Minimizing Distractions

I’m writing this post about eighteen hours before the first polls open on Election Day, and it feels tense out there. The New York Times, for example, just posted an article headlined: “How Americans Feel About the Election: Anxious and Scared.” Based on extensive interviews conducted over this past weekend, the Times concludes: “Americans across the political spectrum reported heading to the polls in battleground states with a sense that their nation was coming undone. While some expressed relief that the long election season was finally nearing an end, it was hard to escape the undercurrent of uneasiness about Election Day.” These results probably come a…

One of the main topics of this newsletter is the quest to cultivate sustainable and meaningful work in a digital age. Given this objective, it’s hard to avoid confronting the furiously disruptive potentials of AI. I’ve been spending a lot time in recent years, in my roles as a digital theorist and technology journalist, researching and writing about this topic, so it occurred to me that it might be useful to capture in one place all of my current thoughts about the intersection of AI and work. The obvious caveat applies: these predictions will shift — perhaps even substantially — as this inherently unpredictable sector continues to evolve. But here’s my current …

In the spring of 2019, while on tour for my book Digital Minimalism, I stopped by the Manhattan production offices of Brian Koppelman to record an episode of his podcast, The Moment. We had a good conversation covering a lot of territory. But there was one point, around the twenty-minute mark, where things got mildly heated. Koppelman took exception to my skepticism surrounding social media, which he found to be reactionary and resisting the inevitable. As he argued: “I was thinking a lot today about the horse and buggy and the cars. Right? Because I could have been a car minimalist. And I could have said, you know, there are all these costs of having a car: y…

As of last week, children​ under the age of 16 in Australia are now banned ​from using a long list of popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and, perhaps most notably, TikTok The law requires these companies to identify and deactivate accounts of users under 16, and to prevent them from setting up new accounts in the future. Failure to comply can result in fines of up to $33 million. Since it was proposed a year ago, the ban has drawn complaints from tech companies who argued that determining users’ ages is somehow beyond their engineers’ capabilities. There was also scattered pushback from civil liberties groups concerne…

​Last week​ in this newsletter, I summarized some interesting results from ​a study​ that analyzed the behavior of 164,000 knowledge workers. It found that introducing AI tools increased administrative tasks by more than 90% while reducing deep work effort by almost 10%. The problem, I concluded, was that digital productivity tools sometimes speed up the wrong tasks, which might feel efficient in the moment, but lead us to accomplish less over time. As I emphasized, AI is not the only technology to produce this paradoxical side effect —we saw something similar with email, mobile computing, and online meeting software as well. So, what’s the solution to avoid these…

On Saturday, the Washington Nationals baseball team played their first spring training game of the season. I was listening to the radio call in the background as I went about my day. I also, however, kept an eye on a community blog called Talk Nats. The site moderators had posted an article about today’s game. As play unfolded, a group of Nationals fans gathered in the comment threads to discuss the unfolding action. Much of the discussion focused on specific plays. “Nasty from Ferrer,” noted a commenter, soon after one of the team’s best relief pitchers, Jose Ferrer, struck out two batters. “Looks like we took the Ferreri [sic] out of the garage,” someo…

Last week, Boris Cherny, the creator and head of Anthropic’s popular Claude Code programming agent, posted ​a thread on X​ about how he personally used the AI tool in his own work. It created a stir. “What began as a casual sharing of his personal terminal setup has spiraled into a viral manifesto on the future of software development,” explained a ​VentureBeat article​ about the incident. As Cherny explained, he runs five different instances of the coding agent at the same time, each in its own tab in his terminal: ‘While one agent runs a test suite, another refactors a legacy module, and a third drafts documentation.’ He cycles rapidly through these tabs, providing …

Late last year, the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson gave a talk at Dragonsteel Nexus, an annual conference organized by his media company. It was titled, ​“The Hidden Cost of AI Art.”​ As Sanderson explains, early in his address: “The surge of large language models and generative AI raises questions that are fascinating, and even if I dislike how the movement is going in relation to writing and art, I want to learn from the experience of what’s happening.” Sanderson makes it clear that he disapproves of AI-generated art (“my stomach turns”), but he wants to understand better why this is the case. To do so, he begins considering and then ultimately dismissing a …

Last year, the celebrated New Yorker writer David Grann spoke with Nieman Storyboard about his book, The Wager. The interviewer asked Grann how he manages to keep coming across the kind of stories that most writers would dream of finding, even once in their lives. Here’s how Grann responded: “Coming up with the right idea is the hardest part. First, you try to find a story that grips you and has subjects that are fascinating. Then, you ask: Are there underlying materials to tell that story?… The third level of interrogation is: Does the story have another dimension, richer themes, or trap doors that lead you places?” He later adds: “I spend a preliminary p…

I’m writing this from a rental property, on a hillside overlooking the northern reach of the Taconic Mountains. A key feature of this property is a small outbuilding, designed and built by the current owner as a quiet place for visitors to work. Spanning, at most, twelve feet square, it features a daybed, a heating stove, and a desk arranged to look outward toward the distant peaks. A ceiling fan moves the air on muggy afternoons. Here’s a view from the desk: This rental property, in other words, includes a canonical example of one of my all-time favorite styles of functional architecture: the writing shed. (Indeed, as the owner told me, I’m not the first…

Growing up in New York, first in the city and then later in Albany, a young Herman Melville made frequent trips to stay with his uncle, Thomas Melvill, who lived on a farm near Pittsfield, in the Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts. In 1850, Thomas decided to sell his property. Melville, now with a young family of his own, arrived that summer for what they believed to be his final visit to the area. It was during this fateful trip that Melville learned that the Brewster farm, consisting of 160 acres abutting his uncle’s plot, was up for sale. Fueled by impulse and nostalgia, he borrowed $3000 from his father-in-law and bought the property. He would come to ca…

At a time when educators are increasingly concerned about technology’s impact in the classroom, the Washington Post published ​an op-ed​ with a contrarian tone. The piece, written by the journalism professor Stephen Kurczy, focuses on Green Bank, a small town in rural West Virginia, home to the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. Due to the sensitivity of this device, the entire area is a congressionally designated “radio quiet zone” in which cell service and WiFi are banned. The thought of a disconnected life might sound refreshing, but as this op-ed argues, there’s one group for which this reality might be causing problems: the students in Green Bank’s combin…

Last month, a 22-year-old entrepreneur named Emil Barr published a Wall Street Journal op-ed boasting a provocative title:​ “‘Work-Life Balance’ Will Keep You Mediocre.”​ He opens with a spicy take: “I’m 22 and I’ve built two companies that together are valued at more than $20 million…When people ask how I did it, the answer isn’t what they expect—or want—to hear. I eliminated work-life balance entirely and just worked. When you front-load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life.” As Barr elaborates, when starting his first company, he slept only three and a half hours per night. “The physical and mental toll was brutal: I gaine…

“Something is up in academic research,” ​write​ the members of an AI Task Force convened by the journal Organization Science. As they go on to elaborate: “If you are an editor or reviewer at a journal these days, you probably already know this. The manuscripts are arriving in greater volume, with a particular feel that is hard to pin down. On the surface, the papers look the same as ever, but the writing feels weightless in a way that rarely describes academic writing…you find yourself scratching your head at the meaning the words are trying to convey.” The culprit? The task force crunched the numbers and produced a clear answer. Starting in 2023, after ChatGPT be…

Last month, The Atlantic published an article with an alarming headline: ​“The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films.”​ The author of the piece, Rose Horowitch, spoke with professors around the country who have begun to complain about this trend. What she learned was disheartening: “I used to think, if homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “But students will not do it.” I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have…

Back in 2012, as a young assistant professor, I traveled to Berkeley to attend a wedding. On the first morning after we arrived, my wife had a conference call, so I decided to wander the nearby university campus to work on a vexing theory problem my collaborators and I had taken to calling “The Beast.” I remember what happened next because ​I wrote an essay​ about the experience. The tale starts slow: “It was early, and the fog was just starting its march down the Berkeley hills. I eventually wandered into an eucalyptus grove. Once there, I sipped my coffee and thought.” I eventually come across an interesting new technique to circumvent a key mathematical obs…

Ten years ago, I published ​Deep Work​. It was my second mainstream hardcover idea book. The previous title, ​So Good They Can’t Ignore You​, hadn’t sold as well as we hoped, so the expectations were lower for this follow-up. This turned out to be freeing, as it allowed me to write Deep Work largely for myself – exploring the conceptual edges of the issues surrounding distraction that interested me most. I was fascinated, for example, by the economic reality that so many knowledge work organizations systematically undervalued focus, and was convinced that this provided a massive opportunity for those willing to correct for this mistake. In this way, I saw myself a…

Last week, millions of New York Times readers were subjected to ​an alarming column​ by Thomas Friedman. “Normally right now I would be writing about the geopolitical implications of the war with Iran,” Friedman begins, before soon continuing, “but I want to interrupt that thought to highlight a stunning advance in artificial intelligence — one that arrived sooner than expected and that will have equally profound geopolitical implications.” The “stunning advance” was the release of Anthropic’s new LLM, named Claude Mythos. In a lengthy ​press release​, Anthropic announced that the model would be made available to a consortium of business partners, but not to the gener…

On ​my podcast this week​, I took a closer look at OpenAI’s new video generation model, ​Sora 2​, which can turn simple text descriptions into impressively realistic videos. If you type in the prompt “a man rides a horse which is on another horse,” for example, you get, well, this: AI video generation is both technically interesting and ethically worrisome in all the ways you might expect. But there’s another element of this story that’s worth highlighting: OpenAI accompanied the release of their new Sora 2 model with a new “social iOS app” called simply Sora. This app, clearly inspired by TikTok, makes it easy for users to quickly generate short videos bas…

A reader recently sent me a viral video. It features a heavily muscled and perpetually shirtless fitness influencer named Ashton Hall demonstrating what he calls “the morning routine that changed my life.” It starts at 3:52 a.m. with Hall flexing in the mirror as he pulls off a piece of tape covering his mouth (presumably placed the night before to promote nose breathing during sleep). At 3:54 a.m., he brushes his teeth and gargles water from a fancy bottle. At 4:00 a.m., he walks onto his balcony to do push-ups. Then he performs some standing meditation. At 4:40 a.m., Hall journals. At 4:55, he listens to sermons on his phone while continuing to drink fro…

In 2006, a high school student from Ontario named James Hobson started posting to a new platform called YouTube. His early videos were meant for his friends, and focused on hobbies (like parkour) and silliness (like one clip in which he drinks a cup of raw eggs). Hobson’s relationship with YouTube evolved in 2013. Now a trained engineer, he put his skills to work in crafting a pair of metal claws based on the Marvel character, Wolverine. The video was a hit. He then built a working version of the exoskeleton used by Matt Damon’s character in the movie Elysium. This was an even bigger hit. This idea of creating real life versions of props from comics and movies proved…

I recently listened to Tim Ferriss interview the prolific fantasy author Brandon Sanderson (see here for my coverage of Sanderson’s insane underground writing lair). Tim traveled to Utah to talk to Sanderson at the headquarters of his 70-person publishing and merchandising company, Dragonsteel Books. The following exchange, from early in the conversation, caught my attention: Ferriss: “It seems like, where we’re sitting –and we’re sitting at HQ — it seems like the design of Dragonsteel, maybe the intent behind it, is to allow you to do that [come up with stories] on some level.” Sanderson: “Yeah, yeah, I mean everything in our company is built around, ‘let Br…

I want to present you with two narratives about AI. Both of them are about using this technology to automate computer programming, but they point toward two very different conclusions. The first narrative notes that Large Language Models (LLMs) are exceptionally well-suited for coding because source code, at its core, is just very well-structured text, which is exactly what these models excel at generating. Because of this tight match between need and capability, the programming industry is serving as an economic sacrificial lamb, the first major sector to suffer a major AI-driven upheaval. There has been no shortage of evidence to support these claims. Here are s…

A reader recently sent me ​a Substack post​ they thought I might like. “I bought my kids an old-school phone to keep smartphones out of their hands while still letting them chat with friends,” the post’s author, Priscilla Harvey, writes. “But it’s turned into the sweetest, most unexpected surprise: my son’s new daily conversations with his grandmothers.” As Harvey continues, her son has adopted the habit of stretching out on the couch, talking to his grandmother on a retro rotary-style phone, the long cable stretching across the room. “There’s no scrolling, no distractions, no comparisons, no dopamine hits to chase,” she notes. “Instead he is just listening to stories…

David Epstein, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ​The Sports Gene​ and ​Range​, has a new book out called ​Inside the Box​. As with all of Epstein’s books, I really enjoyed it. He’s one of the best storytellers currently working in idea writing. There was one chapter in particular, however, that captured my attention as being uniquely well-suited to the themes we discuss here. It focused on the ideas of a somewhat eccentric physicist-turned-management guru named Eliyahu Goldratt, who in the 1980s popularized a framework for understanding industrial productivity that he dubbed the “theory of constraints.” Here’s how a non-profit established to promote Gol…