A tech stack for “deep work”

Riffing on Matthew Crawford’s call for an “attentional commons” — attention as a shared resource we must protect — Alan Jacobs recently proposed that we build “attentional cottages”: private and public physical spaces for focused reflection and work. At a minimum, all one needs is the disciplined mental ability to retreat. The idea goes back at least to Marcus Aurelius: “Nowhere can man find retirement more peaceful and untroubled than in his own soul.”

But as Jacobs notes, the problem is that knowledge workers typically live the vast majority of our lives in online, cortisol-driven mode, and only for rare luxury or from dire need retreat into our quiet spaces, mental or physical. Jacobs proposes regaining a balance where we spend the majority of our lives in our cottages instead. But how, if our work demands that we use digital devices most of the time?

What we further need is a set of digital tools designed to take our cottages with us wherever we go — an attentional pop-up tent, if you will. Many of us presently rely on haphazard life hacks. Did you know that you can use the accessibility settings on your Apple devices to make the screen grayscale, and thus less seductive? Have you heard of the Freedom app, which allows you to block other apps, websites, or the entire Internet for hours at a time? Or the Minimis Launcher, a tool for limiting the time you spend on the apps that distract you most? Some people use dedicated tools, whether analog Bullet Journals and Time-Block Planners, or digital reMarkable tablets and Light Phones.

These tools can be useful — but the whole is missing. They are at about the point of development of digital cameras, cell phones, and MP3 players in the early 2000s: there wasn’t an app for that. There was a device, and the devices did not know how to play together nicely, if at all.

It’s time to build a tech stack, a comprehensive ecosystem of tools intentionally designed to help us abide in “deep work,” as defined by productivity guru Cal Newport in a book of that name: “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.”

I was an early adopter of the reMarkable e-ink tablet, and I credit it for getting me through comprehensive exams while earning my doctorate. Its screen and stylus are nearly perfect imitations of paper and allow for distraction-free reading, with the further advantage that the thousands of pages of PDFs I have read and annotated are all in the cloud, accessible at a moment’s notice any time I need to revisit them.

But no comparable digital tool exists for focused writing, especially writing that requires collaboration with editors or co-authors. It would almost be simpler to use a typewriter and then OCR and email a scan than to use the reMarkable’s text editing functions for collaborative writing: The current workflow requires writing on the tablet, emailing the text in-line to oneself (as the PDF formatting feature is buggy), pasting and formatting the text in Word, sending that to an editor, tracking and making changes in Word, and then pasting it back into the reMarkable app for transfer to the tablet.

No doubt legacy monocultures like Adobe and Microsoft don’t make it easy for independent companies to piggyback on their products — and that is part of the problem. There must be a way to access the benefits of connected, collaborative workflows, without handing one’s mind over to a mode of being where your attention or data is the chief currency.

We need a deep-work tech stack, an independent ecosystem that brings together the emphasis on ending tech addiction with the desire for self-governance that we see in movements like open source code and Platform Cooperativism. The ancient quest to be “in the world, but not of the world” is particularly difficult in the always-connected age. But the ability to write an essay, send it to colleagues for feedback, and see their comments, all without intervening advertising and distractions, is well within our reach. Let’s build tools that help us think with calm recollection, in part so we can think better about what’s most worth building.