Avoiding Digital Productivity Traps
Original excerpt
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.
In today’s episode of my podcast, I suggested three ideas that…
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This article by Cal Newport is part of the Cal Newport reading list on Burn 451, covering deep work · slow productivity.
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