My attention span hasn’t been completely shattered. There are times I can sit down and read an article from start to finish. Sometimes even twenty pages of a book without reaching for my phone. I can sit down and spend an hour or more fully immersed in writing an article for this website, I can focus on whatever my students have to say for up to ten hours a day, but that’s still not what I mean by ‘deep work’. Deep work would be finishing a novel, translating a book, maybe studying something in a more formal way (the kind of studying that leads to a piece of paper that convinces people you really studied something even if you didn’t). That’s now one of my top worries: How can I get some deep work done? I don’t even know if am still capable of deep work. And the temptation of, if not the addiction to, ‘easy’ work gets in the way of my trying to start doing deep work.