The Future of Work is Offline
Going Back to Our Productivity Primitives
It's the day before your project's deadline, so you finally decide to dig in and focus. You turn on do not disturb, close all unnecessary applications and tabs, and place your phone in another room. After a few hours, you have done more work than you have all week. How were you able to do so much in so little time? Pressure? Yeah, pressure is proven to help. But the key thing was limiting distractions and going offline.
Before the mid-2000s, we did most of our work with little to no distractions. Sure, a coworker would pop up and consume an hour with a quick question, but we were not getting constantly alerted or being reeled in by every glowing rectangle. Most of our work, most of the deep work, was done in our heads—with analog, offline tooling.
When we had a project, work or personal, we would gather our materials and go someplace to focus. We would have photocopies of books, clippings of magazines, printed reports, handwritten notes. We would spread them out, put them in piles, and dig into the work. The output might have been digital—in the form of a report, deck, or paper—but the work was done offline. Most of our deliverables were static documents, not created in Google Docs or Figma. There was no need for an internet connection.
A few months back, I saw these posts on Threads:
Mark my words: The future of productivity is offline. Those who learn to unplug will outfocus everyone else. – Benjamin C. Knight
Allow me to amend and extend: The future of humanity is offline. – Larry Mannino
This was something I had been thinking about for months, but these strangers vocalizing the same sentiments solidified it for me. While the connectivity of the internet has democratized information, it has impaired focus. To magnify the issue, nearly every device in our lives has a connection to the internet, endlessly barraging us with distractions. There is a simple solution: go back to our productivity primitives—offline.
I've written about Making in Private, which is related. The difference here is that working offline not only allows us to do the work in private, but it also allows us to focus deeply. By practicing this concept proactively, we don't have to wait until the night before a deadline; we can simply do our work and step out of the office. Hell, if you're really working offline, you can work anywhere.
Amber Case and Charlotte Granet talk about the Great Logging Off eloquently on LinkedIn:
The Revenge of the Real:
It's slowly happening at the edges, but people are experiencing a saturation point of how they're wanting to spend their time and participate in the experience of life. It takes some time and metacognition to be able to ask the self, in the face of blue screens and incendiary online information, "is this what I want to be doing today?" "Is this how I want to be interacting?" and finally, "isn't there something more?"
The Great Logging Off: When Wellness Means Less Screen, More Life
This week, I attempted a digital detox, which, yes, was surprisingly beneficial. But what really struck me was how unnatural it felt to disconnect at first.
We know passive screen time does little for us, yet we can’t stop.
What can we actually do to log off, work more efficiently, and stop getting distracted by our rectangles? Go to the library and photocopy textbooks? Print research papers? Carry around a dozen highlighters to annotate physical paper? While that is a viable solution, in 2025 we have humane, calm technology that can support us.
Firstly, download more onto your actual computer. Don't hoard the information, simply download it for use at that moment. Use technology like a reMarkable Paper tablet or a Daylight Computer to store offline documents that you can review, without having to look at an LCD screen.
Personally, I have been using my reMarkable Paper Pro and Kindle for a lot of this. I take more handwritten notes than I have in 15 years on my reMarkable. I send PDFs, typed meeting notes, and decks to my tablet. I also use my Kindle as a read-it-later tool for long articles. Kindle has a little-known feature where you can send websites, PDFs, and other attachments to it. It works from your phone, computer, or even a website. I then pair these two e-ink devices with my laptop. I have my reference material, offline, on each of them. Then I create my deliverables on my MacBook. While I am generally connected to the internet on my Mac, I don't need to open my browser, email, or other connected tools and possibly get distracted. I also keep 98% of my notifications off — no alerts or red badges.
By implementing this simple change, I don't need to use my devices in a connected way. I can focus on my work when I want to, usually not picking up my phone or iPad for 2-4 hours. I get my work done in record time, and do it in a way that is also healthier—looking at less LCD screens and not being constantly alerted.
While I do advocate for these tools (reMarkable and Kindle), you don't need to buy them to reap the benefits I'm talking about. Storing files offline and printing some documents will do the same job. By simply focusing on productivity primitives, with the focus being offline, you can do your work in a faster, healthier, and calmer manner. If you ever want to see the future, look to the past. We worked offline in the past with great success, and the future will look similar.