Appendix

“We wrote a friction article for Gallup.com, “Too Many Teams, Too Many Bosses,” and for Times Higher Education, “Our To-Do Lists Can’t Grow Forever. It’s Time to Try Subtraction.

A piece for Harvard Business Review, “Meeting Overload Is a Fixable Problem,” provided a “playbook” for “meeting resets” that we helped develop and test.

We also learned what to make harder and slower from works including The Necessity of Friction by Nordal Åkerman, a collection of essays on the virtues of blocking, delaying, and stopping action that draws on fields including economics, organizational theory, physics, and artificial intelligence.

In 2008, he [Grant] carried out a fascinating study of a call center at a major U.S. university…

But the people in the purpose group kicked into overdrive. They more than doubled “the number of weekly pledges that they earned and the amount of weekly donation money that they raised.

Uszkoreit, seeing the analogy with the brain, wanted to do the opposite, piping massive amounts of text, words, and computing firepower through a simple yet elegant funnel. Uszkoreit outlined his thinking in 2023: “If you are given a piece of hardware that has the very key strength of doing lots and lots of simple computations in parallel, as opposed to complicated, structured computations sequentially, then really that’s the statistical property you want to exploit.