# A World Without Email

## Metadata
- Author: [[Cal Newport]]
- Full Title: A World Without Email
- Category: #books
## Highlights
- The Hyperactive Hive Mind A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services. ([Location 139](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKSJX1M&location=139))
- This constant interaction with the hive mind, however, requires that you frequently switch your attention from your work to talking about work, and then back again. As I’ll detail, pioneering research in psychology and neuroscience reveals that these context switches, even if brief, induce a heavy cost in terms of mental energy—reducing cognitive performance and creating a sense of exhaustion and reduced efficacy. ([Location 153](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKSJX1M&location=153))
- As I’ll show, driven by the ideas of the immensely influential business thinker Peter Drucker, we tend to think of knowledge workers as autonomous black boxes—ignoring the details of how they get their work done and focusing instead on providing them with clear objectives and motivational leadership. This is a mistake. ([Location 173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKSJX1M&location=173))
- The world without email referenced in the title of this book, therefore, is not a place in which protocols like SMTP and POP3 are banished. It is, however, a place where you spend most of your day actually working on hard things instead of talking about this work, or endlessly bouncing small tasks back and forth in messages. ([Location 186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKSJX1M&location=186))
- This book, therefore, should not be understood as reactionary or anti-technology. To the contrary, its message is profoundly future-oriented. It recognizes that if we want to extract the full potential of digital networks in professional settings, we must continually and aggressively try to optimize how we use them. ([Location 202](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKSJX1M&location=202))
- When email arrived in the modern workplace, people no longer needed to sit in the same room as their colleagues to discuss their work, as they could now simply trade electronic messages when convenient. Because email counts as “desk work” in these studies, we see time spent on desk work grow as time spent in scheduled meetings falls. Unlike scheduled meetings, however, conversations held through email unfold asynchronously—there’s usually a gap between when a message is sent and ultimately read—meaning that the compacted interactions that once defined synchronous meetings are now spread out into a shattered rhythm of quick checks of inboxes throughout the day. ([Location 292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKSJX1M&location=292))
- It’s no longer accurate to think of communication tools as occasionally interrupting work; the more realistic model is one in which knowledge workers essentially partition their attention into two parallel tracks: one executing work tasks and the other managing an always-present, ongoing, and overloaded electronic conversation about these tasks. ([Location 365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKSJX1M&location=365))
- Why is it so hard to do our work? Because our brains were never designed to maintain parallel tracks of attention. ([Location 442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKSJX1M&location=442))
- Perhaps Marshall’s most striking habit was his insistence on leaving the office each day at 5:30 p.m. In an age before cell phones and email, Marshall didn’t put in a second shift late into the night once he got home. Having experienced burnout earlier in his career, he felt it was important to relax in the evening. “A man who worked himself to tatters on minor details had no ability to handle the more vital issues of war,” he once said. ([Location 500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKSJX1M&location=500))