We're captured.

"You have to listen to this." A loyal reader sent me this podcast.

Cal Newport has been tracking this problem for ten years, across three books, the New Yorker, and a keynote stage near you. His short version: knowledge workers are interrupted, on average, once every two minutes. And more and more are doing their focused work on Saturday and Sunday mornings—when the risk of work-related interruption is lower.

You're likely feeling this, in one way or another … we've moved the focused work to the weekend (or the evenings or over lunch or …) because the weekdays are too full to do it.

Newport calls it the hyperactive hive mind. I'm calling it Tuesday. The way we coordinate work—the constant pinging, the ambient availability, the expectation of immediate response—isn't just distracting, it makes it structurally difficult to do the work you're there to do.

That's because industrialized management, the thing organizations use to coordinate the coordination of the work, runs on your attention.

So no, the system isn't broken when it consumes your focus—that's the system working as optimized. More urgency doesn't just mean get the thing done faster. It also means get back to me immediately, because your responsiveness is what keeps everything "moving". The inboxes multiply. The requests compound. The meetings stack. And somewhere in there, the actual work—the thinking, the judgment, the creative and caring contribution—gets pushed aside.

It's the path of least resistance. The easiest configuration that still allows things to run. And it will keep running that way—with or without your intervention. The question is whether you're going to be captured by it, or take action on your situation.

Newport's guidance comes down to two principles: train your ability to focus as a discrete skill and manage your workload.

… two things the prevailing work environment makes … challenging. But there is no other choice. Your best work arrives via the time to do it. (Even if you're assisted by a chatbot.)

"Enabling conditions" is how I talk about it—the recognition that your environment profoundly impacts your ability to do good work. Some of those conditions you can influence directly. Some require a conversation, or an ask, or some negotiation. But there's no way around it, you either have enabling conditions … or preventing conditions … and most of us are navigating a swirl of preventing conditions in order to do what we do well.

Newport's argument is that the ability to focus is a skill, which means it can be practiced, which means you can get better at it. Managing workload is harder. Much of it isn't yours to control—the meeting invites that fill your calendar, the patient panel, the census, the staffing ratios, the emails that require responses. But some of it is. And if it feels impossible, well that means it's definitely worth a conversation.

The conditions that make your best work possible don't appear on their own. That's a given. So you have to create them. Deliberately. Against a system that will fill every available minute if you let it.

It's the only move. An active one.

What is it that allows your best work? How can you create the conditions to do more of that?

Around The Water Cooler ⛲

Here’s a good icebreaker: “What’s the nicest thing a stranger has done for you?” Rob Walker

Schopenhauer’s dictum: “The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time.” Ian Leslie

Sorry, can’t get away from AI. “In brief, while current (February 2026) LLMs greatly exceed humans in their knowledge-based reasoning, they lack two other significant cognitive skills before they can actually replace humans: they don’t have a flawless grasp of the real world (thus no robots), and they don’t learn.” Kevin Kelly

“Most businesses still focus on capacity, but time-orientation with rhythm leads to better work and flow.” From Toyota to TOSD: For High Performance, Make Time the Boss by Niels Pflaeging

“You understand that weaknesses and fears are temporary states rather than objective facts.” 13 Signs You're More Capable Than You Think You Are by Anna Mackenzie

“A few years ago I sat through a meeting where data was presented on our patient satisfaction scores. The numbers were fine but the conversation that followed had little to do with whether our patients were actually satisfied. It was about the scores themselves and how to move them. At some point I realized that we weren’t talking about patients at all. We were talking about a metric that was supposed to represent a great experience, and the number had become the thing.” The Measure of Everything by Bryan Vartabedian

“But ambition, if you got it, isn’t ugly. It’s beautiful. Finding a great partner is ambition. Raising wonderful children is ambition. Doing passionate work is ambition. Ambition helps us live our deepest and most intentional lives.” 7 Leadership Lessons I’ve Learned From Mel Robbins by Neil Pasricha

“We’ve had two distinct industrial eras. We’re at the start of a third. One that isn’t really about AI, but is fundamentally shaped by it. One less concerned with making people want things, and far more focused on making what people actually want. That distinction sounds small. It isn’t. Most companies still operate like factories.” Tom Goodwin

Thanks for reading. Hit reply and let me know your thoughts.

How To Work is healthcare-focused work design inspiration (from the experts!) to nudge your perspectives and practices into better alignment with the world of work as it is, and away from what it was. Here’s my take on what we’re working through.