The Invisible Violence Behind Overwork
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I’m late in Burnout Society now and I think that the author is missing a key turn in his arguments. He recognizes that many activities in the modern world are being reduce from expert positions to mere labour but then goes on to say that burnout is the result of voluntary self-exploitation. Exploitation framed as…
Thinking in Edges – Boundaries for the Modern Mind
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Adding Edges to Consumption Caitlin Dewey spent this great article exploring how to have guardrails on media consumption. Social media sites aren’t going to do it for you. The algorithms on Facebook and X and Reddit are designed to keep feeding you shit that keeps you interested by focusing on stuff that makes you emotional.…
Hire Smart People—Then Distract Them into Mediocrity
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For years now multitasking has been one of the “key” elements on many job descriptions. It’s often seen as the only way someone can get by in today’s frenetic world, with so many notifications, emails, and other interruptions coming our way. Even outside of the things that push their way into our attentional space, we…
Building Better Systems by Owning What You Want and How You Work
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I’m spending next weekend away racing bikes. Don’t expect an email but have an excellent weekend. Notebooks for Coders I learned very early on in my career that I’m not very good at thinking when I’m at a computer. When I have my code editor open, I’m in a “function mode” where I write stuff…
What Lou Likes in a blog
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Lou wrote a list of what he likes in a blog and I agree with them. I’d add that while I don’t want to hear about how bad things are all the time, I also don’t want fanboy blogs either. There are a number of Apple centric sites that I stopped following because they were…
Reading Against the Scroll – Reflections on The Siren’s Call
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This is the monthly wrap-up of book club get it, along with all the posts for the month, in your inbox for free by clicking that link. Next month I’ve got a busy month of travel so we’re reading a shorter book, The Burnout Society (Amazon). Early in The Siren’s Call Chris Hayes, makes a…
Good Books, Deep Rest, Enough Work
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Get this in your inbox by joining the email list. Workload and Rest Cal Newport brought up a few studies that looked at the four-day work week to show that productivity barely decreases, if it decreases at all, when you reduce work by an entire day. But Alex Pang spent two books examining this idea.…
Opportunity = Let’s put all risk on workers
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While reading the magazine version of Plastic Money I came across this quote near the end. For its part, Plastic Bank isn’t interested in hiring full-time collectors. “I think it’s even more exciting for the world’s most resourceful to have an unlimited opportunity,” Katz says. “If they want to work more, they’ll work more. They…
My least favourite part of `the web`
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I was catching up with some tech news yesterday and while I was listening to a discussion about the latest updates coming from Google and their potential impact on the web I had a sudden realization: when tech reporters say “the web” they don’t mean the web. When these people talk about the web they’re…
The Attention Arms Race – When AI Both Protects and Pollutes
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You go to Google to screen out irrelevant information and to reliably focus on the output of Googles information processing system. This gives Google exclusive access to the most precious resource, which is your attention. And since they have your attention, they can sell your attention to interested parties. – The Sirens’ Call – Chris…
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