The Ability to Read is a Superpower

The fact is, the ability to read is becoming a source of competitive advantage in the world.

I’m not talking about basic literacy. What has become exceedingly scarce (and therefore, valuable) is the physical, emotional, attentional, and mental capability to sit quietly and direct focused attention for sustained periods of time. - The Secret Power of ‘Read It Later’ Apps

While I’m not a fan of all of Tiago Forte’s work, he has this one right. The ability to be able to sit quietly is a superpower for most workers. As he says in the article the biggest issue is repeatedly starting something and never getting to finish it.

There is something deeply, deeply unsatisfying about repeatedly starting something and not finishing it. This is what we experience all day at work, being continuously interrupted by a stream of “emergencies.” The last thing we want after a stressful day starved of wins is to fail even at reading an article.

My biggest solution lately has been to shut down Slack for hours when I’m focusing on deep work. If something rises to a big enough emergency someone will send me a text message and I’ll open Slack to see what’s up.

The standard workplace for most of us needs to do a much better job at letting us isolate ourselves so that we can get good hard work done than they currently do. One of the best options would be to drop instant messaging apps entirely and move to fully asynchronous communication unless there is a true emergency, and then maybe we should default to a call where we can talk as we work out a problem.

I’ll be off next week so no email will be forthcoming for members outside of a reminder that I’m off. Have a great holiday season.