Variety is the spice of life
Thinking about why Twitter is more "addictive" than work
Variety is the spice of life, but it probably makes me eat more.
When I’m in a snacky/bored mood I notice that I eat even more if I jump back and forth between sweet and salty foods. It’s like my brain/stomach gets satisfied by a certain amount of chocolate, but still has room for pretzels, which then makes more room for chocolate.
I think people notice this about themselves and reading. Nowadays I get restless if I try to read a book— typically after 20 minutes or so. But give me a smorgasbord of tweets, substacks, in-depth explainer videos, and long-form journalism and I’m happy to bounce around for hours.
And just to be clear, the digital content is no less sophisticated or informative. It’s simply broken down into smaller bits which makes it easier to jump around and recombine and keep the flow interesting. This is theoretically possible with books, just harder.
This got me thinking— does anything like this exist for work? In an unrealistic, but ideal world, someone would break my work into the smallest, concrete steps possible and I could just scroll through an app and find the tasks I’m in the mood to work on. Maybe when I click on one, it instantly opens to the apps, websites, documents I need.
It wouldn’t be perfect, but I bet I’d get more done. I bet there are even more game/app like mechanisms you could add.
We should put more effort into thinking about shaping our work environments to be as “addictive” as entertainment. Even at small margins, this would seem to be valuable for anyone struggling to stay focused.
For the comments:
Has anyone ever done any interesting self-experiments like this? Or know of any good blog posts? I’m less interested in the theory of gamification and more about real-world examples.
I found this Substack after searching for more works related to Cate Hall’s “How to Be More Agentic” article which I found last night and is one of the best things I’ve read in a while.
We seem to have several things and interests in common (similar age, family situation, goals, Christianity, etc). In the spirit of trying to be more agentic, I’d love to have a call with you (anonymous if that works better). I’d love to pick your brain on how this process is going for you. DM me on Substack if interested.
Interesting but think this process would just further degrade our ability to focus on one thing and enter a "flow state". I think our brains have switching costs and modern creations like twitter and processed food have become too good at manipulating/rewiring our dopamine reward systems. We should probably try to distance ourselves from that sort of manipulation, not lean into it.