In Defense of Slack

Rock star Cal Newport is back with a new book A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. Disclaimer: I've read a few reviews, but not his book yet. I do, however, know this: He's not exactly ambivalent towards Slack and e-mail.

Exhibit A: His recent New Yorker article Slack Is the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work. In Newport's view, they are both scourges that distract us and, by extension, prevent us from doing our best work. From the piece:

We’re simply not wired to monitor an ongoing stream of unpredictable communication at the same time that we’re trying to also finish actual work. E-mail introduced this problem of communication-driven distraction, but Slack pushed it to a new extreme.

For more of Newport's thoughts, give his pod with Ezra Klein a listen.