A world Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

particularly busy periods, such as those surrounding book launches. This would not
have been possible in an age before web-based part-time remote work platforms.
9
. Cal Newport, “A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email,” Harvard Business Review,
February 18, 2016, 
https://hbr.org/2016/02/a-modest-proposal-eliminate-email
.
10
. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (New
York: Harper Business, 2018).
11
. Fried and Hansson, Crazy at Work, 56.
12
. Fried and Hansson, Crazy at Work, 57.
13
. Scott Kirsner, “I’m Joining the Open Office Hours Movement, November 24th,”
Boston.com, November 20, 2009,
http://archive.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2009/11/im_joining_the_op
en_office_hou.html
.
14
. Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest
for Work You Love (New York: Business Plus, 2012), 73.

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15
. The original name of the company was Princeton Internet Solutions. Michael and I soon
realized, however, that the resulting acronym was less than optimal.
16
. Tom Foster, “Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Reality Check,” Inc., April 2, 2013,
www.inc.com/magazine/201304/tom-foster/tim-ferriss-four-hour-reality-check.html
.
17
. Here are the relevant histories from which the different aspects of the email story were
pulled: Samuel Gibbs, “How Did Email Grow from Messages between Academics to a
Global Epidemic?,” The Guardian, March 7, 2016,
www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/07/email-ray-tomlinson-history
; and
Ray Tomlinson, “Frequently Asked Questions,”
http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html.
18
. C. L. Max Nikias, “Why All My Emails Are the Lengths of Texts,” Wall Street Journal,
September 19, 2017, 
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-all-my-emails-are-the-
lengths-of-texts-1505829919
. It’s worth noting that a year after the publication of the
2017 op-ed cited here, Nikias resigned from his position as president of USC. As
subsequent reporting revealed, the outward successes of his presidency had been
mirrored by an erosion of trust between Nikias and the faculty at the university, leading
to unhappiness. It’s probably safe to assume, however, that this ouster had nothing to
do with his email habits (faculty do not have direct email access to the president at
large universities), so we can still learn from his tactics for remaining productive with
an overfilled inbox.
19
. Mike Davidson, “A Low-Fi Solution to E-Mail Overload: Sentenc.es,”
MikeIndustries.com, July 17, 2007,
https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2007/07/fight-email-overload-with-
sentences
.
20
. Michael Hicks and Jeffrey S. Foster, “Adapting Scrum to Managing a Research Group”
(Department of Computer Science Technical Report #CS-TR-4966, University of
Maryland, College Park, September 18, 2010),
https://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/10743
.