For the past year and something, I've been on an inner journey, a personal quest to improve my life across multiple aspects such as health, relationships, skills, focus, etc.

Doing so required understanding what my inner purpose is, and what is my values compass: what legacy I want to live once I'm gone (memento mori), how I want my family and friends to remember me, and what positive impact I want to have on people. To make it less bleak, I wanted to understand how to find joy and purpose in life, every day, and not wasting this limited, precious, and non-refundable resource we call time.

This has been a lengthy and iterative process that would have to be described in its many facets - if there was one resource to quote here, it would be "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen R. Covey.

To get there, I had to first understand that time is a limited resource, then understand how I have been spending it in order to get back control. Although it will seem obvious to the advised mind, this discovery process brought me the realization that we have only so much bandwidth, and that trade offs would have to be made.

This discovery journey also brought me to make multiple decisions, and identify key systemic areas for improvement, areas that I want to share with you today. Note also that this article's title is "How Big Tech Is Killing Productivity", so while time management is an essential aspect, we will eventually focus on Productivity (as a component of time management) and of course Big Tech.

A few comments before moving along: Productivity is often meant as the time spent to produce value (so I don't mean busywork here), but I also consider time spent with my family, talking with my wife and kids as productive time personally. It does not generate monetary value, but it generates sentimental, emotional, bond-creating value. Regarding Big Tech, I am looking at the cumulated effects of big technology companies and how their products / solutions impact our daily lives. I will try as much as possible to keep the matter neutral, even though the ideologies and positivity of some Big Tech company leaders are questionable at the very least.

This is a long read, so bear with me as we go through. You have been warned.

The Competition For Time

For most people, the beginning of a new day is an avalanche of competing priorities to handle.
Family logistics, productive work activities (those delivering actual value), a deluge of meetings, personal activities of all sorts (administrative matters, doctor appointments, etc.), unexpected life situations and, for some, even handling one or more side hustles.

Add to this maintenance activities (health / sport, cleaning the house, cooking, reading, self-development etc.) and you are already set for the next couple of decades.

This is nothing new to a middle-aged adult - the time by which you usually come to the realization that your parents were probably doing their best. This is also nothing new in the context of modern life for at least the past 50-60 years, although technology has evolved.

We were pretty busy enough indeed already, until the time when we started getting actively diverted from our existing time management activities by the Internet. Is it the Internet though? We already had some sort of Internet connectivity at least since the mid-nineties: web browsers, chat services, online games, forums... it wasn't fundamentally different from what we use today. Unless there was a paradigm shift?

From Early Internet To Today's Smartphone

One assumption I had was that the smartphone and the introduction of truly portable handheld devices was one of the culprits to this epidemic of time waste that is eating us alive socially and mentally.

Is it the case though? Looking back 30 years ago we already had (clunky) laptops, portable game consoles, and even the venerable ancestors of the smartphone / tablet, the "personal digital assistant". You could do things on the go, and yet it seems to me that, somehow, we still were able to get the work done, and go along with our lives.

My non-qualified assessment is that two nearly simultaneous innovations broke the status quo: first, the advent of what would become social media, and second, the advent of the smartphone. We will develop this a bit later, but social media introduced a key change compared to forums or chat.

What was previously a grassroots initiative (I'm building, say, a forum on photography because I want to interact with my peers), turned into a platform that was explicitly designed for engagement: here's the place where things are happening, friends are letting other friends know what they're up to, and hey, you can also comment on this by the way. And so were born Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, the ill-ended Twitter, and many more with varying destinies.

At the same time, the industry started innovating and moving away from the good old GSM phone which offered not only the mind blowing possibility to call people on the go (and, later, some discovered the SMS), gradually into MMS and the ability to browse websites in a horrendously impractical manner. Email and calendars started their journey into phones, followed by other services. The Blackberry was a great piece of technology during its heyday, but it fell into oblivion when the smartphone made its debut.

By the time the iPhone enters the market, and is followed by its competitors (and later on tablets), we enter a different paradigm, with a device that has been built from the ground up for native interaction with the Internet, breaking away from all the legacy layers embedded in mobile phones.

In addition, smartphones were designed with an intuitive, human-friendly user interface, and a solid foundation around the overall user experience, providing a revolutionary level of interaction never seen before. Roughly 15 years on, those principle still continue to apply.

The technology itself - at least at its beginning - was very helpful, with push notifications informing the user about important actions such as meeting reminds, incoming messages, etc. It wasn't long until social media apps were available on smartphones, causing users to massively adopt them.

Fast forward to 2025 and nearly every household has multiple smartphones, tablets, and computers. We now live in a fully connected world where there is an application for almost every possible use case, sometimes even with competing applications that fulfill the same purpose. This fragmentation leads to attention span issues with multiple different interfaces that each user has to master.

Every app maker think their application is super important, so they will make sure to implore the user to send notifications "from time to time", while also onboarding them into their "continuous improvement experience" (a.k.a. send us your usage statistics please). Sure, you may want to get bank notifications, or delivery parcel information, but most of the notifications you will receive are meaningless.

Engagement As Attention Crack

If this wasn't enough, the 2010s' were a period of time when Big Tech companies started significantly improving their algorithms. What is a Big Tech company by the way? Is it Microsoft? Apple? Google? Meta (a.k.a. Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp, etc.)? Yes - those large companies that have a daily impact on your lives. Is it the Zuckerbergs, Bezos', Altmans, and Musks of this world? Yes indeed, these are the "Techbros" that have considerable amounts of money available at hand and use it to imprint their ideology, antics, and ways of seeing the world directly into their products and thus influence your lives day after day. But I disgress - and will attempt to link to better sources.

So, back at algorithms - the massive adoption of social media drove Big Tech companies to find ways to monetize their platforms, primarily with ads. But for ads to be seen, they first have to make sure people are spending enough time on their platforms to see the ads. To do so, they came with a magic metric: engagement.

Engagement is how they ensure that users stay hooked on the platform by engaging with others, or engaging with content created by others. This was initially done naturally, and you could argue that someone sharing great content would get better engagement. This was initially beneficial to the content creator and this led to the creation of ephemeral, but very active communities online such as the "VMware community" around the 2008 to 2018 period on Twitter.

To maintain and increase engagement, social media companies started developing complex algorithms that would prioritize some type of content over others, measuring not by the quality of a post, but by how many people would like it, reshare it, or comment on it. This naturally led to pushing forward the most controversial opinions, fueling incendiary topics, and having the impact that we can still see today, leaving to deeper divisions within societies about problems that should have never reached such proportions.

In their never-ending struggle, platforms started copying each other, with short-form content such as videos (who remembers Vine?), nowadays Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, TikTok, etc.

Hostile By Design

Social media applications have one denominator in common: they are engineered to keep you engaged, captive, unable to move away. Features like endless scrolling, autoplay, automatically switching to the next video are a time trap that I can still see acting on me, even after doing a lot of ground work to get rid of those annoyances.

We have become digital cannibals as a species, putting ourselves on exhibition on social media to be consumed by others, looking for ephemeral fame while Big Tech takes all the profits. But Max, I am using Instagram to develop my business, it can't possibly be wrong? Well, we certainly have to live with the times to some extent, but there's a nuance between advertising what you do as a human being on an occasional basis, and falling prey to doomscrolling. By the way, let's not talk about AI Slop.

But it would be too easy to shoot the ambulance and criticize social media apps when many other applications are essentially doing the same. I am referring you here to a previous article I wrote on Duolingo, an annoying language learning app with unbelievably passive-agressive emotional triggers to keep the users engaged. Many other apps use similar tactics, to varying degrees: the emotional tone is very often used in a manipulative way to discourage the user from disabling features or uninstalling the apps.

At the same time, application developers and Big Tech companies are bloating their apps with needless features, including the now ever-ubiquitous "AI" (mostly some variant of LLM API calls). AI stuffing is happening on an unprecedented scale (a fitting way to put it since we live in "unprecedented times"), in many cases not requested and not needed by users.

This is in turn an excellent way to harvest more and more personal data, because fuck data privacy - we're just mindless lemmings happy to provide our data to train some LLM somewhere. And if you believe that your data will not be seen by humans you're probably wrong, since those bogus tech giants (ab)use poorly paid workers in low-income countries through third-party contract for "data enrichment", a.k.a. our platform does crap and we have to hire humans to validate the data.

Overall, those digital companions that were supposed to help us have an overwhelming influence on us. Even if you do not fully agree with my assessment, you may at least agree with the fact that they are at least killing our free time and productivity.

Regain Control And Limit Exposure

To regain control and limit negative exposure to the endless stream of digital junk that keeps raining upon us, it's best to first start with an situational assessment of your digital life. Dangerous bonus: this can have a positive impact on many other aspects of your life.

Thoughts to have in mind:

• What am I trying to achieve?
• Is this activity aligned with my personal goals?
• Is the content that I consider important aligned with my personal goals?
• Am I focusing on my circle of control or circle of concern?
• Am I consuming the right time of content?
• What content brings the most value to me?

Starting with a full overview ensures the best outcomes. It takes time and might be iterative, but in my opinion the best outcomes require focus and time. Obviously, we may have different goals: someone may just want to slightly reduce the time they spend on social media while others may be so overwhelmed and "sick & tired of being sick & tired" about their phone usage (addiction) that they may want a radical change.

I've documented most of the initial steps above in my personal goals and in my personal mission statement (check out the 7 Habits book mentioned in the reference section for more on this, or the Personal goals link above).

The next thing was to decide what content is important to me and what is not. I wanted to avoid the endless stream of sensationalism and breaking news over breaking news in favor to deep, thoughtful, long form content. In my case, I am prioritizing long reads, newsletters from trusted sources, and podcasts / YouTube videos that deliver meaningful information to me.

Anything else was gradually or fully decluttered. I started by reducing my iPhone addiction (full process covered here) and previously I had also been performing some decluttering on LinkedIn, a necessary evil of the modern age.

The next course of action is to decide what level of control you want to maintain over your data. In my case, what started as a cost assessment exercise gradually but inevitably evolved into a data privacy / data sovereigny / self-sufficiency exercise.

It led me to self-host mutiple services (book library, audio books, movies, music, but also genealogy data and many files / work related data) and led me to a conscious reduction of my data exposure to third parties that can never be fully trusted, especially in the age of AI creep and data harvesting.

Proactive Productivity

Decluttering and reducing distractions is an excellent way to free up mental space and gain clarity, but Spinoza's horror vacui is a thing, and what was freed up will be filled up by something else eventually.

In my case, I was trying to reduce improductive time and replace it with a consciously productive approach. To achieve this, I am taking a proactive approach to create positive conditions to be in a productive state. Note the irony, it doesn't necessarily implies I'm productive on demand and at all times, far from it. In fact, it has taken me quite some time to think about all those ideas and concepts and come to that unique point in time when it was the right moment to get into the required state of mind.

I am not a productivity or time management expert, but I've done my best to comprehend some of the concepts, and I have to praise the excellent Deep Work by Cal Newport (listed below in the reference section), a must-read book on the topic. One of the key things in Newport's approach is that you have to create the conditions for being engaged in deep work, i.e. not shallow work / busywork where attention keeps shifting to many topics, but contiguous blocks of time to focus one one purpose. I would not be able to write this piece in one single go without having the necessary conditions to do so (for example, two of my cats are happily sleeping next to my desk now).

Having the luxury to block time for deep, productive work is important, but in my view it requires some organizational prerequisites i.e., proper view of what should be achieved during the day, proper prioritization of activities through the day, week, and month (I use Todoist with priority tagging, and also use Covey / Quadrants). Planning is one thing, executing based on the realities of the moment is another thing, especially when you have to also accommodate life interruptions, spending time with your partner / kids / pets).

Another important thing that I learned through time is that the struggle to be productive at all costs will eventually lead to a sharp loss in productivity, because of the cognitive limits of our brain. It's better to decompress from time to time, go out for a long walk (ideally without phone), disconnect from the issue we're looking at tackling, even sometimes sleeping on it.

Productivity is not an end goal, it's a way to achieve self-fulfilment and live your way in an empowered and conscious fashion, giving you the freedom to focus on what truly matters. In the end, it will not only be about your work but about your family, friendships, and experiences.

Conclusion

It would be easy to say that it's not Big Tech that is killing productivity, but our own complacency and acceptance of compromise for the sake of comfort: the endless unread End User License Agreements, the blind Accept All on cookies banners, allowing software developers to push their latest shitty features upon us, letting ourselves crumble under the weight of notifications. In the same vein, we can blame ourselves for not taking proactive ownership of our lives and letting others, be it people or large industries, manipulate us for their own benefit.

Yet the industry as a whole has their share of responsibilities: it's way easier to put the blame on you, the helpless isolated individual, rather than act ethically and in the interest of the users. This is no fair game, it's an endless race to the bottom where the only value that matters is the one delivered to shareholders.

It's not that we are lazy, it's that we didn't know: we have never been prepared for this, and also, in the context of overall proactivity and productivity, only a tiny fraction of people have ever been exposed to these concepts while growing up.

As Ed Zitron puts it nicely in the finale of his excellent Make Fun Of Them piece, we have to call out, make fun of, and actively resist the caste of Big Tech industrialists that are pouring their toxic dump over our heads and label it as technological progress.

I invite you to join me and others in taking ownership over your lives and live your life in the most conscious, empowered, and best way possible. You got this!

References

I recommend those videos, articles, and books as they somehow influenced at various stages and times my overall thought process on this matter.

• The Ugly Cost of Smartphones (The Market Exit, YouTube)
• Deep Work (Cal Newport)
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
• How Big is your Circle of Control? (Mr. Money Mustache)