Better thinking

You should protect your team’s “deep work” at all costs. Traditional work environments optimize for rapid-fire communication. Meetings, Slack, text messages, and stand-ups are examples. Levels thinks these defaults are disastrous and reduce the amount of “deep work” its team can do. It does everything possible to protect this time.

In New York, people speak fast. In the American South, they speak slowly. Both of them are a form of politeness, understood in a different way. In New York, you speak quickly because you respect the value of the other person’s time and you don’t want to take up too much of it. In the South, you speak slowly because you want to respect the person by... See more

Popular culture seems to agree with this view. Morning routines, writing routines, exercise routines—these are the blueprints of modern self-actualization, shared online one after another for a perpetually searching public. We study them like clues that may lead us to the correct way to be. The correct way to repeat ourselves.

BRIAN ENO

So what you see when you watch someone surfing is they take control momentarily, to situate themselves on a wave, and then they surrender. They’re carried along by it, and then they take control again, and then they surrender. I think that’s a very good analogy of what we do throughout our lives, actually. We’re constantly moving between... See more