A World Without Email

A World Without Email crystallizes what so many of us feel intuitively but haven’t been able to explain: the way we’re working isn’t working. Cal Newport charts a path back to sanity, offering a variety of road-tested practices to help us escape the tyranny of our inboxes and achieve a calmer, more intentional, and more productive working life.”
--Drew Houston, cofounder and CEO of Dropbox

“The future of work demands new tools of collaboration. Cal Newport is on a quest to uncover better ways for knowledge workers to collaborate. Out of this will come the new work space.”
--Kevin Kelly, senior maverick for Wired

“This new work from Cal Newport goes beyond hacking at the branches of the email problem and strikes right at the root of it. This is a bold, visionary, almost prophetic book that challenges the status quo. If you want to peer into what the future of work could look like, read this book now.”
--Greg McKeown, New York Times bestselling author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

“When a Cal Newport book appears, I drop everything and read. With evidence and examples from the cutting edge of programming to the factory floors of a century ago, Newport makes a compelling argument that we can and will do much, much better than email. Read this superb book. It might just change your life; it’s changing mine.”
--Tim Harford, author of The Data Detective

“This book is a call to action. Newport suggests that now is the time to reimagine work with the specific goal of optimizing our brain’s ability to sustainably add value. Don’t let your teams and organizations lose out any further—read this book to help you get started.”
--Leslie A. Perlow, author of Sleeping with Your Smartphone and professor of leadership at Harvard Business School

"This book defines the scale of a problem too few of us knew existed...it’s a profound insight."
--The Financial Times

"Ford studied how to improve productivity and organize the factory floor. Now, Newport is doing the same for knowledge work."
--Fortune

"A surprisingly zippy history of email that notes how suddenly email changed the way workers worked…This book has smart recommendations for individuals and organizations."
--Laura Vanderkam for the Wall Street Journal

"Newport’s systems-oriented approach is far more promising than the standard personal productivity fare. His ideas are meant to stop the flood altogether."
--GQ

"For knowledge workers in any organization, this analysis and recommendations will resonate."
--Forbes

"This book is a step forward...Newport makes the radical argument that companies that obsess about efficiency are utterly failing to question their own workflows. They are making their products worse, and they are just contributing to an overall degradation of society. It’s a pretty stunning indictment."
--Ezra Klein for the Ezra Klein Show

"This book provides a lens through which we can better examine what many of us sense is a somewhat maddening way to work…here’s to hoping your boss picks up a copy."
--GQ


About the Author
Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he specializes in the theory of distributed systems, as well as a New York Times bestselling author who writes for a broader audience about the intersection of technology and culture. He's the author of seven books, including Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, which have been published in over thirty languages. He's also a regular contributor on these topics to national publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Wired, and is a frequent guest on NPR. His blog, Study Hacks, which he's been publishing since 2007, attracts over three million visits a year. He lives with his wife and three sons in Takoma Park, Maryland.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction

The Hyperactive Hive Mind

In late 2010, Nish Acharya arrived in Washington, DC, ready to work. President Barack Obama had appointed Nish to be his director of innovation and entrepreneurship and a senior adviser to the secretary of commerce. Nish was asked to coordinate with twenty-six different federal agencies and over five hundred universities to dispense $100 million in funding, meaning that he was about to become the prototypical DC power player: smartphone always in hand, messages flying back and forth at all hours. But then the network broke.

On a Tuesday morning, just a couple of months into his new role, Nish received an email from his CTO explaining that they had to temporarily shut down their office’s network due to a computer virus. “We all expected that this would be fixed in a couple of days,” Nish told me when I later interviewed him about the incident. But this prediction proved wildly optimistic. The following week, an undersecretary of commerce convened a meeting. She explained that they suspected the virus infecting their network came from a foreign power, and that Homeland Security was recommending that the network stay down while they traced the attack. Just to be safe, they were also going to destroy all the computers, laptops, printers—anything with a chip—in the office.

One of the biggest impacts of this network shutdown was that the office lost the ability to send or receive emails. For security purposes, it was illegal for them to use personal email addresses to perform their government work, and bureaucratic hurdles kept them from setting up temporary accounts using other agencies’ networks. Nish and his team were effectively cut off from the frenetic ping-pong of digital chatter that defines most high-level work within the federal government. The blackout lasted six weeks. With a touch of gallows humor, they took to calling the fateful day when it all began “Dark Tuesday.”

Not surprisingly, the sudden and unexpected loss of email made certain parts of Nish’s work “quite hellish.” Because the rest of the government continued to rely heavily on this tool, he often worried about missing important meetings or requests. “There was an existing information pipeline,” he explained, “and I was out of the loop.” Another hardship was logistics. Nish’s job required him to set up many meetings, and this task was made substantially more annoying without the ability to coordinate over email.

Perhaps less expected, however, was that Nish’s work didn’t grind to a halt during these six weeks. He instead began to notice that he was actually getting better at his job. Lacking the ability to simply send a quick email when he had a question, he took to leaving his office to meet with people in person. Because these appointments were a pain to arrange, he scheduled longer blocks of time, allowing him to really get to know the people he was meeting and understand the nuances of their issues. As Nish explained, these extended sessions proved “very valuable” for a new political appointee trying to learn the subtle dynamics of the federal government.

The lack of an inbox to check between these meetings opened up cognitive downtime—what Nish took to calling “whitespace”—to dive more deeply into the research literature and legislation relevant to the topics handled by his office. This slower and more thoughtful approach to thinking yielded a pair of breakthrough ideas that ended up setting the agenda for Nish’s agency for the entire year that followed. “In the Washington politic environment, no one gives themselves that space,” he told me. “It’s all neurotic lo