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Everything with AI agents, or fully offline.
Four days in Catalonia. No computer, no AI, almost no social media. I bought this notebook so that I could write down what I would think about, and what I would come across and learn on the trip.
The notebook also records the driver who took us to where we were staying, a man who has lived in Barcelona for decades, although he was born on the opposite side of the Iberian peninsula, close to the Portuguese border. During the ride he spoke, among other things, about the tension between the Catalan question and Spanish centralism. He was clearly on the Spanish side.
We spoke about other topics as well, and he recommended places to visit.
The next day we went into the city. And alongside the pleasant views, we came away with some very unpleasant experiences.
The notebook records, for instance:
“7 May, in the afternoon. A side street running directly off Barceloneta, ten metres from us, in broad daylight: someone violently snatched a valuable straight out of another person’s hands and ran.”
Or:
“9 May. For the second time in three days, again about ten metres from us, in broad daylight, a valuable snatched by force out of another person’s hands, followed by a run. We saw it from the taxi.”
I had never seen a theft like this in my life, and now twice in three days. It would deserve its own article. So would other notes that I am not writing about here.
I have plenty of material. On everything I lived through, I formed my own view, and I wrote it all down. Only now, after returning, am I moving it into digital form. This process makes a great deal of sense to me.
FRAGMENTED ATTENTION, TWO EXTREMES, NO MIDDLE GROUND
For as long as I can remember, I have been surrounded by digital technology. Email, chat applications, project tools: all open, all the time, whether I was working, resting or travelling, the phone usually in my hand. The only stretch of my adult life when that was not true was during my master’s degree, when I read philosophy books in the library, and when something existed only in digital form, I printed it and went to the park to read it there.
Outside that period, the digital world has been everywhere around me. Over time my sense of being overwhelmed by it grew, and my attention became persistently fragmented. The information smog in my inbox and in the other tools I use to run projects reached the point where I could no longer find my own priorities through it.
That is how I arrived at the way I now work: I move in two extremes. Either I solve everything digitally, mostly through AI agents, or I work entirely without a computer. When I pushed the digital side as far as it would go, I even tried running local AI on my own hardware before settling on cloud agents. The things that are genuinely important to me, I write down on paper. On my desk there are about twenty sticky notes with the tasks and projects waiting for me, and I record my thoughts and findings in a paper notebook.
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Summary
Common questions on this article's topic
Should you use AI agents or work offline?
What is attention fragmentation?
Why is writing by hand better for thinking?
Can you live an analogue life and still work online?
What does working with AI agents look like in daily work?
Is a hybrid AI workflow worth it?
If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, feel free to drop me a message at mail@richardgolian.com.
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