How the Digital Workplace Broke Our Brains

Plain English with Derek Thompson

The Ringer

News Commentary, News

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 5 July 2023

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Calvin Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University and the author of, among other books, 'Deep Work' and 'A World Without Email.' At the heart of so much of Newport’s work is this incredibly rich mystery: Why hasn't the internet produced more geniuses? One possibility is that the productivity tools ironically inhibit our productivity. The average white-collar worker in marketing, advertising, finance, and media now spends up to 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication. In a recent survey, Microsoft found that video meetings had taken up so much of the day that a significant share of its workforce was logging online between 9 and 10 p.m. to finish their actual non-email, non-meeting work. In response to this relentless need to loop back and back and back, Newport came up with what he called the Deep Work Hypothesis: He said to learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. But the ability to perform this kind of deep focused work is becoming rare at exactly the same time it is becoming most valuable in our economy. In this conversation, we talk about deep work and shallow work, how our productivity tools make us less productive, and how to actually get things done. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Calvin Newport Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You may find this hard to believe, but 60 saws that explain the 90s.
0:04.4	America's favorite poorly named music podcast is back with 30 more songs than 120 songs total.
0:11.8	I'm your host Rob Harvilla here to bring you more true musical analysis,
0:15.8	poignant nostalgic reveries, crude personal anecdotes, and rad special guests,
0:21.3	all with even less restraint than usual.
0:24.6	Join us once more on 60 saws that explain the 90s every Wednesday
0:29.6	on Spotify.
0:31.2	Today is the second episode in our series about work.
0:34.8	Our first episode a few weeks ago was about the science of procrastination and how to overcome
0:40.6	the natural forces of delay. Today's episode is about how in a fantastic ironic twist,
0:49.3	our productivity technology, email, Slack consistently gets in the way of our actual productivity.
0:57.4	Or in other words, how the digital workplace broke our brains.
1:03.1	Calvin Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of
1:08.0	among other books, Deep Work, and a world without email. And at the heart of so much of Newport's
1:14.5	work is this incredibly rich mystery. Given everything we know or everything we think we know
1:21.3	about creativity, genius, shouldn't the internet have made us more creative? Shouldn't the
1:29.7	internet have produced more genius? We have no shortage of digital tools that make it quick and
1:36.7	easy to write, draw, illustrate, save, organize, share ideas. But email and Slack and IM and these
1:44.5	workflow and project management tools so often create so many parallel stimuli begging for our
1:51.7	attention that it makes it harder to actually do stuff. As the New York Times recently put it,
1:59.0	quote, something in the great digital workplace experiment has gone terribly wrong.
2:05.8	End quote. The average white collar worker that is someone in marketing, advertising, social media,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Ringer, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Ringer and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.