A World Without Email 1

A World Without Email 1

I'm not sure how I feel about this book. I'm doing a lot of head nodding and I'm not really sure if that's good or bad.

On one hand, this book fits into the same category as the E-Myth or It doesn't Have to be Crazy At Work or even Getting Things Done. They describe disfunction at a given level and strategies to work through them, but in each situation those strategies require a certain level of buy in and maintenance. I can't tell you how many times I've hunkered down to align my life with some sort of system, and over time the chaos and complexity of life causes it to break down. The issue is that all of these systems aren't mandatory, so at some level of stress upon the system, maintaining these systems gets sacrificed for some other priority or worse, that the system didn't really accomplish the underlying objective. I don't think these are bad books at all, in fact I think of them fondly. They give me hope, and that hope drives me to think about my life and to seek out solutions that makes it better.

I do give this book credit, the author has at least acknowledged this problem. He did so in talking about the 4-Hour Work Week and how there was a time when it was en vogue to have an autoresponder on your email that you only check at noon and 4pm each day. I'm curious as we get to the more practical advice section of the book if this awareness continues.

Working the process

So far I haven't been outstanding about improving my time working through this book. I've actually reverted to my normal read a chapter per sitting method of reading this book. I have skimmed a little bit, so I guess that's good. Actually in writing the above I think it's good for me to start lumping books together. I know this is a Captain Obvious statement, but I probably need to take all the books above, and the others in the same vein (Flawless Consulting, Building a Bridge while you walk on it, Atomic Habits, etc) and create a compendium in my notes of the thoughts and ideas they contain. The challenge is the time needed to build up the possible reference of those and all the other past books I've read is daunting, especially considering I have other research I do professionally to become a better Developer (need a better term).

The irony of the above statement is that I'm just using the vicious cycle to describe why I can't work on eliminating the vicious cycle. Also, I am working on it. I mean, reading this book and working on this blog are at least in that direction (sure, we can argue about the effectiveness of this particular effort, but I would also argue there are therapeutic benefits).