We can’t carve the future with a blunt knife
How many emails have you received today? How many taps on the shoulder? How many hours have you spent in meetings and on routine admin? Now ask yourself: how much of this were you actually hired to do?
Millions of us wrestle with digital distraction on a daily basis. It wastes our time and our talent, but we’ve come to accept it as a normal part of modern work. But we need to stop — this is not the future of work we were promised; this is not the vision the personal computer handed to us in 1984. This is the result of failed innovation.
Over the last few decades, our tools have pursued connectivity and instant response at the expense of actual progress. Word documents have become cloud Word documents, digital folders have become cloud filing cabinets, and emails are still just emails. Instead of reimagining existing ways of working, we’ve simply repackaged them.
Somewhere along the way, we lost our innovation. Instead of amplifying human ability, our tools have given us extra weight; they create new inefficiencies in place of those they remove. We’ve even poured energy into “unproductive innovation” – building tools which actively distract us from useful work and trap us in addictive environments of viral content, passive social interaction and targeted ads.
But at Memory, we still believe in the potential of tools — and we know we can build better. We want to think beyond what we already have and enable people to produce quality, meaningful “deep work” that actually propels our society forward.
With the power of machine learning behind us, we are already defining the next stage of human technological progress. And if you feel equally as excited and responsible for the direction that journey takes, we’d love to have you with us.