How Do I Escape the “Busyness Singularity”? | Monday Advice  🔗 **Source:** [How Do I Escape the “Busyness Singularity”? | Monday Advice](https://share.snipd.com/episode/41a4b772-d006-4b00-9751-fa6bb38287d6) ## Highlights - **How Pseudo-Productivity Took Over Knowledge Work** - Pseudo-productivity arose as managers used visible activity to judge knowledge workers rather than output. - Computers, networks, and mobile devices progressively amplified busyness, fragmenting attention and increasing shallow tasks. Transcript: Cal Newport They're all about the potential catastrophic loss of jobs that might occur if technology automates existing roles. But there's another possibility that people haven't been discussing as much, but it's a possibility that I've increasingly come to worry about. What if the real fear with new advancements like AI is not that these technologies are going to take your job, but instead are going to make your job miserable. And if this is true, what specifically can you do to avoid this fate? Well, it's Monday, meaning it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to go seek out some answers. All right, so here's the plan. I'm going to start by telling you a story, a story about how technology has slowly and somewhat accidentally made knowledge work jobs increasingly worse. And then I will talk about how the arrival of AI might take this long unfolding process and accelerate it to an absurd degree, creating what I've taken to calling the busyness singularity. Now, once I've told you this tale, I'll then share some practical advice about what you can do individually to avoid the gravitational pull of this grim fate. In more detail, I have five important suggestions to share, and we will go through each of those. All right, so we have a lot to cover today, so let's get started. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. ([Time 0:00:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e6e1b65b-c11d-4c4b-a36e-37f85bb63bd7)) - **Data That Reveals Workday Fragmentation** - Microsoft data shows modern knowledge work is saturated with interruptions: 117 emails and 153 Teams messages per day and interruptions every two minutes. - These metrics illustrate how digital tools turned visibility into constant context switching and burnout. Transcript: Cal Newport This is where Microsoft used data from their online office products to figure out what online workers are actually doing. There's a chart in here that I think is really telling. Here's what they found in their data. The average number of emails received per employee each workday is 117. The average numbers of Teams messages received per workday, 153. The portion of meetings that are ad hoc called in the moment without a calendar invitation, 57%. The average time between interruptions by meeting email or message during core work hours, once every two minutes, right? ([Time 0:06:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/56a69a56-6909-498a-9be1-e3d678b5b5da)) - **AI Could Create A Busyness Singularity** - Generative AI threatens to accelerate pseudo-productivity by automating visible but low-value tasks like email, slide decks, and transcriptions. - With automation reducing friction to near zero, teams risk a feedback loop of churned shallow outputs from AI agents. Transcript: Cal Newport So what's the effect of this new technology? When we add this into the mix, what's its effect onto this ongoing story? Well, this is where things get even worse. People often talk about LLM power tools as providing some sort of productivity miracle, right? We hear reports of computer programmers who are handing off the actual writing of computer code to AI, and we imagine this is coming for all of our other main work as well and all these Other jobs, and this gets us either terrified or excited about AI's possibility. Most non-computer programming office jobs right now, it's much more mundane. Here are the most common uses of AI in most non-programming office jobs at the moment. Writing long emails automatically, summarizing long emails, automatically creating slide decks, transcribing meetings and turning transcriptions into some sort of work product That can then be shared, creating verbose reports and trend analysis. So having to do some research and then write a report. What unifies those examples is that they're all more or less pseudo productive activities, the type of things you do to demonstrate effort to show that you're busy, but that bring not A ton of actual value to the bottom line. Clients aren't paying for the reports or emails you're sending back and forth. So AI right now is often being used in the office to support pseudo-productive activities as things you do to show that you are being busy. Now, the problem is AI has essentially reduced the cost and friction of these existing pseudo-productive activities down to zero. So what happens when you set up a work environment in which visible activity is rewarded? Then you give everyone a machine that can automate those efforts, making them essentially free. Well, what's going to happen is work will become a mad performative dash of button mashing. Who can churn out more slop quicker than the next person? Soon we'll be managing teams of agents that are producing emails and slide decks on our behalf while intercepting, summarizing, and responding to those incoming AI decks that have Been generated by other people's agents. It will be a digital blitz of back and forth nothingness. The density of shallow work here will become infinite. It will collapse in on itself. You will end up with a busyness singularity. It's productivity reducto ad absurdum. ([Time 0:08:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/04e56d21-b323-4e64-9d79-c8c0a9d3f817)) - **Plan Your Week And Protect Deep Blocks** - Plan weekly by blocking calendar time on Monday for the important work that creates unambiguous value. - Protect those blocks by canceling lesser items so daily urgencies can't displace high-value progress. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. The first suggestion, plan weekly. All right. Let me talk about that. Here's what I want you to do. And then I'll explain why. On Monday morning, I want you to look at the week ahead. I want you to ask what important things, things that create non-ambiguous value for your organization, do you want to make progress on that week? Then I want you to find and protect time for it on your calendar, like you were scheduling a meeting or an appointment. This might mean canceling or rescheduling less important things that are already on your calendar to open up bigger swaths of time to make progress on the things that are actually important. Now, why do I want you to do this? Because when you zoom into the moment of a given day, it's easy to get lost in pseudo-productive busyness. There's always more emails to send or slide decks to create or transcriptions to mess around, things that look like you're on it and you're busy. And so if you're just saying, what do I want to work on next? The obvious answer will almost always be something pseudo-productive. So if you want to open up some space between you and pseudo productivity and actually start producing value, you've got to plan in advance. And the weekly scale is a very good way of doing that. ([Time 0:14:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/975ee9f8-db8d-424b-980f-7950f4622378)) - **Keep A Portfolio Of High Value Work** - Maintain a portfolio documenting initiatives, projects, and concrete outcomes so your value isn't judged by visible busyness. - Share this portfolio in reviews to reframe evaluations toward measurable accomplishments, not email counts. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. So what I mean by this is you actually want to keep somewhere like in the document, like a professor would with their CV, a growing list of the important initiatives, projects, or accomplishments That you are responsible for. So if tip number one was about finding more time to do valuable activities, tip number two is about keeping a record of the valuable things you actually did. You want an alternative to just let my visible busyness be how you judge me. You want an alternative to that that's actually grounded in actual value-producing accomplishment activities and initiatives. So actually keep track of it. Here's what I did this month. Here's what I did this quarter. I took on this project. We did this. It had this positive consequence. I did this with this product. We made these changes. Here's the hardest part about it. Here's where I brought my expertise. It had these positive consequences. You're going through and creating a portfolio of things you did that actually brought value. Now, you actually want to share this. This could be something that you bring into your quarterly reviews. It could be something that you show to your bosses. It can say, here's what I did last quarter. What should I focus on for the quarter ahead? What you're trying to do here is rewrite their understanding of you and your value away from pseudo productivity and towards the actual pursuit of things that are valuable. ([Time 0:15:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/22e43809-ba78-41b4-bf72-b6ed79b46666)) - **Avoid Tasks An AI Could Do** - Avoid tasks that AI can do by testing whether a current LLM or agent could handle them; move your time to activities AI cannot replicate. - Use the 'could an AI agent do this?' litmus to prioritize scarce human skill work. Transcript: Cal Newport Avoid what AI can do. Well, if you read my 2016 book, Deep Work, I have this suggestion in there where I say, hey, when thinking about what activities to spend your time on in a professional context, ask yourself The question, is this something that a smart 22-year recent college graduate could do on my behalf with just like a little bit of training? And if the answer is yes, I wrote, that's an indication that this is not an activity that's really making use of hard-won skills, and so it's a lower value-producing activity, and it's Something that you shouldn't spend as much time on. You want to find activities that a smart 22-year without your particular skills and training could do. Well, we have a better version of this test today, which I think, is this something that I could have, you know, Claude Co-work do? Is this something that I could like largely automate with chat GPT queries? And if the answer is yes, you say, then I want to avoid that activity to the extent possible. I want to move work away from things that AI can do and towards things that it cannot. If most of what you're doing is just automated by AI or soon will be, then you are vulnerable. You're kind of bringing this on yourself. If you say, yeah, I go to the meetings, I get the transcripts, I create slide decks, I write a summary of the points with AI, all this in AI, I have an AI agent send this out to everybody. You might feel like you're doing a lot of things, but these efforts that AI is doing or could do, so you're producing very little value yourself. You're more vulnerable. So just do the AI test. Is this something that like an AI agent or chatbot could do or do most of? Then I want to move away towards something else. If the answer is no, I wouldn't even know how to use AI to really help this except for like at the edges, then good. I want to spend more time doing that. ([Time 0:17:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1a0d4964-63f3-4e02-bc05-a8465f9a11e2)) - **Always Work On An Upskill Project** - Pursue upskill projects: consistently learn a hard, relevant skill that makes you rare and valuable in your field. - Connect learning to real projects at work so skill growth is visible and credited by your organization. Transcript: Cal Newport So what you should be doing is always have some sort of new skill that's valuable and relevant to your job that you're working on, something that will make you more rare and valuable in Your field. If possible, find a way to connect this skill to a project you're doing for your job, right? So like, hey, I will take on this responsibility, boss, and in order to do this project, I have to learn a new skill. So at least you can get credit for doing it. But if you can't do that, then just take a half hour every day to be making slow and steady progress on learning something new that is going to be valuable for your job. The harder your skill, the more rare and valuable the skill, the more you can escape the trap of AI accelerated pseudo productivity because you're now playing the game of hard won value That you can point to and say, I did this and it's valuable. ([Time 0:19:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0e1356e3-c6ae-4327-b1e5-4ec45709348b)) - **Differentiate Yourself By Writing Well** - Write exceptionally well: be clear, concise, and deliberate to differentiate human-crafted communication from AI-generated noise. - Spend more time composing fewer, high-quality messages so recipients value what you send. Transcript: Cal Newport Differentiate yourself from the AIs by writing well, taking the time to write well, make your emails, your reports. Anytime you're putting down professional text, make it super clear, make it super concise, make it succinct, make it well-crafted. Make it clear it's from a human. Well, everyone else is going to be sending out these long reports with bullet point lists, with emojis next to the list for some reasons, and all sorts of sort of convoluted language Where you're like, this seems like it's smart, but when I look closer, I have no idea what it's actually saying. Coming succinct, coming clear. This is the issue. We can do it. This is a trap. This is the right way forward. Here's what we should do. We can make this happen, right? Clear, succinct, and smart. Care about your writing. So when more people are trying to automate their writing, you should spend longer on your writing than you were before. It's a huge differentiator from you and what's going on with AI. It means that people value the things you send more than other things. So if you're sending less because you're avoiding the pseudo productivity trap, that's okay because everything else is going to seem sort of sloppy and your things might be more rare, But it's to the point when you send it. ([Time 0:20:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e613035c-374d-4770-a096-bda7250c3897)) - **Manage Teams To Enable Slow Productivity** - For managers, make workloads transparent, hold docket-clearing meetings twice weekly, and set office hours to reduce context-switching. - Require portfolios of accomplishments so evaluation focuses on value produced, not visible busyness. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. A couple of things I want to tell you right off the bat. Make workloads transparent. Who is working on what? Do not let that exist implicitly implied by a bunch of messages and static, know, stack Slack channel transcripts. Here is a central place where we keep track of who is working on what task. The central place needs a holding pin for things that need to be done eventually, but that no one is working on. Do not play the game of all potential work has to be distributed among people. And now you have each individual with these huge workloads that are unworkable at any moment, and they have to kind of figure out how to juggle all these things and try to make progress On some but not others. Keep the workload transparent and have a place for things that need to be worked on but no individual is working on in the moment. Have clear work-in limits for how much any one individual should be doing. Two, you need docket clearing meetings at least twice a week. These are meetings where your team gets together, and you review a shared document where when anything new pops up on any team member's plate as something that needs to be discussed Or potentially done, an issue to be handled, a task to pursue, there's a shared document called a docket where you put it. So it's off your mind. You don't email it out. You don't jump on a Slack channel. You don't call an impromptu meeting right there. You put it in the docket. It's a shared Google doc. Two or three times a week, your team gets together and goes through that Google Doc thing by thing. And what are we going to do for each of these? We don't need to do this. This we need to work on now. So let's add this to the workload for you in our transparent workload document. This is something we need to do, but not now. So we're going to add it to our transparent workload management system in the list of things that need to be done, but no individuals doing. Oh, this we could do right now as a team. Let's just handle it right here. And you go through and you clear out that docket. Doing this two or three times a week, 30 minutes at a pop saves so many context switches of just ambiguous back and forth messages as you try to sort of toss these things around. Three, insist that your team holds daily office hours at posted times. As much as possible, move any discussion that requires more than a single message to answer to the office hours. Come by my office hours. Come by my office hours. If you have an issue that you need feedback from multiple people on, do a reverse meeting. You go to each of their office hours one by one instead of making all of them come to you. Office hours can make a huge difference. And finally, borrowing one of the pieces of advice that I talked about in the deep dive of today's episode, have your employees maintain a portfolio of high value accomplishments, Right? So that you can cut through pseudo productivity and really be monitoring who is doing what that's valuable. And if someone is not growing that log, you say, well, we have to change it so that you're being more valuable to us. This cuts through pseudo productivity. We no longer care about visible busyness. We care about this list growing. And when you have transparent workloads, this also becomes clearer because you're like, I know exactly what you're supposed to work on. Why is this not done? ([Time 0:34:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2c95dc40-a59a-416b-a6b7-7caa72af1a7c)) - **Train Cognitive Fitness With Read Write Reflect** - Improve cognitive fitness through sustained practices: read widely to rewire the brain, write to produce original thoughts, and self-reflect without devices. - Treat these like training: embrace difficulty and regular strain to strengthen focus. Transcript: Cal Newport The three things I talk about a lot on this show is read, write, self-reflect, right? Reading has a unique value to your brain because it's not just practicing using your brain. It actually rewires your brain in a way that you can make more areas of your brain work together to produce smarter thoughts. So reading literally makes you smarter, not just from the content, but the way it rewires your brain. Writing is where you reverse those circuits and actually produce original thoughts using them. You get better at actually focusing these circuits to producing new things of value in the world. So care about writing. Don't automate it with AI. Hard is not bad. Strain is not bad. It's like lifting a weight. You want the burn. You want to feel the burn of a blank page. And self-reflection is going for a walk and thinking about something in your head without a phone. Can I maintain my mind's eye on an internal subject like myself, some problem I'm having, something I'm trying to figure out, and make progress on it with just internal dialogue? Those three things, reading, writing, self-reflections, I think are the primary activities to strengthen your cognitive fitness, right? ([Time 0:39:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/38553823-c1df-4e0c-9777-0c570fa4f3a7))