A World Without Email

Introduction

The Hyperactive Hive Mind

In late 2010, Nish Acharya arrived in Washington, DC, ready to work. President Barack Obama had appointed Nish to be his director of innovation and entrepreneurship and a senior adviser to the secretary of commerce. Nish was asked to coordinate with twenty-six different federal agencies and over five hundred universities to dispense $100 million in funding, meaning that he was about to become the prototypical DC power player: smartphone always in hand, messages flying back and forth at all hours. But then the network broke.

On a Tuesday morning, just a couple of months into his new role, Nish received an email from his CTO explaining that they had to temporarily shut down their office s network due to a computer virus. We all expected that this would be fixed in a couple of days, Nish told me when I later interviewed him about the incident. But this prediction proved wildly optimistic. The following week, an undersecretary of commerce convened a meeting. She explained that they suspected the virus infecting their network came from a foreign power, and that Homeland Security was recommending that the network stay down while they traced the attack. Just to be safe, they were also going to destroy all the computers, laptops, printers anything with a chip in the office.

One of the biggest impacts of this network shutdown was that the office lost the ability to send or receive emails. For security purposes, it was illegal for them to use personal email addresses to perform their government work, and bureaucratic hurdles kept them from setting up temporary accounts using other agencies networks. Nish and his team were effectively cut off from the frenetic ping-pong of digital chatter that defines most high-level work within the federal government. The blackout lasted six weeks. With a touch of gallows humor, they took to calling the fateful day when it all began Dark Tuesday.

Not surprisingly, the

Cal Newport

A World Without Email crystallizes what so many of us feel intuitively but haven t been able to explain: the way we re working isn t working. Cal Newport charts a path back to sanity, offering a variety of road-tested practices to help us escape the tyranny of our inboxes and achieve a calmer, more intentional, and more productive working life.
--Drew Houston, cofounder and CEO of Dropbox

The future of work demands new tools of collaboration. Cal Newport is on a quest to uncover better ways for knowledge workers to collaborate. Out of this will come the new work space.
--Kevin Kelly, senior maverick for Wired
 
This new work from Cal Newport goes beyond hacking at the branches of the email problem and strikes right at the root of it. This is a bold, visionary, almost prophetic book that challenges the status quo. If you want to peer into what the future of work could look like, read this book now.
--Greg McKeown, New York Times bestselling author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
 
When a Cal Newport book appears, I drop everything and read. With evidence and examples from the cutting edge of programming to the factory floors of a century ago, Newport makes a compelling argument that we can and will do much, much better than email. Read this superb book. It might just change your life; it s changing mine.
--Tim Harford, author of The Data Detective
 
This book is a call to action. Newport suggests that now is the time to reimagine work with the specific goal of optimizing our brain s ability to sustainably add value. Don t let your teams and organizations lose out any further read this book to help you get started.
--Leslie A. Perlow, author of Sleeping with Your Smartphone and professor of leadership at Harvard Business School

"This book defines the scale of a problem too few of us knew existed...it s a profound insight."
--The Financial Times

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