Another thing, the thing that really stuck out to me was this approach aimed at "boredom." I'd recently seen that video you mentioned with Arthur Brooks. In fact, last year he had another called "You Need to Be Bored. Here's Why." posted on Harvard Business Review's YouTube channel. So getting comfortable with "boring" really can be a viable approach.

I actually love your example of selling an otherwise good product with a poisonous ingredient and I think the most middle-of-the-road weapon against the negatives of social media is to remove those ingredients. For example, no infinite scroll, no algorithmic ordering, forced slow loading if you've been on it for more than a certain number of minutes, etc. (I'm just spitballing). In other words, undo/ban all technological features (or "ingredients") of the things that the social media companies have done that are deliberately meant to pull on weaknesses in human psychology. They know they're doing it. They hire experts to do it.

You've already got the receipt for this. That memo isn't a company that stumbled into harm and feels bad about it. It's one picking a launch window based on when the people who'd object are busy.

I think the journey of figuring out how to actually create with AI has been as interesting as what I'm able to create. I wish I had documented more of my lessons-learned the way you have. The biggest challenge I've found is that, as you mentioned, AI often thinks more equals better. So I had to learn when "comprehensive" meant subtracting over adding. Of course, there was also the practical reason, that more documentation meant more tokens used up - more context consumed - for a given task.

As far as files and rules, since I like seeing things visually structured, I've had luck creating temporary html files that visually capture the structure (files and rules) of a given effort. I use that as my visual map and it's what I have Claude use for its own understanding. It reduces the need for reading entire docs but it also forces me and the AI to stay structured. I also mirror this in that (as of late) I use Cowork for the planning (i.e. the maintenance of that visual mapping) and Claude Code (in a completely separate instance) to run the task(s) and, in the end, pass the lessons-learned over to Cowork manually. Otherwise if they were one "mind" e.g. when I would use Claude Code to coordinate AND code, it would always add more information to its memory and it would get out of hand very quickly. Ultimately, the key for me was understanding how AI uses structure. For example, when I started using Linear a couple of months ago - prior to which I had no "formal" project management system, all of the tags and labels and 'projects' (as Linear uses the term) really helped manage efficiency in productivity. I use Linear's MCP to connect to Cowork directly and always start sessions with reading 'project' titles, labels, priorities, etc. before diving into details for a given effort.

I'll use podcasts as an example. I think podcasts became very popular because the host could sit with a guest for a long time and discuss important topics at depth. The problem, in my view, is that that medium locked itself into longer lengths of time that it always has to fill. I may want to hear a politician talk for 3 hours if they're running for office but I don't necessarily want to hear an actor's thoughts on life for that long (for the fifth time). Sometimes, a late night show's 5 minutes is sufficient for the latter.

Does every Substack have to include an SEO-esque preamble before it gets to the ultimate point it's trying to make or perspective it's trying to explore? I think, in an ideal situation, the format (including length) of the article/book/etc. would match the reader's capacity and willingness to read it.

One last note - just because I read it somewhere and it stuck with me - "Learning is an intelligent person's favorite form of procrastination." So if you're consuming whatever you're consuming and you feel like it's not just social media-like consumption in a different form, then more power to you.