This is my summary of "A World Without Email" by Cal Newport.

TL;DR - Email as a workflow has taken over work execution and in doing so impacts productivity while making us miserable. The solution is to re-focus our attention on work execution and establish principles for better workflows.

The book is divided into two Parts:

Part 1 has 3 sections that outlines the problem

1. Email Reduces Productivity

2. Email Makes Us Miserable

3. Email Has a Mind of Its Own

Part 2 has 4 sections that describe key principles for a solution

4. The Attention Capital Principle

5. The Process Principle

6. The Protocol Principle

7. The Specialization Principle

The big take-away in this for me was "Differentiating workflows and work execution is crucial if we're going to continue to improve knowledge sector productivity."

In breaking down the problem, Newport does a good job of walking through the history of email, where it came from, and why. He leads to the ultimate issue: "Our brains do not parallel process information" (A quote from the book "The Distracted Mind" by Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen). Note: Slack is not a solution to this, but rather an accelerated version of the problem.

The four principles to drive a solution are presented as follows

4. The productivity of the knowledge sector can be significantly increased if we identify workflows that better optimize the human brain's ability to sustainably add value to information."

5. Introducing smart production processes to knowledge work can dramatically increase performance and make the work much less draining.

6. Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.

7. In the knowledge sector, working on fewer things, but doing each thing with more quality and accountability, can be the foundation for significantly more productivity.

I am a fan of Cal Newport, and read much of what he writes. I think this book does a great job at adding depth to the summary above, and I'd, again, recommend everyone read this book.

My take-aways:

I do use email as work execution (i.e. when I'm on it, I inaccurately feel I'm being very productive). I am working on consciously not checking email, and rather batching that time in one chunk throughout my day. Obviously Slack makes this less impactful. I also am working on batching by time there (smaller chunks, a bit more frequently). This is still an area of growth for me.

I am executing on the "Attention Capital Principle." I chose Todoist to start managing work and projects with my team (shoutout to Andrew Lloyd and Emily Garza). I am using that so we can communicate more asynchronously and focus on working in blocks with focus. Short term, it's helped me do better work. Long-term TBD.

This is all still fresh for me as well, so I've got much more work to do.

Hope this is of some help, and again...get the book. I'd love to hear your thoughts and solutions as well.