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

by Cal Newport

As Devesh explained to me, his company’s efforts now revolve around Trello. If you’re assigned to a project, all of your work, including discussion, delegation, and relevant files, is coordinated on its corresponding board—not in email messages, not in Slack chats. When you decide to work on a project, you navigate to its board and work with the cards. As project steps are completed, cards can be moved from backlog to the active columns. As new ideas come up or clients send extra requests, they can be added to the research & notes column. When questions arise or work needs to be delegated, these notes are appended to the discussion on the back of the relevant card, where everyone involved in the project can see them. Before these changes, each employee’s workday was driven by their inbox. They would open it up when they started work in the morning, then answer messages until quitting time. In the new Trello-based workflow, each employee’s effort is now driven by project boards, which they rotate through during the day.