We are living through the most rapid and sweeping digitalization in history. The average adult touches their phone hundreds if not thousands of times a day. And yet, at this moment of peak digital saturation, a countermovement is taking shape in schools, governments, and research institutions. More and more people have reached the conclusion that for human beings to think well, learn deeply, and stay mentally healthy, we may need significantly less technology.
Consider what’s happening in education. Australia passed legislation banning children under 16 from social media entirely. Sweden, having spent a decade rolling tablets into every classroom and replacing textbooks with screens, has now reversed course. Across the world, country after country is arriving at 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 capabilities when we automate the most demanding tasks? Every convenience comes with an invisible tax levied on our skills. We have 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, more tools. Productivity discourse is almost entirely about addition—add this agent, this app, this workflow—with no attention paid to what is being subtracted in the process.
Here are eight old habits that will give you and your organization an edge because everyone else has forgotten them.
1. Keep a work notebook and write in it by hand
The physical work notebook has become a rarity in the modern office. It shouldn’t be. When we write by hand during meetings or while thinking through a problem, we engage fine motor systems and higher cognition in a way no keyboard can replicate.
A landmark 2014 study shows “the pen is mightier than the keyboard”: Notetakers 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 verbatim transcription. You have to decide, in real time, what actually matters. A 2023 Norwegian study used EEG imaging to confirm that in regions of the brain associated with memory encoding and creative thinking, handwriting produced greater neural connectivity than typing.
2. Read long-form books, reports, and articles
Professionals who read substantive books, reports, and long-form articles gain a clear edge over those who rely on short digital content. Deep reading builds the capacity to follow sustained arguments, retain nuance, and engage critically with complex ideas. By contrast, screen-based reading tends to encourage skimming and shallower comprehension.
In a professional setting, this difference is significant. Being able to work through a 300-page book or a dense industry report (and apply its insights) is what distinguishes true expertise from surface-level familiarity. AI can summarize content, but it won’t replace your mental models formed through slow reading.
3. Run a real brainstorm with people, whiteboard, and no screens
The pandemic normalized video calls to the point where gathering colleagues in a room with a whiteboard now feels old-fashioned. It shouldn’t. Physical copresence generates qualitatively different creative outcomes from remote sessions. People read body language in real time, interrupt productively, and build on ideas before they have been fully articulated.
The best group outputs emerge from spontaneous, unplanned exchanges. A 2022 paper in Nature tracking 60,000 Microsoft employees detailed how remote work can measurably reduce the serendipitous connections that generate novel thinking. Also, remote workers’ professional networks become more siloed over time. “Weak tie” exposure is the single strongest predictor of creative output and career development! So book a room and ban screens for an hour.
4. Walk, especially during the workday
The World Health Organization lists sedentary behavior among the four leading behavioral risk factors for global mortality, alongside smoking, excessive alcohol, and poor diet. Office work is sedentary by design. Most professionals know it and do little about it. The case for walking specifically is the most practical and evidence-backed intervention available to the worker.
A Stanford study found that walking boosts divergent creative thinking by an average of 81% compared to sitting, and the effect persisted after participants returned to their desks. Walking meetings, lunchtime loops around the block, taking the stairs—these activities cost little time and money. But uptake depends on managerial exemplarity: When leaders model these behaviors, they legitimize them and shift workplace norms. Sitting for nine hours a day, five days a week, over decades, by contrast, amounts to a slow, preventable decline.
5. Train and learn without AI . . . to use it better tomorrow
Here is the paradox at the heart of the current AI moment: The productivity gains from AI are substantially larger for senior, experienced workers than for juniors. A Harvard Business School study on 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 outputs 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 atrophy. The colleague who takes the stairs is eccentric until the power goes out and they’re the only one left who can climb the stairs without strain.
If AI absorbs the entry-level and mid-level tasks through which junior staff traditionally developed into senior ones, organizations face a skills cliff. The solution may be deliberate, AI-free learning environments where people are forced to develop real competence and build the judgment that will make their use of AI useful.
6. Have coffee with your colleagues and mean it
Small talk has a terrible reputation in productivity culture. It’s treated as wasted time. The research says otherwise. Casual exchanges improve mood, increase a sense of belonging, and make people feel more invested in the organizations they work for. They are the cement that holds professional communities together.
Susan Pinker’s The Village Effect, published more than a decade ago, 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 wide network of casual, warm workplace relationships invests in the social infrastructure that underpins collaboration and psychological safety.
Loneliness is also a performance risk. Among remote and hybrid knowledge workers, chronic loneliness is a pervasive occupational hazard.
7. Dress the part because enclothed cognition is real
“Enclothed cognition” refers to the measurable influence of clothing on the wearer’s psychological state and performance. Participants wearing a white coat described as a doctor’s coat made 50% fewer errors on attention tasks than those wearing the identical coat described as a painter’s smock. What we wear at work tells us who we are in that context and shapes how we perform accordingly.
The normalization of casualwear in professional environments, accelerated by hybrid work, has had a cost. Clothes also involve mutual respect. As the external signals of professionalism have eroded, many organizations report a corresponding drift in standards of communication, preparation, and commitment. It may not be necessary to go back to formal dress. But the small daily ritual of choosing to look like someone who takes their work 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. Every argument must be bulleted. Every meeting must have its deck that can be shared, forwarded, and consumed asynchronously. Thus we are good at making slides and less comfortable making an argument in real time through the force of clarity and conviction. In fact, now that more and more slides are generated by generative AIs, it will be more and more essential to regain the faculty to convince others without them.
Amazon famously banned PowerPoint in senior leadership meetings, replacing decks with written narratives that had to be read in silence before discussion: The underlying insight was that slides allow the presenter to hide behind formatting. Audiences who receive spoken explanation alone retain more than those who have explanation and on-screen text at the same time. Practice speaking without the deck.
