Cal Newport

I've got the articles I write.

I'll be working very hard, but that part will be out of my life.

All right, so I still have a lot of email.

What will I do with Georgetown email?

I'm not going to do an autoresponder.

I'm not a big believer in them.

I know they make sense in certain contexts where you're in a work environment where –

fast response is required.

And so like you need to, I guess, communicate to people if you're not going to respond.

But I find in a lot of contexts, autoresponders are more about the anxiety of the person who's away from their inbox.

They imagine in their mind

This is very natural, but they imagine in their mind that there's basically a back room somewhere where their peers and their boss come in and they have a big bulletin board where there's all these like statistics and observations and messages from you where they're trying to track like, hmm, how long were they?

What's their average delay time and responses?

This has gone up.

what is going on here?

There's a big question mark.

Where is she?

What's going on?

And like everyone's like tracking and caring.

And if you don't get out in front of it, they're about to like burst out of that back room with torches and come find you.