Transcript

In terms of deep work, and getting a little bit back to kind of practical steps towards deep work. I also have to ask you, because I didn't earlier, when you are on your laptop in your library with your fireplace, and in these books, it's a beautiful image, actually, they've drawn for us. In our minds, is the Wi Fi connection to your computer activated, or are you offline? It's connected, because it doesn't really matter to me, you know, because what is it? What's drawing my attention? I mean, the most important decision I think I made, technically speaking, to be a cognitive worker, is I didn't lack a social media like I think we underestimate the degree to which our problem with digital distraction is not the internet. It's not our phones. It is specific products and services that are engineered at great expense that pull you back to them when you take that away.

The internet's not that interesting. I don't have a cycle of sites to go to. I can check my email, but I don't really know where else to go. I mean, I could go I mean, I could go to the New York Times, I guess. But then you've seen the articles, right? They change it once a day. There's just not much. I've set things up so there's not much that's that interesting to me. We've all heard of FOMO, fear of missing out. I feel like there's the other thing, which is fear of missing something bad, right, sort of like an anxiety, a more primitive anxiety within us, that if we are not engaged on social media or looking at our phone often or texting often, that it's not that we'll miss the party, we'll miss the emergency.