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I'm Rufus Grisco and this is the next big idea.

Today, number 11 in our countdown of last year's most popular bookbites, the most important,

potentially life-changing books of the year. Number 11 is A World Without Email by Cal Newport.

What would the world be like without email? What would your life be like without it?

Those questions may seem pointless. For better or worse, email feels like a permanent fixture in

our lives. But in his bold new book, A World Without Email, reimagining work in an age of

communication overload, Cal Newport dares to imagine a future where new forms of streamlined

digital communication replace endless email threads and haphazard messaging. A world without

email isn't just a fantasy, Cal says, it's coming. Will you be ready for it?

Hi, I'm Cal Newport and I'm a professor of computer science at Georgetown University who also

writes about the intersection of technology and culture. Now, I want to share with you today

five of the key insights from my new book, A World Without Email. Reimagining work in an age of

communication overload. Insight number one, email makes us less productive. Now, this may sound

strange at first. If we go back and look at the history of email, we see that it spread

very quickly during the early 1990s because it was a more productive way of implementing certain

communication task. Email was more productive than a fax machine. It was more productive than voicemail.

It was more productive than sending around paper memos in those folders with the little red thread

ties. So what do I mean when I say it makes us less productive? Well, it wasn't those uses that

caused the problem. It is what followed in the wake of email spread as email moved from office to

...