Dr. Cal Newport

These are how we're collaborating now.

We're not using email freely anymore.

We're going to use this system instead.

It's a very expensive top-down procedure

to free ourselves from the sub-optimality.

It's like in the world of work, that's partially why this is such an intractable problem.

I tried to write a book about this recently, and it was really hard to gain traction because it's not easy to solve this.

No individual can move out of this, and you have to put in a lot of energy as an organization to try to change this.

So in some sense, email is a more insidious problem.

than social media on the phone.

Because at least over here, this is my engagement with this.

And I might have these moderate behavioral addictions, but I could make differences here.

In my company, oh, this is much worse.

This is like a systemic problem.

It's an emergent deterministic work impact on an economic, social, cultural system.

that was completely dynamical and went in a way we didn't really expect.

So it's a really tough situation sometimes, especially in the world of work.

How do we get out of this constant distraction?

It's why, you know, I wrote Deep Work and I was like, well, why don't people just do this?

That's why they don't just do this, because it's not so easy to reclaim this time.