You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that y… - Cal Newport

the cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises.

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you

It’s not just that we’re less clear than we think, but we’re often completely misunderstood. You were sure that you were sending a nice note, while your receiver is equally sure you were delivering a pointed critique. When you build an entire workflow on exactly this type of ambiguous and misunderstood communication — a workflow that bypasses all the rich, non-linguistic social tools that researchers like Alex Pentland documented as being fundamental to successful human interaction — you shouldn’t be surprised that work messaging is making us miserable.