I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions.

Episode 61.

We begin as usual with quick announcements. In fact I have just one announcement and it is a big one

You probably have heard me obliquely reference in various recent episodes my quote new book coming out soon in quote well today I want to officially announce the book it is called a world without email, reimagining work in an age of communication overload.

This book comes out on March 2nd.

Now I've been working on this book for a real long time.

It was actually what I began working on immediately following deep work. I have interviews for this book that go all the way back to

2016. I actually put the book on hold to write digital minimalism because I felt that the trends relevant to a world without

email were very long-term trends and it wasn't like that was going something was

changing really acutely in the moment.

It was a long-term trend that was coming and it was going to continue to go.

I also felt like with the world without email where I am on this topic no one else is, so it's not as if someone was going to

scoot me. So I put a pause to the book to write digital minimalism because that felt very timely.

There was this shift happening right then in this period of like 2017 to 2018 this acute shift

where people were becoming more uncomfortable with their devices and so I put

world without email on hold wrote digital minimalism, then got back to it.

I'm really proud of the book.

I'll be talking about it obviously a lot more on this podcast as we approached the publication date, but I'll give you the

high-level summary now. There's two parts to the book. So the first part is

looking at the world we are in right now.

And I began by doing something that no one else has really done.

I pulled together all of the extant research on email and its potential impacts on our ability to produce work.

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