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4 Comments

Email is making us miserable

  1. 2

    Thanks for sharing! I'm intrigued enough to buy the book. Haven't pulled the trigger yet.

    1. 1

      Deep Work and Digital Minimalism greatly improved my quality of life. I'm curious about this new book, but I can't imagine it helping any more than the last two did.

  2. 2

    The argument isn't "email is making us miserable." That's more of an empirical fact, at least in general. Cal's real focus is about what we should do about it.

    My personal stance has always been: educate individual people to arm themselves against information overload. (Apps like Inbox When Ready and Freedom are my lifeblood.)

    But Cal makes a pretty good data-driven case that as long as we know emails are piling up and waiting on us somewhere, we tend to remain in a state of low-grade anxiety.

    The only remaining non-legal solution is cultural change. For example, associating email addresses with clients rather than individual people. @dhh and Basecamp have done experiments like this.

    Problem is, culture is almost impossible to change without a significant external shock. Highly academic arguments about low-grade anxiety won't move the needle.

  3. 1

    Actually email is one of the less intrusive technologies we have at the moment. I don't have whatsapp and similar instant messengers. They're immeasurably worse.

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