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Zeratsky: Infinite apps and cultural pressure create a distraction flywheel

John Zeratsky · Making time for what matters | Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (Authors of Make Time, Character VC) · Feb 11, 2024 · at 14:15

John Zeratsky, co-author of Make Time and general partner at Character VC, explains how digital products exploit societal expectations of constant busyness.

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“And so when you put these two things together, the busy bandwagon and the infinity pool, you kind of have this like, it's like a flywheel, but bad, you know, it's like this, you feel like you really need to be busy. You really need to be on top of everything. And then you've got this whole collection of apps and services and products there that are sort of ready to pounce on that. They're ready to take advantage of that set of defaults, that cultural and internal, you know, set of defaults that you have about what you should be doing. And for a lot of people just sort of spins out of control.”

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