Cal Newport has been writing some interesting things about what he calls "deep work," by which I think he means actually, well, work--concentrated and focused intellectual attention on a problem that lures you out of the quotidian into something like actual contemplation.  In this piece he talks about the rise of email, "asynchronous work" (work done on a collective concern by individuals that is not simultaneous with other individuals--in other words, not in a meeting where everyone is present at the same time (synchronized)), and the capacity of asynchronous work to amplify, or hamper, actual work.

While the idea of deconnecting individual work from the need to bring everyone together is a good one, Newport thinks it has rebounded against us now, so that "work has become something we do in the small slivers of time that remain amid our Sisyphean skirmishes with our in-boxes."

For any academic, who is still in need of large chunks of concentrated time, this has relevance to our struggles to manage administration of large projects; I'd recommend reading it, to help think about how to capitalize on the "asynchronous" work while still coordinating to have "synchronous" face to face meetings. 

And more generally still, it raises the question of the degree to which we live in a world of distractions.