Cal keeps hitting home runs (the obligatory baseball reference if for you fellow podcast listeners out there). This one might be better than deep work. If you really want to get the most out of this ,read it together with The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt, and anything by Jarod Lanier. I devoured this whole book almost in a single sitting.

Could’ve been an article.

Don’t let the title throw you off. This is a good and practical book about how those who do thought work can set up effective workflow systems to maximize the use of time and productivity of work.

The author has one main idea, “the hyperactive hive mind,“ and just kind of beats it back-and-forth like some sort of coked out squash player. Is it possible that email does exactly what we want it to do? in that it makes us seem and feel busy when in reality we accomplish little. It seems more likely to me that engaging in email as noticeable task is actually optimal in many organizations we have today. I can’t help but visualize this book as a wonderful representation of the parable of the bli...

I hate to say it because I know people have found book incredibly insightful, but it bored me to sleep at points. It could easily have been half as long. I don't know if I just have been lucky enough to never be in the dysfunctional work environments described, or if I was just already aware of most of the productivity tools Newport discusses, but I don't think I was the intended audience. The most interesting parts to me were the history behind email and why we use it the way we do, which I fou...

I was surprised to enjoy this book so much, because I actually like email a lot. Certainly, I much prefer it to instant messaging or text messages.The thing is, the title of this book is really misleading. It is not actually about email. Instead, it is about a dysfunctional process (or an absence of process) in the modern workplace, and how email has helped cultivate it and continues to enable it.Cal Newport uses the term The Hyperactive Hive Mind to describe this. What it means is that instead

In “A World Without Email,” Cal Newport provides a fascinating history of email and how it changed the way organizations worked. He calls the corporate environment as a "hyperactive hive mind" which keeps switching from one task to another briskly. And the most important one seems to be is responding to one's emails. According to him, email makes us miserable. He provides examples of a few small companies that use project boards to manage workflow instead. Knowledge workers need autonomy over ho...

Newport’s gift is his ability to look at something we take for granted and ask if we have to do it the way we have always done it. This is what I appreciated about “Digital Minimalism” and “Deep Work” and it is what led me to this volume. “A World Without Email” is mostly relevant to the knowledge work industry, but is still applicable to anyone who uses email. Perhaps the biggest takeaway to consider is to question, in any given situation, if email is the best tool or process for that task? We

I enjoyed this much more than I expected to. It talks about productivity workflows (which is a pet hobby of mine) with fun analogies to distributed systems and consensus and information theory.

Annoyingly chaotic, imprecise, mixes many different concepts w/o getting down deep enough.1. It's not a book about e-mail, but something the author calls "hyperactive hive mind", which in short is just a way of managing and coordinating the way - primarily by e-mails circulating in the organization. That's one very specific and hardly representative case for e-mail. But on the other hand, Newport puts communicators (message-based) in the very same bag. Utter chaos.2. The overall criticism of e-m...

I am always amused by books that never mention the word capitalism and have no intention of critiquing it, yet do just that. 'A World Without Email' is the latest example I've come across. Newport sets out to explain the problems caused by email's domination of the knowledge economy and suggest solutions. He grounds his analysis in a hilariously (to me) neoliberal combination of theories: predominantly technological determinism and evolutionary psychology, with a dash of utilitarianism. The iniq...

If I never read the phrase “hyperactive hive mind” again it’ll be too soon.

Don't read this book. It is terrible. Email is bad. Use it less. Slack and instant messenger is also bad. Use Trello. Do it with a sprint methodology. There. You read it.

A world without email is not practical, and Newport admits this. Still, this book is an interesting look at how we don't have to be slaves to connection and communication, there are better ways and processes we can apply. Not quite as good as *Deep Work* or *Digital Minimalism* yet still interesting. He introduces a framework he calls "attention capital theory" that argues for "creating workflows built around processes specifically designed to help us get the most out of our human brains while m...

I feel the need to justify my 2 stars here since I rarely rate a book so poorly.First off, it's not a bad book. There are some interesting tidbits about the history of workflows, the writing is engaging, and for what it's worth the Audible narration is excellent. The systematic (read: bigger picture) approaches to thinking taken here are also valuable. If nothing else, this book had me pausing to reflect on my own workflows from time to time, which I always appreciate.Where it fell down for me w...

When Newport finished his manuscript for this book, he wouldn't have known that the 12 months prior to the book's release would have shifted knowledge workers ever deeper into the hyperactive hive mind spiral which he describes in part 1 of the book. That has been true for me and the sneaking suspicion that email begets more email and more busyness than actual productivity validated. My 5-star signifies that this was the right book for me at this moment in time and that it is a part of an ongoin...

It’s not that I think Cal Newport is wrong.I just think he’s self-important, out of touch, and at least five years late with the content of this book.How was this published in 2021 with a long-winded explanation of task boards and somehow zero mention of the pandemic and remote work?

Classic Cal Newport. Timely and helpful.

recommended by my CTO at work - super interesting read!