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1 [1]Skip to main content 2 [2]The New Yorker 3 4 • [3]Newsletter 5 6 To revisit this article, select My Account, then [4]View saved stories 7 8 Close Alert 9 [6]Sign In 10 [7]Search 11 12 • [8]The Latest 13 • [9]News 14 • [10]Books & Culture 15 • [11]Fiction & Poetry 16 • [12]Humor & Cartoons 17 • [13]Magazine 18 • [14]Puzzles & Games 19 • [15]Video 20 • [16]Podcasts 21 • [17]Goings On 22 • [18]Shop 23 24 Open Navigation Menu 25 26 Find anything you save across the site in your account [20] 27 28 Close Alert 29 [22]The New Yorker 30 [23]Office Space 31 32 The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done 33 34 How personal productivity transformed work—and failed to. 35 [undefined] 36 37 By [24]Cal Newport 38 39 November 17, 2020 40 A bunch of hands each handling a single task 41 As the obligations of knowledge work have grown increasingly frenetic, workers 42 have flocked to productivity tools and techniques.Illustration by Timo Lenzen 43 Save this story 44 Save this story 45 46 In the early two-thousands, Merlin Mann, a Web designer and avowed Macintosh 47 enthusiast, was working as a freelance project manager for software companies. 48 He had held similar roles for years, so he knew the ins and outs of the job; he 49 was surprised, therefore, to find that he was overwhelmed—not by the 50 intellectual aspects of his work but by the many small administrative tasks, 51 such as scheduling conference calls, that bubbled up from a turbulent stream of 52 e-mail messages. “I was in this batting cage, deluged with information,” he 53 told me recently. “I went to college. I was smart. Why was I having such a hard 54 time?” 55 56 Mann wasn’t alone in his frustration. In the nineteen-nineties, the spread of 57 e-mail had transformed knowledge work. With nearly all friction removed from 58 professional communication, anyone could bother anyone else at any time. Many 59 e-mails brought obligations: to answer a question, look into a lead, arrange a 60 meeting, or provide feedback. Work lives that had once been sequential—two or 61 three blocks of work, broken up by meetings and phone calls—became frantic, 62 improvisational, and impossibly overloaded. “E-mail is a ball of uncertainty 63 that represents anxiety,” Mann said, reflecting on this period. 64 65 In 2003, he came across a book that seemed to address his frustrations. It was 66 titled “[27]Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity,” and, for 67 Mann, it changed everything. The time-management system it described, called 68 G.T.D., had been developed by David Allen, a consultant turned entrepreneur who 69 lived in the crunchy mountain town of Ojai, California. Allen combined ideas 70 from Zen Buddhism with the strict organizational techniques he’d honed while 71 advising corporate clients. He proposed a theory about how our minds work: when 72 we try to keep track of obligations in our heads, we create “open loops” that 73 make us anxious. That anxiety, in turn, reduces our ability to think 74 effectively. If we could avoid worrying about what we were supposed to be 75 doing, we could focus more fully on what we were actually doing, achieving what 76 Allen called a “mind like water.” 77 78 To maintain such a mind, one must deal with new obligations before they can 79 become entrenched as open loops. G.T.D.’s solution is a multi-step system. It 80 begins with what Allen describes as full capture: the idea is to maintain a set 81 of in-boxes into which you can drop obligations as soon as they arise. One such 82 in-box might be a physical tray on your desk; when you suddenly remember that 83 you need to finish a task before an upcoming meeting, you can jot a reminder on 84 a piece of paper, toss it in the tray, and, without breaking concentration, 85 return to whatever it was you were doing. Throughout the day, you might add 86 similar thoughts to other in-boxes, such as a list on your computer or a pocket 87 notebook. But jotting down notes isn’t, in itself, enough to close the loops; 88 your mind must trust that you will return to your in-boxes and process what’s 89 inside them. Allen calls this final, crucial step regular review. During 90 reviews, you transform your haphazard reminders into concrete “next actions,” 91 then enter them onto a master list. 92 93 This list can now provide a motive force for your efforts. In his book, Allen 94 recommends organizing the master list into contexts, such as @phone or 95 @computer. Moving through the day, you can simply look at the tasks listed 96 under your current context and execute them one after another. Allen uses the 97 analogy of cranking widgets to describe this calmly mechanical approach to 98 work. It’s a rigorous system for the generation of serenity. 99 100 To someone with Mann’s engineering sensibility, the precision of G.T.D. was 101 appealing, and the method itself seemed ripe for optimization. In September, 102 2004, Mann started a blog called 43 Folders—a reference to an organizational 103 hack, the “tickler file,” described in Allen’s book. In an introductory post, 104 Mann wrote, “Believe me, if you keep finding that the water of your life has 105 somehow run onto the floor, GTD may be just the drinking glass you need to get 106 things back together.” He published nine posts about G.T.D. during the blog’s 107 first month. The discussion was often highly technical: in one post, he 108 proposed the creation of a unified XML format for G.T.D. data, which would 109 allow different apps to display the same tasks in multiple formats, including 110 “graphical map, outline, RDF, structured text.” He told me that the writer Cory 111 Doctorow linked to an early 43 Folders post on Doctorow’s popular nerd-culture 112 site, Boing Boing. Traffic surged. Mann soon announced that, in just thirty 113 days, 43 Folders had received over a hundred and fifty thousand unique 114 visitors. (“That’s just nuts,” he wrote.) The site became so popular that Mann 115 quit his job to work on it full time. As his influence grew, he popularized a 116 new term for the genre that he was helping to create: “productivity pr0n,” an 117 adaptation of the “leet speak,” or geek lingo, word for pornography. The hunger 118 for this pr0n, he noticed, was insatiable. People were desperate to tinker with 119 their productivity systems. 120 121 What Mann and his fellow-enthusiasts were doing felt perfectly natural: they 122 were trying to be more productive in a knowledge-work environment that seemed 123 increasingly frenetic and harder to control. What they didn’t realize was that 124 they were reacting to a profound shift in the workplace that had gone largely 125 unnoticed. 126 127 Before there was “personal productivity,” there was just productivity: a 128 measure of how much a worker could produce in a fixed interval of time. At the 129 turn of the twentieth century, Frederick Taylor and his acolytes had studied 130 the physical movements of factory workers, looking for places to save time and 131 reduce costs. It wasn’t immediately obvious how this industrial concept of 132 productivity might be adapted from the assembly line to the office. A major 133 figure in this translation was Peter Drucker, the influential business scholar 134 who is widely regarded as the creator of modern management theory. 135 136 Drucker was born in Austria in 1909. His parents, Adolph and Caroline, held 137 evening salons that were attended by Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter, 138 among other economic luminaries. The intellectual energy of these salons seemed 139 to inspire Drucker’s own productivity: he wrote thirty-nine books, the last 140 shortly before his death, at the age of ninety-five. His career took off after 141 the publication of his second book, “[28]The Future of Industrial Man,” in 142 1942, when he was a thirty-three-year-old professor at Bennington College. The 143 book asked how an “industrial society”—one unfolding within “the entirely new 144 physical reality which Western man has created as his habitat since James Watt 145 invented the steam engine”—might best be structured to respect human freedom 146 and dignity. Arriving in the midst of an industrial world war, the book found a 147 wide audience. After reading it, the management team at [29]General Motors 148 invited Drucker to spend two years studying the operations of what was then the 149 world’s largest corporation. The 1946 book that resulted from that engagement, 150 “[30]Concept of the Corporation,” was one of the first to look seriously at how 151 big organizations actually got work done. It laid the foundation for treating 152 management as a subject that could be studied analytically. 153 154 In the nineteen-fifties, the American economy began to move from manual labor 155 toward cognitive work. Drucker helped business leaders understand this 156 transformation. In his 1959 book, “[31]Landmarks of Tomorrow,” he coined the 157 term “knowledge work,” and argued that autonomy would be the central feature of 158 the new corporate world. Drucker predicted that corporate profits would depend 159 on mental effort, and that each individual knowledge worker, possessing skills 160 too specialized to be broken down into “repetitive, simple, mechanical motions” 161 choreographed from above, would need to decide how to “apply his knowledge as a 162 professional” and monitor his own productivity. “The knowledge worker cannot be 163 supervised closely or in detail,” Drucker wrote, in “[32]The Effective 164 Executive,” from 1967. “He must direct himself.” 165 166 Drucker’s emphasis on the autonomy of knowledge workers made sense, as there 167 was no obvious way to deconstruct the efforts required by newly important 168 mid-century jobs—like corporate research and development or advertisement 169 copywriting—into assembly-line-style sequences of optimized steps. But Drucker 170 was also influenced by the politics of the [33]Cold War. He viewed creativity 171 and innovation as key to staying ahead of the Soviets. Citing the invention of 172 the [34]atomic bomb, he argued that scientific work of such complexity and 173 ambiguity could not have been managed using the heavy-handed techniques of the 174 industrial age, which he likened to the centralized planning of the Soviet 175 economy. Future industries, he suggested, would need to operate in “local” and 176 “decentralized” ways. 177 178 To support his emphasis on knowledge-worker autonomy, Drucker introduced the 179 idea of management by objectives, a process in which managers focus on setting 180 out clear targets, but the details of how they’re accomplished are left to 181 individuals. This idea is both extremely consequential and rarely debated. It’s 182 why the modern office worker is inundated with quantified quarterly goals and 183 motivating mission statements, but receives almost no guidance on how to 184 actually organize and manage these efforts. It was thus largely owing to 185 Drucker that, in 2004, when Merlin Mann found himself overwhelmed by his work, 186 he took it for granted that the solution to his woes would be found in the 187 optimization of his personal habits. 188 189 As the popularity of 43 Folders grew, so did Mann’s influence in the online 190 productivity world. One breakthrough from this period was a novel 191 organizational device that he called “the hipster PDA.” Pre-smartphone handheld 192 devices, such as the Palm Pilot, were often described as “personal digital 193 assistants”; the hipster P.D.A. was proudly analog. The instructions for making 194 one were aggressively simple: “1. Get a bunch of 3x5 inch index cards. 2. Clip 195 them together with a binder clip. 3. There is no step 3.” The “device,” Mann 196 suggested, was ideal for implementing G.T.D.: the top index card could serve as 197 an in-box, where tasks could be jotted down for subsequent processing, while 198 colored cards in the stack could act as dividers to organize tasks by project 199 or context. A 2005 article in the Globe and Mail noted that Ian Capstick, a 200 press secretary for Canada’s New Democratic Party, wielded a hipster P.D.A. in 201 place of a BlackBerry. 202 203 Just as G.T.D. was achieving widespread popularity, however, Mann’s zeal for 204 his own practice began to fade. An inflection point in his writing came in 205 2007, soon after he gave a G.T.D.-inspired speech about e-mail management to an 206 overflow audience at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Building on the 207 classic productivity idea that an office worker shouldn’t touch the same piece 208 of paper more than once, Mann outlined a new method for rapidly processing 209 e-mails. In this system, you would read each e-mail only once, then select from 210 a limited set of options—delete it, respond to it, defer it (by moving it into 211 a folder of messages requiring long responses), delegate it, or “do” it (by 212 extracting and executing the activity at its core, or capturing it for later 213 attention in a system like G.T.D.). The goal was to apply these rules 214 mechanically until your digital message pile was empty. Mann called his 215 strategy Inbox Zero. After [35]Google uploaded a video of his talk to [36] 216 YouTube, the term entered the vernacular. Editors began inquiring about book 217 deals. 218 219 Not long afterward, Mann posted a self-reflective essay on 43 Folders, in which 220 he revealed a growing dissatisfaction with the world of personal productivity. 221 Productivity pr0n, he suggested, was becoming a bewildering, complexifying end 222 in itself—list-making as a “cargo cult,” system-tweaking as an addiction. “On 223 more than a few days, I wondered what, precisely, I was trying to accomplish,” 224 he wrote. Part of the problem was the recursive quality of his work. Refining 225 his productivity system so that he could blog more efficiently about 226 productivity made him feel as if he were being “tossed around by a menacing 227 [37]Rube Goldberg device” of his own design; at times, he said, “I thought I 228 might be losing my mind.” He also wondered whether, on a substantive level, the 229 approach that he’d been following was really capable of addressing his 230 frustrations. It seemed to him that it was possible to implement many 231 G.T.D.-inflected life hacks without feeling “more competent, stable, and 232 alive.” He cleaned house, deleting posts. A new “About” page explained that 43 233 Folders was no longer a productivity blog but a “website about finding the time 234 and attention to do your best creative work.” 235 236 Mann’s posting slowed. In 2011, after a couple years of desultory writing, he 237 published a valedictory essay titled “[38]Cranking”—a rumination on an illness 238 of his father’s, and a description of his own struggle to write a book about 239 Inbox Zero after becoming disenchanted with personal productivity as a concept. 240 “I’d type and type. I’d crank and I’d crank,” he recounted. “I’m done cranking. 241 And, I’m ready to make a change.” After noting that his editor would likely 242 cancel his book contract, he concluded with a bittersweet sign-off: “Thanks for 243 listening, nerds.” There have been no posts on the site for the past nine 244 years. 245 246 Even after the loss of one of its leaders, the productivity pr0n movement 247 continued to thrive because the overload culture that had inspired it continued 248 to worsen. G.T.D. was joined by numerous other attempts to tame excessive work 249 obligations, from the [39]bullet-journal method, to the explosion in 250 smartphone-based productivity apps, to my own contribution to the movement, a 251 call to emphasize “deep” work over “shallow.” But none of these responses 252 solved the underlying problem. 253 254 The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems 255 to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which 256 individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group 257 outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she 258 can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or 259 disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner. But the 260 cumulative effect of such constant, unstructured communication is cognitively 261 harmful: on the receiving end, the deluge of information and demands makes work 262 unmanageable. There’s little that any one individual can do to fix the problem. 263 A worker might send fewer e-mail requests to others, and become more structured 264 about her work, but she’ll still receive requests from everyone else; 265 meanwhile, if she decides to decrease the amount of time that she spends 266 engaging with this harried digital din, she slows down other people’s work, 267 creating frustration. 268 269 In this context, the shortcomings of personal-productivity systems like G.T.D. 270 become clear. They don’t directly address the fundamental problem: the 271 insidiously haphazard way that work unfolds at the organizational level. They 272 only help individuals cope with its effects. A highly optimized implementation 273 of G.T.D. might have helped Mann organize the hundreds of tasks that arrived 274 haphazardly in his in-box daily, but it could do nothing to reduce the quantity 275 of these requests. 276 277 There are ways to fix the destructive effects of overload culture, but such 278 solutions would have to begin with a reëvaluation of Peter Drucker’s insistence 279 on knowledge-worker autonomy. Productivity, we must recognize, can never be 280 entirely personal. It must be connected to a system that we can study, analyze, 281 and improve. 282 283 One of the few academics who has seriously explored knowledge-work productivity 284 in recent years is Tom Davenport, a professor of information technology and 285 management at Babson College. Many organizations claim to be interested in 286 productivity, he told me, but they almost always pursue it by introducing new 287 technology tools—spreadsheets, network applications, Web-based collaboration 288 software—in piecemeal fashion. The general belief is that knowledge workers 289 will never stand for intrusions into the autonomy they’ve come to expect. The 290 idea of large-scale interventions that might replace the mess of unstructured 291 messaging with a more structured set of procedures is rarely considered. 292 293 Although Davenport’s 2005 book, “[40]Thinking for a Living,” attempted to offer 294 concrete advice about how knowledge-worker productivity might be improved, in 295 many places his advice is constrained by the assumed inviolability of autonomy. 296 In one chapter, for example, he explores the possibility of routinizing or 297 constraining the tasks of “transaction” workers, who perform similar duties 298 over and over, by using a diagram to communicate an optimal sequence of 299 actions. He adds, however, that such routinization simply won’t appeal to 300 “expert” workers, who he says are unlikely to pay attention to elaborate 301 flowcharts suggesting when they should collaborate and when they should leave 302 each other alone. In the end, “Thinking for a Living” failed to find an 303 audience. “It was one of my worst-selling books,” Davenport said. He soon 304 shifted his attention to more popular topics, such as big data and artificial 305 intelligence. 306 307 And yet, even if we accept that people don’t want to be micromanaged, it 308 doesn’t follow that every single aspect of knowledge work must be left to the 309 individual. If I’m a computer programmer, I might not want my project manager 310 telling me how to solve a coding problem, but I would welcome clear-cut rules 311 that limit the ability of other divisions to rope me into endless meetings or 312 demand responses to never-ending urgent messages. 313 314 The benefits of top-down interventions designed to protect both attention and 315 autonomy could be significant. In an article published in 1999, Drucker noted 316 that, in the course of the twentieth century, the productivity of the average 317 manual laborer had increased by a factor of fifty—the result, in large part, of 318 an obsessive focus on how to conduct this work more effectively. By some 319 estimates, knowledge workers in North America outnumber manual workers by close 320 to four to one—and yet, as Drucker wrote, “Work on the productivity of the 321 knowledge worker has barely begun.” 322 323 Fittingly, we can derive a clear vision of a more productive future by 324 returning to Merlin Mann. In the final years of 43 Folders, Mann began dabbling 325 in podcasting. After shuttering his Web site, he turned his attention more 326 fully toward this emerging medium. Mann now hosts four regular podcasts. One 327 show, “Roderick on the Line,” consists of “unfiltered” conversations with 328 Mann’s friend John Roderick, the lead singer of the band the Long Winters. 329 Another show, “Back to Work,” tackles productivity, mixing some early 43 330 Folders-style exploration of digital tools with late 43 Folders-style 331 digressions on the purpose of productivity. A recent episode of “Back to Work” 332 combined a technical conversation about TaskPaper—a plain-text to-do-list 333 software for Macs—with a metaphysical discussion about disruptions. 334 335 Mann no longer uses the full G.T.D. system. He remains a fan of David Allen 336 (“there’s a person for whom G.T.D. is a perfect fit,” he told me), but the 337 nature of his current work doesn’t generate the overwhelming load of 338 obligations that first drove him to the system, back in 2004. “My needs are 339 very modest from a task-management perspective,” he said. “I have a production 340 schedule for the podcasts; it’s that and grocery lists.” He does still use some 341 big ideas from G.T.D., such as deploying calendar notifications to remind him 342 to water his plants and clean his cat’s litter box. (“Why would I let that take 343 up any part of my brain?”) However, his day is now structured in such a way 344 that he can spend most of his time focussed on the autonomous, creative, 345 skilled work that Drucker identified as so crucial to growing our economy. 346 347 Most of us are not our own bosses, and therefore lack the ability to 348 drastically overhaul the structure of our work obligations, but in Mann’s 349 current setup there’s a glimpse of what might help. Imagine if, through some 350 combination of new management thinking and technology, we could introduce 351 processes that minimize the time required to talk about work or fight off 352 random tasks flung our way by equally harried co-workers, and instead let us 353 organize our days around a small number of discrete objectives. A way, that is, 354 to preserve Drucker’s essential autonomy while sidestepping the uncontrollable 355 overload that this autonomy can accidentally trigger. This vision is appealing, 356 but it cannot be realized by individual actions alone. It will require 357 management intervention. 358 359 Up until now, there has been little will to instigate this shift in 360 responsibility for productivity from the person to the organization. As 361 Davenport discovered, most knowledge-work companies have been more focussed on 362 keeping up with technological breakthroughs that might open up new markets. To 363 get more done, it’s been sufficient to simply exhort employees to work harder. 364 Laptops and smartphones helped these efforts by enabling office workers to find 365 extra hours in the day to get things done, providing a productivity 366 counterbalance to the inefficiencies of overload culture. And then [41]COVID-19 367 arrived. 368 369 In a remarkably short span, the spread of the coronavirus shut down offices 370 around the world. This unexpected change amplified the inefficiencies latent in 371 our haphazard approach to work. Many individuals responded by immersing 372 themselves in a 43 Folders-style world of productivity hacks. As we attempt to 373 juggle percolating crises, endless [42]Zoom calls, and, for many, the 374 requirement to somehow integrate both child care and homeschooling into the 375 same hours, there’s a sudden, urgent need to carefully organize tasks and 376 intricately synchronize schedules. 377 378 But it’s becoming clear that, as Mann learned, individual efforts are not 379 enough. Although offices are now partially reopening, a significant amount of 380 work will, for the foreseeable future, continue to be performed remotely. To 381 survive the current crisis, knowledge-work companies may finally be forced to 382 move past Drucker’s insistent autonomy and begin asking hard questions about 383 how their work is actually accomplished. 384 385 It seems likely that any successful effort to reform professional life must 386 start by making it easier to figure out who is working on what, and how it’s 387 going. Because so much of our effort in the office now unfolds in rapid 388 exchanges of digital messages, it’s convenient to allow our in-boxes to become 389 an informal repository for everything we need to get done. This strategy, 390 however, obscures many of the worst aspects of overload culture. When I don’t 391 know how much is currently on your plate, it’s easy for me to add one more 392 thing. When I cannot see what my team is up to, I can allow accidental 393 inequities to arise, in which the willing end up overloaded and the unwilling 394 remain happily unbothered. (For instance, in field tests led by Linda Babcock, 395 of Carnegie Mellon University, women were found to take on a disproportionate 396 load of “non-promotable” service tasks, such as organizing office parties, and 397 to be more likely than men to say yes when asked to do so, leading to their 398 being asked more often.) 399 400 Consider instead a system that externalizes work. Following the lead of 401 software developers, we might use virtual task boards, where every task is 402 represented by a card that specifies who is doing the work, and is pinned under 403 a column indicating its status. With a quick glance, you can now ascertain 404 everything going on within your team and ask meaningful questions about how 405 much work any one person should tackle at a time. With this setup, optimization 406 becomes possible. 407 408 In software development, for example, it’s widely accepted that programmers are 409 most effective when they work on one feature at a time, focussing in a 410 distraction-free sprint until done. It’s conceivable that other knowledge 411 fields might enjoy similar productivity boosts from more intentional 412 assignments of effort. What if you began each morning with a status meeting in 413 which your team confronts its task board? A plan could then be made about which 414 handful of things each person would tackle that day. Instead of individuals 415 feeling besieged and resentful—about the additional tasks that similarly 416 overwhelmed colleagues are flinging their way—they could execute a 417 collaborative plan designed to benefit everyone. 418 419 The ability to better visualize work would also enable smarter processes. If 420 you notice that the influx of administrative demands from other parts of your 421 company is overwhelming you and your co-workers, you’re now motivated to seek 422 fixes. Such optimizations are unlikely to occur when the scope of the problem 423 is hidden among in-box detritus, and when productivity is still understood as a 424 matter of personal will. 425 426 Whether or not coronavirus-driven disruption provides the final push we need to 427 move away from our flawed commitment to personal productivity, we can be 428 certain that this transition will eventually happen. Even if we convince 429 ourselves that the psychological toll of overload culture is acceptable 430 collateral damage for a fast-paced modern world, there’s too much latent 431 economic value at stake to keep ignoring the haphazard nature of how we 432 currently work. It’s ironic that Drucker, the very person who extolled the 433 potential of knowledge-worker productivity, helped plant the ideas that have 434 since held it back. To move forward, we must step away from Drucker’s 435 commitment to total autonomy—allowing for freedom in how we execute tasks 436 without also allowing for chaos in how these tasks are assigned. We must, in 437 other words, acknowledge the futility of trying to tame our frenzied work lives 438 all on our own, and instead ask, collectively, whether there’s a better way to 439 get things done. 440 441 [43][undefined] 442 [44]Cal Newport is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and an associate 443 professor of computer science at Georgetown University. 444 More:[45]Productivity[46]Coronavirus[47]Office[48]Workers[49]Technology[50] 445 E-Mail 446 447 Goings On 448 449 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week, online, in N.Y.C., and 450 beyond. 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This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google[55] 457 Privacy Policy and[56] Terms of Service apply. 458 459 Read More 460 [57] 461 The Service That Makes Shame a Productivity Hack 462 Cultural Comment 463 [58] 464 The Service That Makes Shame a Productivity Hack 465 [59] 466 The Service That Makes Shame a Productivity Hack 467 Part social network and part virtual co-working space, Focusmate suggests that 468 accountability is the most powerful motivator to get work done. 469 470 By Carrie Battan 471 472 [60] 473 Was E-mail a Mistake? 474 Office Space 475 [61] 476 Was E-mail a Mistake? 477 [62] 478 Was E-mail a Mistake? 479 Digital messaging was supposed to make our work lives easier and more 480 efficient, but the math suggests that meetings might be better. 481 482 By Cal Newport 483 484 [63] 485 Lisa Brennan-Jobs on the Shadow of Steve Jobs 486 [64]The New Yorker Interview with David Remnick 487 [65] 488 Lisa Brennan-Jobs on the Shadow of Steve Jobs 489 [66] 490 Lisa Brennan-Jobs on the Shadow of Steve Jobs 491 David Remnick speaks with Lisa Brennan-Jobs about her début memoir, “Small 492 Fry,” and what it’s like being the daughter of Steve Jobs. 493 [67] 494 Will a Full-Body MRI Scan Help You or Hurt You? 495 Annals of Medicine 496 [68] 497 Will a Full-Body MRI Scan Help You or Hurt You? 498 [69] 499 Will a Full-Body MRI Scan Help You or Hurt You? 500 Companies like Prenuvo and Ezra will use magnetic resonance imaging to reveal 501 what’s inside you—for a price. 502 503 By Dhruv Khullar 504 505 [70]The New Yorker 506 507 Sections 508 509 • [72]News 510 • [73]Books & Culture 511 • [74]Fiction & Poetry 512 • [75]Humor & Cartoons 513 • [76]Magazine 514 • [77]Crossword 515 • [78]Video 516 • [79]Podcasts 517 • [80]Archive 518 • [81]Goings On 519 520 More 521 522 • [83]Customer Care 523 • [84]Shop The New Yorker 524 • [85]Buy Covers and Cartoons 525 • [86]Condé Nast Store 526 • [87]Digital Access 527 • [88]Newsletters 528 • [89]Jigsaw Puzzle 529 • [90]RSS 530 531 • [91]About 532 • [92]Careers 533 • [93]Contact 534 • [94]F.A.Q. 535 • [95]Media Kit 536 • [96]Press 537 • [97]Accessibility Help 538 539 © 2024 Condé Nast. 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