This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
For many people, this is what work sounds like nowadays.
It's a constant thrum of notifications, tweets, and messages.
Each time we respond to an email or a text or Google, a question that's just popped into our head.
We pay a small price in the moment.
This price is imperceptible, but over time, it adds up.
And we haven't quite come to terms with the cost of constant distractions.
We treat it, I think, in this more general sense of I probably should be less distracted, and I think it's more urgent than people realize.
In the third episode of our Work 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite conversation from 2017 to explore questions many of us struggle with on a daily basis.
What are modern day jobs doing to our minds?
Why is it so hard to cultivate focus?
And what would it look like to transform our jobs so that we can engage in deeper, more meaningful work?
People who spend a larger proportion of their professional time concentrating intensely on a single target tend to enjoy their work a lot more, and there's a lot of different factors about why that might be true.
But I ended by saying a deep life is a good life.
How deep work can change our jobs and our lives.
This week on hidden brain.
Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University.
You might expect a professor of computer science to be tethered to his computer and all the latest devices, but thats not Cal.
Hes deliberately sought to break away from the distractions of modern technology, and hes trying to get the rest of us to follow his lead.