How email destroyed our productivity at work | Cal Newport and Lex Fridman

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GUEST BIO:
Cal Newport is a computer scientist who also writes about productivity.

PODCAST INFO:

SOCIAL:

[brwler]

i graduated recently and and got a job at a well known pharma consulting firm. I can confirm the time devoted to emails and PowerPoints is ridiculously high.

[m.a.robbins]

When it first came out it was expected to be used like real email. In other words, you'd check your email once or twice a day and weren't expected to respond immediately. Imagine trying to get away with that today.

[Psnym]

The only way to make it worse is to use Slack

[maxmustermann]

Internet Relay Chat has provided all of this ever since, but we keep reinventing it all over again.

[BunChan]

If one actually needs to pay cold hard cash for a "digital stamp", I wonder at what cost would people not email sh*t.

[antropatico]

this is how I write effective concise and clear emails: divide your email into three parts.
1. context 2. issue 3. request.
Hi john,

[1] last week I received the invoice for XXX. [2] I am not sure if the products were delivered. [3] can you check with the warehouse, please?

this can be escalated to formal more complex communications or even text messages with your friends.

[edwardlewis]

you are young so you only see a small part in hindsight;
for example; somewhere in that period - in the nineties, more and more people basically self learned to type.
(oh, I should probably note: "type" means basically pressing keys on a computer keyboard ! )

before the internet, typing was something some people - like secretaries - would do, and it would be done at work.
as internet spread, with people getting home computers, more and more people started typing; typing became like walking.

[nikfish]

email gets in the way of my procrustenation

[Ilusionist_loopy]

emails like talking telepathically through a machine, isn't email better than your best dream?

[miraculixxs]

I have essentiay stopped reading and responding to email. Period

[KeyserSoseRulz]

Once again, the bandwidth bottleneck is the human. We created incredibly powerful comm systems while people can only input a few bites per second into the system. With email, there is so much we can even read at any decent rate, let alone respond to.

[petervandenengel]

E mail was mostly used for tail covering leading to a lot of bureaucracy and the inability (fear) to delegate. To call it the hive mind sounds like a (utopian) misinterpretation of what was going on in reality. Anyway it's a good tool for revealing one's psychology.

[nutday]

* imap. When you were in control of your POP it was OK

[thorvald]

Slack is honestly not that bad. I use it in my workplace and it remedies a lot of the core issues with email.

[daviherculano]

I wish we communicated using verbosity levels

[adelinaquijano]

sometimes different vedio I watch 2times because can't understand.