A World Without Email

locus of control theory, a subfield of personality psychology that argues that motivation is closely connected to whether people feel like they have control over their ultimate success in an endeavor. When you have a say in what you’re doing (placing the locus of control toward the internal end of the spectrum), you’re much more motivated than when

Once you’ve identified a process that does seem like a good candidate for automation, the following guidelines will help you succeed with the transformation: Partitioning: Split the process into a series of well-defined phases that follow one after the other. For each phase, clearly specify what work must be accomplished and who is responsible. Sig

We might measure cost, for example, in terms of cognitive cycles, which describes the degree to which a protocol fragments your attention.

If work execution is what generates value, then workflows are what structure these efforts.

Short, structured check-ins can be empowering. As soon as you let these gatherings devolve into looser, more standard-style meetings, they become a tedious burden.

In rarefied pursuits like professional writing, the importance of doing fewer minor things so you can do the main things better makes a lot of sense. We like to imagine our novelists cloistered in sheds, toiling in undisrupted concentration, oblivious to the distractions of the world. But we also assume that this lifestyle doesn’t generalize to the

there’s a large cognitive cost to switching your attention from one target to another. Any workflow that requires you to constantly tend conversations unfolding in an inbox or chat channel is going to diminish the quality of your brain’s output.

another key factor is the rising complexity of communication.

Douglas Rushkoff is also onto something when he laments: “We compete to process more emails . . . as if more to do on the computer meant something good. . . . Instead of working inside the machine, as we did before, we must become the machine.”

this prioritization of abstract written communication over in-person communication disregarded the immensely complex and finely tuned social circuits that our species evolved to optimize our ability to work cooperatively. By embracing email, we inadvertently crippled the systems that make us so good at working together. “Memos and emails simply don