Plain English with Derek Thompson: How the Digital Workplace Broke Our Brains

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Today is the second episode in our series about work. Our first episode a few weeks ago was about

the science of procrastination and how to overcome the natural forces of delay. Today's episode is

about how in a fantastic ironic twist, our productivity technology, email, Slack,

consistently gets in the way of our actual productivity. Or in other words, how the digital

workplace broke our brains. Calvin Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University.

He is the author of, among other books, Deep Work and A World Without Email. And at the heart of so

much of Newport's work is this incredibly rich mystery. Given everything we know or everything

we think we know about creativity, genius, shouldn't the internet have made us more creative?

Shouldn't the internet have produced more genius? We have no shortage of digital tools that make

it quick and easy to write, draw, illustrate, save, organize, share ideas. But email and Slack and IM

and these workflow and project management tools so often create so many parallel stimuli begging

for our attention that it makes it harder to actually do stuff. As the New York Times recently

put it, quote, something in the great digital workplace experiment has gone terribly wrong,

end quote. The average white collar worker that is someone in marketing, advertising,

social media, finance, tech, news media now spends up to 60% of the work week engaged in

communications. More than half the week. In a recent survey, Microsoft found that video meetings now

take up so much of the day for the typical Microsoft worker that a significant share of their workforce

is now logging in online to finish their actual non-email work, their non-meeting work between

9pm and 10 or 11pm, right, as if like the 9 to 10 is the new 9 to 5. In response to this relentless

need to loop back and loop back and meet and zoom and team and meet and zoom and email, Newport came

up with what he called the deep work hypothesis. He said, if you want to learn something, something

hard, something complicated, you have to focus intensely without distraction.

Doing this even three hours a day, five days a week, just uninterrupted, carefully directed

concentration, that is enough to make someone incredibly productive. That's a remarkable

acknowledgment or theory, the idea that a well-constructed 15-hour work week is enough to

make you a star. The problem is that the ability to perform that kind of deep, focused work is

becoming rare at the exact same time that it's probably becoming more valuable than ever in our

economy. So in this conversation, we talk about deep work versus shallow work, how our productivity

tools make us less productive, and how the digital workplace broke our brains and how we can

unbreak them. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English.

Cal Newport, welcome to the podcast. Derek, it's my pleasure.

For those who don't know you, who are you and what do you write about?

This sounds like a Gauguin painting. Where am I from? Where am I going?

I'm a computer science professor at Georgetown University. I also do quite a bit of public

facing writing about technology and its impact on various parts of our world. So you may know

some of my books such as Deep Work, Digital Minimalism in a World Without Email. I'm also on

the contributing staff of The New Yorker where I cover the same general beat tech and the different

ways tech intersects with our lives. Before we get to your diagnosis of the state of the digital

workplace, I want to know a little bit about how a productivity expert structures their workday.

So you are a professor, which I imagine includes teaching, responsibilities and research and

administrative duties. You are, as you said, a New Yorker writer. You're a book writer. You're a

husband. You're a father. I know it might seem like I'm kind of putting the cart before the horse

here by asking you to disclose the medicine before we discuss the disease of our harried minds,

but what is notable about your workday, the way you work, that you think most listeners who do,

let's call it, laptop work like you, might find your strategy distinctive?

And I'll preface the description of what I do. I'll preface it with just the explanation. So

what is the connection between what I just said, which is I write about technology, its impact on

our world, and productivity. It's because one of the biggest impacts of technology in our world

in the last, let's say, decade and a half has actually been the way that new technologies in

the workplace and new technologies in our personal life distract us, exhaust us and keep us away from

being able to do work that we love. So I'm a computer scientist who, why do I talk about

productivity? Because when you study technology and its impact, you can't get away from the way

technology seems to pull on our attention, the way technology seems to try to destabilize our

ability to do good work. So that's what led me to the productivity world. So then what do I do?

Well, I'm a big believer in what I call multi-scale planning, which at its core

is all about having some intention and control about where your time goes. So what it's what

it's rejecting is the reactive approach, which right now has become the default, but has become

more of a default in the last 15 years than it ever was before, because distracting technologies

push us into a mode of reactivity. What's in my inbox? What's on my Slack? What's on my phone?

What can I do in the moment? What message can I send? What thing can I respond to? I reject that,

and the way I try to reject that is through multi-scale planning. So you start at a,

let's say the scale of a semester or the scale of a quarter. If you're not in an academic context

and say, okay, I want a plan, what am I doing this summer? Or I want a plan, what are the big

things I'm working on for this fall? You then use that strategic plan, quarterly plan, semester

plan, whatever you want to call it. You look at that at the next scale, which is weekly. So it's

beginning of every week. You say, okay, let me look at that big picture plan. Use that to help

inform a plan I'm going to make for the week ahead. And now you're actually looking at your

concrete calendar. What is scheduled? Tuesday is busy on teaching. I've got these meetings.

Thursday is pretty open before noon. So that might be a good day to whatever catch up on

your manuscript, whatever it happens to be. So you're looking at your concrete calendar,

you create a plan for the week. So I'll actually usually type this out, plain text file, nothing

fancy. Then you use your weekly plan when you get to the scale of the day, and you make a plan for

each day where you now consult that weekly plan. And when you're planning at the scale of the day,

I like to do what I call time blocking, where I actually look at the available hours during my work

day, and I block them off. Okay, this hour I'm working on this, this specific half hour I'm doing

that. All right, for this two hour stretch here, I'm going to work on this project. So it's actually

giving every minute of your day a job, as opposed to going into your day and saying,

what should I work on next? Who needs me? I'm a little bit exhausted. So let me load up the inbox

real quick or something like this. So at all scales, we're talking from semester down the weekly,

down the daily, each scale informs the next. And the whole idea behind all of this is,

I'm trying to give my time a mission. I'm trying to look at my time and say, what's the best thing

to do with this? What's the best way to make use of this? It's active instead of reactive. And that's

the backbone of how I approach and try to balance all this different work.

That's so interesting, this concept of fractally scheduling your time. And when you were mentioning

the idea that the laptop and the phone screen can trigger this sense of reactivity, I mean,

that really struck a chord with me. There have been so many times where I'll sit down, and I think

I know what I want to accomplish at my desk on that morning. But then email is shouting and Twitter

is shouting and LinkedIn is shouting and Slack is shouting. And then, of course, I should probably

check the news and maybe I should listen to that podcast and oh, that article or that tweet,

you know, launched a tab, which launched a tab, which launched a tab, that reactivity of the

internet to use some of your language essentially schedules our time for us. And you're saying,

if you pre-schedule your time before you reach the computer, you can ward off, you can foreclose

the possibility of being scheduled by these sort of screaming devices. I think the best way to begin

to talk about your diagnosis of why the digital workplace has broken is to draw up a term from

your book, a world without email. And that term is the hyperactive hive mind workflow. Tell us what

that term is referring to. What is the hyperactive hive mind workflow?

Yeah, this is what's critical about what we were just talking about is that in 1992,

if you said, I'm just going to show up at my office and I will let the day unfold as it unfolds,

you would actually probably be okay. I mean, there is some distractions, you might spend some more

time at the coffee, you know, the coffee carothe you might want to, but ultimately say, like, I

don't have much to do here sitting on my desk. All right, let me pull something out, let me work

on it. It's really more of a contemporary issue that now we have all these different sources

pulling at our attention that if you just approach your day saying, what do I want to work on next,

you can actually lose your whole day. And the hyperactive hive mind is why. So that's my name.

I'm putting a name on something that was before not named, but it is implicitly the way we have

decided in laptop work to use your term to collaborate and coordinate our efforts. And

the hyperactive hive mind says we have these low friction digital communication tools.

So at first it was email, then we get Slack and Teams, but it's all the same idea,

low friction digital communication tools. Let's just work things out on the fly. So if I need

something from someone, I'll just shoot them a message, we'll go back and forth. Hey, what time

is this meeting? Do you know about this? Hey, what's going on with this client that just called?

We'll figure things out with back and forth, unscheduling ad hoc message. And that's called

the hyperactive hive mind. That's the name I gave to it. Now it's a very natural mode of collaboration

if you're in a small group of people. I mean, it's how a small group of people in the same

physical location, that's how they would coordinate themselves. I would just talk to you,

you would talk to me, we'd go back and forth ad hoc. Digital communication like email or Slack

made it possible to scale that up to lots of people, to whole organizations, the people who

are spread out over many different locations. And my argument is that this implicit decision

we made to switch to the hyperactive hive mind is at the core of many woes and modern

knowledge work. Having to maintain all of these ongoing back and forth conversations requires

that we have to keep monitoring these communication channels. I do not have the ability to say,

let me wait till three o'clock to check my inbox for the first time, if there's 12 conversations

going on. And some of these conversations might have to have four or five back and forths to

reach a decision. And that decision has to be reached today. And so I have to keep monitoring

my inbox to see when your next message comes in, because I got to volley that back over the

proverbial net pretty quickly, because we have to get this back and forth four or five times

to reach a decision by close of business. And go one level deeper there. Why is this context

switching between communications channels? You use email, then you go to Slack, then you go to

Teams, then you go back to email, back to Slack, onto Twitter, back to LinkedIn. Why is that context

switching bad for our productivity in a world where, as you said, we're knowledge workers and

so much of knowledge work is talking to people. So what's the matter with this sort of digital

workplace that we've built around us that takes these communications technologies and puts them

at scale? Well, it's a human brain is the issue. There are devices that can switch back and forth

between different types of operations with no problems, like a computer processor, for example.

A computer processor is completely agnostic to what operation is executing at the moment. It

doesn't care what the last one was. It doesn't care what the next one is. It'll do it all at the same

speed. But the human brain is very bad at this. So for the human brain to actually change its

target of attention from one topic to another, this can be a 10, 15, maybe 20 minute operation

to completely finish. You have to, in a neurobiological sense, inhibit certain networks in

the brain. You have to excite other networks in the brain. It takes time. And we can measure this

in the lab. We can measure this with imaging. We can measure this with studies where they actually

have people working on a task and then they interrupt them. So they have a confederate come

in and say, in this particular experiment I'm thinking about, oh, you forgot to fill out this

one form that was part of your experimental consent. And you can go back and see what does that do?

What does that do to their ability to finish the task that they're working on? All of these

threads of evidence weave together into the same story, which is the brain takes a long time to

switch attention from one thing to another. So if you're doing once every six minutes,

trying to switch your attention to the grab bag of highly salient distractions that's

represented by an inbox, and then back to an article, back to something you're trying to write,

back to a deep decision. And then after five minutes, you go back to that distracting inbox

again, your brain becomes muddled. You're halfway through context shifts that you then abort and

go back to the original, then abort before you're fully there and go back. And you end up in this

intermediate in-between state where you feel that mental exhaustion. It's where you feel that

resistance to doing more cognitive work. It's why you feel suddenly shut down or tired by 2 p.m.

You find yourself just saying, I'm going to cherry pick through my inbox to find the easiest

things in there to respond to because your brain actually can't do anything more demanding at that

point. I don't know if you can answer this question, but there is a cliché that the internet makes us

ADHD, that it takes what is a minority experience in terms of people having this hyperactive deficit

disorder and makes it a more common experience of being online. Do you have any idea or can you

point to any research that suggests that what used to be considered a minority attention disorder

is now a majority attention disorder because we are all electing to participate in a machine

that is constantly forcing our attention to shift context in the way that you're describing?

It's important to note here there's two different forces at play that have a similar outcome,

but how they work is very different. We have the force of let's call this professional attention

attractors. This is email, this is Slack. Then we have the force of what we can think of as

attention economy attention attractors. This is social media, this is the web. Both of these

things are very alluring, but they operate on different principles. These get muddled,

so I'm going to pull them apart so that we can use this to help structure the conversation going

forward. We're talking about the attention economy attractors. We're talking about TikTok or Twitter.

The attractiveness is engineered in. What you're dealing with here is a tool that has been engineered

to try to get that ADHD style experience of grabbing your attention, pulling your attention back to it,

then moving your attention very quickly to other things before you lose that engagement,

before you lose that energy. There you're fighting a battle of engineered addictiveness in some sense.

The workplace attractors like email or Slack, well, these are not engineered.

The snag our attention. It's not a sort of algorithmic curation of engagement. The things that

are at play here are much more, I would say, pragmatic and intersocial. It's just knowing,

as a human being, knowing there's communication in this inbox that is part of ongoing conversations

where other people I work with need me. They need me to answer this so they can get back to me,

and we can figure something out. That is incredibly salient for much more deeper

Paleolithic tribal reasons. We want to be there and be available to members of our tribe.

We're very uncomfortable with the idea that someone needs us and that we're ignoring them.

So we come back to the inbox less because we're addicted. We come back to the inbox less because

we have bad habits or we just don't know about batching, but because there's an actual pragmatic

imperative, which is this is full of ongoing conversations with people that you work with

and care about who need you, and you need to service them. There there's actually pretty

interesting data where you can break down, for example, people's stress responses to not

checking their inbox. So the experiment I'm thinking about here, this would be Gloria Mark,

and they had heart rate monitors. They might have used heat bloom cameras as well,

and they could monitor also the computers. They could log how often they check an email,

and they took the subject group and said, you have the batch. So wait whatever it was,

four hours to check. This was very stressful. You could predict how stressful it was, though,

depending on also how conscientious the person was, right? So based on the Big Five personality

test, someone who actually was more conscientious, someone who was more wired to care about other

people and what they thought of them had massive stress reactions, not checking their inbox, right?

So we have these two different things going on. We have TikTok pulling out our attention

because of the cybernetic algorithmic slot machine style engineered addictiveness,

and then we have Slack pulling out our attention because there's a good reason for it. There's

people in there who need us. The hyperactive hive mind is how we've decided to coordinate,

and so this is where the work is happening, and when you're not there, you're not being helpful.

So same effect in both cases, this ADHD style constantly moving your attention,

very different sources, and therefore very different prescriptions for what to do about it.

Everything you set up to now creates a big fat mystery in my head. If these tools are so bad,

why have our bosses, our companies, allowed us to use them? Why have the people in charge of

productivity let this productivity toxin through the door? And I've read a bit of your work on this,

I've read a bit of Drucker, and I want to propose a theory and let you play with it and maybe destroy

it. The theory basically begins with this. Nobody knows the secret to great productive

creative work. In manufacturing, we said, oh, the assembly line is more efficient than what came

before it, and that was true. If you have someone who just defixes wheels and cars all day, that is

much more efficient than what came before it, but when it comes to creative work, coming up with a

great ad campaign, changing a website, building a fintech business, coming up with a great book

idea, podcast outline, there are a million books out there about how to master creativity,

but those million books are a million stabs in the dark. No one actually knows. So a lot of companies

have defaulted to something like this. Creativity is teamwork and good teams share information.

That is the thesis. Creativity is teamwork and good teams share information.

But from that starting point comes this other principle. Number one, creativity comes from

teams. Number two, good teams share information. And number three, the more information shared,

the better. And that is how we fucked ourselves. Because if companies subscribe to the more

sharing is better principle, they'll welcome whatever technologies are most frictionless and fun

to share information. So we get email and then text and then gchat replaces text and then slack

replaces email. And before you know it, this assumption that information sharing is at the

core of creativity ultimately and ironically leads to a world that is so overrun with information

sharing that it becomes the enemy of creativity. Is there anything there in that story that connects

with you? Yeah. I mean, I think you're on to something there. I do see the introduction

of this way of working was accidental. And I think it was unanticipated. Email was the first driver.

So I go back in a world without email and I try to trace the corporate introduction of email.

And you can see what it was introduced for. It was trying to replace existing things that are

already happening with a cheaper, more flexible alternative. And it did. So it was voicemail

systems within companies. Those were expensive and not the best way to actually communicate

compared to email. And it was faxes. Actually, some of the driving force behind getting

interoperable network standards across the country. So you could have computers in California

talk to computers over in whatever New Jersey or something like this. One of the driving forces

of getting some interoperable network standards was actually coming out of the aerospace industry

and they're trying to get around faxes. So we need a way for these various far-flung buildings

to be able to talk to each other, send files and stuff like that back and forth.

So it made complete sense. We didn't want interoffice memos. We didn't want voicemail. We

didn't want to use fax machines. And email was a clearly superior alternative to each of those

technologies. We brought it into the office to solve that problem. And it ushered in with it

this new mode of collaboration where we talked more than ever before. And to me, one of the key

case studies of this, and I talked about that in the email book as well, is IBM. So I tracked down

and talked to this engineer who was involved with the IBM headquarters up in Armonk, New York

when they built their first bespoke internal email system. They wrote it from scratch because

their IBM and it didn't exist. This was the early 80s. What was cool about this is that they had

actually run a survey of all of the communication happening in the office because they had to know

if all of this communication is happening in memos and voicemails, if all of that moves to email,

we need a big enough server to handle that. So they figured out, okay, how much communication is

happening. Let's be aggressive and assume that all this is going to move to email. And so they

provisioned a server for that and it overloaded and melted down in three days. Because once they

introduced the tool for email, the amount of communication that happened went up by a factor

of five or 10. Because just having the tool there enabled this low friction back and forth

communication. And I think what's going on here is that, look, energy wants to flow. We want to

find low energy states. We want to find what's the lowest friction way of doing what we want to do.

And in work, sending an email is definitely low friction. These tools that follow Slack, GChat,

et cetera. I wrote a New Yorker piece about this once that said the headline was Slack invented

the right tool for the wrong way to work. Because what happened was, is email taught us to do the

hyperactive high find. Let's just figure things out on the fly. Once we were doing that, we realized,

well, this is not the best tool, right? I mean, it's these messages, they're all in the same inbox.

And so Slack and the other tools came along and said, well, if you're going to do the

hyperactive high find, this is a much better interface. We should have different channels.

We should keep a transcript of each of the different communications. You can go back and

check it out. Back and forth in a common chat room is better than CC. So basically Slack was

meant as a much better implementation of the hyperactive high find, which is why everyone

has a split relationship with it. The hyperactive high find is terrible. But if you're using the

hyperactive high find Slack is better than email. And I think that's why those tools really spread

is because they implemented that workflow well. But the workflow is a problem. So I mean, I think

it really is a almost like a techno determinist narrative that unfolded here. The technology

changed work in ways that wasn't good for anybody and in ways that we weren't really predicting.

This is not a good social construction technology case study of people using email and deploying

it to their advantage versus others. The email basically took advantage of all of us. It changed

the way we worked in a way that almost nobody is happy with. And it was unintentional,

unexpected and almost instantaneous. The one thing I just want to add to what you said is that

Slack is much more fun than email. That a part of what helped Slack win wasn't just that it helped

to organize group conversations better than a typical sort of Gmail interface, but that it was

fun. It had gifs. It allowed you to have reactions to things that people said. It felt, I mean, to my

mind, much more like gossip in a weird way. It got closer to the feeling of gossiping with

co-workers than just responding all and CCing and BCing, which doesn't feel organically like the

act of gossip. I said this before in other contexts, mostly about remote work. In many ways,

it turned many companies into group chats that many companies today, especially those that are

remote, are best described as group chats with a P&L statement. That's what a lot of these companies

essentially are. And that is what I think the experience of being at these companies are. I

myself, I'll admit, I have a very complicated relationship with Slack because my experience

of Slack when I'm using it for work feels a lot like gossip. And sometimes we're just gossiping

about the media industry. And sometimes we're gossiping about something that I might write

about. But sometimes it's just fun bullshitting, which is a part of what being in an office is

and probably should be. There's a certain amount of familiarity that you need to build

with your co-workers in order to trust them, to build psychological safety, to be able to

come up with big plans with them. But I do think that there's just something

very interesting about the fact that, yeah, I suppose to borrow the technological determinism

idea that we invented these tools to make necessary communication more frictionless

and it unleashed an enormous amount of unnecessary communication that now feels like a kind of

deluge, which inhibits our ability to do the most important kind of work. This is, I think,

a good time to bring in this concept of deep work that you've written about. What is deep work

as you define it and how does it click into this conversation about the shallows as we discuss them?

Well, I mean, think about deep work as a, in some sense, a cognitive state

in which you can be doing whatever work it is you're trying to do. It's a cognitive state where

you're focused. So you're focusing on something, typically something skill-based, so you're applying

hard one skill and you're doing it without distraction, which now we kind of have the

terminology from our conversation so far. I mean, we're doing it without context shift. So I'm

locked in on this thing. I'm doing this thing. I'm thinking very hard about it and I'm not checking

email and I'm not checking Slack and I'm not jumping over my phone. I'm just giving it full

attention. And the foundational observation behind deep work is that that cognitive state

where I'm locked on one thing and haven't shifted my attention in a while

is actually the optimal state for our brain to do stuff that is at all valuable.

So that state is a useful state for whatever the main value-producing thing you do as a

knowledge worker. I named it so we could see what it was that we were losing and what it was that

we should try to preserve. So if you're in a hyperactive hive mind workflow, if you're checking

your inbox once every six minutes for all the various reasons we talked about, deep work is

impossible. Even if you think you're locked in on this article, if you also keep jumping

over to Slack, you're not in a state of deep work because you have that context shifting

confusion going on and so your cognitive capacity is reduced. And so this book I wrote about that

was basically arguing this is the state that you want to help put people in on a regular basis

if they're producing anything at all valuable using their brains. You should be preserving this

state in the way that your organization runs. If you work for yourself, you should be preserving

the state in the way you work. You should know these are the hours I do it. Here's how I do it.

Here's how I protect it. Here's how I train for it. It is the core state for producing valuable work

with our minds, but we really didn't have vocabulary for it and it wasn't something that we

emphasized or thought about when we thought about work. We instead used all these technological

metaphors at whatever access to information, efficiency with which we can move information,

digitally produced insights. I want to get the best insights out of data. I want to manage data.

I want to move information quickly. I want access to information. I want communication to bounce back

and forth. We used all these technology metaphors without realizing the thing that the human brain

actually needs to do good work is lack of distraction locked in on one thing for a notable amount of

time. Have you heard from people that you've discussed these ideas with that might be CEOs

or managers where they'll say, look, of course, deep work is important. And of course, the digital

tools we've talked about, email, slack, et cetera, can be a distraction. But my job as a manager

is essentially to talk to people. I need these tools. These are not a waste for me. They're

absolutely essential for me to manage my team, figure out where they are in certain products,

their psychological states, figure out how they're feeling about certain products. I don't see a

way to extricate myself from these tools that you're saying are destroying my ability to have

deep focus. How do you reconcile that tension with the managers that you speak to?

I think it's like talking to someone who eats McDonald's for most meals,

and they're very unhealthy. They say, Derek, look, I need fat, carbohydrates, and protein as a human

being to survive. If I don't have these in a reasonable ratio, like my hair is going to fall

out, I'm going to get scurvy. It would be really bad. And the answer would be, yes, we know you

need those things, but there's probably a more careful way, a little more intentional way of

consuming food that is going to get you what you need because, of course, you need that without

you becoming sick, without you going to a state of ill health. And I think that's what's going on

here is, yeah, of course, you need to be able to communicate. I have to communicate with people

I work with. I need the ability to send them information and get information back. Of course,

that's true. But what's the right way to do that? Is there a way to do that in which we don't have

to switch our attention once every five or six minutes? And once you see it that way, you say,

oh, yeah, of course, there probably is. We have to figure out some more rules and processes.

It's going to be a bit of a pain, just like it's going to be a bit of a pain not to just go by the

drive-through window and actually think through, like, what should I eat? And where do I get that

food? And am I going to have to exercise more? I think that it is quite analogous. I would also

say there's an interesting study I found at some point, I think this is in the email book, where

they actually looked at managers. They looked at managers and email usage. And they found the more

email that a manager was using the less time they spent on what the study authors called

leadership activities. So less time they spent actually doing the big think that is important

to be a manager thinking through, like, what are we missing? What am I, what is my team not getting

from me? Does this person have a clear vision? I need to help this person get a clear vision that's

going to help maybe maximize their usefulness and happiness here. I need to think through what's

going wrong. What do they need? What direction do we need to change this team? All that goes away,

the more you check email. And the managers that they study that are checking email the most just

fell down into what they call productivity activities, which is just the most minor of

checking in and moving things back and forth. Did you get this? What about this? When's this client

dinner happening? You fall back to the small when you have all the context shifting because your

brain can't support the deep. So it's not just that, of course, you have to communicate. But

communicating all the time, checking in all the time, sending information all the time is not

an optimal state for management. So I'll say, Derek, let me just throw this in here. When I

first started talking about this, whatever it be now, seven years, seven years ago, there's a lot

more skepticism, right? The type of complaints you're talking about that people were really deep in

the hyperactive hive mind. So if you just told me to stop using email, what's going to happen? My

whole life would fall apart. By around 2019, 2020, a lot of that skepticism is starting to dissipate.

I think things have gotten so bad. The context shifting has become so obviously

maladapted that I'm much more likely to hear from, let's say, C-sweeter managers now,

please help. I mean, I don't know what could be done here, but something has to be done. We

weren't there yet in 2015. I think by like 2020, we got to a place, and the pandemic probably

accelerated this for a lot of people, where we realized this is not working. This is crazy. I

just did eight hours of Zoom in a row. This is clearly absurd. And I don't know what the solution

is, but there has to be a solution out there. So that's the mind space I think we're in in

knowledge work now is a general recognition something is broken here, even if it's not always

obvious what to do about it. One comment to agree with what you said, and then one comment to

press on what you said, I think there was a Microsoft study in 2021 that showed how much

work had been shifted into the 9pm to 11pm hour, because Microsoft workers had to spend so much

time during the typical nine to five being in meetings, they couldn't actually get any work done.

They were just talking to people and being talked to. And so they had to put their kids to bed,

have dinner, water the garden, walk the dog, come back to their office. And then at 9pm,

they could so-called get their real work done. That's how much meeting inflation took over,

possibly is still taking over in many different companies. One distinction, I think, that's

worth pointing out between eating at McDonald's and being stuck in a corporate regime where you

wake up every morning and there's five fires and 10 urgent emails. The eater is driving

the car and the middle manager is not driving the proverbial car. The middle manager is in a car

being driven by the boss. They are in a system or company where there is a pre-existing culture of

here's when you email, here's how much you can email, here's how and when you should slack,

here are all the group chats where you should discuss these issues and these individual

slacks where you should discuss these other issues. So when you have these discussions with

companies, how much of the conversation do you think of as this is for the individual

worker, this is for the individual middle manager and how much the conversation is just,

I'm going to take this straight to the CEO because fundamentally nothing can change

unless the culture starts to change at the top.

Well, I think that that is absolutely true. These are systemic problems in the sense that

to replace an organization of any size, any reasonable size, to replace the hyperactive

hive mind with alternatives is a top-down type thing that has to happen. I often talk about

our current state of working like a suboptimal Nash equilibrium. No single worker can leave

it by themselves very easily to improve their situation. If everybody else is sort of a tragedy

of the digital comments, if everybody else is using the hyperactive hive mind and you say,

I'm going to get more deep work in by not checking my email until three o'clock,

you actually end up in a worse off situation. You can't unilaterally leave that collaboration

strategy because people are counting on you to respond to their messages because again,

they have to get seven back and forth messages to reach a decision before the client,

before the close of day and you're just going to be screwing a lot of people,

that's just going to turn negatively on you and you're going to be in a worse off situation.

The only way to get out of this suboptimal Nash equilibrium is that you have to have

some force with sufficient authority to push the whole configuration into a different state.

That's a top-down thing. In any sort of large organization, it has to be, okay, we're not,

we have these alternative processes in place. This is how we actually organize,

is how we actually coordinate. I've been preaching this now for a little while. It's a hard message.

Let's just look at book sales, for example. Deep Work talked about, hey, focus is important.

Let's not forget that. It gave people personalized advice of what could you do as an individual

where you could train yourself to focus more. It could be better, more intentional,

like we talked about earlier in the show about how you manage your time to try to protect this time.

There's things you can do to schedule that's better than not doing anything and that's a

very popular book. Then I wrote a world without email as a follow-up where I said,

how did we get to this place with the hyperactive hive mind, the whole history of that, and what

would we need to do to get away from that? All of the answers in there are pretty much,

we're going to have to change the way at the organizational level that we organize work.

That book sold orders of magnitude less because that is a really hard message.

That's just how is that going to happen? We have enough pressures already on our company.

We're already so busy at the C-suite. We can't even envision how these changes are going to happen.

I think that's a really good point to put there is there are things you can do as an

individual that help once you recognize what you're trying to do more deep work and what you're

trying to avoid context switching. You can make your situation about 50% better, but to make it

80% or 90% better, the whole company has to change. That is very difficult because, again,

it's not exactly clear what do we do. There's not one tool we can buy. There's not one management

system we can put in place. It's a whole cultural shift. I just think it's a really difficult one.

That's the sense I get. It is very difficult to change fundamentally the way collaboration happens.

Yeah. You've also very cannily injected a useful criticism of the book publishing industry,

or if not the industry, then maybe just the tastes of book readers, that it is always

more popular to say, here I have the individual fix, then here is the structural analysis that's

going to be more complicated to fix, but that complicated fix actually might be more important.

I think that is just a general principle of book sales that is an interesting maybe side

conversation. You are now working on this idea of slow productivity. What is slow productivity?

Well, I'm working on it. I don't have the definitive answer yet, but I can

tell you what the threads of thought here that are coming together. I entered this

world of thinking about work and how we organize it through those distraction issues that we talked

about before. Once I really started covering what was happening in work, and in particular,

for The New Yorker, this was my beat for a while, really trying to understand the way

knowledge work was unfolding in our modern digital age, this other issue arose, which was, okay,

our definitions of productivity. What we mean when we say productivity in the context of

knowledge work is ambiguous, it's ill-defined, and it's not really something that's helping us

out that much. We have this vague sense of more is better than less. We have this vague sense of,

if I'm busy, that's better than if I'm not. I think a lot of this vagueness comes out of the

complexity of knowledge work, which unlike being an 18th century weaver, is not just one activity.

It's dozens of different activities that you're trying to jump back and forth and coordinate.

It is very difficult, unlike, say, in an assembly line making cars, it's very difficult to measure.

How productive are you being? How successful is your current suite of actual techniques? Because

there's so many different types of activities that don't produce meaningful outputs, a lot of it's

administrative or logistical or collaborative, and it's very difficult. We fall back on these

definitions of productivity that seem to be based around busyness, that seem to be based around

being visibly useful, being visibly trying to take on things, trying to be performatively as a team player.

And this seems to not be working. It leads to this overload. It helps lead to the situation we

talked about before, where you might have eight hours of meetings in a row because you have too

much on your plate, and everything on your plate requires a meeting to help it go. It's the overhead

tax. You get enough things on your plate, and the overhead tax takes up all your schedule,

and there's no time left to actually work on the project. You fall farther behind,

you have to work at midnight. All these woes seem to come out of this

malformed notion of productivity, so I'm working on an alternative. Let's define an

alternative definition of productivity that is going to produce good work, is going to be sustainable

for the person doing it, profitable for the company, but also make work more meaningful

and enjoyable for the individuals. And that's what I'm working on with slow productivity. I'm

trying to articulate a version of productivity that actually works with the way the human brain

operates, that avoids overload, that avoids the constant distraction, that focuses more on what's

produced over time and not what you did in the last few hours. And so that's what I've been up to

recently, is trying to come up with some sort of alternative that you could rally behind and say,

this is what I mean by productive in my company. This is what I mean by productive in my own life.

This is the metric or the approach or philosophy that I'm going to go after. I'm just trying to

actually articulate out there some sort of concrete alternative to what we're doing right now.

You know, one idea that I had as I'm listening to you is that it seems like in the manufacturing

economy, you could say a home run scores four runs, and in a knowledge economy,

home runs can score a million runs. And by that I mean being really productive as a weaver or

an auto manufacturer, there's a limit to how productive you can be. You can only as a human

being with a certain amount of machinery around you, make a certain number of whether it's quilts

or cars or electrical equipment. That number is bounded by time, by muscle, and by machinery.

But in the knowledge economy, a home run can score a million runs, by which I mean,

how productive was the idea that Nike should sign Michael Jordan to a shoe contract?

How productive was the idea that you had that deep work was a valuable concept,

and it was becoming more valuable at the same time that our digital tools were making it harder

to achieve? On the one hand, these are just mind bubbles. This idea could, on a time basis,

take literally half a second. It's a shower idea. It's a mid-workout idea. It's a walk idea. You

could have this billion dollar idea or a million dollar idea when you're not even working. And

it raises, I think, this really profound and spooky question of why do we even think of

productivity at all? Why do you even try to measure it at all like we did in the first half

of the 20th century when the most valuable ideas, like their conception, actually has

nothing in some cases to do with hard work. In many ways, it's something that comes at the

end of lots of hard work. It comes from experience. It comes from curiosity, from a certain amount of

familiarity with the market for shoes and athletes or, in your case, productivity and work history.

But it just made me think that this concept of extreme productivity has changed so much

over the last 100 years that it's sort of crazy that we still even attempt to measure it in the

same way. Well, and I think we actually do it way less precisely and more worse than

then you even realize in the way the question is worded. So even where you say, why are we even

attempting to still measure productivity the same way, we don't even know what it means anymore.

I mean, in other words, I think we're in a more ambiguous, confusing situation

than we really realize. So there's this vague sense in the way we think about knowledge work of,

man, we're so obsessed with productivity, but is that the right thing? But what do we even mean

by productivity there? I mean, what is it that we're looking at that says this person is more

productive than that person? I think this is way even that fundamental thing, which was so clear

when we were weaving, because I could say, how many feet of cloth did you produce or something like

this? It is completely unclear in knowledge work. We really do not have a foothold to think about.

So I think what we criticize when we talk about, even like what you're saying right now,

productivity right now, what do we even mean by the word? We mean more a mindset.

You know, it's more of a mindset of more is better than less, busy is less than lazy,

team player is better than, you know, being someone who's difficult,

because, and I think there's a fundamental insecurity driving this, because I can't actually

look at the pile of widgets, all of the other optics now matter more. It's almost like my role

as a knowledge worker who works in a larger organization is to disprove the hypothesis that

I'm somehow pulling a fast one on you, that you're paying me this paycheck, and I'm not really

doing much, because honestly, knowledge work kind of looks like that. How do I know? You just sort

of sit here at this desk. I don't know what you're doing. And so productivity now becomes almost a

game of trying to disprove the null hypothesis of, yeah, I'm just taking a paycheck. You know,

I am just sitting at this computer. I am not doing anything. And that's so different than what

productivity has meant in any other context where it was always quantitative. We always had some

sort of input, we had some sort of output, and we had some sort of well-defined system or process

that intermediated between the two. And you could have a very clear comparison. This method produced

this ratio versus that method. This method is better than that method. That's what it was for

crops. That's what it was for the introduction of the water frame and the spinning genies, what it

was for the powered lumen, what it was, it was for the introduction of the interchangeable parts

in the assembly line. That's always what productivity was. And what we're talking about now,

when we get to the world of knowledge work, is this weird philosophical mindset, performative,

optical. It's a completely different thing. It's an intersocial compact. It's a response to insecurity.

It's way more ambiguous and haphazard than I think we realize. And yet we use the word confidently. So

I get a lot of, for example, anti-productivity pushback. So a lot of people pushing back,

but it's unclear. I read a lot of these letters and a lot of things are written about me. It's

unclear even what they, what it is they're pushing back against. There's such vagueness around it.

And maybe I'm wandering a little bit in this direction, but to me, this is something that's

been fascinating to me recently. Because we don't even really know how to coherently talk about

productivity for this type of work. And yet it can seem like we all know what we mean, but it's

dewy. Right. I was having a conversation once with my editor at The Atlantic and she

she said something to the extent of, you know, roughly once every year, Derek, you

write an article that introduces some concept or word that enters some kind of online lexicon.

So I wrote, and I say a few years ago about an idea called workism, which is work being the

modern religion. And then workism became kind of a thing. And then two years ago, I wrote an

article about hygiene theater, this idea that we were doing lots of things to protect ourselves

against the pandemic that in effect, scientifically, we're doing nothing to protect us from the

pandemic. And we're giving us a false sense of security. And then hygiene theater and pandemic

theater became a bit of a thing. And I wrote a piece about the abundance agenda. And now I'm

writing a book about that. If you asked me, like truth serum in my arm, how do you do that?

I have no fucking idea. I sit at a desk in front of a computer and I type and I read Twitter and I

type and I read until I come up with a couple essays that do poorly, a couple essays that do

fine and one or two essays that do spectacularly. I have no idea how to distinguish on the front end

which of those essays are going to be okay, very good and sort of lexicon worthy. And maybe

this is just unknowable. Maybe it's like asking a songwriter with a handful of hits.

How do you write more hits? Well, if I knew the answer to that, I'd be John Lennon and not someone

who writes just one hit every three years. But maybe on the more optimistic side, I should be

way more purposeful in a perhaps slow productivity kind of way to think about how do I recognizing

that these sort of lexicon pieces are I think the most important work that I do. How can I

reorient my work around writing less and obsessing over high quality to raise the batting average

of those type of pieces? And maybe there is a kind of, if not formula, then at least

optimal strategy for maximizing the chance that those kind of pieces flow out of my fingers

rather than something that the entire world including me forgets in 24 hours.

Well, but the thing is for a writer like you, a writer like me, we're already way closer

to a slower productivity rhythm than most knowledge workers, right? I mean, so if you're a

writer and you're saying, okay, I'm going to produce, I don't know, an article a week for

the Atlantic or something like this, and they're largely going to leave me alone,

come up with articles, some will be better than others. We don't really care how you do it.

We don't really care if Tuesday at three o'clock, you're quick to respond to an email address.

Ultimately, we're going to look back at this year and say, in the 50 articles that Derek wrote,

were there four or five that really had an impact and was there one that entered a new

term into the lexicon? That would be a slow productivity approach. It's looking at the

highest quality things you produce over a longer term and let that be the goal,

not shorter term performative goals of is Derek very quick on Slack? Is he volunteering for all

the internal task forces? Is he always answering or sending emails? So in some sense, you probably

already are pretty close to slow productivity. So many of the people aren't though, because in a

lot of other work circumstances, there's not necessarily that clarity. So you have a clear

work product. I have a clear work product. Here's my New Yorker piece. Here's your Atlantic piece.

That needs to be really good. It's not a hard argument to leave me alone until I'm done with

it. But I think in a lot of other jobs, it gets a little bit more hazy. What is the ultimate thing

producing? And so then they can fall back more on, okay, I don't really know what you're doing.

So at the very least, I want you to respond to this email, because again, I'm trying to

disprove the null hypothesis that you're doing nothing, the fundamental insecurity.

But you can completely disprove it, because of course I'm not. Here's my articles.

This is my contract. I'm writing these articles. They're doing well for the magazine. You've easily

disproved the null hypothesis. But for other jobs where it's much more logistical and

coordinated and managerial, it becomes a little bit more difficult. And so some more clarity is

needed to say, what are we looking at? What do we mean by productive? In some sense, trying to move

more jobs to be closer to what we do. We're going to look at what you did over the course of a year

and want to see that there's good stuff in there. And that's kind of what we care about,

not so much where you are on Wednesday afternoon.

I want to make sure that we end here with some of the suggestions that have cropped up in your

books, Deep Work, Digital Minimism, a world without email. For those who, when they open their

computer, when they look at their phone during the workday, immediately feel what you described

at the very beginning of this podcast, that rush of being scheduled by other people's words,

other people's emails, other people's slacks, other people's Twitter, immediately schedules their

day for them. What are your biggest pieces of advice for people to escape that centrifuge of

essentially being trapped by their attention? All right. So going back to our separation before of

personal life, social media distraction, work distraction, we can quickly address the TikTok,

address the Twitter. These things are engineered to grab your attention. You need to use it a

lot less. You probably need to quit more of those services than you're using right now.

The services you do use, you probably need to use on a desktop or a laptop and not on your phone.

You need to use it on your terms. You should probably just be doing a lot less of any of those

tools. That's digital minimalism. It's a pretty simple thing. You don't need to be using all those

tools. You're the one being played here. You're the product that's being sold to the advertisers.

Use them less. That's easy in some sense. It's difficult from a willpower point of view,

but it's easy logistically. When it comes to what's happening at work, a couple of things I'm

going to say just to summarize. One is I think it's helpful to think about just the name

context shifts as a productivity poison. So switching your attention from one thing to the

other. You have to adopt this mindset of it's like you just took a shot of whiskey during the work

day. In the moment, it might feel good, but it's going to start to slow down my brain. My words

are going to slur a little bit. I'm not going to get tired. I'm not going to be able to produce as

well. You have to think about it the same way. Once you have that one idea, switching context

is an expensive thing. I need to do sparingly. Once you have that one idea, it will push you then

to introduce alternative ways of collaborating with people. It will push you towards, all right,

I'm going to give more instructions in my email about this. We're not just going to go back and

forth. It'll push you towards ideas like office hours. If it's one hour every afternoon that I'm

always available, I can start deferring back and forth conversations to office hours. Hey,

this is important. Call me or get me on Slack or swing by my office during three to four and

we'll figure it out. So you can now start taking things that would have all unfolded haphazardly

in your inboxes or on Slack and do them all in real time, one hour to a date. Those types of

ideas suddenly become obvious when you see context switching as productivity poison.

Docket clearing meetings become real obvious. Oh, if our team, I work in a team, we work on

things together. There's four of us. We realize we should have these two regular meetings every

week. In between, we should have a shared document where people add stuff that need to be discussed,

decisions that need to be made, issues that need to be raised. You have put them in a shared doc.

When you get to the docket clearing meetings, you start going through those one by one in

real time. This is one meeting, not a separate meeting for every issue that will soon take

over your whole calendar. This is one meeting where everything gets consolidated. This makes

complete sense. Again, processes around information handling that reduce context shifting, that

becomes obvious. Why don't we just figure out a way to produce this weekly newsletter?

That does not depend on us just sending emails back and forth. You put a draft in this dropbox

by this time. I will take it. I will put my revisions and upload it to the dropbox by the

end of business the next day. We then have a 30-minute conversation scheduled every Thursday

morning for final points. The designer picks up whatever is in that directory at 5 o'clock on

Thursday, and then they go ahead and whatever. You start working out processes where you are

putting coordination into the rules and not in the communication. All that makes sense.

When you think of context shifting as productivity poison that you're actually

trying to eliminate, then the final thing I would suggest is what we open with

is be proactive instead of reactive about your time. What do I want to do today? I can't do

everything. Here's the time I have. Here's the one big point. Here's some smaller points.

What should I do? I have 30 minutes early on. Why don't I consolidate four or five little things I

need to get done right there? This two-hour thing is happening midday. That's the key to my day.

That's what I'm going to write the article. No distractions. I'm going to lock down headphones

on. Okay, then I have these two other 30-minute blocks. Why don't I do a bunch of errands in

that one? You begin to take control of your time, figure out a reasonable schedule. What's a good

way to make the most of this time you stay as opposed to just being reactive. That coupled

with a fear of context shifting, those two things going together makes a big difference.

It really will make a big difference. You will feel, again, I'm using this term so

vaguely productive. I don't even really know what that means in knowledge work. You're going to be

less exhausted. You're going to stay on top of things that are urgent. The quality of the

stuff that really matters that you produce is going to go up. Those are the two things I would

suggest. I like the idea by way of closing that it's okay to not really know what productivity is.

It's okay to maybe even replace the concept of productivity, which is what did I get done

within a certain time period with a feeling? How do I feel about the day? Did I feel like I got

some stuff done? That feeling of accomplishment, it might be even more important and even have

more truth in it, even have more utility in it than any measure of productivity that's just

how long was your butt in a seat? How many emails did you answer? That feeling that I

moved something forward. Do I feel good about my time? The point about context shifting is so

it clicks into that idea so clearly for me because the days that I feel worse are absolutely the

days where I feel like I am toggling between five different screens, doing nothing, just waiting for

the mood to strike me to do the actual deep work. Those are always the days that I feel

worst about, even when I've answered more email that day, sent more slacks that day.

There could be a funny situation. I wonder if this is a future study that someone could do

of matching a boss's definition of productivity. How much time are you sitting down? How many

emails did you send with an individual sense of accomplishment? How good do you feel about whether

today met your expectations and you move forward on some kind of project? I do feel like that the

gap between old-fashioned definitions of productivity and new-fangled senses of personal

vocational accomplishment might be opening up. Last thoughts, Cal.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think in some sense there is, are the main things I do? Am I producing

things at the large scale that are quality and good and use my skills and are important and useful?

That's what you want to do and feel organized about everything else. I'm not dropping the ball.

I'm not trying to keep track of things in my head. I forgot to get this thing to this person

that he needs. You want to be organized, so you reduce that stress of just being all over the

place. Outside of being organized, it's in my producing things in the long term that I'm proud

of. I think year is probably the right time scale for that. What did I produce last year

that I'm proud of? I think that is a useful thing to think about each day as you're going through

your days. What am I doing today that when I look back in a year, it's going to contribute

towards something I'm proud of because you're not going to reference your email count. You're not

going to reference the gifts you found for Slack. None of that's going to come up when you look back

and say, what did I do each year that I'm proud of? Maybe that's the whole game. On the scale of

years, you want to produce stuff you're proud of. On the scale of days, you want to be sufficiently

organized that you're not stressed out and running around and getting in your own way. Some of that

is techniques. Some of that is workload management. A lot of that is coming from the top down,

probably, to make that work. But if you feel reasonably on top of the stuff that people need

from you and happy about the best stuff that you're working on this year, that should be

the model that we're going for, but it's going to take a lot of work to make that standard.

Count the report. Thank you very, very much.

Thanks, Dirk.

Plain English was hosted and reported by me, Derek Thompson, and produced by Devon Manzi.

We'll see you back here every Tuesday for a brand new episode. Have a great week.

you

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