Number of words: 710 To return to our question about why cultures of connectivity persist, the answer, according to our principle, is because it’s easier. There are at least two big reasons why this is true. The first concerns responsiveness to your needs. If you work in an environment where you can get an answer … Read more
Number of words: 445 Tom Cochran’s experiment yielded an interesting result about the literal cost of a seemingly harmless behavior. But the real importance of this story is the experiment itself, and in particular, its complexity. It turns out to be really difficult to answer a simple question such as: What’s the impact of our … Read more
Number of words: 338 In a 2009 paper, titled, intriguingly, “Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?,” Leroy introduced an effect she called attention residue. In the introduction to this paper, she noted that other researchers have studied the effect of multitasking—trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously—on performance, but that in the modern … Read more
Number of words: 229 Though Grant’s productivity depends on many factors, there’s one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Grant performs this batching at multiple levels. Within the year, he stacks his teaching into the fall semester, during which he … Read more
Number of words: 425 This brings us to the question of what deliberate practice actually requires. Its core components are usually identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach … Read more
Number of words: 116 What’s the secret to landing in these lucrative sectors of the widening digital divide? I argue that the following two core abilities are crucial. Let’s begin with the first ability. To start, we must remember that we’ve been spoiled by the intuitive and drop-dead-simple user experience of many consumer-facing technologies, like … Read more
Number of words: 150 In a seminal 1981 paper, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked out the mathematics behind these “winner-take-all” markets. One of his key insights was to explicitly model talent—labeled, innocuously, with the variable q in his formulas—as a factor with “imperfect substitution,” which Rosen explains as follows: “Hearing a succession of mediocre singers … Read more
Number of words: 224 Brynjolfsson and McAfee call the group personified by Nate Silver the “high-skilled”. Advances such as robotics and voice recognition are automating many low-skilled positions, but as these economists emphasize, “other technologies like data visualization, analytics, high speed communications, and rapid prototyping have augmented the contributions of more abstract and data-driven reasoning, … Read more
Number of words: 167 To explore this macro perspective we turn to a pair of MIT economists, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who in their influential 2011 book, Race Against the Machine, provide a compelling case that among various forces at play, it’s therise of digital technology in particular that’s transforming our labor markets in … Read more
Number of words: 184 In an industrial economy, there was a small skilled labor and professional class for which deep work was crucial, but most workers could do just fine without ever cultivating an ability to concentrate without distraction. They were paid to crank widgets—and not much about their job would change in the decades … Read more
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