How Do I Escape the “Busyness Singularity”? | Monday Advice

There are a lot of concerns in our current discourse about work and technology. Here, for example, is an Economist article from just a couple weeks ago. The headline reads, prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse. It is not here yet, but government should lay a safety net. Yikes. Right? Now, here's a a a Times headline from just last week. California's governor signs AI order aimed at protecting workers. Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to explore an overhaul of labor policies to deal with potential mass job displacement from artificial intelligence. Now notice what these examples have in common. They're all about the potential catastrophic loss of jobs that might occur if technology automates existing roles. But there's another possibility that people haven't been discussing as much, but it's a possibility that I've increasingly come to worry about. What if the real fear with new advancements like AI is not that these technologies are going to take your job, but instead are going to make your job but instead are gonna make your job miserable. And if this is true, what specifically can you do to avoid this fate? Well, it's Monday, meaning it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to go seek out some answers. Alright. So here's the plan. I'm gonna start by telling you a story. A story about how technology has slowly and somewhat accidentally made knowledge work jobs increasingly worse. And then, I will talk about how the arrival of AI might take this long unfolding process and accelerate it to an absurd degree, creating what I've taken to calling the busyness singularity. Now, Now, once I've told you this tale, I'll then share some practical advice about what you can do individually to avoid the gravitational pull of this grim fate. In more detail, I have five important suggestions to share, and we will go through each of those. Alright? So we have a lot to cover today, so let's get started. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. Alright. I wanna start by telling you a story about the evolution of knowledge work. And I should say right off the bat, if you want the full version of this story, you need to read part one of my most recent book, which is called Slow Productivity. This is basically sort of the the primary source material for a lot of what I talk about these days about work on this show, so you should have your own copy of it. Alright. So here is the short version of the summary I tell in part one the story I tell in part one of that book. In the beginning, we have the notion of knowledge work emerge in the mid nineteen fifties, roughly speaking. That's when the management theorist Peter Drucker actually coins the term knowledge work. His job was to …