Being less available over text, in other words, has a way of paradoxically strengthening your relationship even while making you (slightly) less avai… - Cal Newport

My author website doesn’t provide a personal e-mail address, and I didn’t own my first smartphone until 2012 (when my pregnant wife gave me an ultimatum — “you have to have a phone that works before our son is born”).

The curmudgeons among us are vaguely uneasy about the attention people pay to their phones, and pine for the days of unhurried concentration, while the digital hipsters equate such nostalgia with Luddism and boredom, and believe that increased connection is the foundation for a utopian future.

In one such study, mentioned in Pink’s book, researchers at Cornell followed over three hundred small businesses, half of which focused on giving control to their employees and half of which did not. The control-centric businesses grew at four times the rate of their counterparts. In another study, which I found during my own research, giving autonomy to middle school teachers in a struggling school district not only increased the rate at which the teachers were promoted, but also, to the surprise of the researchers, reversed the downward performance trend of their students.