How Twitter Is Ruining Your Life

There are approximately 20 televisions in the open office where I work, which means that for the past nine months everything I have done has been watched over by 20 Donald J. Trumps, leering at me from all corners of the room. Your articles are a mess, they shout. Sad!

I share this space with approximately 20 coworkers, all young, all rambunctious, all driven mad, like me, by the orange billionaire insulting them from every angle. I keep Twitter open at all times, which connects me to a personalized list of 800 other journalists, writers, and experts offloading their content on the world. I keep Gmail open in another tab so I can listen attentively for a ping heralding the arrival of an article for me to edit.

I had long suspected that this work environment was not doing wonders for my productivity. My suspicion has been confirmed by Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, a book by Cal Newport that should be read by everyone who labors with his brain for a living.

Newport’s view of how most people use technology does not belong to the regressive, burn-it-all-down school of modern critique. He does not, to my knowledge, live on a farm or wear capes or pine for the days of trade guilds and craftsmanship and getting back to nature. To the contrary, he is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University whose work includes such riveting articles as “A Disruption-Resistant MAC Layer for Multichannel Wireless Networks” and “Making Wireless Algorithm Theory More Useful.” An ardent foe of technology he is not.

Newport contends that most people use network tools, particularly social media, to shirk the hard work of thinking and building that require feats of concentration he calls “deep work.” Deep work, Newport writes, is “performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capacities to their limit.”

More here