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

by Cal Newport

To deliver the great promise of the attention capital principle, we must stand on Drucker’s shoulders and push these theories toward their next evolution in complexity. Differentiating workflows and work execution is crucial if we’re going to continue to improve knowledge sector productivity.

seek workflows that (1) minimize mid-task context switches and (2) minimize the sense of communication overload.

Always keeping emails short is a simple rule, but the effects can be profound. Once you no longer think of email as a general-purpose tool for talking about anything at any time, its stranglehold on your attention will diminish.

Knowledge workers with highly trained skills, and the ability to produce high-value output with their brains, spend much of their time wrangling with computer systems, scheduling meetings, filling out forms, fighting with word processors, struggling with PowerPoint, and of course, above all, sending and receiving digital messages from everyone about everything at all times. We think we’ve advanced because we no longer need secretaries or typing pools, but we don’t factor in how much less bottom-line-boosting work we actually accomplish.

When you allow specialists to work with more focus, they produce more, and this extra value can more than compensate for the cost of maintaining dedicated support.