Had it with email? Give personal office hours a try
In this excerpt from Cal Newport’s new book, the author argues one-on-one time is not just for academics. Instead, office hours can be an important way to take back your time.
In early 2016, I published an article with a purposefully provocative title, ‘A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email.’ Though I’d been writing about the unique miseries of this technology on my blog, this piece was one of my first mainstream essays on the ideas that would eventually coalesce into my book, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. At the halfway point of the article, after I’d reviewed the issues caused by the hyperactive hive mind workflow, I delivered my big conclusion: “There’s great advantage for those organizations willing to end the reign of the unstructured workflow and replace it with something designed from scratch with the specific goal of maximizing value production and employee satisfaction.”