A World Without Email: Find Focus and Transform the Way You Work Forever (from the NYT bestselling productivity expert)

by Cal Newport

In 1936, Charlie Chaplin satirized this grim reality with his landmark film Modern Times, which features his Little Tramp character trying to keep up with an assembly line that runs faster and faster. Wielding two large wrenches, Chaplin turns bolts on each item that passes. As the foreman increases the line’s speed, Chaplin’s actions become more frantic, leading him to eventually leap onto the conveyor belt in a vain last attempt to keep up with the items whizzing past. He’s whisked away through a chute and ends up ground among the plant’s oversized gears. Chaplin made the film soon after visiting one of Henry Ford’s factories.17 This general understanding that assembly line work is dehumanizing was what prompted my relative’s negative reaction. He was imagining a future of knowledge work in which we end up in a digital-era reboot of Modern Times, with the frantic wrenching now replaced with frantic typing, and the sequence still ending with us mashed by the proverbial machinery of productivity.