A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

by Cal Newport

we should in general be more aggressive in identifying work that can be delegated.

Outsource what you can so you can excel at what you can’t.

to gain something valuable like autonomy means you have to offer something unambiguously valuable in return.

If two dozen other units and committees all make these same reasonable requests, suddenly we’re desperately overwhelmed by work that has little to do with our main objectives of research and teaching—a recipe not just for inefficiency, but outright frustration.

the sum total of many such “simple” requests leads you to become constantly overwhelmed by everything that has to get done.

There are three keys for a strategy of this type to work. First, it must start from the premise that your time and attention are limited. Second, it must quantify how much of your time and attention is currently dedicated to whatever category of work you’re attempting to budget. And third, whoever is responsible for determining how much work of this type you have to do must confront your current commitments when asking you to do more, even if this person is you.

The task boards discussed in the process principle chapter also provide a powerful tool for implementing workload budgets. Using a task board to organize work offers two benefits in this context: it makes it easy to determine how much work each person is currently doing, and it has a structured system for how these work assignments are updated, usually in the form of a status meeting attended by everyone.

This latter point is critical, as it leads to inequities that are often overlooked.

15 In both field and laboratory studies, the researchers found that women are more likely to volunteer for “non-promotable” service tasks than men.

“This can have serious consequences for women,” the researchers note. “If they are disproportionately saddled with work that has little visibility or impact, it will take them much longer to advance in their careers.”

Most modern knowledge work organizations treat individuals as general-purpose computers that execute a turbulent mixture of value-producing and administrative tasks—often unequally distributed, and not at all optimized for any particular big picture objective.

processes should offer clarity about each step.

to effectively fulfill their administrative duties with as small an impact as possible on the specialists’ main work obligations.

to partition your time into two separate categories: specialist and support.

Email isn’t additive; it’s ecological. The office of 2021 is not the office of 1991 plus some extra capabilities; it’s instead a different office altogether—one

“Knowledge worker productivity is the moonshot of the twenty-first century.”