Cal Newport's Blog, page 30

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)

Yoshua Bengio’s Deep Thoughts on Deep Thinking

Thinking about Thinking

One of the things that surprised me when researching Deep Work was how rare it was to find examples of smart people talking coherently about the process of effective thinking.

This is why I was pleased when a reader recently pointed me toward a video interview with computer scientist Yoshua Bengio — one of the big names in machine learning.

Around an hour and ten minutes into the interview, Bengio turns his attention to the topic of productive thought:

“There is also something to be said about concentration…to really make big progress in science you also need times when I can be very focused and where the ideas about a problem, and different points of view, and all the elements sort of fill my mind. I’m completely filled with this…that’s when I can be really productive.”

Filling your mind with a single problem, Bengio emphasizes, is not a fast process, noting:

“It might take a really long time before you reach that state…”

Hard problems are hard to understand. The best researchers in my field of theoretical computer science, for example, tend to be those who have the drive, brain power and flexibility to read other peoples’ papers constantly to spark a new recombination or extension that advances the field — an exhausting process.

But as Bengio emphasizes, this effort is worth it:

“[After you fill your mind with a problem is] when you can really start seeing through things and getting things to stand together and solving…now you can extend science, now when things are solid in your mind you can move forward.”

Our culture likes to emphasize eureka moments, but we often miss the hard, patient work that goes into preparing the mind to generate breakthroughs.

(Hat tip: Daniel)

Ready Player Productive: On Virtual Reality and Cognitively Demanding Work

Location-Boosted Cognition

A few days ago, I wrote about the converted barn where Simon Winchester writes. By working in a quiet and scenic location, surrounded by books and nature, Winchester is leveraging a key principle of attention capital theory that I call location-boosted cognition.

Put simply, this principle claims that the details of the physical space in which you perform cognitive work can substantially increase the value of what you produce.

Many writers swear by location-boosted cognition. I include myself in this category (the above picture is from the mini-library I built in my new house to support my deep work.)

This shouldn’t be surprising. Writers make their living almost entirely based on the quality of their thoughts, so they tend to care a lot about maximizing what they get out of their brain.

A point I made at the end of my Winchester article, however, is that many other knowledge work endeavors might also benefit from leveraging location-boosted cognition.

Organizations that depend on elite-level thinking — tech companies, law firms, high-end advertising boutiques, and so on — already spend fortunes to hire and retain top talent, and to provide them access to the best information and tools, so it’s only natural that they might deploy extreme work environments to further increase productivity.

Unfortunately, this idea is plagued by logistical obstacles. As a reader noted in the comment thread of my Winchester post: “not everyone…has the resources or possibilites to buy a farm with a place like that [to work].”

He’s right. As our economy increasingly shifts toward advanced knowledge work, location-boosted cognition in the style practiced by writers like Simon Winchester simply doesn’t scale. There are only so many fantastical huts, forest sheds and personal libraries available for the aspiring deep workers of the world.

Virtual Depth

It’s here, however, that I want to return (tentatively) to an idea I first floated two years ago: using virtual reality (VR) to create similar immersive single-tasking experiences.

As I outlined here and here, one of the little-discussed professional applications of VR is its ability to transport the user to a setting that might be capable of enabling some of the benefits of location-boosted cognition — without the need to actually travel to a new physical space.

To make this concrete, let’s consider an example…

Imagine a programmer working from her apartment. Her goal is to master an advanced graph algorithm that she needs to improve the performance of a module she’s coding.

Now imagine that she has a room-scale VR setup (like the HTC Vive) in her apartment living room. She slips on the helmet, picks up the motion-tracked wands, and finds herself transported to a small wooden hut, cantilevered off the side of a snow-capped mountain, overlooking a scenic valley below.

Perhaps her view is something like this:

The clever use of mounted sensors allows the table and chair from her apartment living room to be replicated in the virtual scene in such a way that she can walk over, pull out the chair, and sit down simultaneously in the real and virtual settings — making the illusion of the virtual room exceedingly convincing.

On the virtual desk is a wooden half-lectern, of the type used to hold up large pulpit bibles. When our programmer looks down at the lectern, she sees a page from an algorithm textbook. A swipe of her hand, flips the pages.

Because it’s room-scale VR, she’s free to stand up and wander the hut when stuck on an idea — looking out the windows, and hearing the wind and birds through her rig’s stereo headphones.

Killer App…

The hope is that entering this awe-inspiring scene would allow the programmer in our example to learn the hard material more effectively than if she had simply cracked a textbook in her apartment, at the same table where just moments before she had been web surfing on her laptop, and where, in an hour or two, she’ll eat lunch while watching TV.

The VR, in other words, is meant to enable the same type of location-boosted cognition that Simon Winchester leverages to write smart books.

From a practicality perspective, note that the room-scale VR technology required to implement this scenario already exists, and the image resolution of these systems is rapidly reaching the point where reading dense text in a virtual world will become comfortable.

The table/chair sensors I mentioned don’t exist exactly as described, but similar tools are available and wouldn’t be hard to adapt to this purpose. We are also not that the far from the availability of tactile gloves that enable typing on virtual keyboards, or the use of high-speed internet connections to enable multiple remote workers to collaborate in the same virtual space.

Based on current prices, systems of this type would almost certainly cost less than $10,000. If they produced significant and sustained productivity boosts for elite knowledge workers, this would be a bargain for the individual and organizations that deploy them.

…or Weird Techno-Novelty?

The reason, however, I used the term “tentatively” above when introducing this concept is that it’s also possible that immersive single-tasking simply wouldn’t work.

We don’t yet have evidence that a virtual scene can induce the same state of location-boosted cognition generated by real world environments such as Simon Winchester’s writing barn.

It’s possible, for example, that the programmer in our above example would feel silly putting on a helmet and wandering around a virtual mountain hut like a kid in a video game.

It’s also possible that location-boosted cognition leverages other factors not captured in immersive single-tasking. Perhaps, for example, a big part of the advantage Winchester gains from his writing barn is the chance his brain gets to relax on the long drive from Manhattan to the western Massachusetts farm where the barn is located.

Worth a Closer Look

To summarize, leveraging VR to enable location-boosted cognition is both promising and risky. It might be a killer app for VR in the professional space, or it might be a silly diversion.

What does seem clear, however, is that it’s an idea worth further exploration.

Which is to all to say, if you’re a VR company that’s interested in experimenting with immersive single-tasking, drop me a note — as a promoter of attention capital theory, and the interesting intersections between tech and productivity this theory will inevitably create, I’m particularly eager to learn firsthand what happens when we attempt to shift our deep efforts to deeply inspiring virtual locations.

Simon Winchester’s Writing Barn

Photo by Holly Pelczynski/Berkshire Eagle Staff

The Part-Time Farmer

I’ve been reading Simon Winchester ever since I came across a paperback copy of The Professor and the Madman in my first year of college. Winchester writes on an eclectic mix of topics — from dictionaries, to natural disasters, to bodies of water, to, most recently, the history of precision engineering (naturally) — and his audience follows him because he’s good at what he does.

As I’ve noted many times on this blog, and argued in Deep Work, thinkers who produce unusually original and productive bodies of work often operate in environments that they specifically contrived to help support these cognitive efforts.

Winchester, I was pleased to recently discover, provides a nice case study of this rule in action.

As reported by the Berkshire Eagle, the British-born author splits his time between New York City and a small  farm in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, nestled in the southern Berkshire Mountains: “a bucolic agrarian space with geese, chickens and gardens.”

While in Sandisfield, Winchester lives in an old farmhouse where he keeps his collection of old clocks. When it comes time for deep work, he retreats to a writer’s barn (see above picture) with an interesting history.

Here’s Winchester:

“[It’s an] old timber-framed barn, a onetime granary built in upstate New York back in the 1820s. It was a tumbledown ruin when I bought it, and so I had its posts and beams trucked down to where I live…”

As he elaborates:

“Now it’s filled with books and so much sunlight that in the winter I have to take a break from writing for a while. My view is a line of pine trees, a meadow and newly planted apple trees. And there’s an owl that often comes in the evening.”

One of the more interesting ideas emerging from attention capital theory is the surprising role environment can play in supporting elite cognitive performance.

Professional writers seem to be at the cutting edge of this experimentation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the near future, we start to see more serious attention paid to constructing seriously deep spaces as our economy shifts towards increasingly demanding knowledge work.

In the meantime, if you need me, I’ll be browsing Berkshire farmland on Zillow…

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Speaking of intentional living, one of my favorite bloggers, Liz Thames of Frugalwoods fame, recently published her first book: Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living. It tells the story of how she and her husband Nate left a busy life in Cambridge, MA, to live simply but richly on a 66-acre homestead in Vermont. I recently interviewed Liz for my upcoming book on digital minimalism, and was fascinated by the conversation. I recommend both her blog and book.

My New Project, Part 3

Joshua Francis Newport. Born April 25, 2018. Joins his brothers Max and Asa as another future Study Hacker…

Beyond Black Box Management

An Exciting Way to Make a Living

Alex Honnold is an adventure climber. He specializes in free solo ascents, which means he climbs tall things with no ropes. If he falls, he dies.

He’s perhaps most famous for being the first person to free solo Yosemite’s 3000-foot El Capitan wall (see above).

Not long ago, at a live event at the USC Performance Science Institute, Honnold described an interesting technique he used to help prepare for his El Capitan ascent:

“For the full month before I soloed El Cap, I erased all social media off of my phone…I [also] stopped responding to email so much that I stopped getting emails…”

Free soloing turns out to be an endeavor that’s as cognitively demanding as it is physically demanding. Honnold’s distraction-free month was about getting his mind into shape for the big climb.

Alex Honnold’s feats are clearly awe inspiring, but I’m mentioning him here for another reason: his cognitive training provides a hint about a major transformation that might soon upend the world of knowledge work.

A Cursory History of Modern Management Theory

To understand the transformation I predict is coming, we must first (briskly and incompletely) review some management history.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford independently developed the concepts that came to be known as scientific management.

The basic idea of this movement was that experts should study a given production system, figure out the most efficient way to run it, and then pass down these empirically-validated instructions to a largely de-skilled group of workers to execute.

Both Taylor and Ford also experimented with using salary and bonuses to help motivate workers to operate at their maximum efficiency.

As the 20th century progressed, the knowledge sector became more prominent. Despite some early attempts to adapt scientific management-style ideas from the factory to the cubicle (c.f., this unintentionally dystopian monograph), it soon became clear that “knowledge work” was too amorphous and dynamic to reduce to a set of optimized instructions.

It’s here that Peter Drucker enters the scene.

Emerging in the 1940’s as a forward-looking business thinker, Drucker popularized (among many influential contributions) the idea that knowledge workers are best managed by objectives.

Instead of providing knowledge workers precise operating procedures, he argued, it was more productive to get them to buy in on important objectives, and then allow them flexibility in figuring out how to achieve them.

This management by objectives (MBO) strategy proved enormously effective. Though it has evolved over the years, its theoretical descendants are still deployed to great success today (c.f., John Doerr’s fascinating new management book on the topic.)

Black Box Management

Though different in their details, both scientific management and management by objectives build on the same general foundation: the worker treated as a black box.

In more detail, both philosophies conceive of workers as opaque vessels that receive instructions and incentives as input, then produce valuable artifacts as output.

The key is to figure out which types of instructions and incentives produce the best output:

Scientific management used step-by-step procedures as the instructions, and bonuses as the incentives.
Management by objective , by contrast, uses shared objectives as the instructions, and commitment to the organizational mission as the incentives.

Neither approach, however, is interested in the internal processes within the black box that actually perform the messy work of producing the output.

Attention Capital Theory

Modern black box management theories are important, as there’s no doubt that instructions and incentives are crucial to run an effective organization. People need to know what they should do and why.

But as knowledge work becomes more complex and more cognitively demanding, I’ve come to believe that these black box approaches are insufficient by themselves.

To obtain the high cognitive performance required by modern knowledge work will increasingly require that we open the knowledge worker black box and actually confront the reality of how human brains take in input, process it through complex electrochemical circuits, and produce valuable output.

Which brings me back to Alex Honnold.

His “job” is cognitively demanding. Unlike most cognitively demanding jobs, however, the consequence of operating below his maximum is gruesome death — leading Honnold to care quite a bit about getting the most out of his brain.

The result is his willingness to deploy seemingly extreme strategies — such as quitting social media and abandoning email — to ensure his brain is producing at full capacity on the things that matter most.

I strongly believe that more knowledge work organizations should follow Alex Honnold’s lead.

What I mean by my above claim is that knowledge work management cannot stop at the boundary of the black box: providing workers only shared objectives and the tools/information needed to act on these objectives.

It must also consider what occurs inside the box — setting up cultures, workflows, and environments optimized to help the human brain act on these objectives with maximum effectiveness.

To put this in (admittedly dehumanizing) economic terms, in knowledge work, the largest investment and most valuable resource is the attention capital latent within each worker’s brain — that is, their potential to process information into something more valuable.

To optimize the return on this capital requires that you care about what helps the human brain best pay attention to what matters and think deeply about it.

And yet, almost no one does this.

Both organizations and individuals in knowledge fields tend to prioritize increasing convenience and avoiding small losses over supporting Honnold-style states of maximum cognitive production.

For example:

Constant, unstructured communication delivered through email and IM tools is the standard in knowledge work organizations mainly because it makes life easier for everyone — not because it’s helping people produce tighter code, more impactful research or smarter strategy.
Similarly, creative entrepreneurs tolerate concentration-shattering social media use because they fear they might lose some small benefit if they leave these platforms, even though this behavior might be significantly reducing the value of what they produce (c.f., Tammy Strobel’s recent article on this topic.)

My conjecture is that this reality will soon shift. Simply put, knowledge work organizations that prioritize helping brains operate at peak effectiveness over other priorities will be more profitable.

These organizations will be a massive pain to run (imagine how much extra overhead will be introduced into your daily routine when you can’t simply email someone when you need something), but they will also produce a much better return on their investment in attention capital.

Once the market realizes this truth, embrace of these ideas — which I loosely call attention capital theory — will spread swiftly.

At least, I hope this is true.

If ten years from now the average highly-trained knowledge worker is still compulsively checking their inbox, I just might have to switch my career to adventure climbing.

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(Hat tip to Mark for pointing me toward the Alex Honnold interview.)