Welcome back to the State of the Workflow series on the Cortex podcast. I'm your host, Mike Hurley,

and this time I'm welcoming Casey Newton to the show. Casey is the writer of the platformer

newsletter, one of my favorite publications focused on technology. Casey focuses on tech platforms

and the impacts that they have on our lives. He's also the co-host of the Hard Fork podcast from The New York Times.

I've followed Casey's work for years since before he was writing Platformer when he was writing at The Verge.

I've always liked his fresh style. He's very funny.

He has excellent sources and he breaks big stories as part of Platformer.

So I wanted to see how he does it and how he

manages this workload. Casey also thinks a lot about his productivity and his tools and systems,

and I reckon it's going to come out in this episode. I also want to ask you to stick around at the

end of the show for a very special message about our work this

year with St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. So now, welcome Casey Newton to Cortex.

So Casey, I want to get started by asking you the important question. What is the most important

device for you for getting your work done? My most important device is my laptop.

Okay.

You know, I know that we now live in a mobile world,

but as I reflect on the tools that I used to get things done,

my phone is one of them,

but if I could only have one, I would still want my laptop.

I'm noticing as a sense over the course of the series, different groups of people, gravitate in different ways, and any writer I'm starting to expect will always say their laptop. Because it's like, you can get most of what you need done on the laptop. You can still text people. You can still use maps, right? You might look a bit weird

or get down the street doing it, but you could if you had to, but you can't beat the real keyboard, right? No, I mean, imagine writing a 1,500 word essay on your phone. Like, the very thought makes me tremble. Have you ever? No. Every once in a while, I'll make a mistake and I'll want to go edit my post afterwards and I'll do it on my phone because I'm out somewhere in the world

and it's torture every single time. I can imagine actually editing being more annoying than writing because you've got to like go through and like tap in just the right spots. Yeah, exactly. Do you ever write on anything like an iPad or any other tablet or anything like that? Or is it always a laptop?

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