Minimizing Distractions

Many of you have been asking me about the assassination of the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk earlier this week during a campus event at Utah Valley University. At the time of this writing, little is yet known about the shooter’s motives, but there have been enough cases of political violence over the past year that I think I can say what I’m about to with conviction… Those of us who study online culture like to use the phrase, “Twitter is not real life.” But as we saw yet again this week, when the digital discourses fostered on services like Twitter (and Bluesky, and TikTok) do intersect with the real world, whether they originate from the left or the right, t…

In the wake of my recent (and inaugural) visit to Disneyland, I read Richard Snow’s history of the park, Disney’s Land. Early in the book, Snow tells a story that I hadn’t heard before. It fascinated me—not just for its details, but also, as I’ll soon elaborate, for its potential relevance to our current moment. The tale begins in 1948. According to Snow, Disney’s personal nurse and informal confidant, Hazel George, had become worried. “[She] began to sense that her boss was sinking into what seemed to her to be a dangerous depression,” Snow writes. “Perhaps even heading toward what was then called a nervous breakdown.” The sources of this distress were obvious. …

The second chapter of Genesis poetically describes the beginning of the human story. “The Lord formed Adam from the dust of the earth,” it reads. “He blew into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being.” There are different ways to translate the Hebrew term rendered here as “living being.” Onkelos, a Roman nobleman turned Torah scholar, interpreted it to mean “speaking spirit” (in Aramaic: ruach memalela). As Rabbi Shai Held elaborates in the second volume of ​The Heart of the Torah​, Onkelos’s translation implies that “speech is constitutive of what it means to be a human – a core part of our humanity is our ability to communicate with words.” …

In 1939, Simon & Schuster revolutionized the American publishing industry with the launch of Pocket Books, a line of diminutive volumes (measuring 4 by 6 inches) that cost only a quarter; a significant discount at a time when a typical hardcover book would ​set you back​ between $2.50 and $3.00. To make the economics of this new model work, Simon & Schuster had to move a huge volume of units. “[They] sold books where they had never been available before–grocery stores, drugstores and airport terminals,” explains Clive Thompson in ​a fascinating 2013 article​ about the Pocket Books phenomenon. “Within two years, [they’d] sold 17 million.” Thompson quotes the hi…

Last fall, a Norwegian psychology professor named Lars Dehli was asked to give a lecture on intelligence. It had been a while since he had taught the topic, so he looked forward to revisiting it. As he explained in ​an essay​ about the experience, he decided to start the lecture by discussing the so-called Flynn Effect—the well-known phenomenon, first observed by James Flynn, whereby measured IQ scores have been steadily increasing since World War II. “It’s always fun to tell students that their generation is the smartest people who have ever lived,” Dehli wrote. But as he gathered data to build an up-to-date chart, he was “very surprised” by what he discovered: “IQ h…

A reader recently sent me a clip from Chris Williamson’s podcast. In the segment, Williamson discusses his evolving relationship with productivity: “Look, I come from a productivity background. When I first started this show, I was chatting shit about Pomodoro timers, and Notion external brains, and Ebbinhaus forgetting curves, and all of that. Right? I’ve been through the ringer, so I’m allowed to say, and, um, you realize after a while that it ends up being this weird superstitious rain dance you’re doing, this sort of odd sort of productivity rain dance, in the desperate hope that later that day you’re going to get something done.” I was intrigued by this te…

Last week, news broke that Amazon would be laying off 16,000 workers. Here was the headline ​from an article​ about this news published in Quartz: The implication of this framing is clear: AI is taking jobs. Nothing in the body of this article contradicts this idea. It describes the number of people laid off and the benefits they’ll receive. It quotes executives who won’t deny the possibility of future job losses. It mentions how Amazon is known for its “cutthroat” corporate culture. You walk away feeling that the impact of AI on our economy is already getting out of hand. The only problem is that this reporting omits almost all relevant deta…

If you’ve been following technology news recently, you’ve probably noticed a sudden increase in references to a 19th-century economics theory called the ​Jevons Paradox​, which is named for the neoclassical economist William Stanley Jevons, and captures the observation that increasing the efficiency of a resource can lead to greater consumption. Jevons first articulated this idea in an 1865 book, pithily titled, ​The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines​. He argued that building more efficient steam engines – ones that required less fuel to generate the same power – would not solve the problem o…

Last week, I published an essay about the so-called Great Lock In of 2025, a TikTok challenge that asks participants to tackle self-improvement goals. I argued that this trend was positive, especially for Gen Z, because the more you take control of your real life, the easier it becomes to take control of your screens. In response, I received an interesting note from a reader. “The biggest challenge with this useful goal Gen Z is pursuing,” he wrote, “is they don’t know what to do.” As he then elaborates: “Most of them are chasing shiny objects that others are showing whether on social media or in real life. And when they (quickly) realize it’s not what they wa…

If there’s one thing that I’m always late to discover, it has to be online youth trends. True to form, I’m only now starting to hear about the so-called “Great Lock In of 2025.” This idea began circulating on TikTok over the summer. Borrowing the term ‘lock in’, which is Gen Z slang for focusing without distraction on an important goal, this challenge asks people to spend the last four months of 2025 working on the types of personal improvement resolutions that they might otherwise defer until the New Year. “It’s just about hunkering down for the rest of the year and doing everything that you said you’re going to do,” explained one TikTok influencer, ​quoted recently​…

I recently heard from a historian of science at All Souls College, Oxford. He forwarded me ​an essay​ he wrote about Nicolaus Steno, a seventeenth-century anatomist and geologist who was later ordained as a Catholic Bishop. Steno’s training as a scholar unfolded in a period challenged by a novel problem: information overload. Here’s how the essay describes it: “Books were a leading distraction in the early modern period—and how envious we should be of those times. From the 1500s onward, with the development of the printing press and the humanist revival of ancient philosophies, knowledge became available at a much greater pace than ever before.” This created…

Many predictions and concerns tumbled into the slipstream trailing ChatGPT’s dazzling, turbulent entrance onto the technology scene in late 2022. Few of these initial warnings felt more immediate than those of imminent disruptions to higher education. “Could the chatbot, which provides coherent, quirky, and conversational responses to simple language inquires, inspire more students to cheat?”, asked an NBC News article, published only a week after ChatGPT’s initial launch. Several months later, a professor in the Texas A&M system took this warning to heart and failed his entire class after convincing himself that every one of his students had used AI to write thei…

Between this newsletter, my podcast, my books, and my New Yorker journalism, I offer a lot of advice and propose a lot of ideas about how the modern digital environment impacts our lives, both professionally and personally, and how we should respond. This techno-pontification covers everything from the nitty gritty details of producing good work in an office saturated with emails and Zoom, to heady decisions about shaping a meaningful life amid the nihilistic abstraction of an increasingly networked existence. With the end of year rapidly approaching, and people finding themselves with some spare thinking time as work winds down for the holidays, I thought it mi…

Over the past four years, a remarkable story has been quietly unfolding in the knowledge sector: a growing interest in the viability of a 4-day workweek. Iceland helped spark this movement with a series of government-sponsored trials which unfolded between 2015 and 2019. The experiment eventually included more than 2,500 workers, which, believe it or not, is about 1% of Iceland’s total working population. These subjects were drawn from multiple different types of workplaces, including, notably, offices and social service providers. Not everyone dropped an entire workday, but most participants reduced their schedule from forty hours to at most thirty-six hours a week o…

I recently came across an interesting academic article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. It was titled, ​“The relationships between social media use, time management, and decision-making styles.”​ The paper’s author surveyed 612 university students and young adults, asking them, among other things, about their digital habits and levels of personal organization. Using a linear regression analysis, she uncovered the following: “Social media use was negatively and significantly associated with overall time management and all its subscales.” Here’s the standard interpretation of this result: Social media is distracting, and if you’re distracted, it becomes h…

Last fall, I filmed a course for MasterClass. It’s mainly based on my book Slow Productivity, but there’s some Deep Work in there too. It’s called: ​“Rebuild Your Focus & Reclaim Your Time.”​ The course launched last week, so you should definitely ​check it out​. It gets to the core of a lot of the topics we tackle in this newsletter about the intersection of technology and productivity, and it’s an incredibly polished final product. It’s actually this latter point that I want to talk a little bit more about today, as it sparks an interesting question about the future of online media more generally… One of the most striking things about working with Ma…

In the years since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, it’s been hard not to get swept up in feelings of euphoria or dread about the looming impacts of generative AI. This reaction has been fueled, in part, by the confident declarations of tech CEOs, who have veered toward increasingly bombastic rhetoric. “AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently told Anderson Cooper. He added that half of entry-level white collar jobs might be “wiped out” in the next one to five years, creating unemployment levels as high as 20%—a peak last seen during the Great Depression. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Sam Altman said that …

Back in 2008, when I was still early in my writing career, I published an essay on my blog that posed a provocative question: Would Lincoln Have Been President if He Had Email? This was one of my early attempts to grapple with problems like digital distraction and focus that would eventually evolve into my books Deep Work and A World Without Email. And at its core was a troubling notion that occurred to me in response to watching a documentary about our sixteenth president: If the Internet is robbing us of our ability to sit and concentrate, without distraction, in a Lincoln log cabin style of intense focus, we must ask the obvious question: Are we doomed to be a gen…

This week on my podcast, I delved deep into the neural mechanisms involved in making your phone so irresistible. To summarize, there are bundles of neurons in your brain, associated with your short-term motivation system, that recognize different situations and then effectively vote for corresponding actions. If you’re hungry and see a plate of cookies, there’s a neuron bundle that will fire in response to this pattern, advocating for the action of eating a cookie. The strength of these votes depends on an implicit calculation of expected reward, based on your past experiences. When multiple actions are possible in a given situation, then, in most cases, the action as…

In 2018, the NYU social scientist Jonathan Haidt co-authored a book titled ​The Coddling of the American Mind​. It argued that the alarming rise in mental health issues among American adolescents was being driven, in part, by a culture of “safetyism“ that trained young people to obsess over perceived traumas and to understand life as full of dangers that need to be avoided. At the time, the message was received as a critique of the worst excesses of the academic left and wokeism. But in the aftermath of Coddling, Haidt began to wonder if he had underestimated another possible cause for these concerning mental health trends: smartphones and social media. In 2019, w…

James Somers recently published an interesting essay in The New Yorker titled “The Case That A.I. Is Thinking.” He starts by presenting a specific definition of thinking, attributed in part to Eric B. Baum’s 2003 book What is Thought?, that describes this act as deploying a “compressed model of the world” to make predictions about what you expect to happen. (Jeff Hawkins’s 2004 exercise in amateur neuroscience, On Intelligence, makes a similar case). Somers then talks to experts who study how modern large language models operate, and notes that the mechanics of LLMs’ next-token prediction resemble this existing definition of thinking. Somers is careful to constrain hi…

In 1973, an author named Alan Lakein published a book titled How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. It wasn’t the first book about professional time management — my library contains a first edition of James McCay’s 1959 classic, The Management of Time — but it’s arguably the first book to talk about the topic in a recognizably modern way, with a focus on personalized tools like daily to-do lists. It went on to reportedly sell more than three million copies, and was even shouted out by Bill Clinton, who cites its influence on his early career in his autobiography. Revisiting Lakein’s advice today provides a glimpse into office life fifty years ago. And the enc…

Last week, Elizabeth Lopatto published an insightful article in The Verge. It boasted an intriguing title: ​“Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want.”​ “Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customers. It was to identify a need, and then fill it,” she writes. “But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future.” I certainly noticed this shift when it first began emerging. See, for example, my 2015 article titled, ​“It’s Not Your Job to Figure Ou…

A couple of weeks ago, Ezra Klein ​interviewed​ AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky about his new, cheerfully-titled book, ​If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies​. Yudkowsky is worried about so-called superintelligence, AI systems so much smarter than humans that we cannot hope to contain or control them. As Yudkowsky explained to Klein, once such systems exist, we’re all doomed. Not because the machines will intentionally seek to kill us, but because we’ll be so unimportant and puny to them that they won’t consider us at all. “When we build a skyscraper on top of where there used to be an ant heap, we’re not trying to kill the ants; we’re trying to build a skyscraper,” …