Nicholas Sonnenberg

“Constant communication is not something that gets in the way of real work; it has instead become totally intertwined in how this work actually gets done—preventing easy efforts to reduce distractions through better habits or short-lived management stunts like email-free Fridays. Real improvement, it became clear, would require fundamental change to how we organize our professional efforts. It also became clear that these changes can’t come too soon: whereas email overload emerged as a fashionable annoyance in the early 2000s, it has recently advanced into a much more serious problem, reaching a saturation point for many in which their actual productive output gets squeezed into the early morning, or evenings and weekends, while their workdays devolve into Sisyphean battles against their inboxes—a uniquely misery-inducing approach to getting things done.”
― Cal Newport, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

“As email spread through the professional world in the 1980s and 1990s it introduced something novel: low-friction communication at scale. With this new tool, the cost in terms of time and social capital to communicate with anyone related to your job plummeted from significant to almost nothing. As the writer Chris Anderson notes in his 2009 book, Free, the dynamics of reducing a cost to zero can be “deeply mysterious,”
― Cal Newport, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

“While the ability to rapidly communicate using digital messages is useful, the frequent disruptions created by this behavior also make it hard to focus, which has a bigger impact on our ability to produce valuable output than we may have realized.”
― Cal Newport, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

“A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services. The hyperactive hive mind workflow has become ubiquitous in the knowledge sector.”
― Cal Newport, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload