Marshall was more effective at his job because of his ability to focus on important issues — giving each full attention before moving on to the next.… - Cal Newport

The world without email referenced in the title of this book, therefore, is not a place in which protocols like SMTP and POP3 are banished. It is, however, a place where you spend most of your day actually working on hard things instead of talking about this work, or endlessly bouncing small tasks back and forth in messages.

Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

In Lynn White Jr.’s study of the stirrup we find a classic example of a technology introduced for a simple reason (to make riding horses easier) leading to vast and complicated consequences never imagined by its inventors (the rise of medieval feudalism). In the second half of the twentieth century, many scholars in the field of the philosophy of technology began to research similar case studies of unintended consequences. Over time, this idea that tools can sometimes drive human behavior became known as technological determinism.