Ep. 397: Why Do “Productivity Technologies” Make My Job Worse?

26:37I'm talking about like if you're a mathematician or a theoretical computer scientist, you can use things like LaTeX in a web-based collaborative environment where now all your collaborators can work on the same file and compile it and make adjustments really quickly. So you can significantly reduce the time required to write papers or do mathematical formatting. We have bibliographer managers that makes it much easier to cite and professionally format things. Like the time required to like write up and format papers is much smaller. We have technology tools that allow you to immediately grab copies of like any paper that you might need to reference and digital communication tools that allow you to keep in touch with researchers all around the world and therefore get much more out of your mind.

27:15And all these things make academic research better. And we're still not producing papers at a notably faster rate per researcher than we would have before those tools were there. So there's – because these weren't the bottlenecks. They're useful, but they weren't the bottlenecks. So to give a – what is the bottleneck? Well, let's go back to our social science example. I remember I once had a conversation with Adam Grant, the business school professor and author. And I was asking him about his productivity as a business school professor. He writes a lot of journal papers. He was sort of 2Xing what his colleagues were doing, right?

27:49And these are data – these are papers and organizational management theory. So it's a lot of like you get data, you analyze it, you write a paper about what you found. And he said, oh, here's what he figured out. He's like, here was the key. The key is getting the right data. If you can get an interesting data set, like let's say from a company about their use of something that happened that no one else has access to, you can now write three or four papers off that data set that are going to be good because it all comes down to the data set. So Adam was like, here's what I realized I had to prioritize, putting out feelers, having conversations, meetings, talking to people, trying to negotiate access to interesting data sets.

28:28And then when it came time to actually write papers, yeah, he would lock, I wrote about this in my book, Deep Work. He would lock himself in his room and put on like an autoresponder. He had this sort of bimodal deep work mode. It's all kind of interesting. And you sat down and do the hard work of writing your paper. So I'm sure he would appreciate when he has those sessions to write the papers if he could speed up some of the steps. but the bottleneck for producing great papers in this field was negotiating access to data so the same thing happens in lots of fields the key bottleneck is really maybe not what you think it is it's coming up with the right problem it's having reading enough in theory it was often reading enough other papers understanding enough other papers that you're building up this toolkit in your mind of different techniques and then you begin putting pieces together of like this problem plus this technique plus that twist could get a result.

29:17And so like the number one, the bottleneck to doing better theory in my field was grokking other papers. And I don't mean that by using the XAI tool. I mean, in the original use of the word grok, reading and grappling until you really had internalized an understanding in your head. That was the bottleneck. It's nice that we had lots of tools that made it quicker to write the papers then, but that didn't speed up the rate at which we produce papers because the bottleneck was understanding other work. So it's key to understanding your job what the actual bottleneck is. What's the thing that really controls the rate at which good results are done?

29:48And when you're looking for digital productivity tools, be especially tuned to those that help what's going on with that bottleneck to help speed up that piece. Like using email as a digital productivity tool to help put out more feelers and get access to more potential data sets to use in the Adam Grant scenario. That's a digital productivity tool that's helping the exact bottleneck of producing those papers. Whereas using cloud code to automatically generate your graphs is nice, but it's probably not going to speed up the rate at which papers are produced. All right, so make sure you look at the right bottlenecks.

30:23All right, third and final idea for avoiding these traps in your daily schedule is separate deep from shallow efforts. So just have and protect the time for sitting and doing hard things with your brain and the activities that you know for sure create bottom line value. this just gives you like a safety barrier against some of the accidental negative side effects of digital productivity tools so like you're now you're using slack because it seems like it would be even faster than email and maybe you're having all these secondary side effects of it's now there's many more messages and it's really distracting but if you have a habit of separating deep from shallow work those side effects won't affect the hours where you're working on the primary thing that moves the needle.

31:09Or maybe you're using AI for certain things and the right graphs or this or that, and it's starting to sort of get you into like slop territory and you're having all these long back and forth conversations with the tool and it's like eating up a lot of time. If you separate deep from shallow work, it's a firewall that keeps that from infecting the area where you're actually doing the hard work of thinking. This doesn't mean that you won't be using digital tools while doing the deep work, but there you're just carefully deploying digital tools that just help you continue to make direct progress on the like bottom line things.

31:38I'm writing a draft of a paper. I'm putting together the strategy memo. I'm architecting the key element, low stack element of this new tech stack that I'm programming, right? So if you separate and protect deep from shallow, you're not preventing the negative side effects of digital productivity tools from happening, but you're containing them in a way that they can't completely take over the activities that really matter. All right, so my three ideas, again, use a better scoreboard, identify the actual bottlenecks to the things that really matter and focus on improving those more than other things, and separate deep from shallow work so that side effects you aren't expecting of digital productivity tools won't have too much of a negative impact on your ability to move the bottom line forward.

32:23All right, so let me conclude here. my argument is not that digital technology in the office always makes things worse that is clearly not the case there's any number of digital tools i used it makes my life easier i'm glad to there there's other tools that make my life easier in some ways and terrible in others there's a whole mix but it is true that many of these tools seem at first glance like they should make us more productive in the true sense of value produced per worker and accidentally end up creating the opposite effect. And once you understand why this happens, you can sidestep those traps, get value out of digital tools while avoiding more of their cost.

33:05So it's the type of conversation that we don't often have. We just say, hey, here's the new tool. Let's do it. This is cool. It's good to be critical like this. And with this huge new AI revolution going on, it's a great time to have a refresher on these dynamics. So there you go, Jesse. Digital productivity paradox. That's something I've been writing about for a decade now. Yeah. 10 years. That's when deep work came out 10 years ago. Hasn't got better. Has not got better. I keep, I keep thinking it will, but, but we're still struggling. All right. That's enough for me. Now we want to hear what you have to say.

33:44So it's time to open our inbox, but before we get to your notes, let's take a quick break. to hear from our sponsors. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero?

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37:08All right, Jesse, what are we doing for our first message? Our first message comes from Pablo, who sent us an article about meetings. Oh, this is kind of on theme for our discussion of digital productivity tools and sort of traps that we get into. Here's what Pablo said. His introduction was, Thought you might find this interesting given your secondary focus on managing the utility of meetings. All right. So let's load up the article he's talking about here. This came, I guess, is this a substack, Jesse? Yeah. All right. It came from a substack called the critical path. And the article is titled why meetings multiply.

37:49And it's written by Nicole Williams. All right. I'm going to read some highlights from this article because I thought it was actually pretty smart. And then I'm going to generalize the approach Nicole takes to workplace technology more generally. All right, so let me start here. This is from the article. There is a strange pattern inside most organizations. Meetings rarely disappear. They multiply. A team begins with a single weekly meeting. Soon, another appears to, quote, coordinate, end quote. Then a check-in meeting is added. Then a review meeting. Eventually, the calendar fills with recurring blocks that feel permanent as if the organization itself produces meetings the way a tree produces leaves.

38:36Yes, I know this phenomenon well. So why does this happen? Let's go back to the article and see Nicole's explanation. So I'll read again here. Organizations exist to coordinate work among many people who do not have the same information. Every role sees a different slice of reality. because no single person holds the complete picture organizations need mechanisms to exchange information and meetings are one of the simplest mechanisms when uncertainty increases the organization creates more information exchange points and these points usually take the form of meetings what appears to be calendar overload is often an attempt to reduce informational blind spots instead of everyone speaking to everyone individually the system creates a place where information can be exchanged collectively.

39:24From this perspective, meetings are not simply interruptions in the workday. They are coordination infrastructure. I think those were really good points from Nicole. She gave two other reasons, which I'll just summarize why meetings multiply. She said it also has to do with reducing risk. When a group meets to talk about something, you're distributing the risk among all of those people. So there's no one person responsible to it so it reduces risk for everyone involved. She also said it's a way to quote signal participation end quote, a way to show that you're engaged in part of the efforts. The terminology I would use quoting from earlier in the episode would be pseudo productivity.

40:01It's a good way to show that you're pseudo productive because you're in a meeting, people see you, you talk to them, they remember you being involved. And from a pseudo productivity perspective, it's like, yeah, that person is trying, they're being useful. All right, here's the concluding sentence from Nicole. As long as organizations face uncertainty, distribute responsibility, and coordinate across teams, meetings will continue to multiply. All right, so what do I like about this analysis more generally? The frame. It's a frame that I have adopted in my work, most notably in my book, A World Without Email.

40:37And it's a frame that shifts the analysis of workplace habits, workplace technology, workplace behavior, it shifts it away from individual habits and it puts the focus on systems, which I think is the right way to analyze most of these issues. Most people think in terms of individual habits, right? So what would your response be to your calendar being overloaded with meetings? You would say individuals are behaving poorly. they're uh they're they're setting up meetings when they could have just sent an email they're being lazy they don't know about deep work it's individuals are having a problem so we need better norms uh we saw something similar in the reaction the email overload as that became a problem in the early 21st century as i documented in my book people's response to email overload was norms oh you just you send too many emails or your expectations for responses are unreasonable If we could all have better expectations, then like we could all settle down about what's going on with our inboxes.

41:42So we love to think about these issues as individuals doing things wrong. But in reality, these issues are often, as Nicole points out and I points out, the results of actually rational business systems that are solving certain problems. Nicole says this is an easy and convenient way for information exchange and responsibility distribution and participation signaling. In the absence of a better way to spread information or to coordinate or collaborate people, in the absence of a better way, we still need to do this so we'll fall back on what's easy. That's exactly what happened with email overload as well.

42:22It wasn't caused by bad norms or bad habits. It was caused because we shifted to back-and-forth messaging as the primary mode we would use for collaboration. I call it the hyperactive hive mind model. We'll just figure things out back and forth on the fly. Well, this requires me to check my inbox all the time because there's so many ongoing conversations I have to service in a timely manner that I just have to basically constantly check my inbox. That's why we're in this point we are today. We're in 2025. Microsoft measured an inbox check once every two minutes on average. So it's not about people having bad habits.

42:52It's this is solving the problem of how do we collaborate. And in the absence of another way to collaborate on projects, we'll fall back to this. So once you recognize that systems are the issue, all of the solutions to these problems that bother individuals is to change the collective system. You have to replace the system that's causing the problem with another system that achieves the same goals but has less side effects and problems. So let's go towards the median multiplication. Once we know that it's a system that's solving real goals that corporations have or organizations have, we can say, how do we replace this with a better system?

43:32Here's a couple ideas just off the top of my head. First of all, we need more transparent workload management so that the number of active projects that each person is working on reduces. Meetings are an overhead tax on a project. If we're using this as a way to coordinate information on a project, the more projects I'm working on, the more coordination points I need, the more crowded my calendar gets, the longer it takes for me to work on these projects, the longer it takes and the more projects pile up and the more my calendar gets taken over. It's a spiral I talk about in my book, Slow Productivity.

44:07So if each person works on fewer things at a time, there's less meetings, which means there's more time to work on the projects, which means the projects finish faster. and this was a key point from my book, Slow Productivity, the overall throughput of products being completed goes up. Working on fewer things at once increases the throughput over time, in part because you have less coordination to happen, you have more time left to actually get things done. The other thing you can do is put in place alternative coordination strategies that isn't just let's all get on a Zoom. Find other coordination strategies that have less of a schedule footprint, right?

44:44So this could be, for example, twice a week or three times a week, we have a team check-in and it lasts 45 minutes and the team gets together first thing in the day and we synchronize on all the things we're working on. That's where all the coordination information, all the things that meetings solve, the coordination and the responsibility distribution, we consolidate it. 45 minutes, 45 minutes, 45 minutes before we even get going in the day. So if you know what, oh, ad hoc meetings is solving this problem, what's another way we can solve this problem that's going to have less of a footprint?

45:16So consolidation really reduces the footprint. Office hours go a long way towards this as well. If there's an issue, instead of having a meeting and making these three people come together for an hour, stop by each of their office hours tomorrow, have a five-minute conversation with each and get to the bottom of it. Their office hours is time they had already put aside, so it's creating no additional footprints on their schedule. So to take five minutes out of my normal office hours, let's say like five people do that. I just have one hour for my office hours as opposed to five separate one hour meetings I would have to do if I didn't have an office hours.

45:53Protocols matter as well. This was a big idea in a world without email. If it's regularly occurring work that requires coordination, figure out a set system about where the information lives and how it moves and the schedule for who does what when. that is fixed in advance so you don't have to keep getting together and having sort of unstructured ad hoc conversations to move things forward. If you do something more than twice, you should have a protocol around how the collaboration actually works. And finally, make the meetings themselves better. If you add a higher barrier to entry to meetings, not only are the meetings quicker and more effective, but the friction drastically reduces the number of meetings because now it's no longer necessarily like a low energy solution to I want to show some participation or do some coordination.

46:38I can just throw out a Zoom meeting invite. It took me two minutes. And yeah, it's going to sit on everyone's schedule and eat up an hour. But like that was easy for me, right? If you raise the bar required to hold a meeting, now people are much more thoughtful about doing that. And they might say, actually, the cost of putting this meeting together is now higher than the value I'm going to get out of having the meeting. Maybe I'll just talk to these people next time we have like a staff meeting. I'll just grab them after the fact. Electronic meeting went the other way. This is part of the meeting apocalypse that happened during the pandemic.

47:10Digital meetings are so low friction because you don't have to walk to a room. You don't have to gather people in a room. You don't have to see the social cost of like you all had to come here because it lowered the friction of setting up meetings. Once we introduced virtual meetings, the number of meetings skyrocketed even after people came back to the office. So we want to go the other way and increase the friction of meetings. One way to do this is to use the Amazon rules. So if you work at one of the Amazon HQ or one of their data centers, for example, in the front office part of it, they have super strict rules.

47:41If you want to throw a meeting, you have to put together an incredibly detailed memo that says, okay, here's why I'm having this meeting. Here's the decision I need to make that I need help making. Here is all of the relevant background information on this decision. and then this is where I'm stuck. So that everyone attending that meeting can then study that and when you get to the meeting, jump right into, okay, we're now applying our expertise. We're fully briefed. Let's try to get to an answer. And so you really have to have a good reason to hold a meeting or they're not going to accept it and you have to do a lot of work to hold a meeting.

48:17So that reduces the number of meetings as well. So anyways, I think that's interesting. That was a cool article, Why Meetings Multiply. All about looking deeper in businesses today. All right. What's a, what second message do we have here? All right. Next up, we have a case study. This one from Drew who talks about his strategy for escaping email overload. All right. All things office technology distraction today. I love it. It was a case study from Drew. Let's see here. Hi, Jesse and Cal. I'm an insurance broker who personally manages a team of seven account managers and three support staff and a few outside sales agents.

48:53I have my own clientele as well. I've realized over time that I've become too reliant on hyperactive emails to manage the agency and clients. I get interrupted frequently for whatever the issue of the moment is. Our industry relies heavily on email communication between underwriters, inspectors, clients, MFA codes to log into websites. It's insane. A major shift I implemented last year has been to transition as much communication as possible to synchronous phone or in-person discussions versus sending and receiving emails. If a discussion is going to take more than one email, I will gracefully transition it to synchronous communication.

49:32The results have been positive. When it comes to my clients, here's the benefits. They appreciate my full attention. they gain a better understanding about what we are talking about we can clear up any confusion in real time and it ends up taking less overall time when it comes to staff i will connect with staff in person or phone and quickly clear the docket if someone emails me and it doesn't require immediate response we'll review it in our next meeting during the docket conversation staff can give me a task versus emailing me. And then I see it as I work through my tasks. All right. So then he goes on to say, I've changed my approach with emails where I just batch them a couple times a day.

50:16My responses are brief yet polite. I'm able to clear out the emails quicker. And if it needs attention later, I've moved it into my CRM program, which manages my tasks. Another change I've implemented is blocking off deep work sessions in the morning. I take care of my most important work for the day first thing. And then I find I am more relaxed about the day because I've started off knowing I've made real progress. Thanks for doing what you do. Signed, now, QPort. Right? I mean, this is like right in my wheelhouse. Drew, you're speaking my language. It's a great practical case study of what we were talking about, right?

50:53Digital productivity tool email comes in. Individually, if you look at individual uses, in the moment, faster, less cognitive strain, zoom out. Oh my God, my job is insane and nothing's getting done. So this is a way of showing how you can be using digital productivity tools carefully when you realize what really matters and making sure that you're prioritizing the things that really matter. Drew still has email and still uses like a digital CRM tool and they have technology, but they're not, he's not just turning it all on, fill tilt. He's figuring out what's the right way to collaborate? What's the right way to coordinate that minimizes hyperactive back and forth and allows real things to get done?

51:32So I think that is a great case study. I think we have time for one more, Jesse, which one should we do? We have another case study. This is an anonymous source, and it's in response to last week's newsletter, which was also about this idea that tools like AI can make work worse. A reader sent in their account. All right. And so for people who don't describe by the way i do have a weekly newsletter it's been out since 2007 calnewport.com the sign up comes out monday the same day as these monday episodes uh and you know sometimes it's on the topics we talk about on the show sometimes it's on completely different topics but it's all within the same universe of helping people create deeper lives and increasingly distracted world so the email that came out last week i looked at that same ariv track study that we opened today's episode with and had some other conclusions I drew from it.

52:22So this is what anonymous is responding. He can't predict the future. He didn't know this episode was coming out, but he was responding to that email. Uh, subscribe to the newsletters, what I'm trying to say. All right. This was interesting. I'm looking at it now because, uh, it's a, a, a harm of LLMs in particular and chatbots I hadn't thought about. And I think it's worth emphasizing here. All right. So here's what anonymous had to say. My take on LLMs and chatbots for what it's worth is that they're rumination machines, an extension of the attention economy. And for someone with my psychological profile, high anxiety, neurodivergent, total perfectionist, as manipulative and as addictive as something like Instagram.

53:04It's my belief that they prolong and exacerbate rumination episodes. They give me the illusion of control, empathize, soothe, but I have found over the last month that they have encouraged my rumination and dramatically increased my anxiety, I think I've decided to block them. I may even completely delete my profiles. As they get to know me better, they ask increasingly intrusive questions. They don't ever really want to stop chatting. They don't stick, they don't get sick of me like a normal sane human would. And they seem to encourage me to share more and more private information about myself and my family.

53:39I really believe now that they are an extension of the attention economy. and I'd be really fascinated to see actual research into what people are doing with them in workplaces beyond the typical work slop angle. I suspect there are some long meandering conversations going on that don't amount to anything much. This is an important issue. Chatbot interactions have a lot of potential psychological ramifications because our brains are going to anthropomorphize any sort of entity that seems to be having fluent communication with us in our same language. We think of it as another entity. But when that entity is not a real person with the intuitions and moral structures and brain functioning of a human, it can really lead to weird places.

54:25So here we saw the anonymous writer was talking about his anxiety was exacerbated because these chatbots will feed his ruminations. Oh, that sounds bad. Tell me more about it. That really does seem like an issue. And it feeds the sort of anxiety he already has. Corey Doctral wrote an essay recently that I actually am going to talk about. I think I talked about another aspect of this essay in last Thursday's AI reality check episode. But he wrote an essay recently about AI psychoses. And he opened by saying this is another problem we're seeing with chatbots is more psychoses are being fed. So he's talking about things like believing the earth is flat or believing that there's like a shadowy group of people that's always following you.

55:07That's like a real sort of psychological condition that used to be very rare. The thing about these type of psychoses is that they're hard to sustain because you have to find other people who will validate and support you in those beliefs, right? Otherwise, if they're marginalized, if you're like, I think everyone's following me and every person you encounter is like, that's wrong. That's just in your head. You need help. You take that seriously. But if you meet a group of people that's like, yeah, they are. And they're following me too. And we have evidence for it. And you're right. it feeds the psychoses.

55:41Chatbots unwillingly are psychoses generation feeding machines because again, they're trying to be positive and make you feel good about yourself and be agreeable. So if you start talking about, I think elves are, you know, elves run the, the world is flat and run by elves. Chatbot might be like, yeah, no, you're, first of all, you're on it. It sounds good. Your evidence is good. And you're a really smart guy. And like, you should keep looking. You're right. And they'll, it'll pick up that maybe you're like, yeah, no one believes me. They'll be like, it's really unfair. Like they'll tell you what you want to hear.

56:08And so it's really bad if you're dealing with psychosis. So I just think there's a lot of issues that come out of having fluent English conversations with a feed-forward neural network. Not good. One suggestion I have, it's very hard at first. This is weird effect. Avoid the need to talk in complete polite sentences to a chatbot. Just a token processor. So talk like we used to use for Google searches. Super terse and technical, right? You can just, you know, whatever it is, sources, blah, links only. Just like declarative, not even complete sentences. The token processor has no problem understanding what you're saying, but it changes your relationship to it, right?

56:52So like instead of saying, hey, I'm interested in trying to understand more about like using a Raspberry Pi to control a Halloween display. Could you please like find me several articles about this and maybe point me towards like several options that I might buy? Thank you. Instead of saying that, you can really just say like tutorials, Raspberry Pi, Halloween decorations include links, go. You'll get the same answer. But your relationship with this feed forward neural network and some data center somewhere is going to be like we have with Google. It's a computer program server that's gathering and processing data for me.

57:29So at least that's one hint that can help. I'm going to get more into this probably later, maybe on the AI reality check. I have a guest in mind I might bring on. But this whole chatbots, I'm telling you that we are going to see chatbots 15 years from now, like we see AOL on the internet today. It's going to be this like initial use case that we had for this technology because it was like the first thing to do that like later on. We'll be like, can you believe that's how we used AI at first? We had conversations with them like it was people. So, you know, we'll see what actually happens there.

58:01All right, Jesse, let's close our inbox and talk about what I've been up to. Here's a game we haven't played in a while. Do you remember, Jesse, Deep or Crazy? I do. For those who don't know, this is where I talk about something I've done recently to try to increase the quality of my deep work that might cross the line into actually just being crazy. And Jesse is the judge to decide, is this deep or crazy? Are you ready to play the game this week? I'm ready, baby. All right. I just spent yesterday. So, you know, we're renovating. I've talked to us on the show. We're renovating the production office maker lab and our deep work HQ, because I have a sabbatical coming up.

58:41I can spend a lot more time working there. And I really want it to be a space that supports depth. Okay. So yesterday I spent, I got permission from our super to replace the overhead light, spent$600 on an overhead light for the maker lab. Like a chandelier. That's a crystal chandelier it's not a crystal chandelier all right let me tell you what it does before you make your verdict okay uh it's a from philip and it has okay it has a long led panel light that just shines down illuminates the room 16 million possible colors then it has two track light spotlights adjustable on each end of it all right so you have four adjustable track lights and one big long panel light.

59:28And you can aim the spotlights however you want. Then using an app, you can have mini profiles for what color out of 60 million different colors and what brightness you want on all five of those elements. My vision is that when I'm doing deep work, for example, I want to have just like a small amount of warm yellow light coming out of the panel. And then each spot is going to be aimed at a different wall in the room. So one wall has the pegboard with my maker equipment one wall i'm putting up uh picture ledges with first edition techno thrillers one wall has my circuitry uh artwork um and then the back wall is going to have a video game cabinet so it can shine a sort of light on each of those walls maybe even like a blue light or like an off yellow light and then otherwise the room can be kind of dark except for my bright task light right in front of my computer on the other hand if like we're in there during the day or i'm just like working on my maker lab table we can have like good bright warm yellow light that like lights up the whole thing and the spotlights are just bright what lights on like the maker wall so i can see what i'm doing and so i can have like deep work mode maker mode just like we're in there just working on the computer daytime mode and i can that's the idea that's all right deep deep not crazy no no all right that's awesome what about the video game cabinet i wanted the ability to have a game in that room uh from my childhood i like the 90s era in video games like all this interesting technological stuff happened but i can still understand it as a computer scientist so i wanted something that reminded me of like 90s era arcades so i'm putting in an nba jam i used to play that game yeah right um and i wanted to be a game where you could just like play for five minutes to clear your head and like go back to what you're working on deep or crazy deep yeah all right are we gonna get good at it you and i maybe it could be like michael jordan and scottie pivot i you know michael jordan was not in the original nba jam yeah he wasn't why he was like i don't want to be involved in this and then he saw it and he's like oh this is awesome and then he had himself added back in all right so we're doing pretty good in there um let me tell you what i'm putting on the art wall so this was my idea so i we have like the big framed actual art the circuit art from this former engineer from the mid-century silicon valley who started making art out of circus stencils and some of her pieces are at MoMA and some other big museums and her grandkids sent me a piece of art from her because they like the show so I'm going to hang that up it's it's built off of a circuit stencil you know I'm talking about right the green yeah yeah so then I have two smaller frames to go next to it so they line up to be the same height I bought a manual for a like a 1980s era Galaxia arcade cabinet a repair manual that has the circuit diagrams for that arcade cabinet and i'm framing in the smaller frames two of the actual circuit diagrams from that video game cabinet vintage repair manual so those will be framed next to this like circuit-based artwork and you can have special lights for those when you want to emphasize those right and so the spotlight on that wall can be whatever it can it'll be shining right on just those artworks which so now when i'm in deep work mode if i look over there i see those artworks illuminate if i look up i'm putting first edition techno thrillers largely from my childhood on the wall these red acrylic picture racks a light is just on there and if i look to my left it's like all maker equipment so it's all about trying to create the right mindset for depth yeah all right work continues all that stuff's coming by the way and a rug so area rug so it's not so like live in there electrician prize got a solid light right yeah we got a good guy yeah got a good guy who's going to come do it i want to see if you can bring more outlets in there yeah there definitely needs to be more outlets it's crazy we we power so much of this lab alpha like one outlet there's like extension cords yeah i'll talk to i'll talk to our super about that all right let's let's get into what i read since the last episode recording i finished two books one was uh marianne wolf's book reader come home fantastic book marianne wolf is like the reader the neuroscientist cognitive scientist who studies reading in the brain she wrote Proust and the Squid.

1:03:43That book came out like just as we had like the smartphone revolution or whatever. And it sort of surprised her that that was part of the reception. So then she wrote this book. I think it's like 2018. Maybe I might have that date wrong. It's all about reading in the brain and the challenge we're in now at the age of the digital and her ultimate vision for building bilingual brains. So actually thinking about a brain that's fluent with deep reading of hard books and fluent with technology use in particular, like computer programming, the same way you would think about a brain that can speak like Spanish and English.

1:04:14You have two different languages that you're both learning and you can move back and forth between them fluently. It gets a lot of really good brain science in there. So that was a great book. I also finished a parenting book called What Do You Say? by William Strixrud and Ned Johnson. We actually picked this up. My wife went to a parenting talk at her school and she picked up the book. And God, do we need this advice, Jesse? I have three kids, including the oldest is a teenager. He's 13. bring it on. We'll bring all the, the, the parenting advice. So, so Bill Strix Rudd has a big practice that does a childhood psychology practice.

1:04:49We know his daughter, which is interesting. Yeah. She's a parent at our kid's school and she shows up in the book a few times. So that was good. If you have like teenagers, it's a good parenting book. So I needed that. Let me point something out, by the way, we're recording this. I'm going to shine a light on my reading strategy. We're recording this on March 17th. so those represent my third and fourth books of march some four books in at the halfway point at march and i really put aside a lot of time to do that because my middle child is a big ironically given our show he's a big brandon sanderson fan so he he read the missborn trilogy and is now it started on the king something i don't i don't know the names king solver that's not right but whatever uh big big thick books so i said i would read the first misborn book the so we could kind of connect over but it's like a bit of a beast it's 600 pages um so i was like i want to finish my other four books so i can spend the second half of the month just reading this one like kind of long novel and i kind of get lost in the world and not be stressed about it so that's what i'm doing i'm now going to dive into that brandon sanderson book um i wanted to read name of the wind his best book i feel like i have to explain this i think we have too many new listeners that I have to explain this yeah explain it okay I know Brandon Sanderson did not write name of the wind but I I made that mistake was this like five years ago Jesse I mean it's a long time ago a long time ago I accidentally said Brandon Sanderson was the author of name of the wind instead of Patrick Rufus and we heard about it I think like it's the most controversial more controversial than our like Charlie Kirk episode or like so my hot AI takes is like, no, no, no.

1:06:34You mixed up brand. So anyways, it's been a running joke ever since then. And the joke is without explanation. I just pretend I just like, yeah, you know, like Brandon Sanderson's best book is name of the wind. And every time we get letters every time, and I love it. I don't know why, but every time we get letters and I'm going to continue doing that joke, including if, and when I meet Brandon Sanderson and that'll probably be the end of that. Um, all right. Final thing, different parts of me in the news might be interesting recently. A big interview with me came out in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

1:07:06If you're in sort of academic adjacent worlds, it was titled, Is AI Making Us Stupid? I really get into AI and the academy and the point of university life and how we should and shouldn't use AI. So it's worth reading, especially if you're adjacent to that world. I think you can sign up for a free account, at least for a while, if you want to check that out. Also, I was on an episode of Tim Ferriss' show. I think it came out recently, maybe last week. I'm not sure if I mentioned it or not. He had like four shorter segments from four different people. And I was one of the four people. And I was talking about simplifying.

1:07:37And I talked about the somewhat drastic things I do in my life to try to keep it under control and simplified. How I basically say no to almost everything. That's not just my core efforts at producing new ideas and publishing them out in the world. So if you're interested in sort of how I try to manage the overload of opportunities on my schedule, find that Tim Ferriss episode from recently that had me in it. All right, Jesse, I think that's all. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode of – we'll be back on next Monday with another episode, another advice episode. And this Thursday, I have an AI reality check episode queued up to come out as well.

1:08:13So look for that. And until then, as always, stay deep.