{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"80,000 Hours Podcast","title":"#106 – Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":6807,"description":"If you wanted to start a university department from scratch, and attract as many superstar researchers as possible, what’s the most attractive perk you could offer? \r\n\r\nHow about just not needing an email address. \r\n\r\nAccording to today's guest, Cal Newport — computer science professor and best-selling author of A World Without Email — it should seem obscene and absurd for a world-renowned vaccine researcher with decades of experience to spend a third of their time fielding requests from HR, building management, finance, and so on. Yet with offices organised the way they are today, nothing could be more natural. \r\n\r\nLinks to learn more, summary and full transcript.\r\n\r\nBut this isn’t just a problem at the elite level — this affects almost all of us. A typical U.S. office worker checks their email 80 times a day, once every six minutes on average. Data analysis by RescueTime found that a third of users checked email or Slack every three minutes or more, averaged over a full work day. \r\n\r\nEach time that happens our focus is broken, killing our momentum on the knowledge work we're supposedly paid to do. \r\n\r\nWhen we lament how much email and chat have reduced our focus and filled our days with anxiety and frenetic activity, we most naturally blame 'weakness of will'. If only we had the discipline to check Slack and email once a day, all would be well — or so the story goes. \r\n\r\nCal believes that line of thinking fundamentally misunderstands how we got to a place where knowledge workers can rarely find more than five consecutive minutes to spend doing just one thing. \r\n\r\nSince the Industrial Revolution, a combination of technology and better organization have allowed the manufacturing industry to produce a hundred-fold as much with the same number of people. \r\n\r\nCal says that by comparison, it's not clear that specialised knowledge workers like scientists, authors, or senior managers are *any* more productive than they were 50 years ago. If the knowledge sector could...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/VO1STE7hN95RRg9QdLo4soV2VhhbR9PF5ZZlRhDYcwE/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzQxNDAyLzE2ODM1/NDQ1NDAtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}