Underneath all of the frenetic busyness and hyperactive communication that defines the modern office, uninterrupted focus actually has the biggest impact on the bottom line. The knowledge economy, however, has systematically undervalued such efforts. This presents an opportunity: If you are one of the few organizations or individuals to prioritize concentration as a prime skill, you could reap a disproportionate reward. That was the thesis of my 2016 book “Deep Work,” which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. This milestone led me to ask a natural question: How had its arguments held up? As I elaborate in a guest essay for Times Opinion this week, the issues I described then have since become much worse. In the office, interruptions exploded as email became augmented by instant messenger services like Slack and low-friction videoconferencing tools like Zoom. (A 2025 report from Microsoft found that the average knowledge worker is now interrupted once every two minutes on average.) Our lives outside of work are even more distracted as apps like TikTok, Instagram and X have become increasingly adept at locking our slack-jawed attention onto our smartphones. Generative A.I. has joined this assault on concentration by filling both our inboxes and our browsers with low-quality slop, while simultaneously offering shortcuts for completing tasks that once required sustained focus. This adds up to a persistent destabilization of one of the most fundamental of human activities: thinking. We’re losing our ability to apply our minds to sustained cognition, and to what end? So that a small number of technology billionaires can become even richer? Or because we want to squeeze every ounce of friction and strain out of our jobs? Some of our species’ greatest satisfactions, not to mention innovations — and even our closest encounters with the transcendent — have come out of the intentional application of our minds. And yet, seemingly all at once, we’re giving this up. This state of affairs is intolerable. As I argue in my essay, the only reasonable response is a revolution in defense of thinking, similar to the health revolution that erupted into our cultural consciousness during the 20th century. I, for one, am not willing to cede my brain to the relentless onslaught of the digital. Perhaps it’s finally time to fight back.
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