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Lukas Nel's avatar

The fundamental issue is that:

- To have space to think requires the system to have slack i.e. surplus

- A system having surplus is by definition, inefficient.

- We've built a lot of systems around systematically squeezing out inefficiencies.

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Brent P. Newhall's avatar

Great post!

I wonder if another factor here is the rising personal cost of administrative work. In the past, the "great thinkers" had either servants or secretaries who took care of administrative work for them. Now that's all been pushed on the knowledge worker.

I suspect that every knowledge worker gets in at most 4 hours of knowledge work per day, and usually far less; the rest of their time is spent on email and Slack and meetings and creating slide decks for meetings. To be clear, some of that time is necessary as a function of arranging your thoughts to disseminate them to other people and to receive knowledge from others. Also, as you point out Rohit, great thinkers traditionally haven't done actual "big thinking" for more than a few hours per day. But processing 100 emails a day inevitably takes time away from deep thought.

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