Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

The Productivity Frontier Pointed Us Backwards

7 Sept 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:56

Einstein couldn't develop relativity in today's Slack-and-LinkedIn world. Constant interruptions fragment the workday into attention-draining pieces, wasting half our mental capacity on friction. Within five to ten years, we'll recognize this mis-wiring and shift away from fragmented workflows.

Chapters

Well, if Einstein were alive today, like what would his day be like? Like he would wake up, he'd have to like delete a bunch of like LinkedIn notifications. He'd like get down to work and start writing equations and then someone would Slack him and interrupt him. Would we still understand relativity if Einstein were living in that kind of working environment? Probably not. I'm not saying we should go back to the early '90s, but I'm saying it wasn't always like this. The whole frontier of productivity at the time felt like it was just like taking us in the wrong direction. Like things like Slack. which are wonderful tools, also chop up your day into little fragments and sort of make you like cognitively diabetic. There's like a lot of empty carbs in our collaboration and our collaboration tools. And I'm like, okay, here is a problem that's not solving itself. And I think as a civilization, we're going to like, hopefully in, you know, 5 or 10 years be like, man, we took this like crazy detour where we basically hooked up that brainpower to this thing that was just like burning off half of it as friction with our tools. Like that was dumb.