The problem with this binary response to this issue is that these two choices are much too crude to be useful. The notion that you would quit the Internet is, of course, an overstuffed straw man, infeasible for most (unless you’re a journalist writing a piece about distraction). No one is meant to actually follow Baratunde Thurston’s lead—and this reality provides justification for remaining with the only offered alternative: accepting our current distracted state as inevitable. For all the insight and clarity that Thurston gained during his Internet sabbatical, for example, it didn’t take him long once the experiment ended to slide back into the fragmented state where he began. On the day when I first starting writing this chapter, which fell only six months after Thurston’s article originally appeared in Fast Company, the reformed connector had already sent a dozen Tweets in the few hours since he woke up.
This rule attempts to break us out of this rut by proposing a third option: accepting that these tools are not inherently evil, and that some of them might be quite vital to your success and happiness, but at the same time also accepting that the threshold for allowing a site regular access to your time and attention (not to mention personal data) should be much more stringent, and that most people should therefore be using many fewer such tools. I won’t ask you, in other words, to quit the Internet altogether like Baratunde Thurston did for twenty-five days back in 2013. But I will ask you to reject the state of distracted hyperconnectedness that drove him to that drastic experiment in the first place. There is a middle ground, and if you’re interested in developing a deep work habit, you must fight to get there.
Our first step toward finding this middle ground in network tool selection is to understand the current default decision process deployed by most Internet users. In the fall of 2013, I received insight into this process because of an article I wrote explaining why I never joined Facebook. Though the piece was meant to be explanatory and not accusatory, it nonetheless put many readers on the defensive, leading them to reply with justifications for their use of the service. Here are some examples of these justifications:
? “Entertainment was my initial draw to Facebook. I can see what my friends are up to and post funny photos, make quick comments.”
? “[When] I first joined, [I didn’t know why]… By mere curiosity I joined a forum of short fiction stories. [Once] there I improved my writing and made very good friends.”
? “[I use] Facebook because a lot of people I knew in high school are on there.”
Here’s what strikes me about these responses (which are representative of the large amount of feedback I received on this topic): They’re surprisingly minor. I don’t doubt, for example, that the first commenter from this list finds some entertainment in using Facebook, but I would also assume that this person wasn’t suffering some severe deficit of entertainment options before he or she signed up for the service. I would further wager that this user would succeed in staving off boredom even if the service were suddenly shut down. Facebook, at best, added one more (arguably quite mediocre) entertainment option to many that already existed.
Another commenter cited making friends in a writing forum. I don’t doubt the existence of these friends, but we can assume that these friendships are lightweight—given that they’re based on sending short messages back and forth over a computer network. There’s nothing wrong with such lightweight friendships, but they’re unlikely to be at the center of this user’s social life. Something similar can be said about the commenter who reconnected with high school friends: This is a nice diversion, but hardly something central to his or her sense of social connection or happiness.
To be clear, I’m not trying to denigrate the benefits identified previously—there’s nothing illusory or misguided about them. What I’m emphasizing, however, is that these benefits are minor and somewhat random. (By contrast, if you’d instead asked someone to justify the use of, say, the World Wide Web more generally, or e-mail, the arguments would become much more concrete and compelling.) To this observation, you might reply that value is value: If you can find some extra benefit in using a service like Facebook—even if it’s small—then why not use it? I call this way of thinking the any-benefit mind-set, as it identifies any possible benefit as sufficient justification for using a network tool. In more detail:
The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use, or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.
The problem with this approach, of course, is that it ignores all the negatives that come along with the tools in question. These services are engineered to be addictive—robbing time and attention from activities that more directly support your professional and personal goals (such as deep work). Eventually, if you use these tools enough, you’ll arrive at the state of burned-out, hyperdistracted connectivity that plagued Baratunde Thurston and millions of others like him. It’s here that we encounter the true insidious nature of an any-benefit mind-set. The use of network tools can be harmful. If you don’t attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you’re unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work.
This conclusion, if considered objectively, shouldn’t be surprising. In the context of network tools, we’ve become comfortable with the any-benefit mind-set, but if we instead zoom out and consider this mind-set in the broader context of skilled labor, it suddenly seems a bizarre and ahistorical approach to choosing tools. In other words, once you put aside the revolutionary rhetoric surrounding all things Internet—the sense, summarized in Part 1, that you’re either fully committed to “the revolution” or a Luddite curmudgeon—you’ll soon realize that network tools are not exceptional; they’re tools, no different from a blacksmith’s hammer or an artist’s brush, used by skilled laborers to do their jobs better (and occasionally to enhance their leisure). Throughout history, skilled laborers have applied sophistication and skepticism to their encounters with new tools and their decisions about whether to adopt them. There’s no reason why knowledge workers cannot do the same when it comes to the Internet—the fact that the skilled labor here now involves digital bits doesn’t change this reality.
To help understand what this more careful tool curation might look like, it makes sense to start by talking to someone who makes a living working with (nondigital) tools and relies on a complex relationship with these tools to succeed. Fortunately for our purposes, I found just such an individual in a lanky English major turned successful sustainable farmer, named (almost too aptly), Forrest Pritchard.
Forrest Pritchard runs Smith Meadows, a family farm located an hour west of D.C.—one of many farms clustered in the valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Soon after taking control of the land from his parents, as I learned, Pritchard moved the operation away from traditional monoculture crops and toward the then novel concept of grass-finished meat. The farm bypasses wholesaling—you cannot find Smith Meadows steaks in Whole Foods—to sell direct to consumers at the bustling farmers’ markets in the Washington, D.C., metro area. By all accounts, the farm is thriving in an industry that rarely rewards small operations.
I first encountered Pritchard at our local farmers’ market in Takoma Park, Maryland, where the Smith Meadows stand does good business. To see Pritchard, usually standing a foot taller than most of his suburbanite customers, wearing the obligatory faded flannel of the farmer, is to see a craftsman confident in his trade. I introduced myself to him because farming is a skill dependent on the careful management of tools, and I wanted to understand how a craftsman in a nondigital field approaches this crucial task.