The Cult of the Internet and Personal Productivity

There’s an increasing number of people who think they should be posting things on their social networks consistently to be visible, to stand out in their different social circles, or simply to prove they exist. A tweet here, an Instagram pic there… We can’t let our followers down.

In top of that, if we add that there are more and more companies and organizations that are pressuring their employees to tweet stuff related to their work and the company, share their content on Facebook, etc., it turns out that the productivity of each individual is no longer just threatened by the consumption of information in the network, but also by the need/obligation to produce their part.

The cult of the Internet is making work in depth more and more unusual. Deep work, as defined by Cal Newport in his book Deep Work, always creates a new value, improves your skills and is difficult to replicate. And, above all and unlike swallow work, it has to be done without interruptions.

However, we insist in interrupting our workflow once and again to share, comment, or like something. Being a company or an individual, you have to be on the Internet. Otherwise, you don’t exist and you’re irrelevant. The bad thing isn’t being on the Internet (which can be very interesting on certain occasions and for important reasons), but to make the Internet the center of our lives, something that most people already see as a normal thing.

The development of technology has produced enormous advances, but at the same time, new problems have appeared. The tendency to see the Internet as a source of wisdom, has turned the Web into a very attractive ideology (Neil Postman coined the term Technopoly to define a culture in which technology seems to lead individuals and society).

If you value what you do, if a good part of your work is significant and deep, is based on the quality of the results and a strong knowledge and mastery of certain skills, then you need to learn how to manage well your attention because, right now, the world conspires against you.