Cal Newport's Blog, page 29

Habits vs. Workflows

Productive Pondering

As I transition from the slow freedom of summer to the constrained energy of fall, my thoughts have been gravitating back towards nuts and bolts productivity issues. One topic that keeps catching my attention is the distinction between habits and workflows.

When most people talk about personal productivity, they tend to focus on improving the habits they deploy to wrangle their work. For example, batching email, or deploying time blocking to control the flow of their day (which, as longtime readers know, I highly recommend).

There is, however, another relevant layer: the underlying workflows that dictate what you work on and how this work is executed. For example, if you’re a project manager at a consulting firm, and you spend much of your day emailing back and forth with your team members to get answers to questions from your clients, this behavior is an implicit workflow that dictates that asynchronous, unstructured messaging is your preferred method for extracting relevant information from your team.

Workflows are arguably more important than your high-level habits when it comes to impacting how effectively you produce valuable things (my preferred definition of “productivity”), but they’re a topic that’s often ignored.

Indeed, for most people, the workflows that drive their professional life are processes that haphazardly arose without much intention or consideration.

I believe this state of affairs should change, as there’s great advantage to be gained by confronting these flows, and, for each, investigating their optimality.

Consider the project manager example above. Better inbox habits and clever strategies for blocking out deep work time can only go so far so long as the underlying workflow demands asynchronous, unstructured messaging throughout the day.

On the other hand, once this process is examined objectively, better alternatives might arise. The savvy project manager, concerned about maximizing the return on her attention capital (as well as that of her team), might decide that everyone would function better if all this messaging was replaced with 10-minute synchronous meetings, held at noon and four everyday, during which questions and planning could be efficiently handled.

This fall, in other words, consider spending some serious time evaluating your workflows before turning your attention to the habits that help you deal with the obligations these flows generate.

Charles Wagner’s 100-Year-Old Warning About Social Media

The Simple Life

Charles Wagner was a French reformed pastor who worked around the turn of the twentieth century. He preached a radical gospel that rejected dogma and promoted simple living and love of nature.

In 1901, he published a book titled The Simple Life, which angered religious authorities, but became popular in America once translated into English by Mary Louise Hendee.

The fourth chapter of the book is titled “Simplicity in Speech.” It opens with Wagner’s assessment of the current state of  human communication. It starts with a familiar claim:

“Formerly the means of communication between men were considerably restricted. It was natural to suppose that in perfecting and multiplying avenues of information, a better understanding would be brought about. Nations would learn to love each other…citizens of one country would feel themselves bound in closer brotherhood…Nothing could have seemed more evident.”

But even in Wagner’s time, it was clear that this theory wasn’t playing out as expected:

“Alas! this reasoning was based upon the nature and capacity of the instruments, without taking into account the human element, always the most important factor. And what has really come about is this: that cavilers, calumniators, and crooks — all gentlemen glib of tongue, who know better than any one else how to turn voice and pen to account — have taken the utmost advantage of these extended means for circulating thought, with the result that the men of our times have the greatest difficulty in the world to know the truth about their own age and their own affairs.”

As Wagner elaborates:

“For every newspaper that fosters good feeling and good understanding between nations, by trying to rightly inform its neighbors and to study them without reservations, how many spread defamation and distrust! What unnatural and dangerous currents of opinion set in motion! What false alarms and malicious interpretations of words and facts!”

Writing in 1901, Wagner was commenting on the rise of tabloid newspapers, and the decontextualization of information caused by the telegraph (as Neil Postman so expertly documented).

I’m citing his commentary here, of course, because he could have just as easily been referring to the cycle of utopian hope to fake news despair that describes the recent rapid progression from the early internet boosterism to the Facebook Age.

It’s worth revisiting Wagner because his diagnosis of the issue is as relevant today as it was in 1901: when confronting new technology we cannot reason based only on the “nature and capacity of the instruments,” we must also remember the “human element.”

It’s this “most important factor” that keeps tripping us up.

(Hat tip: Cliff)

A Brief Summary of the Social Media Reform Movement

A Lonely Voice Finds Company

I’ve been publicly criticizing social media since at least 2010. For most of this period, most of the people I encountered were either puzzled or annoyed by my stance on these services.

When the event organizers first posted the video of my anti-social media TEDx talk, for example, they changed my suggested title, “Quit Social Media,” to something blander, along the lines of “Why deep work is important in the new economy.” I think this was a good-intentioned effort to make me seem less eccentric. I had to ask them to change it back.

When I subsequently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times arguing that social media’s role in career advancement was overhyped, I created such an uproar that the paper took the rare step of commissioning a response op-ed the next week with the sole purpose of refuting my dangerous ideas.

But then things began to change.

At some point in early 2017, as the various shockwaves emanating from the Trump election victory began to align and amplify, sentiment toward these services started shifting in ways I hadn’t noticed before.

I began, for example, to receive more notes of support and less confused looks when I told people I’ve never had a social media account.

Prominent figures suddenly announced they were leaving these services.

Last weekend, at the Kent Presents ideas conference, I sat on a panel called “The Social Media Crisis.” The crowd attending was so large they had to setup chairs in the hallway outside the auditorium doors.

The cultural conversation surrounding social media, in other words, is undergoing a rapid and surprisingly complicated evolution.

With this in mind, I thought it would be a useful exercise for both my readers and myself to do my best here to briefly summarize my understanding of the current state of this burgeoning social media reform movement…

 The Main Anti-Social Media Arguments

There seems to be at least three main arguments against social media at the moment. These concerns overlap in interesting ways, but also maintain distinct characteristics, and are advanced by their own vocal constituencies.

Argument #1: Social Media is Harmful to Individuals.

This argument focuses on the ways that heavy social media use can make users less happy, less healthy, and/or less successful. Most of my writing and speaking on this topic falls into this category. (My main point is that the benefits of these services are exaggerated, while we tend to underestimate their damage to our ability to do valuable things with our brains.)

In recent years, this argument has been bolstered by important whistleblowers and flashy media attention; c.f., the Atlantic’s cover stories on Tristan Harris, a former Google executive who sounded the alarm on how social media companies engineer their products to be addictive, and Jean Twenge, a demographic researcher concerned that smartphones might have sparked a youth mental health crisis.

A growing scientific literature, featuring top researchers, is also starting to quantify this harm with a precision that’s hard to ignore.

Argument #2: Social Media is Bad for our Democracy.

This argument was instigated, in large part, by revelations surrounding Russian election meddling, and, more generally, the relatively unsupervised role of social media in the otherwise heavily regulated election process.

Conservative commentators have also become increasingly vocal with their concerns about the unchecked ability of these services to censor ideas they don’t like, and users from all points on the political spectrum are experiencing fatigue from the constant drip of outrage and division these services seem to instill into their daily experience.

Argument #3: Social Media is Bad for Privacy.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal from earlier this year underscored the degree to which social media platforms harvest and exploit their users’ personal data. Facebook’s PR professionals did a good job at the time of casting Cambridge Analytica executives as Bond Villains, performing dastardly deeds. But what much of the media reports at the time missed is that there was actually very little illegal (beyond some potential issues with user agreements) or even all that unusual about Cambridge Analytica’s actions.

As several different social media researchers confirmed to me, what this firm was up to — using personality quizzes to gather information about users’ friend graphs — was basically standard fare in the growth industry of social media influence marketing. (Policy changes starting around 2014 have since impeded — though not stopped — some of these practices.)

The banality of Cambridge Analytica, of course, is what makes their case study even more scary from a privacy perspective.

The Main Proposed Reforms

The obvious follow up question is to ask what reforms might help solve the problems summarized above. Here are the main categories of proposed fixes that I’m hearing a lot about at the moment.

Reform #1: Cultural Changes.

Tristan Harris, Adam Alter, and former Facebook president Sean Parker, among many others, have been recently revealing ugly secrets about how major social media platforms engineer their products to be more addictive. Jaron Lanier has effectively portrayed these service as trying to manipulate your actions and emotions toward dark purposes.

These assaults from technology insiders are serving a similar purpose as the anti-tobacco Truth ad campaigns of my youth (which helped drop teen smoking rates from 23% to 6%) — they’re changing the narrative surrounding social media from one of cultural ubiquity and hipness, to something more exploitive, corporate, and icky.

This category largely captures my own modest efforts to help with this issue. My push to better protect your cognitive capabilities from relentless distraction, as well as my upcoming book on digital minimalism, are efforts to change the cultural conversation about these services.

Reform #2: Youth Protection.

The data on the negative impact of addictive smartphone use on teenage well-being is stark and alarming. Jean Twenge’s work on the mental health of iGen is an example of a strong early warning that there’s a serious problem lurking. I get the sense from others I know in this space that the scope of this issue is going to keep expanding until it becomes an unavoidable public health crisis.

My prediction (and I could be wrong here) is that we’re going to start to see more serious restrictions on young people’s access to this technology. France, for example, recently outlawed smartphones and tablets in their schools. Their education minister was clear about why: “our main role is to protect children and adolescents.” We’ll likely see similar moves in many American school districts.

I also think social media companies will be pushed to increase the minimum age for their users, and that the normative age at which kids receive their first smartphone will rise to something closer to 18.

Reform #3: Federal Regulation.

The E.U.’s response to social media’s excesses was to pass a sweeping new set of privacy measures known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR is aimed, primarily, at giving users more control over the data online sites and services gather from them. Under these regulations, which provide users de facto ownership over their personal data, you can now demand to see what information a given service has collected on you, and the service must delete it all if you request. These requirements are enforced with strict fines.

US lawmakers are increasingly more willing to discuss thematically-similar regulation, though probably not fixes as sweeping as the GDPR. A paper recently leaked from Senator Mark Warner’s office, for example, proposed reforms built around increased transparency and more aggressive FTC audits of the major social media platforms. There are also rumblings about developing anti-trust cases against the biggest of these platforms.

On the other hand, the people I know who are up to speed on Capitol Hill machinations in this area keep emphasizing the massive amounts of money these tech giants are spending on lobbying efforts, and Congress, of course, is not exactly a shining paragon of efficient lawmaking at the moment, so there are serious impediments to this rising regulatory enthusiasm.

My Thoughts

My commentary on social media has traditionally deployed a narrow focus on the individual: this is how social media is harming you, and here is what you can do to avoid these harms.

I was caught off guard by how quickly the social media reform movement, once it finally lumbered to life in the past two years, blew past the individual to seek facets to these issues that demand systemic solutions.

What I’m trying to figure out at the moment is whether I was ignoring these broader responses because I don’t think they’ll be particularly productive, or if after spending so many years alone in the wilderness on this issue, I haven’t yet recalibrated to the full scope of what’s possible.

Either way, it’s an interesting time to be engaged with this issue…

Beyond Digital Ethics

Extremist Suggestions

Earlier this week, Zeynep Tufekci appeared on Ezra Klein’s podcast. If you don’t know Tufekci, you should: she’s one of my favorite academic thinkers on the intersection of technology and society.

During the interview, Tufecki discussed her investigation of YouTube’s autoplay recommendation algorithm. She noticed that YouTube tends to push users toward increasingly extreme content.

If you start with a mainstream conservative video, for example, and let YouTube’s autoplay feature keep loading your next video, it doesn’t take long until you’re watching white supremacists.

Similarly, if you start with a mainstream liberal video, it doesn’t take long until you’re mired in a swamp of wild government and health conspiracies.

Tufecki is understandably concerned about this state of affairs. But what’s the solution? She offers a suggestion that has become increasingly popular in recent years:

“We owe it to ourselves to [ask], how do we design our systems so they help us be our better selves, [rather] than constantly tempting us with things that, if we sat down and were asked about, would probably say ‘that’s not what we want.'”

This represents a standard response from the growing digital ethics movement, which believes that if we better train engineers about the ethical impact of their technology design choices, we can usher in an age in which our relationship with these tools is more humane and positive.

A Pragmatic Alternative

I agree that digital ethics is an important area of inquiry; perhaps one of the more exciting topics within modern philosophical thought.

But I don’t share the movement’s optimism that more awareness will influence the operation of major attention economy conglomerates such as YouTube. The algorithm that drives this site’s autoplay toward extremes does so not because it’s evil, but because it was tasked to optimize user engagement, which in turn optimizes revenue — the primary objective of a publicly traded corporation.

It’s hard to imagine companies of this size voluntarily reducing revenue in response to a new brand of ethics. It’s unclear, given their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, if they’re even allowed to do so.

By contrast, I’ve long supported a focus on culture over corporations. Instead of quixotically convincing some of the most valuable business enterprises in the history of the world to behave against their interests, we should convince individuals to adopt a much more skeptical and minimalist approach to the digital junk these companies peddle.

We don’t need to convince YouTube to artificially constrain the effectiveness of its AutoPlay algorithm, we should instead convince users of the life-draining inanity of idly browsing YouTube.

I’m not alone in holding this position.

Consider Tristan Harris, who, to quote his website, spent three years “as a Google Design Ethicist developing a framework for how technology should ‘ethically’ steer the thoughts and actions of billions of people from screens.”

After realizing that Google actually had very little interest in making their technology more ethical, he quit to start a non-profit that eventually became the Center for Humane Technology.

I’m both a fan and close observer of Harris, so I’ve been intrigued to observe how his focus has shifted increasingly from promoting better digital ethics, and toward other forms of defending against the worst excesses of the attention economy.

The current website for his center, for example, now includes emphases on political pressure, cultural change (as I promote), and a focus on smartphone manufacturers, who don’t directly profit from exploiting user attention, and might  therefore be persuaded to introduce more bulwarks against cognitive incursions.

I appreciate this pragmatism and think it hints at a better technological future. We need to harness the discomfort we increasingly feel toward the current crop of tech giants and redirect it toward an honest examination of our own behavior.

On Facebook’s Unique Weakness

An Anti-Social Response

Last week, Facebook reported weaker than expected second quarter earnings and warned investors to expect diminished growth. As a result, its stock promptly fell 19%, wiping out over $120 billion in market capitalization. No publicly traded US company has ever lost more dollar value in a single day.

This seems like bad news for the social media giant, perhaps the first indication that its struggles over the past couple of years are catching up to its bottom line.

But not everyone agrees.

Earlier today, business columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote an optimistic piece for the New York Times titled, “Stumbles? What Stumbles? Big Tech Is as Strong as Ever.”

As Manjoo writes:

“[T]here is something deeply incongruous at the heart of the supposed ‘techlash’: It is not really making a huge dent in the tech giants’ financial performance.”

But what about Facebook’s massive price plunge? Here’s Manjoo’s response:

“In a strange way, the social network’s troubles only underscored its dominance…Pretty much everyone who studies Facebook believes that it will hold its grip on the culture and the advertising industry for the foreseeable future.”

Manjoo supports this assertion by quoting RBC Capital analyst Mark Mahoney, who argues: “[Facebook] is one of the most profitable business models I’ve ever seen, and that really hasn’t changed.”

A Different Opinion

I agree with Manjoo and Mahoney’s assertion that Facebook remains massively profitable.

But I disagree strongly with their conclusion that Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth should be considered in the same blue chip league as other dominant tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

While Facebook’s value might be comparable to these other companies at the moment, it suffers from a unique weakness that I don’t think is discussed enough by the professional investor class: it’s dispensable.

In my experience researching and writing about the intersection of technology and culture, I’ve noticed that a substantial fraction of Facebook users seem indifferent, or, at best, only mildly positive about the service.

They don’t mind it, and perhaps even experience some small benefit from its features, but they would also be completely fine if you removed it from their life. I know this, in part, because I’ve helped thousands of people do exactly this.

The most common reaction I encounter when asking people what life is like after quitting Facebook? A shoulder shrug.

It turns out you don’t need Facebook to maintain a vibrant social life (if anything, it might make things worse), and there are better ways to keep up with the news or find entertainment. This service does help you remember your friends’ birthdays and monitor the political opinions of high school classmates — but does this justify a larger market capitalization than ExxonMobil?

Now compare Facebook to the other tech giants currently dominating the stock exchanges. If you shut down google.com, forced Amazon shoppers to return to brick-and-mortar malls, or outlawed Apple and Samsung smartphones,  people’s lives would be significantly harmed.

The services offered by these companies, in other words, are indispensable for large portions of the population — and this provides them a foundation in the marketplace that I don’t believe Facebook shares.

(This doesn’t mean, of course, that companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Samsung are untouchable. They must still aggressively fight off competitors and fear bottom-up disruption, but the markets they dominate are stable and unlikely to dissipate any time soon.)

I haven’t done the research to back up this assertion with complete confidence, but I’d wager that in the history of modern capitalism, there’s never been a company that has been so valuable while simultaneously being so dispensable as Facebook is at the moment.

Given all the recent chatter surrounding social media, technology, and culture, this seems like an observation worthy of note.

The Peacock in Menlo Park: On Open Offices and Signaling Theory

An Open Discussion

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a new study that took a careful look at interactions in an open office. It found, contrary to popular belief, that moving to an open format made people less likely to talk face-to-face with their coworkers, and more likely to instead send distracting digital messages.

Not surprisingly, these changes led to lower productivity.

This post sparked an interesting discussion in the comment section and my personal inbox on the question of why so many organizations are so eager to embrace open concept workspaces.

A popular explanation was the cynical claim that open offices are a covert attempt to lower costs.

This might be right in some instances, but thrift can’t explain why Silicon Valley giants like Facebook or Apple, who literally have more cash than they know what to do with, embraced open formats in their new billion dollar headquarters.

The Peacock in Menlo Park

During these exchanges, I came to believe that when it comes to Silicon Valley (and other hot tech regions), the answer probably has a lot more to do with signaling theory.

The goal of an open office in this context is not to make employees more efficient, or to spark more brilliant cross-discipline breakthroughs, but instead to signal to new hires and investors that your organization is innovative.

Disruption and revolution are so valuable in the fiercely competitive tech sector that signaling these traits through a radical office layout might be worth the cost in reduced productivity. (This is similar, in signaling theory terms, to how a healthy peacock will expose itself to greater predation risk with a garish plumage to increase the chances it attracts a mate.)

Put simpler: If you were a Silicon Valley start-up, would you rather your 10x developers work from home to avoid open office distraction, or not be able to attract 10x developers in the first place?

A Deeper Alternative

When seen through the perspective of attention capital theory, however, this trade-off suddenly seems unnecessary. What if these organizations could instead signal their disruptive nature by reconfiguring their offices spaces to optimize the cognitive capacity of their workers?

What if, for example, they had soundproof pods where individuals and small teams could work with intense unbroken concentration, and these pods were then surrounded by common spaces that provided access to email terminals, coffee, and impromptu discussions?

Or, perhaps more conceptually, what if they could boast that their elite cognitive workers had no email addresses, but instead had access to Leo McGarry, chief of staff style coordinators who took care of the necessary but disruptive shallow tasks that infest so much of modern work — allowing them to focus deeply on producing extremely valuable output.

My sense is that there must be a way in the knowledge sector to signal to the world that you’re not doing business as usual, while actually enhancing your ability to do your business better than usual.

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All of next week (starting Monday, July 23rd), I’ll be at Royal Holloway University, in Egham, UK (near London), at a computer science conference I helped organize. Please me know in the comments or at interesting@calnewport.com if there are places I should see, food I should eat, or people I should meet while in this particular corner of the UK.

Open Offices Make You Less Open

On Spatial Boundaries and Face-to-Face Interaction

Why do companies deploy open office layouts? A major justification is the idea that removing spatial boundaries between colleagues will generate increased collaboration and smarter collective intelligence.

As I learned in a fascinating new study, published earlier this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, there was good reason to believe that this might be true. As the study’s authors, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, note:

“[T]he notion that propinquity, or proximity, predicts social interaction — driving the formation of social ties and therefore information exchange and collaboration — is one of the most robust findings in sociology.”

But when researchers turned their attention to the specific impact of open offices on interaction, the results were mixed.  Perhaps troubled by this inconsistency, Bernstein and Turban decided to get to the bottom of this issue.

Prior studies of open offices had relied on imprecise measures such as self-reported activity logs to quantify interactions before and after a shift to an open office plan. Bernstein and Turban tried something more accurate: they had subjects wear devices around their neck that directly measured every face-to-face encounter. They also used email and IM server logs to determine exactly how much the volume of electronic interactions changed.

Here’s a summary of what they found:

Contrary to what’s predicted by the sociological literature, the 52 participants studied spent 72% less time interacting face-to-face after the shift to an open office layout. To make these numbers concrete: In the 15 days before the office redesign, participants accumulated an average of around 5.8 hours of face-to-face interaction per person per day. After the switch to the open layout, the same participants dropped to around 1.7 hours of face-to-face interaction per day.
At the same time, the shift to an open office significantly increased digital communication. After the redesign, participants sent 56% more emails (and were cc’d 41% more times), and the number of IM messages sent increased by 67%.

Not surprisingly, this shift from face-to-face to electronic interaction made employees less effective. As Berstein and Turban summarize:

“[In] an internal and confidential management review, [the company’s] executives reported to us qualitatively that productivity, as defined by the metrics used by their internal performance management system, had declined after the redesign to eliminate spatial boundaries.”

What is surprising, however, is the fact that face-to-face interactions declined so sharply in the first place. My critiques of open offices (c.f., Deep Work) assumed that removing spatial barriers would generate more face-to-face disruptions. In this study, removing barriers instead decreased these interactions while increasing the amount of electronic distraction.

The negative impact is the same — more interruptions = less deep work = poor return on investment in the organization’s attention capital — but the underlying mechanism is not what I expected.

What explains this unexpected result? Here’s an intriguing hypothesis advanced by the study’s authors:

“Like social insects which swarm within functionally-determined zones ‘partitioned’ by spatial boundaries (e.g. hives, nests or schools), human beings — despite their greater cognitive abilities — may also require boundaries to constrain their interactions, thereby reducing the potential for overload, distraction, bias, myopia and other symptoms of bounded rationality…”

When you remove any semblance of structure to human interaction, people get overloaded and withdrawal into private, electronic cocoons.

This is just one study concerning one company and only 52 employees. But it underscores a conclusion that I’ve increasingly come to believe: when it comes to the main challenge of knowledge work, which is figuring out how to get the most value out of human brains working together to process information, we still have no idea what we’re doing.

(Hat tip: Masha.)

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An unrelated administrative note: The cover and summary of my next book, Digital Minimalism (due out in February),  just made its way to Amazon. Obviously, I’ll tell you more about this project as the publication date gets closer.

On Passion and Its Discontents

An Earlier Book

New readers of this blog might not know that back in 2012 I published a book about career satisfaction. It was titled So Good They Can’t Ignore You.

The book draws from interviews and relevant scientific research to answer a simple but important question: How do people end up passionate about what they do for a living?

Early in the book I make a provocative claim: the popular advice that you should “follow your passion” is counterproductive in the sense that it will likely reduce the probability that you end up loving your work.

I detail two reasons why “follow your passion” is bad advice:

The first reason is that most people don’t have a clear pre-defined passion to follow. This is especially true if you consider young people who are just setting out on their own for the first time. The advice to “follow your passion” is frustratingly meaningless if, like many people, you don’t have a passion to follow.
The second reason is that we don’t have much evidence that matching your job to a pre-existing interest makes you more likely to find that work satisfying. The properties we know lead people to enjoy their work — such as autonomy, mastery, and relationships — have little to do with whether or not the work matches an established inclination.

What works better? Put in the hard work to master something rare and valuable, then deploy this leverage to steer your working life in directions that resonate.

(This is what I call career capital theory. For more on these ideas, c.f., my New York Times op-ed, my CNN article, my talks at Google, 99u, and WDS, or my Art of Manliness podcast interview.)

The reason I’m dredging up this topic is that several people I know recently pointed me toward new research that supports some of my conclusions.

The paper is titled “Implicit Theories of Interest: Finding Your Passion or Developing It?” It’s written by Paul O’Keefe, Carol Dweck (of growth mindset fame) and Gregory Walton. It’s set to appear in the journal Psychological Science.

The Stanford press release announcing the article is titled, “Instead of ‘finding your passion,’ try developing it.” As the release elaborates:

“While ‘find your passion’ is well-intended advice, it might not be good advice.

A new study by Stanford psychologists examines the hidden implications of the advice to ‘find your passion.’

…

Mantras like ‘find your passion’ carry hidden implications…they imply that once an interest resonates, pursuing it will be easy. But, the research found that when people encounter inevitable challenges, that mindset makes it more likely people will surrender their newfound interest.

And the idea that passions are found fully formed implies that the number of interests a person has is limited. That can cause people to narrow their focus and neglect other areas.”

When So Good was first released, I was somewhat alone in my anti-passion advocacy. It’s nice to welcome some new prominent voices to my side of this issue.

Digital Wellness for Grown Ups

Beyond Digital Wellness

Earlier this week, the Washington Post published an article on the digital wellness movement, which attempts to use technology to help cure some of the issues caused by technology.

This movement, for example, is responsible for an app that “plants a tree” each time you put down your phone, and then shows the tree withering and dying when you pick the phone back up. It also produced a popular plug-in that displays, each time you go online, the number of days left in your expected lifetime.

Even Apple is getting involved in digital wellness. Their new suite of “wellbeing” features in iOS includes a wake-up screen that helps you “gently [ease] into your day” when you pick up your phone in the morning, and an improved Siri that makes suggestions about optimal notification settings.

I recognize that digital tools have a useful role to play in productivity. I’ve long advised, for example, that people use internet blocking software like Freedom to help jumpstart deep work training.

But something about this growing digital wellness movement makes me uneasy, and I think I’ve finally put my finger on the source of my concern: it’s infantilizing.

I’m a grown man. If I’m checking my phone every 5 minutes, or playing video games instead of paying attention to my kids, I don’t need an animation of a dying tree to nudge me toward better habits, I need someone I respect to knock the stupid thing out of my hand and say “get your act together.”

My sense is that more and more people in our current culture of digital excess are hungry for this type of strong challenge.

They don’t want to depend on Apple to tweak their OS to be slightly less intrusive, or need to download an app that provides a fun reminder about disconnecting; they want instead to be so wrapped up in doing things that are hard and important and meaningful that they forgot where they left their phone in the first place.

There’s something about these new technologies (and the screen zombie lifestyle that surrounds them) that feels fundamentally childish. This is making people uneasy. They’re ready to grow up.

(Photo by Jacob Gomez)

Jerry Seinfeld’s Closed Door

The Price of Funny

A reader recently pointed me toward a 2014 interview with Jerry Seinfeld on Alec Baldwin’s Here’s The Thing. Around 34 minutes into the conversation, Seinfeld provides a fascinating insight into the success of his eponymous television show:

“Let me tell you why my tv series in the 90s was so good, besides just an inordinate amount of just pure good fortune. In most tv series, 50 percent of the time is spent working on the show, 50 percent of the time is spent dealing with personality, political, and hierarchical issues of making something. We spent 99 percent of our time writing. Me and Larry [David]. The two of us. The door was closed. It’s closed. Somebody calls. We’re not taking the call. We were gonna make this thing funny. That’s why the show was good.”

Lurking in this quote is a lesson that applies well beyond the world of entertainment.

Convenience versus Funny

For Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David to close their door and ignore the non-creative aspects of creating a television show was almost certainly massively inconvenient for most of the people involved in the series.

Some of those calls they ignored were urgent and some of the “personality, political, and hierarchical issues” they refused to engage were important.

Opportunities were missed. Bad things happened. Executives were frustrated. Everyone would have been much happier if Seinfeld and David would just pick up the phone and take the meeting.

But they didn’t.

And this thing they obsessively polished ended up producing over $3.1 billion in revenue.

A key idea in attention capital theory is that knowledge work organizations implicitly prioritize convenience over value production. It makes everyones’ life easier in the moment if you’re quick to reply to email, willing to hop on a call, attend one more planning meeting and join that internal committee.

But as Seinfeld’s example hints, it’s possible that many of these organizations might end up producing massively more value in the long run if they set things up so their cognitive talent could shut the metaphorical door, disengage from the logistical tangle, and decide, “we’re going to make this thing funny.”

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(Hat tip: Jacob)