Cal Newport

Outlines recommendations for business leaders on how to maximize a working team's professional productivity by improving administrative support and streamlining digital traffic.

Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

A World Without Email

Sephyrc 

design principle for developing approaches to work that provide better returns from your personal or organizational attention capital: seek workflows that (1) minimize mid-task context switches and (2) minimize the sense of communication overload. 

From the bestselling author of Digital Minimalism comes a radical vision of a world without email - a world with increased creativity, productivity and collaboration You start the day checking your inbox, spend hours fruitlessly triaging the onslaught of requests and information, then when 5:30pm rolls around you realise with crushing stress that you haven't even got to the most important items on your to-do list yet. Sound familiar? Constant communication has become part of the way we work and we check our bursting inboxes on average every 5.4 minutes. But at what expense? In A World Without Email, bestselling author Cal Newport argues that this steady flow of distractions disrupts us from achieving any meaningful work, causes us undue stress and is costing businesses millions in the form of untapped potential. Newport shows us how to completely reimagine and redesign our work without the constant pings of emails distracting us. Drawing on a fascinating array of case studies and offering practical solutions, this radical book shows us how dramatically reducing email will liberate people to do their most profound, fulfilling and creative work - and much more of it too.

Rina

Pavlos Nicolaou

Duality Diva

could be useful for an outsider but am interested as to whether anyone currently entrenched in corporate America found value/was even interested in this.. also dependent on your “team” per usual

Julien Sobczak

"There is a massive potential productivity currently latent in the knowledge sector," declares Cal Newport, "[…] The right answer is unlikely to involve checking email [and instant messaging applications] once every six minutes."

The author resumes where "Deep Work" stopped. If staying focused during long hours seems appealing but not directly applicable to your job, this new book will convince you that you are surely wrong; and that there is still hope to make work productive, and enjoyable, again.

"A World Without Email" is not perfect. I find the first part (the "why") more persuasive than the second (the "how"). The book doesn't reasonably contain all the answers. But it has the potential to ignite change. We need to reinvent a culture where ignoring Slack doesn't mean that you are slacking off. A culture where technology will be used to produce work, and not make us busy. A culture where we end every day with the satisfaction of a productive day, and stop feeling depressed by having more and more work to complete.

"A world without email is not a step backward but a step forward into an exciting technological future we're only just beginning to understand." There are more and more knowledge workers. Maybe it's time to unleash our true potential.

Keven Wang

I enjoyed his comparison between physical work and knowledge work. Some chapters can be shorter though

Pranav

First half of the book, pages is a bunch of interesting case studies and a description of the problems with email. The author also quotes from academic papers and research, given his background as a Professor. The basic problem is that we tend to keep checking mail throughout the day, which keeps us distracted from actual deep work. 
Interesting quotes:
“Those who retained access to Marshall were provided a clear structure for their interactions, turning briefing the general into an exercise in controlled efficiency. You were instructed to enter his office and sit down without saluting (to save time). At Marshall’s signal, you would begin your brief while he listened with “absolute concentration.” If he discovered a flaw or something missing, he would become angry that you hadn’t noticed and resolved the issue before wasting his time. When you finished, he’d ask for your recommendation, deliberate briefly, then make a decision. He then delegated taking action on the decision back to you.” – a model for manager-employee communication.
Try reducing your actual working hours from the existing ones to maybe 2 hours lesser, and see how you are able to finish your work in the reduced time. It will make you prioritise better and also prevent you from stretching your work just to fill up the timeclock. It will also reduce context switching, and thus overload.
“If people trust you to handle the work they send your way, then they’re generally fine with not hearing back from you right away. On the other hand, if you’re flaky, others will demand faster responses, as they’ll feel they have to stay on you to ensure things get done.”
“He notes that without this structure, you’re left with only one option for increasing productivity: figuring out how to get people to “work faster.” Once you see the whole process, however, a much more powerful option emerges: “We can change the nature of the work performed.” Optimize processes, he urged, not people.”
“An email arrives that informally represents a new responsibility for you to manage; because there’s no formal process in place to assign the work or track its progress, you seek instead the easiest way to get the responsibility off your plate—even if just temporarily—so you send a quick reply asking for an ambiguous clarification. Thus unfolds a game of obligation hot potato, as messages bounce around, each temporarily shifting responsibility from one inbox to another, until a deadline or irate boss finally stops the music, leading to a last-minute scramble to churn out a barely acceptable result.”
“As Johnson explained, the manager in question has a schedule that begins every day with three hours of uninterrupted deep work before he receives “even a single input.” This is time set aside for the manager to think intensely about his projects—making informed decisions on how to go forward, where to focus next, what to improve, and what to ignore. Only after this morning block ends does the manager turn his attention to actively managing the projects he runs.”
“Every employee of Optimize is expected to spend at least the first ninety minutes of every day in a deep work block, free from inputs (some people, like the manager profiled above, spend much more). One of the key uses of this morning block is to think about processes and how to improve them.”

The Protocols part of the book is extremely insightful, and has plug-and-play principles which can be applied. 
On the whole, this book will have its biggest impact on you if you know Newport’s style of writing, and have read his previous books, especially Deep Work.

Marcel

It's a good book. I'm just not part of the "hyperactive hive mind" Newport is trying to fix. If email and Slack are a huge part of your day, this will be the right book for you. Seriously.

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

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