We are experiencing the fastest and most radical digitalization in history. The average adult touches their phone hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day. And yet, in this moment of peak digital saturation, a countermovement is taking shape in schools, governments, and research institutions. More and more people have come to the conclusion that for humans to think well, learn deeply, and stay mentally healthy, we may need significantly less technology.
Let’s consider what is happening in education. Australia passed legislation that completely bans children under 16 from accessing social media. Sweden, after spending a decade introducing tablets into every classroom and replacing textbooks with screens, has now backtracked. Around the world, country after country reaches the same verdict: digital tools, introduced with enormous enthusiasm and the best of intentions, turned out to be a corrosive threat to children’s cognitive development.
What happens to our cognitive and professional abilities when we automate the most demanding tasks? Every comfort comes with an invisible tax that taxes our abilities. We’ve spent decades enthusiastically building workplaces that use our brains less and less. In schools, the reckoning has already begun. At work we are still waiting.
The dominant professional narrative still pushes for more AI, more automation, and more tools. The productivity discourse revolves almost exclusively around addition (adding this agent, this application, this workflow) without paying attention to what is subtracted in the process.
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Here are eight old habits that will give you and your organization an advantage because everyone else has forgotten them.
1. Keep a workbook and write in it by hand.
The physical workbook has become a rarity in the modern office. It shouldn’t be like this. When we write by hand during meetings or while thinking about a problem, we activate fine motor systems and higher cognition in a way that no keyboard can replicate.
A landmark 2014 study shows that “the pencil is more powerful than the keyboard”: Annotators who write by hand show deeper conceptual understanding than those who type because the slowness of the hand forces genuine processing and synthesis rather than word-for-word transcription. You have to decide, in real time, what really matters. A 2023 Norwegian study used EEG imaging to confirm that in brain regions associated with memory encoding and creative thinking, handwriting produced greater neural connectivity than typing.
2. Read books, reports and long articles.
Professionals who read long-form books, reports and articles have a clear advantage over those who rely on short digital content. Deep reading develops the ability to follow sustained arguments, retain nuances, and critically engage complex ideas. In contrast, screen-based reading tends to encourage skimming and shallower comprehension.
In a professional environment, this difference is significant. Being able to work through a 300-page book or dense industry report (and apply your knowledge) is what separates true expertise from superficial familiarity. AI can summarize content, but it won’t replace mental models formed by slow reading.
3. Do a real brainstorm with people, a whiteboard, and no screens.
The pandemic normalized video calls to the point that gathering colleagues in a room with a whiteboard now seems old-fashioned. It shouldn’t. Physical co-presence generates qualitatively different creative results than remote sessions. People read body language in real time, interrupt productively, and develop ideas before they have been fully articulated.
The best group results arise from spontaneous, unplanned exchanges. An article from 2022 in Nature Tracking 60,000 Microsoft employees detailed how remote work can measurably reduce serendipitous connections that generate novel thoughts. Additionally, remote workers’ professional networks become more isolated over time. Exposure to a “weak tie” is the strongest predictor of creative production and professional development! So book a room and ban screens for an hour.
4. Walking, especially during the work day
The World Health Organization lists sedentary behavior among the top four behavioral risk factors for global mortality, along with smoking, excess alcohol, and poor diet. Office work is sedentary by design. Most professionals know this and do little about it. The argument for walking specifically is the most practical and evidence-backed intervention available to the worker.
A Stanford study found that walking stimulates divergent creative thinking by an average of 81% compared to sitting, and the effect persisted after participants returned to their desks. Walking meetings, walking around the block at lunch, climbing stairs: these activities cost little time and money. But acceptance depends on managerial exemplarity: When leaders model these behaviors, they legitimize them and change workplace norms. By contrast, sitting nine hours a day, five days a week, for decades, amounts to slow, avoidable decline.
5. Train and learn without AI. . . to use it better tomorrow
Here is the central paradox of AI’s current moment: the productivity gains from AI are substantially greater for senior and experienced workers than for junior ones. A Harvard Business School study of AI-assisted consultants found that experts using AI outperformed all other groups, but that less experienced users, when deployed on tasks beyond their current competence, produced worse results than those working unaided.
Let’s use the elevator as a simple metaphor. Pressing a button is effortless. Repeat that choice every day and your legs and glutes will atrophy. The colleague who climbs the stairs is eccentric until the power goes out and he is the only one who can climb the stairs effortlessly.
If AI absorbs the entry-level and mid-level tasks through which junior staff traditionally became senior staff, organizations face a skills gap. The solution may be deliberate, AI-free learning environments, where people are forced to develop real competencies and develop the judgment that will make their use of AI useful.
6. Have coffee with your colleagues and be serious
Small talk has a terrible reputation in productivity culture. It is treated as wasted time. Research says otherwise. Casual exchanges improve mood, increase a sense of belonging, and make people feel more committed to the organizations they work for. They are the cement that holds professional communities together.
Susan Pinker’s The village effectPublished over a decade ago, it is arguably even more relevant today. It shows that face-to-face social contact is one of the strongest predictors of longevity and sustained cognitive performance. The professional who cultivates a broad network of warm, informal working relationships invests in the social infrastructure that supports collaboration and psychological safety.
Loneliness is also a risk to performance. Among remote and hybrid knowledge workers, chronic loneliness is a widespread occupational risk.
7. Dress accordingly because the cognition involved is real
“Enveloped cognition” refers to the measurable influence of clothing on the psychological state and performance of the wearer. Participants wearing a white coat described as a doctor’s coat made 50% fewer errors on attention tasks than those wearing the same coat described as a painter’s coat. What we wear at work tells us who we are in that context and determines how we perform accordingly.
The normalization of casual wear in professional environments, accelerated by hybrid work, has come at a cost. Clothing also implies mutual respect. As external signs of professionalism have eroded, many organizations report a corresponding drift in standards of communication, preparation and engagement. It may not be necessary to return to formal attire. But the small daily ritual of choosing to look like someone who takes their job seriously is worth a lot.
8. Speak without slides and learn to persuade your audience
The slide deck has become the default unit of professional thought. Each argument should have bullet points. Every meeting should have its platform that can be shared, forwarded and consumed. asynchronously. Therefore, we are good at making slides and less comfortable presenting an argument in real time through the force of clarity and conviction. In fact, now that more and more slides are generated by generative AI, it will be increasingly essential to regain the ability to convince others without them.
Amazon banned PowerPoint from senior management meetings, replacing presentations with written narratives that had to be read silently before the discussion: the underlying idea was that slides allow the presenter to hide behind formatting. Audiences who only receive a spoken explanation retain more than those who receive an explanation and on-screen text at the same time. Practice speaking without the platform.
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