Great conversation.

Re social media: I like the arena vs. town square analogy.

Re productivity: Throttling the number of in-progress tasks, to reduce context switching, is tricky. I do occasionally prune my project list (in Omnifocus, #GTD), by either dropping things or setting a start date in the future.

https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/363-knowledge-work