Cal Newport

So the very nature of that style of collaboration demands constant inbox checking, which is what I think people often get wrong about this.

When I think about things like Slack or email, they think too often about either information like, oh, I've got so many messages in my inbox that I don't need.

I have all these newsletters and spam.

That's not a problem.

That's a minor problem.

That's an easily solvable problem.

It's like clutter.

That's not a big problem.

The issue is actually my collaboration style requires me to be in there because if I miss messages in a timely fashion, everything falls apart.

And so the issue is not how do I interact with my inbox?

It really has to be how do I change the way the inbox is being used?

I mean, so I ended up

I feel like had three big ideas on this that span three different books, right?

So in deep work, like one of the big ideas was you can train your personal ability to focus.

Focusing is really important.

Putting aside for now all the things trying to prevent you from focusing, you have to practice it.

And if you practice it, you'll get better at it.

And if you get better at it, you'll be a superstar because like that's what matters in the knowledge economy.

Everything good comes out of focus.

Then I wrote a book after that called A World Without Email.