Are You Always On, Always Reachable?

Fred Stutzman is founder and CEO of Freedom - a company developing a toolset for the future of focused work in a distraction-first world. 

Our discussion is about what the future of work will look like in a world where the things that enable remote collaboration, like Slack and email, are the very things which make it hardest to focus. 

We talk about fighting the negative externalities of social media with tools like Freedom, which blocks distracting websites and apps across your devices. We talk about how social media creates time displacement and how good work hygiene, creating guardrails, and pre-committing to take advantage of your best intentions can be used to create a better working environment. 

The conversation also gets into why high quality work is more mentally taxing in an era of what Fred calls “distraction machines," how knowledge work resembles an endurance sport, and how the next generation entering the labor force will relate to the technologies they use to work. 

It’s a sobering but eye-opening reminder of the perpetual battle for focus that defines modern work. 

Hosted by Marshall Kosloff and produced by Jackson Steger