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

by Cal Newport

maintain a separate board for every major role in your professional life.

I added a column to my DGS task board labeled to discuss at next meeting. Whenever a task arises that requires input from one of these individuals, I sidestep my instinct to shoot them a quick email by instead moving the task to the appropriate to discuss column.

but the reality is that the energy and attention saved from administrative wrangling can be invested into activities that actually improve the quality of the class, like polishing lectures or answering student questions. This advantage is true of most automatic processes: eliminating unnecessary coordination does not just reduce frustration, but also increases resources to invest in the activities that really matter.

Take the time to build the protocol that has the best average cost, even if it’s not the most natural option in the moment, as the long-term performance gains can be substantial.

The Protocol Principle Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.

The Specialization Principle In the knowledge sector, working on fewer things, but doing each thing with more quality and accountability, can be the foundation for significantly more productivity.

In rarefied pursuits like professional writing, the importance of doing fewer minor things so you can do the main things better makes a lot of sense. We like to imagine our novelists cloistered in sheds, toiling in undisrupted concentration, oblivious to the distractions of the world. But we also assume that this lifestyle doesn’t generalize to the less romanticized setting of standard office work. The specialization principle argues it should.

Once you start looking for opportunities to off-load nonessential tasks, you’ll be surprised by how many you find.

If you’re self-employed, you must clearly explain to your clients that your work is fundamentally bimodal, and during the sprint modes, you cannot be reached.

Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. . . . A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe.

Once you accept that the primary capital resource in knowledge work is the human brains you employ (or, more accurately, these brains’ capacity to focus on information and produce new information that’s more valuable), then basic capitalist economics take over and make it obvious that success depends on the details of how you deploy this capital.

The Luddites in this current moment are those who nostalgically cling to the hyperactive hive mind, claiming that there’s no need to keep striving to improve how we work in an increasingly high-tech world.