How to Redesign Your Workflow

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Two thirds of the book gets into principles for how to redesign whether it's in your own life as an employee or if you're an entrepreneur that runs your own company. How do you begin this reengineering process? We can actually talk about each process. No, we don't just figure this out on email. For this, we have weekly status meetings. We have a shared document. There's tons of examples,. but you begin to explicitly engineer how work happens in a way that minimizes all this ad hoc unscheduled messaging and stops all the context shifting. You need to change the structure of your business so that that inbox is not overflowing. It takes off a lot of sort of

Cal Newport reveals how the rise of email led to a productivity disaster and what we can do to change that.

— YOU’LL LEARN —

1) How email changed the way we work for worse

2) Simple strategies for cutting down the email back-and-forth

3) Why we feel guilty when we don’t respond—and what to do about it

Subscribe or visit AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep647 for clickable versions of the links below.

— ABOUT CAL —

Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. In addition to researching cutting edge technology, he also writes about the impact of these innovations on our culture. Newport is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller, Digital Minimalism, which argues that we should be much more selective about the technologies we adopt in our personal lives, and Deep Work, which argues that focus is the new I.Q. in the modern workplace.

Newport’s work has been published in over 25 languages and has been featured in many major publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Washington Post, and Economist, and his long-running blog Study Hacks, which receives over 3 million visits a year. He’s also a frequent guest on NPR.

• Cal’s book: A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

• Cal’s book: Deep Work (Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)

• Cal’s podcast: Deep Questions

• Cal’s planner: Time Block Planner

• Cal’s website: CalNewport.com

— RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW —

• App: Calendly

• App: Trello

• Researcher: Sophie Leroy

• Book: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman

• Previous episode: 632: How to Reclaim 40 Hours Every Month (WITHOUT Multitasking!) with Dave Crenshaw

— THANK YOU SPONSORS! —