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

by Cal Newport

“Slack is just a string of messages. It invites people to post almost without limitations,” wrote an executive coach named Mark. “It’s awful.”

a dedication to responsiveness will likely degrade your ability to make smart decisions and plan for future challenges

The real surprise in all this was the fact that until the engineer forced the issue, no one had ever stopped to wonder about whether the way they were working was actually working.

moving away from the hive mind workflow isn’t about tweaking productivity habits, but instead about significant boosts to effectiveness. When these advantages are made clear, it becomes harder to justify their loss simply for the added convenience of responsiveness.

“The longer one spends on email in [a given] hour the higher is one’s stress for that hour.”

the way we work today is much more arbitrary than we realize.

So who ultimately decided that everyone should instead start interacting five to six times more than normal? To some who study this question closely, the answer is radical: it was the technology itself.

Soon every other major platform introduced similar approval indicator streams—favorites, retweets, auto-tagging photos, streaks—as part of a technological contest played out on the field of what became known as attention engineering, a battle that left in its wake a small number of massively powerful technology platform monopolies and a weary populace exhausted by a life increasingly dominated by handheld glowing screens.

the general idea that increasing the size of a team doesn’t necessarily increase its effectiveness in direct proportion.

At the moment, most organizations remain stuck in the productivity quicksand of the hyperactive hive mind workflow, content to focus on tweaks meant to compensate for its worst excesses. It’s this mindset that leads to “solutions” like improving expectations around email response times or writing better subject lines. It leads us to embrace text autocomplete in Gmail, so we can write messages faster, or the search feature in Slack, so we can more quickly find what we’re looking for amid the scrum of back-and-forth chatter. These are the knowledge work equivalents of speeding up the craft method of car manufacturing by giving the workers faster shoes. It’s a small victory won in the wrong war.

The key is to find ways to minimize context shifts and overload

“Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential,”

The agile mindset argues that software development should be broken down into smaller chunks that can be released into the wild as quickly as possible. As users provide feedback, the information can be quickly integrated into future updates—creating a fluid feedback cycle that evolves useful software instead of trying to build it perfectly all at once before releasing.