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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Notes on "A World Without Email", plus my practical implementation, published by Peter Wildeford on June 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Cal Newport previously wrote “Deep Work”, which outlined a rule for success - you do your best work when you are in a large uninterrupted distraction-free block of time called a “deep work block”. Newport’s thesis is that a single uninterrupted 3-4 hour block of focused work on your most important tasks would pay far more dividends than 9-12x 20min blocks chunked throughout your day. (See my “Notes and Reflections on ‘Deep Work’ by Cal Newport” for details.) This book didn’t revolutionize the workplace as much as Newport likely hoped, so the real question has become - why is it so hard to get deep work done? It’s certainly not lack of awareness given how far and wide Newport’s book has spread, so there must be some sinister culprit. There are many ways to kill a deep work block, but the traditional villain has been meetings (see “Makers Schedule, Managers Schedule” by Paul Graham). But this has now been mostly addressed as well (at least within forward-looking tech and tech-adjacent companies) and reducing meetings doesn’t seem to have solved the problem much. So now what? Newport has emerged with a new villain - email. And by email, Newport also means ubiquitous office instant messaging tools like Slack that have largely replaced email but not solved the problems. And Newport has also emerged with a new book to fight the villain - “A World Without Email”. Again, as a reminder, when Newport says “A World Without Email”, you should also take this to mean “A World Without Slack” or whatever office chat you use. And therefore in these notes, you should always think of the word “email” as a shorthand for “email, Slack, whatever office communication platform you use, etc.” with the mostly but maybe not entirely correct assumption that they all share similar problems. Also another reminder/caveat - in these notes I mainly aim to summarize what I find as the key takeaways of the book, from my understanding and as applied to my personal context (CEO of a non-profit), rather than try to present my all-things-considered view on how best to run a company. Lastly, one more reminder/caveat that I think one’s personal context likely changes a lot about how you should approach this - managers need to be slightly more plugged in and I think independent contributors should consider dialing even harder into avoiding distraction than I would personally feel comfortable doing. You also may need to change your workflow depending on how collaborative your work is. But the basic problems will be very similar even if the constraints and solutions look different and context-dependent. So with that in mind, let’s get into it. The Four Core Problems Basically, there are four core problems of email. I took the liberty to reorganize Newport’s book into concepts and give names to the concepts myself, rather than repeat the names Newport uses: (1) the distraction-urgency trade-off – it is often incredibly useful to be able to get a hold of someone else instantaneously for them to respond to you about a question related to work but interrupting their work is often detrimental due to the negative effects of constant context switching. A message can unblock your work, but at the cost of interrupting their deep work. How does one solve this trade-off? (2) the unavoidable trivialities problem - much of email is very trivial (e.g., random gifs and whatnot) that isn’t even worth interrupting your day, but it is very difficult when processing your email to tell which messages are high priority (and thus worth interrupting your work for) and which messages are low priority (and thus properly batched to a once-a-day scroll session or something). (3) the FOMO prob...