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

by Cal Newport

Maybe Tuesday from four to six is when you write up your lab reports for BIO 101, and you tackle your statistics problem sets in the free blocks between classes you have on Mondays and Wednesdays from ten thirty to eleven thirty, and so on. I then recommended detailing how this work gets done during these set times, including where on campus you go to work, as well as any methods or materials you regularly use. The key was to reduce cognitive energy wasted on planning or decision making, allowing the student to focus simply on execution. This advice often proved revelatory for the students. Whereas they used to wander through their week, always guilty that they were behind, driven by impending deadlines into all-nighters, they could now confidently execute their automated schedule, secure in their knowledge that what needed to get done would get done, week after week. The reduced overhead and cognitive toll made the same amount of work suddenly seem to require a lot less energy.