Book Review: A World Without Email - Cal Newport

Sat, 08 May 2021 00:00:00 +0530

This book is a good refresher on Cal Newport’s central thesis which shows up in both Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, but with email as the central device. The same essential theorem, but a lot of new stories to go with it as corollaries. Of course, it’s not email technology that the book contests, but the hyperactive hive-mind that are enabled by people’s email habits.

But here’s the only thing I want to leave a note of: I was mildly annoyed by Newport’s invocation (or perhaps, misappropriation) of Claude Shannon’s information theory. He gives four “principles” for a world without email, the third of which he calls The Protocol Principle, which is as follows:

Playing With the Konmari Method

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 13:42:55 +0530

I heard about the bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up at a SciPy talk about deculttering your data science project. The speakers admitted they hadn’t read it - they were simply trying to point out that tidying up your space and tidying up your software project are both similar.

I’ve been married and living with my wife for about a year now. After we moved into “our own home” last year, we have both undergone major role reversals when it comes to tidying up. I was never accustomed to spaces larger than a single bedroom, so I never cared enough to sort or declutter my space as long as my desk and bed were clean. As for my wife, she never owned too much stuff (between the two of us, I’m the hoarder) and therefore never had to make a chore out of tidying up. Now that I live in a fairly spacious apartment, even a little clutter looks very conspicuous to me. My wife generally agrees with me about tidying up, but she’s not anal about it. I have been having arguments about the clutter in my house with her for a long time now. Since both of us jokingly say that I’m the wife in this relationship (by the way, I would be proud to be one), tidying up and decluttering is often left up to me. I lost no time in buying Marie Kondo’s book and diving right in.

Productivity on Jaidev's Blog

Book Review: A World Without Email - Cal Newport

Playing With the Konmari Method