draft = true

I've benn pondering alot lately about communication in the modern workplace. I read two popular books recently with nearly diametrically opposed viewpoints and I'm trying to hash out where I stand.

The first was Cal Newport's "A World Without Email". Cal diagnoses the problem quite accurately. He calls the working model of most modern companies the "hyperactive hive-mind". The advent of email and other asynchronous communication methods led to workers being in a state of constant inbox checking. Calendar-sharing and no cohesive policy on when and why to have meetings leads to a work day that is sliced-and-diced with meetings and whatever time is left is entirely interrupt-driven.

Cal's prescriptions are mostly about cutting down on email

There's kind of a vague idea that Kanban board tools like Jira and Trello will help with this situation but I didn't quite follow the argument. I guess because it's "easy" to find the information about a particular work item on the card you will be less likely to email someone about it? Unfortunately, these tools all have the ability to @mention someone in a comment and those show up in a notification window that effectively becomes another email inbox without any of the familiar UI affordances or power-user features of a decent email client.