How Do I Escape the “Busyness Singularity”? | Monday Advice

0:00There are a lot of concerns in our current discourse about work and technology. Here, for example, is an Economist article from just a couple of weeks ago. The headline reads, prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse. It is not here yet, but government should lay a safety net. Yikes, right? Now, here's a Times headline from just last week. California's governor signs AI order aimed at protecting workers. Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to explore an overhaul of labor policies to deal with potential mass job displacement from artificial intelligence. Now, notice what these examples have in common.

0:41They're all about the potential catastrophic loss of jobs that might occur if technology automates existing roles. But there's another possibility that people haven't been discussing as much, but it's a possibility that I've increasingly come to worry about. So what if the real fear with new advancements like AI is not that these technologies are going to take your job, but instead are going to make your job miserable? And if this is true, what specifically can you do to avoid this fate? Well, it's Monday, meaning it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to go seek out some answers.

1:24All right, so here's the plan. I'm going to start by telling you a story, a story about how technology has slowly and somewhat accidentally made knowledge work jobs increasingly worse. And then I will talk about how the arrival of AI might take this long unfolding process and accelerate it to an absurd degree, creating what I've taken to calling the busyness singularity. Now, once I've told you this tale, I'll then share some practical advice about what you can do individually to avoid the gravitational pull of this grim fate. In more detail, I have five important suggestions to share, and we will go through each of those.

2:05All right, so we have a lot to cover today, so let's get started. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.

2:24All right, I want to start by telling you a story about the evolution of knowledge work. And I should say right off the bat, if you want the full version of this story, you need to read part one of my most recent book, which is called Slow Productivity. This is basically sort of the primary source material for a lot of what I talk about these days about work on this show. So you should have your own copy of it. All right. So here is the short version of the summary I tell in part one, the story I tell in part one of that book. In the beginning, we have the notion of knowledge work emerge in the mid-1950s, roughly speaking.

2:58That's when the management theorist Peter Drucker actually coins the term knowledge work. His job was to help the business leaders of America in particular understand what knowledge work is and how it differs from the industrial work that had been driving the American economy up to that point. Now, one of the key concepts of knowledge work that Peter Drucker drilled into the heads of American executives was autonomy. Unlike assembly line workers, knowledge workers are creative and have specific skills. They often know more about what they're doing than the managers who manage them. So instead of trying to give them an exact step-by-step checklist to follow like you would do if you're building a Magneto for a Model T Ford, you need to give them autonomy to figure out how they're going to work and what they're going to do with their work.

3:41It's going to need to be much more of a hands-off management style. Well, this created a problem for managers because how do we manage knowledge workers if we can't just have a pile of widgets we look at and say, how many did you produce today? If they're autonomous, how do we manage them? The implicit answer that arose is what I call pseudo productivity. It was a heuristic that says, let's use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. The more we see you doing, the more useful we'll assume you're being. Now, this is not a very precise way to manage productivity in the knowledge sector, but, you know, for decades it worked well enough, right?

4:16It was like at the water cooler, if the boss comes in, change your conversation from the latest episode of ALF to instead some work-like topic. This was also like the Mad Men era. They're like, well, we'll just be here long hours so we look busy, but also we'll have full bars in our offices. So, like, pseudo-productivity wasn't the best way of actually managing knowledge workers, but it was good enough. Then digital technology arrives in the office environment. And this is where pseudo-productivity begins to take a turn for the worst, at least when it comes to the subjective experience of the individual workers.

4:54First, we get computers on the desk. This greatly increased the number of different things that each individual worker could work on. Many of these things would be administrative focus. Many of these things are sort of never-ending. There's like endless things you could be doing. Well, that created a new level of busyness that didn't exist before we had the computer. And in a pseudo-productive environment where more busyness is better than less, we began to feel like we had to run after all these different things. And suddenly we were switching our attention back and forth between many more tasks than we had been before.

5:27Then we get networking technology. We networked up these computers, giving us tools like email. Well, this increased both the granularity and rate at which you could now demonstrate to people that you were doing a visible effort, right? It used to be you had to just be at the office and kind of hide the martini glass when the boss walked by. Now, how quickly you respond to an email thread is an indication of useful effort. How many emails you send to people is an indication of effort. So now there was this incredibly fine-grained granularity at which you could be demonstrating that you are pseudo-productive.

5:59And then finally, we got mobile computing, laptops, and then smartphones, which meant the times and locations in which you could be working became nearly endless, which again, in a pseudo-productive environment, was a disaster. because now every moment that you weren't in the office, you still were navigating this question of, should I in this moment jump on my phone or my laptop, answer some emails, jump on Slack, demonstrate some sort of effort because the more busyness, the better. So it became a never-ending tension. So digital technology, computers to networks and mobile computing played poorly with pseudo productivity.

6:33And in the 90s into the 2000s, these jobs got increasingly frantic and busy and all-encompassing. The result of this sort of supercharging of busyness has not been great. I'm going to bring up on the screen here, for example, this report I like to talk about from Microsoft, the Work Trend Index Annual Report. This is where Microsoft used data from their online office products to figure out what online workers are actually doing. There's a chart in here that I think is really telling. Here's what they found in their data. The average number of emails received per employee each workday is 117. The average number of Teams messages received per workday, 153.

7:16The portion of meetings that are ad hoc called in the moment without a calendar invitation, 57%. The average time between interruptions by meeting email or message during core work hours, once every two minutes. Right? So what we're seeing there is a portrait of work getting insane and not because of some deep capitalist plot to exploit the workers that for some reason we weren't implementing until we got to the 90s or 2000s. It's because technology played poorly with pseudo-productivity. I'm going to load up another headline here. This is another natural consequence. This headline from Axios says, global survey, worker burnout reaches new high.

7:55This is going to be the obvious consequence of a work that is now hyper busy. And so this is sort of the story I tell in slow productivity. I think it's one of the defining stories of office work in the 21st century. But all of this happened before generative AI began to make its move into the workplace. So what's the effect of this new technology? When we add this into the mix, what's its effect onto this ongoing story? Well, this is where things get even worse. People often talk about LLM power tools as providing some sort of productivity miracle, right? We hear reports of computer programmers who are handing off the actual writing of computer code to AI, and we imagine this is coming for all of our other main work as well and all these other jobs.

8:39And this gets us either terrified or excited about AI's possibility. But what's really happening with AI in most non-computer programming office jobs right now, it's much more mundane. Here are the most common uses of AI in most non-programming office jobs at the moment. Writing long emails automatically, summarizing long emails, automatically creating slide decks, transcribing meetings and turning transcriptions into some sort of work product that can then be shared, creating verbose reports and trend analyses. So having to do some research and then write a report. What unifies those examples is that they're all more or less pseudo-productive activities.

9:19The type of things you do to demonstrate effort to show that you're busy, but that bring not a ton of actual value to the bottom line. Clients aren't paying for the reports or emails you're sending back and forth. So AI right now is often being used in the office to support pseudo-productive activities as things you do to show that you are being busy. Now, the problem is, is AI has essentially reduced the cost and friction of these existing pseudo-productive activities down to zero. So what happens when you set up a work environment in which visible activity is rewarded? Then you give everyone a machine that can automate those efforts, making them essentially free.

10:00Well, what's going to happen is work will become a mad performative dash of button mashing. Who can churn out more slop quicker than the next person? Soon we'll be managing teams of agents that are producing emails and slide decks on our behalf while intercepting, summarizing, and responding to those incoming AI decks that have been generated by other people's agents. It will be a digital blitz of back and forth nothingness. The density of shallow work here will become infinite. It will collapse in on itself. You will end up with a busyness singularity. It's productivity reducto ad absurdum. All right, so if we step back here, what we're facing is not really an AI problem in the sense of, oh, everything was fine, and then AI came along and created a new problem.

10:45Pseudo-productivity was never the right answer for measuring useful effort in the knowledge work. And with each new decade, a new technology came along that made these shortcomings even more apparent. And it's on this trajectory that when you then throw AI into the mix, we now are collapsing towards a self-destructive conclusion. this busyness singularity to me is going to have a much more widespread negative consequence society-wide than the threats of jobs being fully automated. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors.

11:33or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. All right, so what can you as an individual do to try to escape the worst effects of this coming busyness singularity? Well, I have five suggestions that I'm going to offer. I'll go through these one by one, and we will discuss. All right. The first suggestion, plan weekly. All right. Let me talk about that. Here's what I want you to do, and then I'll explain why.

12:17On Monday morning, I want you to look at the week ahead. I want you to ask what important things, things that create nonambiguous value for your organization, do you want to make progress on that week? that I want you to find and protect time for it on your calendar, like you were scheduling a meeting or an appointment. This might mean canceling or rescheduling less important things that are already on your calendar to open up bigger swaths of time to make progress on the things that are actually important. Now, why do I want you to do this? Because when you zoom into the moment of a given day, it's easy to get lost in pseudo-productive busyness.

12:53There's always more emails to send or slide decks to create or transcriptions to mess around, things that look like you're on it and you're busy. And so if you're just saying, what do I want to work on next? The obvious answer will almost always be something pseudo productive. So if you want to open up some space between you and pseudo productivity and actually start producing value, you got to plan in advance. And the weekly scale is a very good way of doing that. All right. What's my second tip? Let's go back to our big list here. Number two, maintain a portfolio. All right. So what I mean by this is you actually want to keep somewhere, like in the document, like a professor would with their CV, a growing list of the important initiatives, projects, or accomplishments that you are responsible for.

13:46So if tip number one was about finding more time to do valuable activities, tip number two is about keeping a record of the valuable things you actually did. You want an alternative to just let my visible busyness be how you judge me. You want an alternative to that that's actually grounded in actual value-producing accomplishment activities and initiatives. So actually keep track of it. Here's what I did this month. Here's what I did this quarter. I took on this project. We did this. It had this positive consequence. I did this with this product. We made these changes. Here's the hardest part about it.

14:22Here's where I brought my expertise. It had these positive consequences. You're going through and creating a portfolio of things you did that actually brought value. Now, you actually want to share this. This could be something that you bring into your quarterly reviews. It could be something that you show to your bosses. It can say, here's what I did last quarter. What should I focus on for the quarter ahead? What you're trying to do here is rewrite their understanding of you and your value away from pseudo productivity and towards the actual pursuit of things that are valuable, try to free you from this trap of just trying to automatically generate busyness.

15:00All right. I have a third idea here. Bring up my big list. Avoid what AI can do. Well, if you read my 2016 book, Deep Work, I have this suggestion in there where I say, hey, when thinking about what activities to spend your time on in a professional context, ask yourself the question, is this something that a smart 22-year-old recent college graduate could do on my behalf with just like a little bit of training? And if the answer is yes, I wrote, that's an indication that this is not an activity that's really making use of hard-won skills. And so it's a lower value producing activity. And it's something that you shouldn't spend as much time on.

15:42You want to find activities that a smart 22-year-old without your particular skills and training could do. Well, we have a better version of this test today, which I think, is this something that I could have, you know, Claude Co-Work do? Is this something that I could, like, largely automate with chat GPT queries? And if the answer is yes, you say, then I want to avoid that activity to the extent possible. I want to move my work away from things that AI can do and towards things that it cannot. If most of what you're doing is just automated by AI or soon will be, then you are vulnerable. You're kind of bringing this on yourself.

16:17If you say, yeah, I go to the meetings, I get the transcripts, I create slide decks, I write a summary of the points with AI, all this in AI, I have an AI agent send this out to everybody. You might feel like you're doing a lot of things, but these efforts that AI is doing or could do, so you're producing very little value yourself, you're more vulnerable. So just do the AI test. is this something that like an AI agent or chatbot could do or do most of? Then I want to move away towards something else. If the answer is no, I wouldn't even know how to use AI to really help this except for like at the edges.

16:49Then good. I want to spend more time doing that. So you need to move away from activities where it's obvious that AI can do them. You're not being productive if you're letting AI automate your work. You're working on things that is not very valuable. All right. My fourth piece of advice is a big reveal.

17:10pursue upskill projects. So what you should be doing is always have some sort of new skill that's valuable and relevant to your job that you're working on, something that will make you more rare and valuable in your field. If possible, find a way to connect this skill to a project you're doing for your job, right? So like, hey, I will take on this responsibility, boss, and in order to do this project, I have to learn a new skill. So at least you can get credit for doing it. But if you can't do that, then just take a half hour every day to be making slow and steady progress on learning something new that is going to be valuable for your job.

17:42The harder your skill, the more rare and valuable the skill, the more you can escape the trap of AI-accelerated pseudo-productivity because you're now playing the game of hard-won value that you can point to and say, I did this and it's valuable. The better you are at things, the more valuable things you can do, the less you have to play the game of using visible busyness as a proxy for useful effort. All right. The final tip I am going to suggest, write well. Differentiate yourself from the AIs by writing well, taking the time to write well. Make your emails, your reports. Anytime you're putting down professional text, make it super clear, make it super concise, make it succinct, make it well-crafted.

18:31Make it clear it's from a human. Well, everyone else is going to be sending out these long reports with bullet point lists, with emojis next to the list for some reasons, and all sorts of sort of convoluted language where you're like, this seems like it's smart, but when I look closer, I have no idea what it's actually saying. Coming succinct, coming clear. This is the issue. we can do it. This is a trap. This is the right way forward. Here's what we should do. We can make this happen, right? Clear, succinct, and smart. Care about your writing. So when more people are trying to automate their writing, you should spend longer on your writing than you were before.

19:07It's a huge differentiator from you and what's going on with AI. It means that people value the things you send more than other things. So if you're sending less because you're avoiding the pseudo productivity trap, that's okay because everything else is going to seem sort of sloppy and your things might be more rare, but it's to the point when you send it. You're trying to set yourself up as the sort of alternative to what's going on with some of this AI autogen. So let's look at these five things again. I think this is what you can do right now to help escape the busyness singularity. Use weekly plans to make sure you're making time for what values.

19:41Maintain a portfolio so you can point to other people. Here's the stuff I'm doing that's actually valuable, that's unrelated to how busy I am. Avoid what AI can do. Tasks that could be easily or substantially automated by AI are tasks you need to spend less time on. Always be pursuing upskill projects. You want to be better, better, better, better. You have to rely on skills, not busyness, if you're going to survive this moment without going insane, and value your writing. Be succinct, clear, and valuable when you write so you don't have to write as much and yet still get a lot of value or acclaim for what you do produce in your professional in the professional context.

20:18All right, so this is what, it's an idea I've been developing. Look, computer programmers have their own issues. You should listen to a couple of weeks ago, I did a whole AI reality check episode on what's really happening with computer programming. There's all sorts of issues with AI in the fields. Last week, I did something on what's happening in mathematics with AI. These are the fields where AI is best suited to play. But when it comes to like normal knowledge work jobs, you're not a professional mathematician or computer scientist. you're not a programmer. This is what I'm worried about. The business singularity, pseudo productivity being pushed reducto ad absurdum.

20:51And these are the type of things, this is what you have to be doing now is you have to leave the pseudo productivity trap. This is the time to start leaving pseudo productivity and moving towards depth. It's the time to stop relying on visible activity as your main marker of value in the workplace, and instead relying on actual hard one things you did and can point to. Now, it might seem scary at first because there's a certain predictable comfort that just sitting there and sending emails and having AI make that even easier. But that is a trap that's not sustainable. It's going to become increasingly exhausting and you will become increasingly vulnerable.

21:22Do the hard work of actually doing hard work. That is the key to differentiating yourself in our current technological moment. All right. So there we go, Jesse. I got all the tape off this time. Yeah. That's my protest against technology is using painter's tape and a notebook. It's like our main graphical element on this show. Do you have new terms in your new book that you've developed? Like pseudo productivity? Yes. I always have new terms. Yeah, you always have great new terms. Yeah. So for the Deep Life book I'm working on, which I'm, the final edits for the pre-copy, like just the main edits, the final edits are being done.

22:02You know, as you hear this episode, by the end of the week you're hearing this episode, in theory I will have submitted the sort of polished version of that book. Yeah, you've heard these on the show before. Lifestyle-centric planning, the phase shift model of the deep life has been worse than the lifestyle-centric approach to the deep life. I get into lifestyle visions, lifestyle properties, keystone habits, things like property scraping, residence isolation. I got a lot of terms in that book. It's a very practical book, which is the way I'm trying to write it. And then the new book idea I have, if I end up writing it about thinking, is all going to be about cognitive fitness, which is a term that I'm also really trying to promote.

22:41I was actually brought, that idea is kind of making the rounds. There was an Atlantic piece last week where the president of Amherst, I think, was basically reacting to my idea of cognitive fitness. He thought it sounded too grim and that college would be more fun, but I've actually written tons of stuff about how to make the intellectual life of college fun, go back and see like five years of my writing from the late 2000s. So we're actually more on the same page on that than he might realize. But the key thing here is the idea is out there. It's being reacted to. so you know the more I can change vocabulary the happier I am for whatever that's worth all right I want to take another quick break to hear from our sponsors this episode is brought to you by google chrome you think you know a browser but gemini and chrome that's new it can help you with practically anything on the web like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.

23:34Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. All right, well, that's enough about my thoughts. Now it's time to hear what you have to say, as is our tradition on Mondays. We like to open the show's inbox to read some of your messages. Remember, if you have a question, comment, or interesting article or idea to share, You can reach us at podcast at calnewport.com. All right, Jesse, where are we going to start this week? We received a bunch of notes and comments and reaction to your newsletter from last week about LLMs and the sacredness of speech.

24:14Yeah, we did. People were into this one. All right, so let me just load up the essay real quick on the screen. It was called On Gods and LLMs. It opens, you know, I talk about Genesis. I talk about the identification of humans as speaking beings. I'll just read one quote from the Rabbi Shai held. According to the medieval commentary, Rashi's speech is thus not only central to who we are as human beings, it is also key to our uniqueness. Alone among God's creations, Jewish tradition affirms human beings are capable of speech. The essay goes on to say there's something sacred about the production of ideas, whether it's vocalized or written.

24:51It's a telepathy. It's a mind state from one human being recreated in another human's mind. It's the foundation on which we democratize holiness and from that all the ideas we enjoy today about things like human rights and justice, that speech is at the core of the human experience. And then the point of the article is asking the question, the ethical question. So is there something profane then about letting a machine produce speech as well? Is this like unique to humans, something we should cherish, or something like, oh, machines can do this as well. We'll just automate it around. So I asked that question.