Minimizing Distractions

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…

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…

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…

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,” …

The address that I use for this newsletter has long since been overrun by nonsense. Seemingly every PR and marketing firm in existence has gleefully added it to the various mailing lists that they use to convince their clients that they offer global reach. I recently received, for example, a message announcing a new uranium mining venture. Yesterday morning, someone helpfully sent me a note to alert me that “CPI Aerostructures Reports Third Quarter and Nine Month 2025 Results.” Here’s the problem: this is also the address where my readers send me interesting notes about my essays, or point me toward articles or books they think I might like. I want to read these messa…

Exactly one year ago, Sam Altman ​made a bold prediction​: “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.” Soon after, OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, elaborated on this claim when he stated in an interview that 2025 would be the year “that we go from ChatGPT being this super smart thing…to ChatGPT doing things in the real world for you.” He provided examples, such as filling out paperwork and booking hotel rooms. ​An Axios article covering Weil’s remarks​ provided a blunt summary: “2025 is the year of AI agents.” These claims mattered. A chatbot can summarize text or directly a…

The recent ​announcement​ that Netflix formalized a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s television and film studios, as well as the HBO Max streaming service, got me thinking about an essay that Derek Thompson published on ​his ​Substack titled ​“Everything is Television.​” “A spooky convergence is happening in media,” he begins. “Everything that is not already television is turning into television.” Thompson then gives three examples of what he means: 1. Social Media is moving from offering connection to streaming videos (in ​court documents​ from this summer, Meta admitted that only 7% of activity on their Instagram platform involves users following peo…