What if time blocks, email-free Thursdays, and turning off notifications is not enough? What if we need to totally re-imagine how we work to reclaim our productivity?
This is the question that Cal Newport, of Deep Work and So Good They Can't Ignore You fame, tries to answer in A World Without Email.
He argues that email and Slack have not only made communication fast and frictionless β they have also introduced some quite horrible side effects like growing anxiety, frustration, and loss of productivity among knowledge workers.
He calls it The Hyperactive Hive Mind: workplaces that let the email inbox dictate priorities. You jump between random tasks and get stuck in never-ending email threads that seem to go nowhere.
A lot of things play into the feeling of dissatisfaction, frustration, and guilt:
"I've just opened my email and there's nothing out of the ordinary there. It's the usual daily flood of schedule, project, travel, information and junk mail. Then I noticeβ¦ I'm holding my breath." β Linda Stone
π₯ Implemented Personal Work Board: Started experimenting with focusing on certain work on certain days to reduce the draining effect of switching between tasks of unrelated nature.
The book is new, but feels a bit dated β I mean, who is organizing task management through email these days?! Or maybe I'm just working at a company that is ahead of the curve. I have been using Agile frameworks like Kanban and Scrum for a decade, which is what the book suggests as an antidote to email chaos.
That being said, I'm implementing a few ideas from this book and it feels like they might revolutionize the way I'm working!
If you're still heavily reliant on email for your daily work, then definitely check out this book! π