastrously ineffective way to organize our efforts.
This book, therefore, should not be understood as reactionary or anti-technology. To the contrary, its message is profoundly future-oriented. It recognizes that if we want to extract the full potential of digital networks in professional settings, we must continually and aggressively try to optimize how we use them. Attacking the flaws of the hyperactive hive mind is decidedly not an act of Luddism—if anything, the true obstruction to progress is giving in to the simplistic comforts of this blunt workflow at the expense of further refinement.
In this formulation, a world without email is not a step backward but a step forward into an exciting technological future we’re only just beginning to understand. Knowledge work does not yet have its Henry Ford, but workflow innovations with impact on the same scale as the assembly line are inevitable. I can’t predict all the details of this future, but I’m convinced it will not involve checking an inbox every six minutes. This world without email is coming, and I hope this book will get you as excited about its potential as I am.
Notes
[1] Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (New York: Hyperion, 2009), 4.
[2] Radicati Group, Inc., Email Statistics Report, 2015–2019 (Palo Alto, CA: March 2015).
[3] Jory MacKay, “Communication Overload: Our Research Shows Most Workers Can’t Go 6 Minutes without Checking Email or IM,” RescueTime (blog), July 11, 2018, https://blog.rescuetime.com/communication-multitasking-switches/.
[4] Gloria Mark et al., “Email Duration, Batching and Self-Interruption: Patterns of Email Use on Productivity and Stress,” Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2016, 1717–28. See table 2.
[5] Adobe, “2018 Consumer Email Survey,” August 17, 2018, www.slideshare.net/adobe/2018-adobe-consumer-email-survey.
Product details
- Publisher : Portfolio (March 2, 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0525536558
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525536550
- Item Weight : 14.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.7 x 1.09 x 8.51 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #40,053 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #12 in Work Life Balance in Business
- #49 in Social Aspects of Technology
- #459 in Business Management (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University who writes for general audiences about the intersections of culture and technology. He is the author of eight books, including, most recently, Slow Productivity, A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. These titles include multiple New York Times bestsellers and have been published in over 40 languages. Newport is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book's content relevant and thought-provoking. They appreciate the well-written, concise, and articulated arguments. The book provides practical advice on improving productivity and reducing waste. However, opinions differ on the pacing - some find it tailored to individual needs, while others feel it's too fast-paced and repetitive.
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Customers find the book's content relevant to today's challenges. They appreciate the thought and ideas that went into it. The author makes a compelling case for innovation in our workflows and work lives. Readers describe the book as practical and thought-provoking, an important work for the 21st century.
"...high-quality argument-type books, which identify serious, modern-day problems (usually related to human cognition, concentration and productivity)..." Read more
"...While the book turned out to be highly enjoyable, full of good insights and not that much anti-technology, I am not sold on the author’s belief that..." Read more
"...interesting, as Cal includes numerous case studies and lessons from business history. I would love to meet Cal someday and thank him for his work...." Read more
"...To be sure, there are good ideas in this book, and the sections on how we got here — and what it’s costing us — are worth the price of admission...." Read more
Customers find the book well-written, with concise and useful words. They appreciate the author's well-articulated argument in favor of challenging the status quo. The prose is crisp, punchy, and persuasive.
"...His prose has always been crisp, punchy, and persuasive. He comes across in all mediums as honest, smart, and prescient...." Read more
"...It is a good book, it highlights an important problem, it is well written - but I am not sure if it can spark a revolution. Still, food for thought...." Read more
"...Must read for managers and knowledge worker!" Read more
"...Call’s thoughts are well thought through. I found it motivational to believe in a future where I can enjoy work more AND give my employer more...." Read more
Customers find the book efficient. They say it's an incredibly effective and free way to stay productive.
"...with his other books, Cal keeps the table of contents simple and efficient...." Read more
"...not literally suggesting that we all stop using email: it is an incredibly efficient (virtually free) means of asynchronous communication...." Read more
"...I've spent the last 2 weeks offline and have been 5X more productive than normal...." Read more
"Efficiency is a wonderful goal, but not the most important goal...." Read more
Customers have different views on the book's pacing. Some find the recommendations tailored to individual needs, while others feel it's overwritten and repetitive.
"...is very relevant to today’s challenges and the recommendations provided are broad enough to be tailored to individual needs." Read more
"No doubt about it, email sucks. It’s full of false urgency and the sort of endless interruptions that make modern knowledge work such a drag...." Read more
"Aimed at the business sector, but good for individuals, too..." Read more
"...The first half of the book, while overwritten at times and unnecessarily repetitive, painted a great picture of how email has made work less..." Read more
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Learning to put email in its proper place
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2021I received this book TODAY and have been tearing through it. I can always rely on Cal to produce high-quality argument-type books, which identify serious, modern-day problems (usually related to human cognition, concentration and productivity) and then propose solutions. His prior book, Digital Minimalism, was my favorite book of 2019.
The clarity in Cal's thinking is second to none. He is garnering a rabid fan base because of his demonstrable success as he practices what he preaches. I just discovered his podcast (Deep Questions), and absolutely love that too. He speaks like he writes: with precision and wisdom; Every word is concise and useful. And of course, his blog is central to his hive of followers, which I have not consumed that much of to be honest. But I read is prior works of Digital Minimalism, Deep Work, and So Good they Can't Ignore You. They were all extremely satisfying reads. You'll love his work if you like personal development, self-actualization, productivity, and living an intentional, well-balanced life.
I'm a sucker for research books on the effects of modern-day consumer tech. And Cal owns this space. He puts his professorial research skills to use as a purveyor of desperately needed insights in a world dominated by distraction. We check our email inboxes every six minutes. Email has "transformed our workflow" under our noses. It's a "radical shift" in work culture, which has amounted to a drag on productivity. It's a "constant state of unease in a low-grade background of humdrum anxiety." Those are just a couple of gem, hard-hitting quotes you'll find in this book.
Consistent with his other books, Cal keeps the table of contents simple and efficient. It has two parts: 1) The Case Against Email and 2) Principles in a World without Email. I'm a practicing lawyer and I very much appreciate Cal's thesis type of writing. His prose has always been crisp, punchy, and persuasive. He comes across in all mediums as honest, smart, and prescient.
I will check back in when I finish the book, or will post my final review on Goodreads. Cal, thank you SO much. I've been telling my friends that I've been waiting for your follow-up to Digital Minimalism. I learned of this book through your podcast feature on Todd Henry's Accidental Creative.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2021I have bought this book on impulse, seeing the eponymous phrase “World without email” which seems to suggest that email is a menace worthy of nothing short of eradication. Not feeling particularly oppressed myself, I was wondering what exactly is the problem Cal Newport attributes to emails and what the “reimagining” is about. While the book turned out to be highly enjoyable, full of good insights and not that much anti-technology, I am not sold on the author’s belief that electronic communication is stifling the effectiveness of work. Our habits are.
It is true that you can spend the whole day in your inbox. You can feel productive - so many messages sent! So many people can see how responsive you are! - without actually delivering much in the whole day. You can offload work to other people just by clicking “reply”. You can FYI everyone in the team (and beyond) in a pretense that their silence means agreement. All of that is easy with email, and all of that is oftentimes unnecessary. We are inundated with excessive messages. Cal - in the first part of the book - traces the reasons to the fundamental property of email being vastly quicker and cheaper than paper letters or phone calls. Couple that with our innate tendency to respond to social cues, the reasoning goes, and no wonder the inbox became the place we visit every couple minutes. The author claims this reinforcing relation between the electronic communication and human psychology to be so strong that he uses the argument of “technological determinism”. Back in the nineties, the offices switching from paper to email expected reductions of time spent on communication, but it turned out the volume of messaging increased dramatically, kept growing ever since and became the new normal in the office work.
But, I dare to say, we are not losing precious time and attention on corporate spam because email - as a technology - destined us to do so. I believe the whole situation is just convenient to many employees, who would not have that much to do if emails stopped flowing in. Moreover, many organisations are toxic, with people fearing of being judged as slackers without email trail justifying their efforts. Last, but not least - engaging in email threads is easier than actual knowledge work. I believe that rather than the effortlessness of the technology, it is the prevalent office conformism and minimisation of mental effort that lead to excessive time spent on emails. As Cal notices, “the underlying value of the constant electronic communication that defines modern work is never questioned”. This value is low - but it’s part of the common landscape, and it is rather a minority of people who tend to question how their companies work. On the other hand, there are some people who do value uninterrupted time - mainly in the knowledge-based jobs (where quality suffers greatly from interruptions); the second part of the publication is devoted to existing communication/collaboration techniques used in IT, engineering and scientific organisations.
While I have some doubts about the reasoning shown in the “why email hurts us” part of the book, it was more enjoyable to read than the “solutions” part, which is perfectly in order but felt just a bit dull. Moreover, I don’t feel there is anything radical or visionary to warrant the “reimagination” of work promised in the title. Setting up processes for repeatable work, using task boards, reducing people synchronisation by giving them autonomy - none of that is new or cutting-edge. It’s common sense applied to motivated people.
It is a good book, it highlights an important problem, it is well written - but I am not sure if it can spark a revolution. Still, food for thought. Recommended.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2021As an entrepreneur and a business leader I'm always searching for ways to improve performance in my life and my organization. My inbox has been a pit of despair for the last decade and this year I started a quest to fix it. Most business books regurgitate many of the same concepts we're all familiar with in a fresh format but practically speaking they offer very little substance. "A World without Email" is perhaps one of the most revolutionary, brilliant, and practical books I've ever read. It's also very interesting, as Cal includes numerous case studies and lessons from business history. I would love to meet Cal someday and thank him for his work. I just ordered 10 more copies for my leadership team. My only complaint is that Cal did not publish this book 5 years ago. Maybe we weren't ready. I highly recommend it.
Top reviews from other countries
- Jananie MohanReviewed in India on June 6, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars a lot of practical strategies
I really recommend this book to people who involved in project management and people management because this book provides a lot practical strategies and quick ideas to effective lead a team.
- AltadelReviewed in Canada on July 11, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Addressing Digital Inefficiency
Anyone looking for a step-by-step SOLUTION to their work situation underestimates the problem and how varied our responsibilities and work outputs and outcomes are. Newport states that knowledge work is at an efficiency that manual labour was at in 1900. No book for manual labour existed in 1900: Taylor performed an experiment that resulted in improvements (at the cost of worker satisfaction and health). Now we can explore and experiment, finding our way forward in knowledge work efficacy and efficiency, which will be a winding path, as it was in factories all the way up to just-in-time delivery, kaizen, and still there are issues (pandemic chip shortages at auto manufacturers, anyone?).
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Natalia MartínezReviewed in Spain on October 18, 2021
2.0 out of 5 stars Muy teórico
Muy teórico
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KlaraMaraParaReviewed in Germany on March 21, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Interessante behandlung eines wichtigen Problems unserer modernen Gesellschaft
Ich habe nur die ersten 50 seiten gelesen, da ich mich in der Freizeit nicht über die Arbeit nachdenken will und das Kindle buch zurückgegeben.
Ich finde Cal Newport ist einer der Wichtigsten Denker unserer Zeit und räumt die konstante massen-Kommunikation am arbeitsplatz einfach mal von hinten auf.
- ChiraagReviewed in the United Kingdom on March 14, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Thought Provoking and Insightful - Offering Practical solutions to find better focus without email
This book introduces the big problem of email in our work and personal lives and offers insight into how our approach to working with email can be changed.
I have been in jobs where the rate of email and the expectation of quick responses has meant that I am constantly checking emails and reacting to requests. From the start of day, till the end of the week, all the attention and work is around email. The issue with this is you are constantly in reactive mode, spend more time on reading and responding to emails than actual work on tasks. This is what Cal refers to as the Hyperactive Hive Mind.
If you have read Deep Work then you will appreciate how important focused time is to produce high quality output and workplaces today with their constant focus on email or IM communications means that people are constantly trying to multitask and have divided attention spans. In the first part of the book, Cal presents the evidence of how Email reduces productivity, makes us miserable and has a mind of it's own.
The second part of the book focuses on the principles to allow for solutions for this. It also has case studies of organisations where they have adopted these principles and dramatically reduced the need and use of email. The four principles covered are the Attention Capital Principle, The Process Principle, the Protocol Principle and Specialization Principle.
The book has an academic style of writing which you will be used to if you have read Cal's other books and I think it really helps do a great job of painting the picture of how email communication became the problem it is now, how it impacts as and what we can do about it. The solutions aspects of the book aren't revolutionary but combined with the case studies and examples of what can be done, they provide a great framework for a change of attitude towards email and what can be done to actually improve productivity in the workplace.
If you are an employee you may not have as much influence in some of the solutions but you may be able to influence those you work with to understand the detrimental effect of email and other solutions including the use of collaborative software. Organisation leaders and owners could really get inspired with what is possible without email to start bringing in changes to how they work. It is not an easy change but one that is desperately needed. I urge you to read this book, also read Deep Work if you haven't and listen to Cal Newport's podcast - Deep Questions which are a great resource to help to adopt this mindset. I will continue to revisit these three resources and play my part in my workplace setting. We can collectively start to make things better. Let's not give in to the norm of the Hyperactive Hive Mind and create changes to support us to work in a more productive and focused manner.
Chiraag
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 14, 2021
I have been in jobs where the rate of email and the expectation of quick responses has meant that I am constantly checking emails and reacting to requests. From the start of day, till the end of the week, all the attention and work is around email. The issue with this is you are constantly in reactive mode, spend more time on reading and responding to emails than actual work on tasks. This is what Cal refers to as the Hyperactive Hive Mind.
If you have read Deep Work then you will appreciate how important focused time is to produce high quality output and workplaces today with their constant focus on email or IM communications means that people are constantly trying to multitask and have divided attention spans. In the first part of the book, Cal presents the evidence of how Email reduces productivity, makes us miserable and has a mind of it's own.
The second part of the book focuses on the principles to allow for solutions for this. It also has case studies of organisations where they have adopted these principles and dramatically reduced the need and use of email. The four principles covered are the Attention Capital Principle, The Process Principle, the Protocol Principle and Specialization Principle.
The book has an academic style of writing which you will be used to if you have read Cal's other books and I think it really helps do a great job of painting the picture of how email communication became the problem it is now, how it impacts as and what we can do about it. The solutions aspects of the book aren't revolutionary but combined with the case studies and examples of what can be done, they provide a great framework for a change of attitude towards email and what can be done to actually improve productivity in the workplace.
If you are an employee you may not have as much influence in some of the solutions but you may be able to influence those you work with to understand the detrimental effect of email and other solutions including the use of collaborative software. Organisation leaders and owners could really get inspired with what is possible without email to start bringing in changes to how they work. It is not an easy change but one that is desperately needed. I urge you to read this book, also read Deep Work if you haven't and listen to Cal Newport's podcast - Deep Questions which are a great resource to help to adopt this mindset. I will continue to revisit these three resources and play my part in my workplace setting. We can collectively start to make things better. Let's not give in to the norm of the Hyperactive Hive Mind and create changes to support us to work in a more productive and focused manner.
Images in this review