Choose The Game You Want to Focus On

You should recognize the level of commitment you are willing to live with for a particular game, and be content with it. There are a few games I take very seriously, and the rest I simply enjoy as much as I can with my limited commitment. For example, I have read many books on chess and played chess occasionally over the years. On the whole though, I am a terrible player. During a game of chess, I do everything I can (within the scope of the game) to win, but I do very little to improve mysel...

 How Social Media Annexes Your Cognitive Landscape

In my 2016 book, Deep Work, I proposed a strictly binary approach to social media: you should perform an honest cost/benefit analysis on the social media platforms in your life, and quit all services that don’t provide substantially more benefits than costs with respect to things you truly value. The issue with this idea, as I discovered, is that many people could identify a small number of important benefits provided to them by particular social media platforms that couldn’t be easily r...

 Arguing with People Online Allows Them to Burn Your Time

But while some amount of bullshit is inevitably forced on you, the bullshit that sneaks into your life by tricking you is no one's fault but your own. And yet the bullshit you choose may be harder to eliminate than the bullshit that's forced on you. Things that lure you into wasting your time on them have to be really good at tricking you. An example that will be familiar to a lot of people is arguing online. When someone contradicts you, they're in a sense attacking you. Sometimes pretty ove...

 Having Kids Makes One Cognizant of the Brevity of Life

Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter ...