In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts.
Face-to-face conversation is the most human – and humanizing – thing we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood.
The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.
Twitter is crack for media addicts.
You need your own philosophy for integrating deep work into your professional life.
Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.
Because digital minimalists spend so much less time connected than their peers, it’s easy to think of their lifestyle as extreme, but the minimalist would argue that this perception is backward: what’s extreme is how much time everyone else spends staring at their screens.
The more time you spend “connecting” on these services, the more isolated you’re likely to become.
What’s making us uncomfortable... is this feeling of losing control – a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child’s bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience.
A better strategy for shifting other’s expectations about your work is to consistently deliver what you promise instead of consistently explaining how you’re working.
Why bother hiring a hotshot if the bulk of their time is spent doing administrative work?
In this second part, I introduce a framework I call attention capital theory that argues for creating workflows built around processes specifically designed to help us get the most out of our human brains while minimizing unnecessary miseries. This.
Examples similar to those given above are voluminous and point to a clear conclusion: regular doses of solitude, mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish as a human being. It’s more urgent now than ever that we recognize this fact, because, as I’ll argue next, for the first time in human history solitude is starting to fade away altogether.
As I argued, when you delegate productivity decisions to the individual, it’s not surprising that you end up stuck with a simple, flexible, lowest common denominator–style workflow like the hyperactive hive mind.
While the ability to rapidly communicate using digital messages is useful, the frequent disruptions created by this behavior also make it hard to focus, which has a bigger impact on our ability to produce valuable output than we may have realized.
One study estimates that by 2019 the average worker was sending and receiving 126 business emails per day, which works out to about one message every four minutes.2 A software company called RescueTime recently measured this behavior directly using time-tracking software and calculated that its users were checking email or instant messenger tools like Slack once every six minutes on average.3 A.
A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services. The hyperactive hive mind workflow has become ubiquitous in the knowledge sector.
I’m usually facing someone who wants to send twenty-nine emails to fix a problem.” His solution is simpler: “Go talk to them.
By working backward from their deep values to their technology choices, digital minimalists transform these innovations from a source of distraction into tools to support a life well lived. By doing so, they break the spell that has made so many people feel like they’re losing control to their screens.
For many, the core question of “is this the best way to use technology to support this value?” leads them to carefully optimize services that most people fiddle with mindlessly.