What does it mean to live —and work— in the Distraction Economy? It means to be overwhelmed by so much information, tools and all kinds of stimuli. If a couple of years ago technology seemed to allow us to work increasingly less, today it has been proven that this is just an illusion.
Most of us have to juggle multiple jobs at the same time, and dedicate our attention to a great deal of things, without being able to genuinely focus on any of them. This happens both at work and at home: because of new technologies, work is always with us.
All of this, instead of helping us work better, has transformed us into machines, incapable of stopping, convinced that slowing down implies reducing our productivity, which seems to be the end goal of everything that we do. Have we ever really thought about what productivity is?
If we think about it, the idea we have of productivity is related to the industrial era, when the main objective was to produce more, faster. Today, on the contrary, we know that working more doesn’t proportionately increase productivity, and we also know the side-effects of keeping up a fast pace: increasing tiredness and stress, leading to burnout.
Our automatic response is to adopt systems and tools capable of optimizing what we do, so that we can have some spare time that we fill with other tasks, bringing us right back to the initial problem.
The objective of the author’s method is to accomplish more by doing less. The program is divided into three fundamental steps, each of them including three actions.
