The cumulative three hours a day spent on email is splintered into 77 inbox checks – for some heavy users, it can be over 400.

Since then, the number of emails the average ‘knowledge’, or office, worker sends and receives each day has continued to shoot up: 50 in 2005, 69 in 2006, 96 in 2011 and 126 in 2019. But this ostensible productivity silver bullet, says Newport, “had the side effect of completely changing the way we work and, almost overnight, severely increased the amount of communication.” The fact that email is both “low-friction” and “asynchronous” – not requiring people to be on the line or in the room at the same time – apparently solved the problem of communicating at scale in the ‘90s.

His latest book is A World Without Email but, given how seemingly fundamental email is to our working lives, a world without it is hard to imagine. An associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, Washington DC, Newport is more widely known for his influential productivity books such as Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. “You’d be like, ‘This is crazy – why are we keeping this factory open all day if nobody’s building anything?’” says Cal Newport over Zoom.

Imagine a car factory where workers spent most of the day talking, only really getting round to making cars before 9am and after 5pm, when things sufficiently quietened down.

Taskboard sphere