Study Hacks Blog

Ten years ago, I published ​Deep Work​. It was my second mainstream hardcover idea book. The previous title, ​So Good They Can’t Ignore You​, hadn’t sold as well as we hoped, so the expectations were lower for this follow-up.

This turned out to be freeing, as it allowed me to write Deep Work largely for myself – exploring the conceptual edges of the issues surrounding distraction that interested me most.

I was fascinated, for example, by the economic reality that so many knowledge work organizations systematically undervalued focus, and was convinced that this provided a massive opportunity for those willing to correct for this mistake. In this way, I saw myself as articulating something like Moneyball for the cubicle class. I also firmly believed that the act of thinking was at the core of the post-Paleolithic human experience; the source of our greatest ideas, satisfactions, and even moments of transcendence.

This mixture of the economic and philosophical was different from the typical book in this genre at the time. Readers probably expected that I would open on a breathless tale of an overworked executive, then regurgitate some stats about interruptions, before proceeding with long lists of tips calibrated to be practical, but also not too challenging, presented in a conversational tone and accompanied by clearly manipulated case studies.

But Deep Work was much weirder and more intense than that. Re-reading it recently, I was struck by how many of my stories had nothing to do with the knowledge sector at all. I quoted philosophers of religion and a blacksmith who forged swords with ancient techniques. I profiled a memory champion and discussed chavruta, the Jewish practice of studying Talmud or Torah in pairs. Rather than opening the book on a frustrated executive, I focused on Carl Jung’s efforts to break free from Sigmund Freud’s capriciousness. It was a direct look at the sources and ideas that most resonated with me.

This idiosyncratic approach seemed to reveal something fundamentally true about the problematic state of work at that time, as the book soon found an audience, going on to sell more than two million copies in over forty-five languages. (In its wake, So Good They Can’t Ignore You finally found its groove as well, quietly selling more than half a million copies, providing me with a dash of retrospective vindication.)

All of this led me recently to ask a natural follow-up question: How have things changed since that book first came out in 2016?

I tackled this query in ​a long-form essay​ I published in the New York Times over the weekend. My answer wasn’t optimistic:

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​Last week​ in this newsletter, I summarized some interesting results from ​a study​ that analyzed the behavior of 164,000 knowledge workers. It found that introducing AI tools increased administrative tasks by more than 90% while reducing deep work effort by almost 10%.

The problem, I concluded, was that digital productivity tools sometimes speed up the wrong tasks, which might feel efficient in the moment, but lead us to accomplish less over time. As I emphasized, AI is not the only technology to produce this paradoxical side effect —we saw something similar with email, mobile computing, and online meeting software as well.

So, what’s the solution to avoid these traps?

In ​today’s episode​ of my podcast, I suggested three ideas that might help. I want to summarize them here as well:

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I’ve been studying the intersection of digital technology and office work for quite some time. (I find it hard to believe that my book, ​Deep Work​, just passed its ten-year anniversary!?) Here’s a pattern I’ve observed again and again:

• A new technology promises to speed up some annoying aspects of our jobs.
• Everyone gets excited about freeing up more time for deep work and leisure.
• We end up busier than before without producing more of the high-value output that actually moves the needle.

This happened with the front-office IT revolution, and email, and mobile computing, and once again with video-conferencing.

I’m now starting to fear that we’re beginning to encounter the same thing with AI as well.

My worries were stoked, in part, by a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, titled ​“AI Isn’t Lightening Workloads. It’s Making Them More Intense.”​

The piece cites new research from the software company ActivTrak, which analyzed the digital activity of 164,000 workers across more than 1,000 employers. What makes the study notable is its methodology: it tracked individual AI users for 180 days before and after they began using these tools, providing clear insight into what changed. The results?

“ActivTrak found AI intensified activity across nearly every category: The time they spent on email, messaging and chat apps more than doubled, while their use of business-management tools, such as human-resources or accounting software, rose 94%.“

The one category where activity was not intensified, however, was deep work:

“[T]he amount of time AI users devoted to focused, uninterrupted work—the kind of concentration often required for figuring out complex problems, writing formulas, creating and strategizing—fell 9%, compared with nearly no change for nonusers.”

This is a worst-case scenario: you work faster and harder, but mainly on shallow, mentally taxing tasks (because of all the context shifting they require) that only indirectly help the bottom line compared to harder efforts.

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I recently heard from a historian of science at All Souls College, Oxford. He forwarded me ​an essay​ he wrote about Nicolaus Steno, a seventeenth-century anatomist and geologist who was later ordained as a Catholic Bishop.

Steno’s training as a scholar unfolded in a period challenged by a novel problem: information overload. Here’s how the essay describes it:

“Books were a leading distraction in the early modern period—and how envious we should be of those times. From the 1500s onward, with the development of the printing press and the humanist revival of ancient philosophies, knowledge became available at a much greater pace than ever before.”

This created pressing questions for aspiring thinkers, including: “How do we decide what to read? How long should we read it for? Must every single chapter be excerpted?”

Part of the solution was the development of “new note-taking techniques,” including the copying of excerpts into a master notebook called a book of commonplaces. (For more on this technique, I recommend William Powell’s delightful 2010 techno-history, ​Hamlet’s Blackberry​).

But as the essay on Steno elaborates, better notes weren’t enough on their own, as there were simply too many good books available. In response to this reality, Steno, during his university studies in the 1650s, innovated some more advanced attention management strategies:

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I recently came across an interesting academic article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. It was titled, ​“The relationships between social media use, time management, and decision-making styles.”​

The paper’s author surveyed 612 university students and young adults, asking them, among other things, about their digital habits and levels of personal organization. Using a linear regression analysis, she uncovered the following:

“Social media use was negatively and significantly associated with overall time management and all its subscales.”

Here’s the standard interpretation of this result: Social media is distracting, and if you’re distracted, it becomes harder to maintain control over your schedule. So, the more you use social media, the worse you become at time management.

But I’ve become interested in the reverse form of this argument: the better your planning system, the less time you’ll spend on engagement-based applications like social media.

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Last month, The Atlantic published an article with an alarming headline: ​“The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films.”​

The author of the piece, Rose Horowitch, spoke with professors around the country who have begun to complain about this trend. What she learned was disheartening:

“I used to think, if homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “But students will not do it.”

I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films.

What’s the source of this attention span crisis? The professors interviewed for Horowitch’s article point to a clear culprit: smartphones.

The founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies, for example, tried to ban electronics during screenings, but found the rule impossible to enforce. “About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones,” she said. Meanwhile, a Cinema and Media Studies professor at USC reports that his students remind him of “nicotine addicts going through withdrawal…the longer they go without checking their phone, the more they fidget.”

The mechanism at play here is an ability that reading scholar Maryanne Wolf calls cognitive patience, which is ​defined as​ the “ability to [maintain] focused and sustained attention and delay gratification, while refraining from multitasking.”

The presence of smartphones degrades cognitive patience because they activate neuronal bundles in our brain’s short-term reward system that anticipate a high expected value from picking up the device. These bundles effectively vote for the distracting behavior, creating a cascade of neurochemicals that are experienced as motivation to grab the phone. After a while, due to a lack of practice, you lose your comfort with sustained attention altogether.

It’s no wonder more and more people lack the cognitive patience to make it through a two-hour film!

But as I elaborate on my ​podcast this week​, in this specific problem with movies, we can find a solution to the more general issue of weakened attention. Why not make the ability to watch an entire film a training goal for the attempt to reclaim our brains? Like the new runner working up to completing their first 5k, it’s a milestone that’s challenging, but not too challenging, and therefore a great way to begin an effort toward attention autonomy.

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Last fall, I filmed a course for MasterClass. It’s mainly based on my book Slow Productivity, but there’s some Deep Work in there too. It’s called: ​“Rebuild Your Focus & Reclaim Your Time.”​

The course launched last week, so you should definitely ​check it out​. It gets to the core of a lot of the topics we tackle in this newsletter about the intersection of technology and productivity, and it’s an incredibly polished final product.

It’s actually this latter point that I want to talk a little bit more about today, as it sparks an interesting question about the future of online media more generally…

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