The Cult of Productivity is Breaking People

Fake meetings, zombie tasks, and digital anxiety.

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Friends,

This is a version of a section of my forthcoming book, SuperSkills, that I'm considering for inclusion. It's an honest and uncomfortable look at the rituals, illusions, and terrors of modern work, and how we reclaim control. It's a lot longer than usual (it's a deep dive from my forthcoming book!) - but I think you'll appreciate it. If you've worked in an office over the last five years, much of this will resonate, but you might need a double espresso or something stronger to get through the first part. (There are some solutions at the end!) You have my full permission to share it widely. I welcome your feedback, comments, and anything I missed from the absurdities of work today. [You'll find that list at the bottom of this note]

We're in the middle of the Great Pretend. Everyone's productive. Everyone's busy. Everyone's exhausted. And no one really knows what they did all day. We’ve all learned to lie: about how hard we work, and how well we’re coping.

We emerged from COVID craving a reset. Instead, we got 2025: the year AI flooded offices, gig work, and side hustles with busywork, breaking our brains while we pretended to keep up. What started as tools to help us think became sophisticated distractions that made us forget how to think at all. AI created the illusion of infinite capability whilst multiplying meaningless work. We automated the easy parts of thinking and kept the hard parts of performing productivity. The worst possible outcome.

In my research over the last year and my observations over the past 20-plus years, I can see that work is shifting into a strange world that my grey hair can't quite comprehend. Something fundamental has broken in how we organise human effort, and we're all pretending it's normal.

The Geography of Anxiety

You spend ten minutes before every meeting playing platform roulette. Is this Google Meet? Teams? Zoom? The meeting invite says one thing, the follow-up email says another. You finally find a hot desk at the shared workspace, where people sit inches apart in noise-cancelling headphones, creating isolation bubbles. They glug from branded water bottles and unbranded coffee mugs in communal spaces, apart from that one person with their own cat-branded coffee mug you're not supposed to use.

You show up to the office for "collaboration," only to spend the day on Zoom with someone in another city whose in-office day was yesterday because they had a plumber coming. You're all speaking from corporate silos in different postcodes, next to strangers from other companies in a parallel world. Someone excuses themselves from a video call to use the bathroom.

This is work now: asking permission for basic human functions because the machine requires constant attention and feeding.

Hybrid work was supposed to fix this. Instead, it amplified the nightmare. Now work has become your geography. You're never fully at work, never fully home. You're always potentially working, which means you're always potentially failing to work hard enough.

You swap your "in-office day" because your partner needs the car, the dog is sick, or Amazon has a delivery window, and you really need that leotard for your daughter's performance tomorrow. Nobody notices. So the next week, you do it again, so you can do the click-and-collect food shop from Tesco. The only constant in hybrid culture is logistical improvisation masquerading as strategy, until you are flagged for consistently missing your hybrid targets at your end-of-year appraisal, much like receiving a speeding ticket in an average speeding check zone that you thought was never monitored.

Your colleague sees you're "away" on Teams at 3 PM and wonders if you're really pulling your weight. The office used to contain work. Now work contains everything. Your kitchen table is a conference room. Your bedroom is a backup office. Your phone is a portable anxiety generator that follows you everywhere.

"Hybrid flexibility" became "hybrid visibility paranoia." Show up to the office so you're not invisible. Join every video call so you're not forgotten. You join with audio-only "whilst finishing another call," then turn on video halfway through to signal your arrival. Then you move the pink gown and Mickey Mouse pyjamas from the bed because the blur settings were turned off in the latest update. This is slapstick comedy in real life. Charlie Chaplin in a 21st-century office. The flexibility to work anywhere became the obligation to be available everywhere.

People book fake "focus time" in their calendars so they can take a break. Others fill theirs with 30-minute syncs as proof-of-life markers. You send someone your Calendly link, as if it's a power move, then spend the next 12 hours apologising because it didn't sync with your personal calendar and you forgot about school pickup. Your calendar becomes a résumé. Some private meetings. Some networking with people for no reason. Blank space is dangerous.

The physical office is becoming a museum of productivity. Hot desks that no one can book properly. Open floor plans designed for "collaboration" make focus impossible, combined with hybrid schedules that fragment attention across multiple spaces. Meeting rooms with booking systems that require three apps and still double-book or that get evil glares or overconfident knocks with one minute to go from someone you know won't be using it for a meeting with another human. Kitchen areas are where people eat lunch whilst on muted video calls, chewing silently to avoid disrupting the show. You still have the app to confirm you don't have COVID, but are vaccinated.

WeWork promised community and delivered isolation booths. We replaced coffee chats and corridor conversations with Zoom fatigue and emoji reactions. The "energy" everyone raves about is dozens of people juggling Zoom calls and coffee, hoping nobody notices they're Googling "how to look busy" on incognito mode using a highly secure obscure browser on their mobile phone.

The hybrid model will finish what open offices started: the complete elimination of any space designed for deep work. Offices will become networking stages where people perform collaboration for a few days a week, then retreat to their homes to do the actual thinking. Soon we'll have hologram meetings where you can be virtually present in multiple places simultaneously, ensuring you're never truly present anywhere. The worst of all worlds: expensive real estate optimised for interruption, combined with homes that never feel like home because the office never really leaves. The corporate swag-sticker-laden laptop is piled on a notepad, with a charger dangling for good measure, next to your headphones all encroaching on the space where you eat and live your life. Cookies on your laptop. Crumbs on your desk.

The Performance Trap

AI was supposed to liberate us. Instead, it became another whip. Saved thirty minutes on a report? Congratulations! You've earned the privilege of attending three more meetings about meetings, writing status updates on your status updates, and crafting emails that exist solely to prove you're alive.

The average knowledge worker app-switches 1,100 times per day (according to workplace analytics firm RescueTime), draining attention with every switch. I just alt-tabbed that to make sure it was true. Research from the University of California, Irvine found that it takes an average of 23 minutes to refocus after each interruption. That's five weeks of productivity bled out annually in digital quicksand. This broken system is working exactly as designed.

Welcome to digital debt - the compound interest of bullshit. Every message spawns three more. Every automation creates five new expectations. The system wants feeding. Email and Slack have transformed the workplace into a frenetic, zero-sum communication environment. You're a content generator for the attention economy, frantically producing proof-of-life signals for systems that measure your keystrokes and screen time but have no idea if you've solved a single meaningful problem.

This is how AI broke us in 2025. Through multiplication, not replacement. AI created zombie work. Work that looks alive but has no pulse. Work that moves and responds but serves no purpose except its own perpetuation. We are doing empty work.

We use words that we don’t understand, are never explained, or just irritate us:

optimise for scale, AI-powered, quick win, radical candour, double down, seamless integration, empowered teams, touch base, growth mindset, ping you later, land and expand, hyper-personalised, low-hanging fruit, operationalise learnings, loop in, bring your whole self to work, bandwidth check, unlock value, modular deployment, align on outcomes, people-first culture, tech stack agnostic, check in, psychological safety, strategic pillars, move the needle, strategic alignment, embedded innovation, data-driven decisions, authentic leadership, get it on the roadmap, run it up the flagpole, end-to-end solution, still under discussion, let’s take this offline, culture of ownership, purpose-driven, needs further unpacking, boil the ocean,

There’s no dictionary to help us. Sometimes the definitions in our head are ominous. Most of the time, it’s just buzzword bingo on loop with each phrase hitting like a dull cymbal in a padded room. This is the language of manufactured momentum, phrases that create the illusion of movement while masking a deeper inertia. They sound urgent, strategic, and forward-leaning, but rarely signal anything real. It’s the dialect of the performance trap, where articulation is rewarded over action, signalling replaces solving, and noise drowns out clarity.

The world is growing exponentially, and we are pretending to do work. Let’s apply to work for OpenAI or Nvidia. Sorry, no jobs. Not a match. Back to reality. Let’s get a job in an AI startup. You’re not even sure where to start. You create email updates about work that never happened, to satisfy invisible oversight. You perform productivity, pretending you're accountable to a manager no one really works with. Rushing Slack responses makes you visible rather than productive. Visible activity becomes the proxy for actual work. You start using shortened forms of phrases because you're trying to multitask until your Slack feed starts to look like a Gen Z WhatsApp channel.

AI reveals a mirror. The way we've deployed it reveals what we've chosen to value and what we've chosen to ignore. Shift teams and you realise you're jumping into a whole new world. Join a new company and you're in the lion’s den. A different kind of chaos.

Perform or Perish

The real terror lies in the performance of staying employable. Is your workload lighter this month? Panic. Light workload signals non-essential. Non-essential becomes a line item that gets deleted in the next "right-sizing" for wrong reasons.

So you hunt for projects like a desperate actor auditioning for parts. You volunteer for initiatives you barely understand. You learn AI tools you'll never use to put "prompt engineering" on LinkedIn, in the hope that an AI bot sees that you can do a job elsewhere. You attend webinars about upskilling during lunch because being behind on trends feels like career suicide. But you've picked the wrong training. And the training you've received to date seems fit for 1999. The corporate subscription to a training provider seems like a big investment in time, so you try to complete it in the background on another laptop while you're on a call to prove you did the training. There's a joke about how intense the presenter was in the team meeting. Everyone awkwardly “murmur laughs” or comments “so true, thought it was just me. ROFL.” But no one actually ever laughs out loud or rolls on the floor with laughter.” Imagine if you did? It might be disruptive. You give a fistbump emoji, but it’s defaulted to not your skin colour. You’re beyond caring. What we need isn’t more training. We need SuperSkills, the human capabilities that AI can’t replace and the system doesn’t reward.

Everyone is frantically learning the same AI tools that will eventually replace them, calling it "professional development." You get another login for another platform that does exactly what the old one did, except now it has "AI-powered insights" that nobody asked for. Your company announces it's "leveraging artificial intelligence to optimise human capital allocation." Corporate speak for "we're figuring out who to fire first."

You copy LinkedIn “AI best tools” posts from other people's playbooks, following someone else's path as a shortcut, whilst sacrificing your own thinking. You post every Friday about new certifications even when you're bored because the streak of output has become addictive rather than purposeful. You repost viral articles without comment just to prove you read great posts, but you haven’t actually read them. There's a race to download the latest PDF report from any industry leader, upload it to ChatGPT, humanise it with Claude, and post it on LinkedIn, complete with emojis, to be the thought leader. You realise later that part of the report had to be written with Grok. It sounds gnarly for a corporate report. All this while the half-life of your skills keeps shrinking, so you're always learning something new whilst forgetting what you learned last year. It’s exhausting.

The more clearly applicable your work, the easier it is to automate. The safest jobs are the ones nobody can define. Meaninglessness has become job security. In some parts of the world, this productivity show becomes a matter of survival in an economy where metrics are the only thing protecting you from being replaced.

Everyone knows a reorg is coming. It hasn't been announced. It hasn't been denied. The silence says more than any official update ever could. You start adding "next steps" and "actions" to every project to signal that you're still helpful, and you can hide your black box method of getting work done. The expanding job forces you to take on more, because saying no makes you "a poor culture fit." Calendar bloat and always-on work have become hidden tests of loyalty rather than strategic planning.

You're waiting for the announcement. Everyone is. The CEO memo. You know, the one that starts with "After careful consideration of our AI capabilities..." Whenever the CEO memo gets leaked from another company, you know your CEO is reading it, planning her next move.

This system is designed to break. But it's also designed to be escaped.

The Meaning Crisis

The Script We Can't Understand

Ask someone what they really do (their title aside, but what they actually accomplish) and watch the existential panic set in. "I facilitate cross-functional alignment," they'll say. Push harder. "What does that accomplish?" Silence. "Well, it ensures that stakeholders are aligned on key priorities and deliverables are optimised for maximum impact and..." They're reading from a script they can't understand for a play nobody's watching. Sometimes they're reading from an automated AI interview helper.

Modern jobs have become elaborate cargo cults, fuelled by a corporate dialect designed to obscure. "Alignment" means endless meetings. "Agility" means no job security. "AI transformation" means cuts with nicer slides. "Optimisation" means doing more with fewer people. "Right-sizing" means downsizing your life. People perform productivity rituals (the meetings, the documents, the updates) without understanding what they're supposed to summon. They've lost the connection between activity and outcome, motion and progress.

The Performance Review Theatre

The result is a mass existential crisis disguised as professional development. Gallup says that 85% of workers openly admit to hating their work. For me, I think they feel that they are saying that it serves no purpose except existential camouflage. Busywork-as-an-identity (BAAI) is performed to an audience that watches.

You still click "I believe in our mission" on the engagement survey. But deep down, you don't. You used to. Now you believe in keeping your job. The company value is "Be Bold." Your job is to write passive emails, stay neutral in every meeting, and never disagree unless it's already on the roadmap. You nod your head so much that you’re turning into that cute car dog decoration, while the car is still moving.

Performance reviews have become quarterly ridiculousness. You need to pick colleagues for your 360 feedback, but you haven't actually worked with anyone this quarter because everyone's been in different meetings about different projects that connect to nothing and you've only just finished the last review. So you invent collaborations to feed the review metrics. "Sarah and I aligned on the Q3 OKR optimisation initiative", which was a single Slack exchange about a deadline that got moved anyway. God knows how you'll get promoted. You ponder how others play the game and say the right thing to have that double promotion in two years. Maybe it's because they were focused on "inbox zero" or because of their advocacy of process innovation. Maybe they've shared their box breathing techniques with the uppers. Maybe they have an AI tool that we don’t know about yet. Maybe they’re just better. Either way, they will be your boss soon.

You join your weekly 1:1 with your manager. They ask how you are. You say "good." You both know that's not true. But there's no time for that. You move to the agenda items.

You haven't spoken to half your team in months, but you're still asked to review their "cross-functional collaboration." So you copy-paste phrases from your last review, tweak a few adjectives, change a few tenses, and hit submit. Survival rather than dishonesty.

You book a 30-minute call to "align" because typing a Slack message feels too emotionally risky. The meeting accomplishes nothing. But now everyone involved feels productive. Someone's typing furiously on mute during your presentation. They're either taking notes, writing an email, or checking WhatsApp. You'll never know. But you pretend they're listening because they nodded once five minutes ago. But they also smiled at the wrong point. They're probably laughing at you with your colleagues. You get actions from the AI auto-summariser. Person 4 will be taking everything forward. Someone else has been summarising using their own AI. It’s actually Person 2 with support from Person 6 and Sanjay. There were only five people in the meeting. Sanjay wasn’t there. Sanjay left two years ago. Maybe they meant Simon? But Simon didn’t say anything. He’s new and already a master at head nodding.

A colleague asks what you're working on. You pause. You scroll your mental tabs. You say something vague like "setting up a new process." They say, “exciting” You both feel relieved. Neither of you knows what it means.

You read the message. You send 🙌 anyway, to prove you're paying attention. A Slack thread announcing a reorg gets flooded with 👏 and 💪 within three minutes. No one reads the actual message. Emotional insurance rather than feedback. Appreciation has been reduced to a reaction.

You really miss old-school email read receipts and hate being left on read. You send the same message on three platforms in three tones to a cross-functional colleague. No reply. You’re not ignored. You’re just not urgent. They're fighting other corporate forest fires. Your fire hasn't made the agenda yet.

The Intellectual Decline

In researching SuperSkills, I found workers chasing AI tools driven by curiosity, posting AI-generated "thought leadership" on LinkedIn to appear relevant. You open LinkedIn. Everyone's thrilled about AI. Excited about transitions. Celebrating micro-wins. You wonder if you're the only one quietly losing it. You post something about "growth" or "curiosity". You get a few likes. You like a few back. You feel seen. Then you close the tab and go back to work, that feels like you're invisible.

You ask ChatGPT to write your weekly update. You copy-paste it without reading. Then your manager replies, asking why it sounds like a speech at Davos. You feel a flicker of pride. Then forget what you wrote. Then you realise that she knows. That. You. Used. AI. People are quietly feeding their entire jobs into ChatGPT. Reports. Responses. Research. Even though you have been told not to. No one talks about it, but everyone's doing it. In modern workplaces, intellectual status is earned by dropping obscure reports into Slack threads nobody asked for and nobody reads. Proof that you've consumed more noise than the next person, rather than insight.

The decline of the brain is happening in plain sight. People spend more time editing out their em dashes than writing something that matters. We've gained new skills in spotting AI articles in seconds, whilst losing the ability to think original thoughts. Are we witnessing intellectual collapse disguised as productivity optimisation?

There's no Diet Coke break, no water cooler moment. Work is in the fast lane without a map, driving a car that has the wrong fuel. You close your laptop at 8:47pm. Not because you're done. But because you've run out of pretending to care. Something has to break.

You send emails marked "urgent" about things that won't matter in a week. And you do it all whilst your life happens in the margins.

The Work Beneath the Work

The Always-On Trap

This architectural design is intentional. Modern corporations are distraction machines designed to fragment human consciousness. Work has become the theatre of availability, not the discipline of contribution. You're never fully present anywhere because you're always partially available everywhere.

You don't say what you think anymore. Not in Slack. Not in meetings. Not even at the offsite. Not because you're indifferent, but because you don't know which sentence might ruin your career. At work, you're apolitical. In WhatsApp groups, you're furious and political.

You're told to bring your whole self to work, but only the parts that align with the brand. Some took that literally and didn't pass probation. The angry self, the politically vocal self, the spiritual self stay in the draft folder. You're not sure if you should mention pronouns or not. You learn which version of "whole" they meant.

Wellness as Performance

You're invited to a mindfulness webinar whilst being looped into three projects you didn't ask for. There’s a free yoga session between 6 and 8pm. And one at 2am for colleagues in other offices online. 2am in their timezone. You're told to take care of your mental health whilst hitting stretch goals under hiring freeze conditions. You are told there are compulsory regulatory training courses that you need to complete by the end of the quarter. You joke that you will pay someone for the answers, but secretly you know you can snap the question on ChatGPT to get it quicker as there's no camera watching, for now. Everyone's doing it. No-one cares. You’re secretly monitoring the news about keeping Chat-GPT's history. Your world would fall apart if anyone found out what was in that history. The wellness portal has a breathing app. It's also the only thing that's not behind a firewall. You've also forgotten the password as it's not stored in the highly secure corporate access management solution.

The CEO posts about AI, purpose, and transformation. The slide deck is beautiful. You're still trying to get access to the SharePoint folder from last week. You fly in for a "values reset." There's a session on authenticity. Everyone wears branded hoodies. No one says what they actually think. The company says "we're a family," right after slashing headcount and removing bereavement leave. You barely notice you’re agreeing to nothing. And smile. Because that's what family does. The vibe is reminiscent of summer camp, with a focus on performance metrics. The evening is a sit-down affair, where you have dinner followed by drinks with umbrellas. Some giggles. But you retire early enough to be up at 6 am to show you couldn't sleep and defaulted to work slacks. After your forced run to prove you are healthier than you are, you apologise at breakfast to those who didn't have their notifications off at 6:13 am. Secretly, you're emotionally and physically exhausted, need three more coffees and feel sick. But you soldier on with gritted teeth for more team building.

Fear of Invisibility

The individual cost of resistance feels higher than the collective cost of compliance. Everyone knows 90% of meetings are psychological torture disguised as collaboration. Everyone knows most emails are anxiety made manifest. But declining a meeting in a hybrid world brands you as "not a team player", and it makes you literally invisible. For some, the fear isn't being forgotten; it's being erased. Visibility isn't equal, and neither is safety. The system has made rational behaviour feel suicidal.

Your phone buzzes with work notifications during family dinner. Your family know your anxiety and your addiction to staying relevant, but don't quite understand it. You check emails whilst waiting for medical results because fifteen minutes offline might mean missing something important. But important to what? Important to whom? You forgot to follow up with your doctor because of the all-hands where the company update felt the same as last month. Ten people got $50 Amazon vouchers because they were nominated by their friends in other departments. You’ve never got a voucher.

You tell yourself you'll launch your side project this year. But the platform is overwhelming, the tools are exhausting, and the idea of "building in public" sounds like another job. So you post a book quote on Instagram and tell yourself you're cultivating your voice.

The machine feels unstoppable, but some are fighting back and winning.

Breaking Free

A few organisations have broken free from this madness, but only by treating productivity theatre as an existential threat rather than a management challenge.

Scorched Earth Meeting Policy: Shopify didn't ask people to decline bad meetings; they deleted 12,000 hours of recurring meetings in a single day. Nuclear option. Complete reset. The message was clear: we're not optimising the theatre, we're burning it down.

Time Apartheid: After Microsoft Japan banned Friday meetings and capped others at 30 minutes, productivity increased by 40%, not from harder work, but from reduced noise. They created cognitive sanctuaries where actual thinking could happen instead of being performed. Doing fewer things well became more productive than scattering attention across endless inputs.

Boundary Enforcement: Some companies and countries now have "right to disconnect" policies with teeth. No emails after 6 PM. No Slack on weekends. No calls during PTO. Sometimes as law, but mostly as a competitive advantage. Teams that rest think better. Teams that think better win. Some organisations plan deliberate "slow seasons" as a strategy rather than indulgence: scheduled downtime that protects deep work rather than fragmenting it across the year.

Async Supremacy: Companies like GitLab operate almost entirely without real-time communication. Every meeting requires a written agenda with specific decisions to be made. The default assumption: work happens in solitude, coordination happens deliberately. No more "syncs" that metastasise into hour-long therapy sessions.

AI as a Deleter: The smartest companies use AI to eliminate work rather than amplify it. Whilst most organisations deploy AI to generate more emails, more reports, and more meetings with better agendas, the leaders use it backwards. They identify which emails shouldn't exist, which reports no one reads, which meetings serve no purpose. Companies like Notion use AI to automatically archive unused documents, cutting administrative overhead by significant margins. AI becomes a deletion tool rather than a multiplication tool.

A friend at a small startup told me that they ditched Slack for email-only updates, claiming it "saved their sanity." Her team laughed at first, then followed suit when they realised they could think again. They have to use old-school SMS if things are important. When organisations actually cauterise the productivity show infection, the effects ripple beyond work. People don't get more done and they start living again. They pick up their kids without checking Slack. They have dinner conversations without laptops open. They sleep without phones charging next to their heads. The human costs of this productivity theatre radiate far beyond office walls into the core of human existence.

The Reckoning

Real change requires acknowledging that productivity theatre isn't a bug; it's a feature of systems designed to extract maximum behavioural compliance from human resources. Individual resistance is noble but futile. The machine is too hungry, too sophisticated, too deeply embedded in every moment of our day.

But systemic change becomes inevitable when leaders realise productivity theatre is eating their competitive advantage alive. Whilst they're burning human cognitive capacity on digital busywork, competitors who've solved this problem are making better decisions, moving faster, and thinking clearer.

Measure what matters, delete what doesn't. Track decision quality rather than meeting attendance. Customer impact rather than email response time. Promote those who cut pointless tasks (cancelling redundant reports) over those churning out more slides. Make visible work optional and invisible thinking mandatory.

Declare war on distraction. Question every recurring meeting as if it were a malignant tumour. Ask "what specific decision are we making?" when discussions drift into status performance. Create communication protocols that assume asynchronous as the natural state, with real-time interaction reserved for genuine emergencies.

Protect boundaries like classified information. The most productive action is often stopping something that doesn't matter. The most radical thing you can do is be unavailable.

Organisations that solve this first will possess an unfair advantage that compounds daily. Whilst competitors exhaust their people with hybrid anxiety and digital busywork, they'll have teams that think deeply, decide quickly, and execute with precision.

Reclaiming Work

The critical skill in the AI age isn't learning to work faster; it's learning to think slower. To resist the algorithmic pressure for immediate response. To sit with complexity until it reveals its structure. To distinguish between motion and progress, activity and achievement, performance and purpose.

Our ancestors worked in meaningful chunks with immediate purpose: hunting, gathering, creating. We've fragmented work into digital inputs that serve no clear end. The cleaner who scrubs your building every night? Their work is finished when it's clean. Yours is never finished, only redefined, recirculated, and reformatted. The unbundling of work into endless micro-tasks and gig components has broken the connection between effort and outcome. Good work may involve choosing not to climb, stepping away from the hustle when the system asks you to move faster. Sometimes, the most productive choice is deliberate underachievement by design.

Real productivity is maximising impact whilst minimising waste. Having the clarity to know what matters and the courage to ignore what doesn't.

Nobody wants to be a fraud. But the system requires you to fake it to stay visible. Your best work lives in drafts. Your job lives in metrics.

The Absurdities of Work Today

• Join a Zoom call from the office to speak to someone at home

• Swap your in-office day for a delivery window

• React with 👏 to messages you haven't read

• Book fake "focus blocks" so no one schedules over your anxiety

• Write weekly updates with ChatGPT to sound professional

• Apologise for your Calendly not syncing with your child's pickup

• Say "working on alignment" when you're not sure what you're doing

• Turn your camera on late to look important

• Call a meeting to avoid typing a Slack message

• Feel productive when someone writes "Great point 👏" under your LinkedIn post

Start small:

• Say no once today: Decline one non-essential meeting with a polite, "I'm focusing on [priority]. Can we handle this async?" Track how this feels and what happens.

• Unplug nightly: Silence work notifications after 7 PM to reclaim your brain. Set your phone to Do Not Disturb and put it in another room.

• Ask why before every task: "What's the actual goal?" If it's unclear, skip it. Write down how many tasks you eliminate this way.

• Protect one meeting-free morning: Block Wednesday morning (or any morning) for deep work only. Defend this time like a client deadline.

• Batch communication: Check email three times daily at set times rather than three hundred. Use an auto-responder explaining your response schedule.

• Practice productive invisibility: Take one day per week where you don't post, react, or comment on anything work-related. Notice the withdrawal anxiety, then notice how it fades.

For leaders:

• Measure decisions, not activity: Track how many actual decisions your team made this week versus how many meetings they attended.

• Default to async: Require written agendas with specific decisions for any meeting over 15 minutes.

• Create cognitive days off: Institute company-wide no-meeting Fridays or protected morning hours across all teams.

Reclaim your time. Reclaim your mind. Reclaim your work.

And help others do the same. Forward this to someone who needs it. Forward to someone who is friendly with your HR team.

The future belongs to those who protect clarity at all costs. Those who refuse to confuse performance with purpose. Who build organisations that think deeply and act precisely. Who remembers that being human is not a productivity problem to solve?

That future is possible. But only if we stop feeding the machine.

Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,

Rahim

Here are my recommendations for this week:

Now

1. A.I. Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You.

   In a few key areas, humans will be more essential than ever.

2. The End of Lawyers. Excellent hypothetical 8-minute video.

3. When to quit: A simple framework for life’s toughest decisions - Annie Duke views decision-making as a teachable skill that many people never learn how to do systematically. Also: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex

4. The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition

   One professor's reflections on the end of an era, as AI tools such as ChatGPT have murdered the student essay (RIP).

5. The unseen - Our crisis of work and technology is one in which too many people feel that nobody sees them as a fellow human being. Uncomfortable

Next

1. The New Mantra: If You Could Start Fresh with AI, then What Would You Do?

   Excellent essay from Peter Leyden topped with my comment. Must read

2. How your brain controls ageing — and why zombie cells could be key

   Research is revealing the cellular mechanisms that link mental well-being and longevity.

3. Why Big Tech cannot agree on artificial general intelligence - It has been tipped as the next big breakthrough out of Silicon Valley, but is it a scientific goal — or a marketing buzzword?

4. ChatGPT is making us dumb. Let me save you reading the 200 pages. I also didn’t read the report. MIT researchers scanned brains of ChatGPT users and found alarming results: participants showed weaker neural connectivity, reduced cognitive engagement, and declining performance with continued use. The study adds to growing evidence that AI chatbots may be negatively affecting users' critical thinking skills, brain function, and potentially causing dependency issues.

5. Publishers facing existential threat from AI, Cloudflare CEO says. Search traffic referrals have plummeted as people increasingly rely on AI summaries to answer their queries, forcing many publishers to reevaluate their business models.

If you are interested in advertising in this newsletter, please see this link