It is exactly what author Cal Newport is recommending in his new book "A World Without Email" (March 2021): replacing the ping-pong of emails and meetings by standardized processes and requests via tools. It's simply incredible to see that Bezos saw this coming 20 years ago!

> Some have been trying to get rid of email for years. Writers like Cal Newport, whose book “A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload” was published in March, has long argued that the “tyranny of the inbox” causes us to lose our ability to concentrate. Switching rapidly between email, Slack and other tasks creates a pileup in our brains.

How would it help to replace email with the communication tools that Gen Z uses? People expect even more rapid responses to text messages than emails. That means more context switching.

> “It’s impossible to expect email to be the main form of communication because so many people aren’t working office jobs or are sitting in an office with an email notification coming through,” she said. “I don’t think it’s the most relevant way to expect people to communicate with you.”

Seems like this person doesn't know that smartphones receive email.

Slack destroying American companies is one of the core points of discussion in Ezra Klein's interview with Cal Newport, nominally about his new book "A World Without Email"[1][2]. Great conversation. We feel weirdly run aground at this minima, to me.

I think there's still an unresolved but asked question about how we got stuck here. I forget who observed, but worth noting that the workers themselves tend to demand the popular, already mainstream product, which entrenches tools like Slack.

But I think there's a general lack of willingness & interest in catering to more alpha geeks, in trying to enable humans, in giving them means to tool themselves up. Industrial software is, almost universally, highly massified in nature.

Worth noting that Ezra's already a fan of Cal's work. From 2017[3], discussing Cal's book "Deep Work",

> I was asked recently to name a book that changed my life. The book I chose was Cal Newport’s “Deep Work,” and for the most literal of reasons: It’s changed how I lived my life. Particularly, it’s led me to stop scheduling morning meetings, and to preserve that time for more sustained, creative work.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...

[2] https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2021/03/15/one-step-closer-t...

[3] https://www.vox.com/2017/4/21/15382282/cal-newport-taking-li...

I'm surprised Cal Newport's recent book, A World Without Email wasn't mentioned!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525536558/

He takes ideas from Deep Work and builds on them by scaling up the ideas to how an organization should work, coordinate, and collaborate. Specifically, he looks at how to build organizations that are designed to support how our brains have evolved to think & work (without frequent context switches!)

Starting off with new collaboration tooling integration is pretty on target for 2021!

Getting a big vibe of yesterday's "Slack Destroying American Companies"[1]. I didn't actually click through & read, which would have lead me to finding out it's Matt Taibbi having a discussion with Antonio Garcia-Martinez (who personally I am not interested in hearing from). But the title reminded me of a part of Ezra Klein interviewing Cal Newport about his new book, "A World Without Email"[2]. In the interview they spend quite a while discussing how it seems like the whole world is presently stuck with Slack, how there's so little visible mainstream competition. Cal has been engaged with this question of workflow & tech & collaboration for a number years, often from a somewhat anti- standpoint, with books such as "Deep Work" and "Digital Minimalism". Hearing two sharp minds talking about collaboration was incredibly enriching to me.

Notably, the collaboration tools shown at the beginning of IO are for explicit collaboration times. They're not marketed as always on communication devices, not a replacement for slack. But they both are about modern tech-enabled collaboration, which is an interesting topic, and one that seems like we're only just starting to really dive into. Long long long after Engelbart's Mother of All Demos (52.4 years after).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27191181

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...