A World Without Email
Quotes
"You should do 30x the amount of time training someone to do a task than it would take you to do the task yourself one time." - Rory Vaden
"Become known as someone who never drops the ball, not someone who thinks a lot about their own productivity. If a request comes your way, be it in an email or hallway chat, make sure it's handled. Don't let things fall through the cracks, and if you commit to doing something by a certain time, hit the deadline, or explain why you need to shift it."
"[email overload] 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.
Paradigm Shift
This may seem an odd book and an odd subject, but with how ubiquitous asynchronous communication is, and how obnoxious it can be when paired to high-stress/pressure knowledge work, Cal Newport's analysis is very welcome. I very often think about a concept he presents in this book around the "Jacob's ladder" of email. The mental model borrows from the exercise equipment called a "Jacob's ladder", which is essentially a stair stepper in ladder form. The higher you get on the ladder, the faster it cycles through the rungs. This is similar to asynchronous communication, where every email you send out is, most likely, another response you will need to address in the future. As such, the more email (or messages) you send, the more work you're making for yourself in the future.
I had a manager once that would spend many late hours firing off tons of messages in all sorts of platforms. It wouldn't be uncommon for me to come to work the next morning with multiple emails, 8 slack messages (all in different threads), and 10 comments in a document, all from the same manager. Not only were they redundant (many had the exact same comments, only in different threads), but they were largely unnecessary. When responding to these queries, I kept wondering about how it probably felt productive to create all those threads and chains (some might call it "productivity theater", however), but how keeping the "jacob's ladder" in mind might have pushed the manager to a different approach, thus saving them the need to attend to every new chain they started (maybe asking me the question once when I was online?).
I love how Cal Newport has spent so much time thinking through how to "knowledge work" effectively. His productivity philosophy resonates deeply with me, so I appreciate his tackling problems that may seem mundane at first but affect all of us deeply due to their relevance. We all are mired neck-deep in asynchronous communication, and A World Without Email provides solutions.