Dr. Cal Newport

So it's the absurdity of it would drive people crazy.

And it is driving people crazy.

Yeah.

Well, in the workplace, it's even harder than that, right?

Because part of the issue...

is email and Slack.

Let's just say digital communication.

I spent a lot of time studying that closely, right?

From like a technocratic standpoint, the introduction of digital communication to the workplace.

And the problem there is the reason why we're checking this all the time.

It's not some like individual habit

It's not, oh, I should just check this less often.

What happened is when we introduced low-friction digital communication to the office, this emerging consensus came about that said, great, let's just use ad hoc messaging as our major way of collaborating.

Like we can just figure things out on the fly.

I can just be like, Andrew, what's going on with the whatever?

And you can answer me and I can send it back.

This was very convenient.

The activation cost was low.

And so this is how we began actually collaborating on work.

Now what happens is as workloads get higher, we now have many things at the same time.