Rania El-Ghezzaoui

“When we gear our society around efficiency, we produce more and more of the measurable, while the immeasurable, the qualitative, and the things we don’t think to measure drain away. Bedazzled by quantitative abundance, we might not be able to see what is lost, but we can definitely feel its absence.”

shift to a new paradigm

I believe there are two plausible scenarios for the future of knowledge work. There’s one in which as machines become more human-like in their capabilities, we paradoxically become more machine-like in our pursuit of productivity, focused on efficiency and keeping busy above all else. But there’s another where we lean into ways of working that are ... See more

Our interfaces should facilitate prose-sculpting, meaning-architecting, memory-augmenting, and inspiration-harvesting—all grounded in sources we love and trust.

keeps us on a miserable hamster wheel of churning out more

When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular, I’ll remember everything better; everything w... See more

the neurotic hamster in us

We live in a culture that venerates productivity above all else.

the productivity religion is so ingrained that it’s almost impossible to imagine a different way of working