A World Without Email cover art

A World Without Email

Find Focus and Transform the Way You Work Forever (from the NYT bestselling productivity expert)

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A World Without Email

By: Cal Newport
Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Feel like you're always drowning in email? How much more would you achieve without them - and how much happier would you be?

Emails are an integral part of work today. But the 'kind regards', forwards and attachments we check every 5.4 minutes are making us unproductive, stressed and costing businesses millions in untapped potential.

Bestselling author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport, is here to offer a radical new vision - a world without email. Drawing on sociology, behavioural economics and fascinating case studies of thriving email-free companies, Newport explains how this modern tool doesn't work for our ancient brains and provides solutions you can implement today to transform your workday into one without constant, distracting pings.

Revolutionary and practical, A World Without Email will liberate you to do your most profound, fulfilling and creative work - and be happier too.

Praise for A World Without Email:

'If you are currently drowning in endless email and not sure where to start: read this book' Emma Gannon, author of The Multi-Hyphen Method

'Read this superb book. It might just change your life; it's changing mine' Tim Harford, author of How To Make The World Add Up

'This is a bold, visionary, almost prophetic book that challenges the status quo' Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism

 History & Culture Personal Development Self-Esteem Technology & Society Workplace & Organisational Behavior Workplace Culture Technology Business Management Software Development Project Management

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Critic reviews

Cal Newport has proved himself as the most essential writer around, yet again making a compelling case for us to renegotiate our relationship with technology (Bruce Daisley, author of Sunday Times #1 Bestseller The Joy of Work)
Life is full of interruptions, but when a Cal Newport book appears, I drop everything and read. Newport is making an outrageous claim here: not just that email is annoying and overwhelming, but that we can and we will do much, much better. But with evidence and examples from the cutting edge of programming to the factory floors of a century ago, he makes a compelling argument. Read this superb book. It might just change your life; it's changing mine (Tim Harford, author of 'How To Make The World Add Up')
This is the book I didn't know I desperately needed. If you are currently drowning in endless email and not sure where to start: read this book (Emma Gannon, author of Sunday Times bestseller The Multi-Hyphen Method and host of award-winning podcast Ctrl Alt Delete)
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, co-founder 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)
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 Perlow, author of Sleeping with Your Smartphone and Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School)
Cal Newport is an essential worker in today's hyperactive workplace, and his commitment to waking the digital sleepwalker should be applauded (Damian Bradfield, co-founder of WeTransfer and author of The Trust Manifesto)
Newport has defined the scale of a problem too few of us knew existed (Pilita Clark)
All stars
Most relevant
Useful ideas, seems simple but more to it than there seems at first. Definitely worth listening to if you want to get more efficient and effective at knowledge work.

Could really do with tighter editing as some of it repetitive.

Could also do with better chapter summaries and a final summary as it’s hard to take out key points from discursive text. James Clear Atomic Habits is good at this

Good ideas but quite a lot too long

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Carl Newport is one of the few voices standing up against this new attention economy and the many predators lurking in the shadows to grasp our focus and feed on it.

This one is his best work yet, a stepping stone in a new way to conceive office work.

A visionary work

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Struggling through an audio book about the tyranny of email and being led through first three chapters on the (not riveting) history of email. Cal has done his research for sure but we don't need three chapters defining the problem in detail. We wouldn't have bought the book of we were not well versed! Hoping it gets better from here.

Cut to the chase Cal!

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Well produced and great content. The writer starts by highlighting all the problems with today’s overload of workplace communication and then offers a glimpse of light in the tunnel.

Great read for anyone who want to find a way for knowledge workers to reclaim their effectiveness and sanity.

Illuminating and full with easy to implementable strategies and tactics

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A world without email, ironically lacks the same kind of focus that he sees in work in general. The strongest part of the book is the idea that the email centred workflow of the office is something that most organisations use unthinkingly, as if this is the only way that work can function, rather than deciding what the best flow of work is for their organisation. Where he is weakest is deciding on solutions. Some of the suggestions seem sensible if you are Prof with full control of your time, but would be impossible to put into practice. I am also very enamoured of his idea that the quantity of focused work is more important than the number of hours.

It feels like a ratio of ten pages of theory to one page of implementation.

Occasionally he mentions things like extreme programming or some other practical implementations of similar ideas to his and as a reader you think: now I would like to read their book.

Great ideas with little practicality

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