Cal Newport

And in that book, I was arguing the way we, the thing I was telling you about, hyperactive hive mind, communication is a problem.

This is a real problem.

The fact that we are using this method for coordination is causing all these trouble, is really causing problems.

And I went through all the data and all the research and made the case, this is super nonproductive.

I went back to the archives of

the new york times business session in the 80s and 90s to exactly document the rise of email and how people were talking about email when it first came onto the business scene and i made the case

The way we work is arbitrary.

This hyperactive hive mind was not a plan.

It wasn't seen to be more productive.

We stumbled into it, so we really should change it.

So that was that book.

And then the most recent book, Slow Productivity from a couple of years ago.

In that book, I argued, oh, wait a second, workload matters too.

The other issue of this problem is we don't put any limits or transparency on how many things we're working on.

And if you pile too many things on your plate,

too much communication interruption becomes unavoidable because they each have little issues they need you to deal with.

So I've now, over this 10-year period, have kind of broken down this problem.

There's like training yourself to focus, fixing your communication protocols, like how do I communicate in a professional context?

How do we collaborate?

And then managing workload to be more reasonable.