Rania El-Ghezzaoui

keeps us on a miserable hamster wheel of churning out more

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

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

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

“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.”

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