Reimagining work in the age of overload — by Cal Newport
Link to Book: A World Without Email →
Summary of the Book: here →
<aside> 🧭 This page presents some notes and highlights from the book "A World Without Email". You can find a summary of the book at the link above.
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**Simone Smerilli | Newsletter**
Constant communication is not something that gets in the way of real work; it has instead become intertwined in how this work actually gets done.
<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/7b7aa77a-ef2a-4b8c-95e6-fdfe7dfd5440/Hive_Icon.svg" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/7b7aa77a-ef2a-4b8c-95e6-fdfe7dfd5440/Hive_Icon.svg" width="40px" /> 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.
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Our belief that frenetic communication is somehow synonymous with work is largely backfilled narrative we tell ourselves to make sense of sudden changes driven by complex dynamics.
The world without email is 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.
Email might have made certain specific actions much more efficient, but as the science will make clear, the hyperactive hive mind workflow this technology enabled has been a disaster for overall productivity.
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.
**"Every time you switch your attention from one task to another, you are basically asking your brain to switch all of these cognitive resources"**
Why is it so hard to do our work? Because our brains were never designed to maintain parallel tracks of attention (attention switching cost).