"This year, I’ve had another big load on my time: I’m writing my first book! Thus far it’s called Outsmart: The Future of Thought in the Age of Machines — a title possessed of such purple, sci-fi bombast that even though I wrote it myself, I still crack up every time I say it out loud. As you might imagine, coming from me, the book is a generally optimistic assessment of how digital tools are generating new ways for us to learn things, muse over them, and act on them. But the point is that it’s another time hog: Researching and writing a book has required such nose-to-the-grindstone work — to say nothing of nose-to-the-grindstone procrastination — that it has crowded out whatever time I might have had for blogging. Authors frequently describe the process of book-writing as similar to giving birth to a child, a metaphor I always found faintly icky; but, hey, maybe they were right. I’ve got three kids now, and no blog.

Yet as I’ve worked away on the book, I’ve increasingly begun to feel intellectually claustrophic. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like a cabin fever of the mind. The symptoms: I’ll get obsessed with a particular line of research, chewing away at it for days or weeks, only to realize it’s a) kind of half-baked or b) super interesting but not at all useful to my work. Or I’ll read a fascinating white paper, write a bunch of notes on it, but never crystallize a solid analysis.

I now think the problem is I’m not doing enough thinking in public."