A World Without Email #shorts

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This would never happen.

Cal wants to permanently delete email. He attacks the instantaneous email system as a distraction from focused work, a callback to his earlier book “Deep Work”.

“Deep Work” was clearly written despite its faulty premise. Cal has the gift of weaving stories to support a flimsy thesis. He would be an engaging fiction writer.

Instead of the ease of email, Cal proposes pseudo solutions that burden the user, like creating an internal work board so everyone can see how the project is progressing, weekly review meetings to catch any missed issues, and dedicated office hours to discuss concerns in person even though users preferred not to have more meetings and found it hard to coordinate meetings from different time zones.

This isn’t a new idea. Cal cited another improbable book, Tim Ferris’s “The 4-Hour Workweek” that limited when you answer emails in the day. Cal doesn’t know why it failed. But understanding this failure is what’s lacking in Cal’s book. He seeks to isolate email as a tool from the overall context of life and work. But real life is interconnected.

Cal is now a professor and his wordy writing shows it. He could have shortened this to 200 pages or less. Instead, he cites various sources from all over and uses obscure chapter titles. Cal has succumbed to the sickness of academia to sound smarter.

Even Cal admits that he’s “an academic, not a business expert.” Exactly. And that’s the problem. Academics cannot cite research to solve business problems in real life. Not everything that looks good on paper is practical. There is no singular solution that applies to every situation.

In his introduction, Cal cannot deny that “part of email’s appeal was that this one easy tool could be applied to almost every type of knowledge work—a much smaller learning curve than needing to separate bespoke digital system for each type of work. Unstructured conversation is also an effective method for identifying unexpected challenges and quickly coordinating responses.”

That’s a damning anti-thesis that this book cannot overcome.

@IvyDigest

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A World Without Email—Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload
By Cal Newport
Hardcover, 297 pages, 2021.
Portfolio/Penguin

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Hello bookworm.

I’m a lawyer turned columnist and book critic.
My MISSION is to find the best books and ban bad boring books.
I want to share the fun of reading.

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