Jennifer Magnolfi Astill is the founder of Programmable Habitats, a consultancy that specializes in the strategic development of high-tech future work environments. She’s advised companies such as Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Herman Miller, and BBC on headquarter workspace initiatives. With the future of offices still uncertain, we wanted to get her perspective on how the pandemic could shape where and how we work in the years ahead. The following is a conversation that took place over email.

How do you envision workspaces changing in the next 5-10 years? 

MAGNOLFI ASTILL: The innovations that catalyze structural shifts in the world of work, particularly in the field of technology workspaces, often become manifest in physical environments a few years after their adoption by end users.

For example, at a large scale, building infrastructure systems for new technologies might require upgrades planned across several business cycles. Or, closer to the end user, workers might default to tablets or wireless laptops as their primary work tool and might see their desks give way to unassigned seating well before workstations are upgraded to have USB instead of Ethernet ports.

It is safe to predict that changes in the workspace in the next 5-10 years will inevitably be influenced by our work experience during the Coronavirus pandemic. This will impact the entire ecosystem of stakeholders, from landlords to occupants.

In the near term, new considerations such as staggered days in the office, social distancing and new hygiene measures, modified design and circulation patterns, increased use of video and remote collaboration software and many other new factors will continue to inform our work experience.

The pandemic is akin to a spike in the work evolution curve. It has accelerated the widespread adoption of the prior shift—mobility—to areas of the workforce traditionally more reticent to it. It has also revealed a broader undercurrent, namely our reliance on machine assistance for complex decision making and analysis, which are increasingly more common scenarios across all areas of business.

It is reasonable to assume that the pandemic will inform both policy as well as design modifications in most work environments. In the absence of a reliable and widespread vaccine, however, organizations will be required to maximize their capacity for adaptation so this will take different forms depending on the organization. I don’t really see a one size fits all solution. Having said this, the generalizable factor that the pandemic revealed is the increasingly dominant role that machine intelligence has for business and competitiveness.

An example that comes to mind in terms of recent use of ML/AI in relation to the workspace is IBM’s Watson Works, a system that uses AI to both support decision making at the level of workspace portfolio to facilitate re-entry into the office, as well as an employee app to connect the individual end-user with both policy decisions and information about a specific workspace. The system thus allows a centralized “hub” view of integrated workforce/workspace insights on one end, and it is an individual portal for the end-user for things like reserving a desk or meeting space, logging health status for accessing the workspace, reviewing new space plans and layouts, policies etc.

Effectively, the modeling allows for visibility into a range of activities in the workplace which would otherwise be very difficult to assess or manage remotely, particularly for large real estate/workspace portfolios—things like making decisions on re-entry into the workspace based on real-time data on employees’ health or location safety, visibility into the occupancy rates and utilization patterns or social distancing of different workspaces, and eventually facilitating contact tracing in case of need. This is an example of a curated system that helps interpret and derive insights from data provided by a workforce network to inform decisions about workspace strategy to support that same network.

In a recent interview, you noted that the people developing workspaces in 2008 weren’t thinking about creating innovation, they were responding to an unmet need. What are the unmet needs that have become clear during this crisis, particularly during the shift to work? 

Broadly speaking, I would group the unmet needs unveiled by the pandemic in three categories: digital space unmet needs, physical space unmet needs, and work culture unmet needs.

To start with, there has been a change in mindset when it comes to the mobility of work. From the organization’s perspective, most know they can be productive but few had prior experience in managing a distributed workforce as a community. Transforming a network of remote colleagues into a cohesive community of work is the domain of community managers, a function that was mostly absorbed by HR departments, but that emerged as a distinct job to be done during the pandemic.

Secondly, the pandemic clarified that certain functions are optimized by interaction in the real world—in proximity with each other and in real time. Decision making, course of action selection, and learning in teams are functions that are optimized in space, particularly when it comes to work contexts that require the integration or manipulation of data or the interaction with machine work—be it robotics or data analytics. The third has to do with culture and work anthropology, particularly in the context of socialization with colleagues as an important aspect of professional life and the on-boarding of new employees.

While the first can look to some established precedent for inspiration, and therefore a new function can emerge to meet that need, the other two will require innovation and new design, insofar as the basis for performance in both has traditionally been afforded by access to shared physical spaces.

What’s been the most surprising development you’ve observed in the past few months as workers and companies have made the shift to remote work? 

I’d say many things have surprised me, but one stands out. The chaos that many have experienced from merging their entire life with their work “space” has in many cases been liberating—causing what we might call an “extreme humanizing” of work relations.

Prior to the pandemic, even the most informal and friendly work cultures, such as tech or startups, drew a fine line between personal/family life and work/office life, particularly in more experienced, higher-ranking workers. In ordinary times, this mental and emotional separation is both appropriate and in many cases necessary.

In the midst of a pandemic, however, this line was softened by a shared experience of struggle and by the unavoidable conversations that many workers and leaders had to have with each other about the reality of their circumstances and the things and the people that mattered in their lives. In my observation, the renewed perspective of the human person at work might be one of the most valuable insights we have gained from the past few months.

Your research shows that remote teams benefit from physical interaction by coming together to solidify social bonds that improve teamwork—and you’ve advocated for designing a workspace that encourages people to interact more. What might that look like in virtual workspaces such as collaboration docs ? 

Both research and observations in the field suggest that shared experiences in real life—in the physical world together in real time—provide strong foundations for interpersonal relations, trust and improved communication among team members. These, in turn, support the team’s productivity and collaborative work patterns when they are distributed for an extended period of time.

What is important to note in this, however, is that these interactions, when successful, are seldom left to chance. They are either facilitated by the intentional design of the physical environment in which they take place or, in many cases, purposely curated with the intent to create a memorable experience. Often, both.

Digital collaboration spaces which allow for both management of workflow and communication in a team environment are not immune to this need for memorable (and purposeful) interactions, in as much as they, too, are social spaces for exchange. The governing principle often distinguishing successful and productive communities of work, whether in physical or digital space, is to forge connections that otherwise would not happen and guide those interactions towards a certain goal.

How do you foresee people interacting and collaborating when some are in the physical office building while others are in the digital/virtual space? 

This requires a delicate balance early on as new norms of work in our hybrid context are emerging. “Work from Anywhere” strategies being currently developed across organizations will be best served by taking this point into account.

Early on in my research, I found that engineering and programming teams would often define somewhat organically the things that needed to happen in digital space—like chat, for example, where a lot of iterative work would take place—and those that required a wall (often a whiteboard)—which was good to “fix in space” a moment in the evolution of a project.

My sense is that something similar is occurring in high-performing teams now. Cohesive teams, particularly knowledge and technology workers, will be adept at organizing their work, their assumptions and expectations of performance based on a mental model of working through the pandemic most of us now share.

In some cases, the choice between working in digital space or going to the office might be based less on arbitrary scheduling, and more on where it makes more sense to work at that point in time in the lifecycle of the project or to optimize overall team performance.

In terms of adopting new collaboration tools, you’ve noted how almost 10 years of workspace progress has happened in a few months, simply because more people were forced to adopt video conferencing and remote collaboration tools. Do you think these adoptions will “stick” and continue to be valued going forward? 

Some of the things that I think will stick, as you say, will constitute a new baseline for the future workspace, inevitably including new video collaboration tools. One of the main reasons for this is their effectiveness in underpinning most distributed work strategies.

Having said this, I think it’s still too early to determine which tools and what mix will stay and for how long, because we are still learning which parts of our psychology at work each of these tools is best suited for. We are all developing fluency and a personal or company work style with regards to, for example, when we feel it’s necessary to have a video vs. a call.

This experimentation will in some cases lead to new forms of “work culture”—i.e. this is how things are done in our organization now—that will then be formalized and integrated into work practices and policy. This will take time and much will depend on the evolution of the pandemic in the next year.

How much of the benefit of remote collaboration today would you say depends on pre-established trust between colleagues, which would need to be built up for new hires? 

The curation of digital work communities, and therefore the fostering of the values and norms that help those communities thrive, is an important and necessary job function, particularly at scale. Interaction design is a key factor in this.

Trust develops over time and is facilitated by shared experiences and by the development of knowledge about each other’s character and expertise. There are cognitive factors—like developing a shared mental model of work—and interpersonal factors—like psychological safety and dependability—at work in all high-performing teams.

We instinctively know when we are part of a great team. The translation of these factors to a remote workforce is necessary for developing trust among team members, particularly when a new one joins an established group, and will offer great opportunities for innovation in work practices and culture.

Dropbox recently announced that we’re now a Virtual First company, meaning remote work will be the day-to-day default for individual work. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this concept. What would you say are the advantages of being Virtual First? 

I think there is a notable point to be made, and it’s the cultural one—the (seemingly) intentional effort to level the field for all employees when it comes to the choice of how to work. I think this will likely show positive outcomes in addition to the logistical advantages implied by the new workspace policy.

In 2011, Eyal released Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, a behavioral design manual. “My idea was to democratize the psychological techniques technology companies use so that all of us in business can help people form healthy habits,” says Eyal in an interview for Dropbox. Hooked was an instant success, spreading like wildfire across the technology industry and beyond.

But recently, Eyal’s focus has swung one-eighty. In his latest book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, Eyal focuses not on building habits, but breaking them. And his radical switch in focus started with a children’s activity book.

Eyal was playing with his young daughter. He had set aside an afternoon for them to work through a book of fun activities. “If you could have any superpower in the world,” Eyal asked his daughter, reading from the book, “what would you choose?”

As his daughter weighed the pros and cons of flight, invisibility, and super strength, Eyal’s phone buzzed in his pocket. Instinctively, he pulled it out. When his daughter had decided on an answer, Eyal was still glued to his device. “Just a second,” he said, his fingers tapping out an email. “I need to respond to one thing.”

By the time he had hit send and returned his focus to the activity book, Eyal’s daughter had wandered off. “I had just blown a special moment with my daughter because I had allowed something on my phone to distract me,” wrote Eyal on his blog Nir & Far. Eyal says this one isolated incident wasn’t a huge deal but the scene kept repeating itself in his head, and that worried him. He knew something was wrong. He started to investigate the problem of distraction. Several years later, that investigation would culminate in the publication of Indistractable.

We sat down with Nir to hear more about his findings.

Why is it important to examine distraction?

I wrote the book because I was Patient Zero and felt I was struggling with distraction. I found that I was distracted with my daughter, I found that I wasn’t able to complete the work I had planned, and I wasn’t taking care of my body.

I wasn’t doing what I said I would do and that was annoying — but it was also fascinating.

The fascination came from a question: Why did we do this? It’s an age old question. In fact, Socrates and Aristotle asked the same question 2,500 years ago. They called it akrasia, which is the tendency to do things against our better interests. And they also struggled to explain the mystery.

What I initially planned as a book about technology distraction quickly turned into a book about the psychology of all distraction.

When you identified the problem, your first reaction wasn’t to write a book. Instead, you investigated existing advice. What did you find?

I followed many self-help books to a tee. I went on a digital detox, I did a 30-day plan, and I excised technologies from my life — and two things happened. First, I realized I need these technologies. I need them to connect with my friends and I need them for my livelihood. Saying ‘Hey, stop using social media’ is easy but not every profession can do that.

Second, even when I did get rid of these things, it didn’t work. I got myself a flip phone and a word processor from the 1990s. I got rid of all my internet connections. I got rid of all the apps and social media. Then I thought, “Okay, now I’m going to be focused and not be distracted.” But it didn’t work.

I would find other distractions. I would organize my desk, I would say, “Oh, there’s that book I’ve been meaning to read,” or “Let me just take out the garbage real quick.” I kept getting distracted because — and here’s the truth we don’t like to admit to ourselves — distraction starts from within.

We use these devices as psychological pacifiers as we are looking for an escape from uncomfortable sensations. And if we don’t deal with that fact, we will always find distraction somewhere.

If technology is not the enemy, how do you advise fighting back against distraction?

Let’s start with the four part model that I talk about in Indistractable, which starts with a definition of distraction. What does that term mean? In order to understand distraction, we have to understand the opposite of distraction, which is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction.

Traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do. And the opposite of traction is distraction, which is anything you do that pulls you away from what you want to do.

This is really important for two reasons. Number one, it frees us from this silly moral hierarchy that lets people judge each other for how they spend their time. If you want to play Candy Crush or browse social media, there is nothing morally inferior to doing that versus watching football on TV. It’s a pastime and there’s nothing wrong with it as long as you do it with intent and it’s consistent with your values.

Number two, it makes us be honest with ourselves about what is traction. Many of us sit down at our desk at work and we say, “Okay, we’re going to do that big project that we’ve been delaying. We’re going to start working on it… right after we check email, right after we check our Slack channel.” And that’s just as much of a distraction as playing video games because it fools us. Distraction tricks us, it makes us think that what we’re doing is productive — but it’s not. It’s just as much of a distraction because it’s not what we intended to do.

What prompts us towards traction and distraction are only two things: external triggers and internal triggers. External triggers are kind of the usual suspects, the pings, dings and rings. They’re not inherently good or bad as it depends what they lead us to. If an external trigger says, “Hey, it’s time to wake up and go to the gym,” and that’s what you intended to do, that’s terrific. That trigger was serving its function. But if the external trigger is a notification while you’re in the middle of a meeting, it’s taking you off track and now it’s distraction.

In my research, what I found is that external triggers are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the number of distractions that we encounter every day. And most distractions don’t start from outside of us — they begin within us.

We have to go a layer deeper to answer the question: why do we get distracted? In fact, we actually have to go one layer deeper again and ask, why do we do anything? And it turns out that all behavior is prompted by the desire to escape discomfort.

It’s pain all the way down, which means that even the pursuit of pleasure is itself psychologically destabilizing. There’s a reason we say love hurts. All of these things are psychologically destabilizing and so we escape through action. And if all behavior is prompted by a desire to escape discomfort, that means time management is pain management.

This is a fundamental truth we have to realize. We can blame the proximal causes like technology all day long, but if we fail to realize we are doing things against our better interest because they are helping us escape from discomfort, we will always be distracted by one thing or another.

Your work is built on fairly old research, but it will sound new and novel to most people. Why is that?

The irony is that professional media organizations are built on the same exact business model, and the technology companies, that they’re blaming. The publication that criticizes technology, calls them distractions, and say they’re hijacking your brain, use the same exact business model of selling your attention for money. They make their money on advertising.

When The New York Times or The Guardian writes a piece about how technology is melting your brain, they’re doing that because people love negativity. It’s called negativity bias and it’s an inborn tendency for us to be fearful of things. And so we want a big, bad monster, we want threats because looking inside of us and saying, “Wait a minute, we’ve met the enemy and it is us” is scary and requires us to do something.

You think the dominant ‘big, bad tech’ narrative has influenced the language we use to describe the problem. For example, you say we overuse the term addiction.

Everybody uses the term addiction, every article, every critic. It drives me crazy because an addiction is a pathology. You wouldn’t say, “I was reading a book and it was so good it made me OCD.” Obsessive compulsive disorder is a pathology, like addiction is a pathology. And when we use this term incorrectly, it’s not only incredibly disrespectful to the people who actually suffer from it but it also gives us an excuse to not do anything about the problem.

Watch what happens when I call technology addictiveversus when I say technology is something that some people overuse. If there’s no addiction, there’s no pusher, there’s nobody making me do anything, there’s nothing hijacking my brain. If it’s just overuse, it’s like any number of things that I overuse. Sometimes I drink a little too much or I eat a little too much — but that doesn’t mean I don’t have agency. It means that I need to have better control and find ways and systems to make sure that I don’t go overboard. I think the right term is overuse.

If there’s one motto I want people to remember it’s: the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. So in the moment, of course they’re going to get you. If you’re on a diet and a fork of chocolate cake is on its way to your mouth, it’s too late to do anything.

Likewise, if you’re complaining about how technology is hijacking your brain and you’re sleeping next to your cell phone, it’s too late. Of course it’s going to interrupt your sleep, of course it’s going to interfere with your sense of wellbeing. You have to take steps beforehand.

This is where I really disagree with critics who say, “Oh, it’s the algorithms and they’re hijacking your brain.” The fact is, with our current technology, there is nothing that you cannot easily overcome with forethought.

These simple steps that I talk about in my book — mastering the internal triggers, making time for traction, hacking back external triggers, and preventing distraction with pacts — are based on decades old research that I’m just applying in a new way. It’s not rocket science but it is harder than just saying, “Well, it’s big, bad tech doing it to me.” The problem is when we learn to be helpless, we are giving these companies exactly what they want.

So far we’ve talked about individuals but people spend huge chunks of their days in workplaces that are increasingly full of disruptions. How can we address that?

Half of the book is about things that we as individuals could do, and it’s important that we take those steps first. But I’ve helped start two tech companies and I’ve worked in big companies as well. I know that sometimes the solution is not quite as simple as changing your own behavior as we also operate in a larger context.

I think the workplace, despite our best intentions, can make us distracted. It can perpetuate a culture that creates more internal triggers. We know through the work of Stansfield and Candy that the confluence of high expectations and low control leads to anxiety and depression in the workplace. And when people are feeling anxious and depressed, how do they escape? They send more emails, they call more meetings, and they are on Slack channels all day long. They’re doing this in a desperate attempt for more agency and control when they don’t have enough.

We need to realize that technology overuse in the workplace is not caused by the technology itself. It is, in fact, a symptom of a dysfunctional workplace culture. And when you add technology that has the ability to keep us constantly connected to a sick workplace environment, you get up an unholy mix. It looks like technology is the source but it is just a proximal cause, not the root cause. The root cause is a dysfunctional workplace culture.

You’ve said that the world is bifurcating into two groups: those who allow their attention to be manipulated and those who have become indistractable. Do you think society is trending towards either group?

I think there is much more interest in the problem. When I wrote Hooked, the opposite was true. I had to convince people that companies were using psychology to change your behavior. Back then people thought, “Oh, Zuckerberg just got lucky.” But I came in and said, “No, no, no. They understand these techniques and they use them to change our behavior.” And, of course, today I have to convince no one of that.

But now, the pendulum swung too far in the other direction. I need to convince people to ease up a little bit. These techniques are good, but they’re not that good. We are not puppets on a string. You can’t make people do something they don’t want to do for very long.

When I was reading Deep Work, I was struck at how stark the comparison was between shallow work and deep work. It seemed to me a little bit confusing that when people were presented with both options, that they would choose shallow work over working on something significant and important. Why do you think this is?

I think there’s a couple things going on. One, deep work is hard and it’s something that also requires practice. Let’s say you’re an accomplished fiction writer, you’re actually like an Olympic caliber, Deep Work thinker at this point. Let’s say that’s what you do is you write literary fiction, which is incredibly cognitively demanding. To you, it would seem like you want to do the deep work. It feels very comfortable, it feels very fulfilling. But if you’re young, and you’ve grown up in an age of smartphones and you’ve never had to spend more than 15 minutes focusing on one thing at a time without some distraction, Deep Work is very difficult. In fact, if you try it, not much is gonna happen. It actually takes a lot of practice, which is why in Deep Work I really get in a lot of detail about how you train this skill. I think that’s one aspect of it.

The second aspect is in knowledge work, in particular, we don’t really quite have the right management structures in place so there’s an implicit reward for the shallow because it’s visible. Let’s say I work at this company, I sit in this cubicle, my title is confusing, I don’t produce this one thing, I’m just involved in a lot of meetings and sending emails back and forth. I seem to do a lot PowerPoint. It becomes ambiguous what it is exactly that I do. If you’re visibly busy then you can make the argument that at least I’m not slacking off. I’m doing something. Look, I’m answering all these emails, I’m jumping on calls, I’m having coffee. There’s something comforting in that. Managers feel like they know this person isn’t taking advantage of me.

There’s also these structural biases in favor of publicly visible busyness that we haven’t yet figured out. This is actually a new book I’m working on now. We haven’t yet figured out how do we restructure the modern knowledge work organization to actually be focused on optimizing cognitive output. As opposed to what we’re doing now, which I think is a lot more tentative, arbitrary, and ad hoc than we would like to admit.

In roles like project management or account management, where interruptions are almost a core part of what you do, does deep work make sense?

Well, there’s two relevant points. One is that it’s certainly true. I talk about it in the book that different roles require different amounts of deep work, with some roles requiring none and some roles where basically if all you did was deep work it would probably be the optimal configuration. There’s a whole scale, but I’ve also noticed that people, especially in management positions, tend to, I think, misestimate where they fall on the scale. They tend to push themselves more toward the fundamentally can’t do deep work side of the scale than they need to be.

Project managers are an example that I would get a lot of pushback from. They say, “No, I have to constantly be communicating because I can unlock a log jam that’s stopping three other people from getting work done. That’s my highest bit of contribution.”

But some of this is actually just locked into the actual work flow with which you’re doing project managing, which is what I call hyperactive, highline workflow. It just takes the paleolithic model of working it out on the fly—just the three of us trying to hunt the mastodon—scaled up into knowledge work. We use email and Slack as opposed to talking to people in person. It’s the same idea, let’s just keep the conversation going. If you need something let me know. It’s this flexible, unstructured way of communicating.

As long as that’s your underlying workflow, if you’re a project manager, you have to tend that ongoing conversation because if someone needs something, and you’re not there, there’s problems. But the deeper response to it is, well is that the right actual structural workflow for the projects you’re running? We’ve seen a lot of disruption on this, especially in software because software is really producing a product that actually has a lot of overlaps with the industrial sector where they figured this stuff out about a century ago. Process development. You have to think about processes and what works better than others. They’re much more innovative in industry, than we are in knowledge work.

In software, where you have all this overlap, what you’re starting to see is alternative workflows. Alternatives to just the hyperactive, highline, let’s just keep talking. There you see things like agile methodologies, or scrum, where who is working on what is transparent, and everyone can see it, and everyone knows what they’re working on. They have these synchronized meetings twice a day, standing up, so they don’t last too long. Okay, who’s working on what, who needs what from whom? So everyone knows what everyone is working on, and who they owe what to who. There’s no actual need to have an ongoing conversation in between. By making tasks and obligations transparent and structured, it’s a completely different experience if you are running a scrum as opposed to being a software knowledge worker that just uses email.

It’s a long answer to a short question, but in a big sense yes. Different jobs do different amounts of deep work. But in a small sense, there’s a lot of these positions where the reason they require little deep work right now is because the underlying workflow I think is way suboptimal. You could restructure the whole way this type of work happened in such a way that it still is very effective, but people get a lot more concentration. And by doing so, actually a lot more value is produced.

Is there a way we could shift some or all of the shallow work to AI and simply not have that as a human task anymore?

AI is going to eventually eat most of it. That’s my prediction. It’s gonna take a while, but there’s a lot of money being invested in this right now. This is potentially bad news for people who are in creative fields. On the face of it, it seems like this is gonna be great because in the future of AI handling shallow work-type scenario, it’s gonna be like you have your own presidential Chief of Staff. This is the vision that I get from the industry when I research this. Everyone has their own agent and the agents talk to each other. So when you come in, it can say, “This is what you should be working on today. I’ve gathered the information you need. I already booked your tickets for this thing you’re doing next week. Don’t worry about it. I’m talking to other people’s AI on your behalf. There’s no email you have to answer, there’s not phone calls you have to go on. You’re working on your article today. I’ll set up interviews for you of these people who you want to talk to. Great, I’ll go take care of that for you.” You’ll be able to get substantially more value out of your brain per hour spent working.

That seems like it’s great, except for the problem is it’s gonna reduce the number of people we need in the creative field. I’m actually potentially worried for the creative fields because we’ve been so inefficient because of the shallow work and the impact it has on our cognitive performance. We have been so inefficient that if we actually remove that inefficiency from the system, it’s gonna require drastically fewer people to get the same amount of work done. So it’s possible that, even if you’re in a job that is never gonna itself never gonna be automated by AI, you still might be having to worry about losing this job because when the AI comes, one of you is gonna be able to do what it used to take three. There’s potentially even a concern here for the very high and creative class because of how inefficient we’ve been. That’s been our implicit Achilles heal from a technological perspective.

So AI won’t wipe out skilled work but it will condense it?

If your AI chief of staff took care of everything else, here it all is, come in, spend three hours, write, take a break, come back in, here you go. You have a 10 minute back and forth interaction with your agent each day and that’s it, you would probably be producing at a two or three X faster rate.

It’s possible the other response to that is that’s just gonna free up a lot of highly creative, cognitive surplus, and the economy might adapt. We might just find many more places in which we can now insert high and creative thinking. Where, once we have a surplus, maybe the economy will adapt and find other places that this type of thinking is useful. That’s the optimistic way of looking at it. But I think it’s an interesting point that people think, I’m completely fine if I’m in the high and creative field, and I don’t think that’s at all assured.

I’ve listened to a couple of your interviews where you talk about how we’re a fulcrum in our use of technology; is there something that happened over the last two or three years that made you think that way?

I noticed a shift starting a little bit less than two years ago. As best I can tell, it’s connected to 2016 Presidential Election. My running theory is that the 2016 Election gave everyone in the country, regardless for example their political stance, something to be upset about regarding social media. The impact of this is that it changed the place that social media occupied in most people’s minds.

Before they tended to see it as Bill Maher joked—a gift handed down from the nerd gods. You have to use it, it’s weird to criticize it. But once they shifted its location to something that had some pros and cons, I think it completely changed the cultural zeitgeist on social media. Once people started looking at it critically, it was like the floodgates opened.

So for me I used to get a lot of pushback and confused shrugs when I would talk about social media being problematic. But starting about 18 months ago, I began to get much more engaged head nods and requests to tell me more, so I think there’s been a shift. I think the shift is pretty recent.

You’ve been talking and writing about digital minimalism for quite a few years now. Was it the changing in culture attitudes that prompted you to write this book, or is this something that you’ve been wanting to write for a while?

It was definitely the changes. Earlier in 2016, I had published Deep Work and I began starting to get feedback from those readers who said, “Okay, I buy your argument about technology in the workplace, but you’re also missing out on this bigger picture, which is technology in our personal lives.” There’s something here. I kept hearing that message. Then I noticed that shift in the fall of 2016. It was the week after the election I had this op-ed in the New York Times that was saying something critical about social media. I got a lot of negative pushback, like I usually do. But about a month or two later, I noticed that talk I had given on quitting social media had jumped up to millions of views. So sometime in that fall, there was some sort of transition. So it’s not coincidental that in late 2016, I began to experiment publicly with some of these ideas about digital minimalism.

Reading your new book, you had quite a lot of people in your self-selecting experimental group who weren’t able to complete the process of quitting social media and distracting tech for 30 days and then adding back in only what they deemed valuable. Do you see society, out of its own volition changing its relationship with technology?

I think there needs to be some sort of philosophical framework. The example that I look to is health and fitness. We figured out in the 20th Century that processed food and junk food make people sick. It makes you obese, it gives you diabetes, it gives you heart disease. But simple advice—eat less, eat healthier—wasn’t getting it done. [The pull of processed food] was so powerful that it wasn’t making a significant dent in people’s health and fitness.

Whereas, if you think of the healthiest person you know, it’s almost certainly someone who has a named philosophy of health and fitness. They’re Paleo or Vegan or they’re a Crossfitter. They have some sort of philosophy that’s based on values they can believe in and it gives them a consistent way of dealing with these issues in their life. It’s ground into their values and doesn’t require them to make a lot of decisions on the fly.

I’ve noticed that the same thing is happening digitally. So everyone has read the same article about turning off notifications. Everyone has read the same article about doing a digital Shabbat once a week and it doesn’t seem to be working. So I became convinced that we basically need the digital equivalent of Veganism or Paleo or crossfit. Something that’s an actual philosophy of technology use. Something that you can say I am a digital minimalist, and this is what it means because it typically requires something like that to overcome strong cultural and biological forces. At least that’s what we’ve observed in a lot of different areas in human life.

You have previously defined digital minimalism in a number of ways. Is it an idea that’s evolved over time? And do you see it evolving into the future?

Yeah, I think so. In some sense, there’s two things going on here. The first contribution is more fundamental, which is just let’s start thinking in terms of philosophies. In that sense, I’m completely happy if another philosophy comes along for tech users. If a dozen philosophies come along for tech use, I would still be completely happy. What I would define as success is that we get to a place where when you ask people about how they use tech in their personal life, they have some philosophy. The idea is that you don’t just do this in an ad hoc fashion. I think if we get there, we’re gonna be in a much better place.

Now, is digital minimalism the right philosophy? Well, probably not for everyone. It seems to be working pretty well. I think it’s a good one. I came up with the term, but there were a lot of people who were doing this and just didn’t have a name for it. The people [who] take this on seem to be having a lot of success. So as a first philosophy, I think it’s a good one. But more important to me is the idea that most people have some philosophy when it comes to this part of their life.

There are a lot of people who try and frame you and digital minimalism as anti-technology, which is obviously not true. Are there any services or tools that you use that you think facilitate concentration, and deep work, and your work life?

As a computer scientist it would be self-defeating if I was anti-technology. That’d be a self-hating career case that I’d made. What I’m pro is critical engagement with technology.

In a period where we get away from that, like industrialization, or like we did during the Dot Com exuberance, we tend to get into trouble. Then when we come back and say, “Let’s be a little bit more critically engaged and figure out what are we trying to do and how can we make tech tools.” I think that’s the pendulum were on.

In terms of my own engagement with technology, especially in the personal sphere, I’ve never had a social media account. I do really like blogging though, I’m a huge booster of blogging. I think the social internet, which has been around since the early ‘90s, is a great way to express yourself, connect with people, and find interesting ideas. When I’m against social media, for example, I’m not against a social internet. I’m against the idea that we need to have one or two companies build their own private internet, behind a wall, guarded, in which they watch everything we do. I’m an old fashioned net nerd. I mean, learn some HTML! I have my own server with my own WordPress instance running on it. No one’s tracking any data on it and it’s all mine. That’s the type of thing that us old tech geeks get a lot of interest out of.

I have a smartphone, an old generation iPhone, but it doesn’t really have much on it. It’s my wife’s old phone. I’m on a laptop right now. I don’t web surf for the most part so I don’t have a cycle of sites I go through. I also don’t believe in bookmarks because my idea is it’s a perfect filtering tool. You can only remember so many websites so the ones you like the best will be the ones you remember. Whichever ones I happen to remember, those are probably the ones worth checking out anyways.

I have a tech footprint that is pretty similar to someone in the year 2001. I don’t look at my phone a lot. I don’t entertain myself with my computer that much but I have tools. I connect, I do things on the Internet, and so I’m like a circa 2001 tech denizen at this point.

In the past one or two years, we’ve seen a handful of tech companies going against the grain, taking a step away from what Facebook and Instagram are doing with attention economies. They’re maybe trying to build products and tools that make people happy rather than hold their attention. Is that something that you’ve seen as well?

These ideas are definitely out there. Essentially what happens is when you get away from social internet companies that are based off attention and support a 500 billion dollar valuation and say, “We don’t necessarily have to support ourselves off of attention. We don’t necessarily have to be one of the five biggest companies in the world” then a lot more breathing room is opened up.

I think that it’s good for the internet. The more that we have smaller, more agile companies, and products, and people are piecing together more heterogeneous collection of tools. I think it is for the better.

There’s not a clear winner in this space yet, but there’s a lot of interesting movement going on. One thing I’ve been tracking has been this broader IndieWeb movement, which is trying to push people back towards this idea that you should have your own domain. You should have your own server. You should have your own WordPress instance. There could be tools to make this easier, but you own your own stuff, you’re posting your own stuff. Then there could be other services that come along that can help aggregate this.

Now, with the IndieWeb movement, there might be some sort of portal that you log into to help arrange content from a lot of people’s privately owned servers into a way that maybe it looks like a social media feed but they don’t own any of the information. That’s all on your server and you push your information to ten other services if you want to as well. I’m interested in this IndieWeb movement, of getting back to individuals owning their own data, expressing themselves not through the auspices of another company. It’s the original vision before the social media guys came along. I think that’s kind of interesting.

Also, I think different models, more niche social media where you pay. I think there’s a lot of interest in that. Where they don’t make money off trying to get you compulsively use it so now they can focus on things you actually care about.

The final thing I’ve written about recently is this network effect argument that the large social media platforms use to justify themselves, I think is largely built on hot air. This idea says that you have to have everyone on a service like Facebook before it’s useful, therefore no one else can compete because no one else will ever get a billion users. This is largely untrue because everyone always has access to the infrastructure that allows you to connect with people, communicate with people. It’s the internet and the associated protocols.

I think there’s a lot more room out there for niche and interesting behavior because we have this underlying universal framework already. We have email and HTML, and all these protocols that already exist and are free and completely decentralised. They already exist, so you don’t actually have to have a new private internet in order for people to find each other and communicate. I think there’s a lot more room for smaller and niche plays than the larger companies would want you to believe.

You’re talking about decentralization of power, which hasn’t been the way things work, historically. Do you see the tech space, and internet in particular, do you see that as being different?

Well, I think the social internet is largely decentralized and actually works really well. I came up in the age of the blogosphere, which actually worked out to be an incredibly effective decentralized publishing platform. People owned their own servers, people posted their own stuff, they connected to other people with hyperlinks. And reputation and visibility within this world grew as more links came to you, and those links came from people that themselves were more linked to. It’s the same logic that Sergey Brin and Larry Page used to come up with the original Page Rank algorithm that runs Google’s search engine. It worked really well, and it was a decentralized trust hierarchy, and it was pretty good at finding voices that were interesting and letting new voices in.

There was no centralized editorial overview or censorship. And yet, it did a really good job of implicitly censoring out the crazy stuff and giving emphasis to the good stuff because it was all humans making decisions. I want a link to this, this person that has a lot of links to them, which gives them social capital. Now they’re linking to this person, which gives them the social capital. It worked really well. That was essentially the original vision of the internet. Humans linking to other humans, information linking to information, itself creates this web. That’s where we got the original name, The World Wide Web. It’s really effective for expression and spreading information.

Maybe it’s because I used to work a floor above Tim Berners-Lee when I was at MIT but I think his vision is actually a powerful one. And stands in strong contrast to the alternative, which is that we need a company to build its own version of the internet. We all have to use this internet version two. But the difference between internet one and internet two is that also the company who built internet two watches every single thing you do.

In fact, according to a 2018 Nielsen report, we spend over 11 hours a day interacting with media. It’s enough to make you wonder if we’re more devoted to our devices than to our own well-being. If constant connection is bringing us to the brink of burnout, what’s the solution?

Recently, workers have been raising their voices, and in some countries, lawmakers are listening. In August 2016, France enacted the El Khomri Law. This officially gave workers the right to disconnect. But is the law enough to make real change in the workplace?

In our new series, “The Working World,” we’re looking at how different cultures deal with the challenges of modern work, and how countries are adapting to address the problems. In part one, we explored how Japan’s work style reform laws are affecting office life for everyone from temps to executives.

Here in part two, we’ll look at the impact of France’s “Right to Disconnect” law—and how well it’s delivering on its promise.

What drove the demands?

The downsides of perpetual connection are obvious. Employees feel overwhelmed by the pressure to respond at all hours and health-related issues are on the rise. Turns out, having the freedom to work from anywhere doesn’t always feel like freedom.

We’ve lost the boundary between our professional and personal lives. Mobile devices removed what was once one of the best excuses to unplug: You had to drive to work and drive back home. Now we can’t even count on our commutes to disconnect us.

Weekends aren’t an oasis anymore, either. When you feel the need to be reachable on Saturday and Sunday, it’s hard not to feel obligated to check your messages to see if anything urgent has come up. Now most people use one phone for both their professional and personal lives. So work can follow us everywhere.

We traded a natural separation for the promise of convenience. As a result, we’re not resting and recuperating like we used to, and sometimes we return to work on Monday worse than when we left on Friday.

Workers around the world face this problem.

“In France, the economic crisis of 2007 reinforced the pressure on workers,” says Héloïse Boungnasith, French Language Specialist at Dropbox. “This resulted in less employment and more work for those with a job—the price of maintaining the same level of productivity.”

The rising pressure on employees has taken a terrible toll—including some work-related suicides. People began calling for action from the government. And in 2015, French Labor Minister Myriam El Khomri commissioned a study of the health impact of “info-obesity.”

The following year, France adopted the “El Khomri” law, popularly known as the “right to disconnect.” It became famous for supposedly forbidding work email after 6:00 pm—but the reality is a lot more complicated.

The law calls for “a regulation for the use of digital tools in order to ensure the respect of rest and leave time, as well as personal and family life.” One year after its implementation, though, some question whether the law is too vague to be effective—and whether this legislation can truly have a lasting impact on longstanding work habits.

Can the problem be solved by a law?

France has a history of trying to legislate a work-life balance for employees. Nearly two decades ago, the statutory work week was reduced to 35 hours per week with a law that also called for mandatory overtime pay when employees go over the limit.

However, it’s a misconception that French people work 35 hours a week, says Boungnasith.

“The 35-hour week applies to non-executive staff only,” explains Boungnasith. “It doesn’t prevent them from working more than 35 hours per week. It’s just that if they do, they are paid extra. Also, employers can agree on a longer working week with their employees. Actually, 71,4% of French employees work more than 35 hours a week according to a Randstad study.”

Just as the 35-hour law doesn’t mean that most people work from 9-4, the “Right to Disconnect” law hasn’t relegated nights and weekends to leisure time. And there’s debate on whether that would even be the outcome every worker wants.

How are companies reacting?

There are already signs that breaking the law can carry consequences. In July 2018, a former France-based employee of a British pest control company was awarded €60,000 for being required to be on call if issues arose. To keep from crossing the line, managers are striving to be extra clear about what needs an immediate response.

Even though several court decisions condemned employers who didn’t respect employees’ rest time as a violation of the “Code du travail,” the El Khomri law itself doesn’t impose sanctions on companies that decide not to implement it.

And so far, only a few businesses have—some have even gone backwards. According to Le Monde, Canon in 2010, and Sodexo in 2013, didn’t follow through with their initiatives for a day without emails. Until a law includes specific sanctions for its violation, many remain skeptical that there will be real change.

How are workers responding?

“People feel protected by it,” says Micha Sprinz, who works in Marketing Communications at Dropbox France. “But, more often than not, when you work for an international company and you work across time zones, you’re still compelled to work beyond 6:00 pm.”

Sprinz says one flaw in the law is that it seeks to empower employees by putting clean-cut time limits on what is work and what is private. “The reality that is increasingly being recognized is that the two are intertwined. People need to be free to look after personal things during the working day and work things during non-work hours if that is, in fact, what suits them.”

Boungnasith agrees and believes this is why the law is not a viable solution.

“Each individual must be free to work the way that makes the most sense for them,” says Boungnasith. “For instance, if I had kids, I would prefer to leave work early and pick them up from school, spend time with them, and start working again later during the day. How can you do that if you’re not supposed to access your emails after 6:00 pm?”

Although she can understand why the law was passed, Boungnasith says that having the right to disconnect hasn’t affected her working life at all.

“In France, most companies still have a very traditional mindset when it comes to work and work practices,” Boungnasith explains. “I’m lucky enough to work for a company that is committed to employee well-being, so nobody would require me to work after hours. But for my friends, who work for French companies, it’s a different world. Almost all of them work much later than me.”

Boungnasith says she thinks the law is counterproductive as is, and that the real answer to this problem would be for French companies to change their mindset. But she thinks there’s a long way to go. “Even working from home is not common practice in France yet,” she adds.

The ripple effect around the world

Though its impact in France remains to be seen, the right to disconnect law has inspired many other nations to follow suit. The National Law Review reportsItaly now requires employers to clarify how responsive workers need to be beyond regular working hours.

The Philippines, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, India, Québec, and the federal government of Canada are all following in France’s footsteps and granting their workers similar rights to disconnect. In November 2018, Spain adopted a “Data Protection and Digital Rights Act.” Even New York is working on its own Right to Disconnect bill.

With growing interest like this, it’s tempting to think governments will be able to legislate a better way of working. But it’s a complex issue that goes beyond our dependence on devices. Political, economic, and cultural forces—not to mention personal preferences—make it hard to find a solution that satisfies everyone.

One law won’t cure burnout. Real change may only come when companies prioritize employee experience as highly as customer experience and productivity. Then employees and companies may be able to build a new relationship with work that’s less draining and more fulfilling.