Chapter 3, Footnotes

It’s worth mentioning: this kind of design is the opposite of the stereotypical approach in tech.

In the stereotypical approach, the app is designed as a funnel, not a space.

• There’s an app where you can make a ‘deep work colleague request’, and review the requests you’ve received, sometimes pressing an ‘accept’ button.
• Flows or point systems drive people to click those buttons—to “find colleagues”—so to speak. But note, these aren’t real colleagues. These are just button presses! Deep work camaraderie has been redefined as a relation in a database.

In their investor reports, “deep work colleague” are going up and to the right.

People start bragging about having millions of “colleagues”, just like people have millions of “followers” today.

This isn’t how to help people live by their values.

It gets numbers up, but it takes choices away from the user and puts them in a funnel. It makes everything transactional.

The very act of streamlining a flow—which makes a space into a funnel—tends to make it bad for values.