My friend Jonathan Garner and I have written a book! It's called Your Best Digital Life and is coming out soon on 15 April 2025.
In 2023 we were asked to write a book about the mind and technology by Media Labs, a publisher under Macmillan USA. Once we agreed to it and sat down together to plan out the book, the whole process took 448 days to the day the final file went to the printers! While this was a relatively speedy turnaround for a 256-page book, the process was intense, with research, writing and editing all happening in parallel.
Thankfully Jonathan and I have worked closely together before, and we also had a fantastic editorial team (whose margin comments could form a primer on diplomacy eg. "this is so interesting, but consider cutting?" when we went too far down a rabbit hole!).
Perhaps what helped us the most is that we both have our daily meditation practices to ground us when things got tough. We also supported each other to take short breaks from the book during the writing process. And of course, so often our best ideas would come to us right after these breaks.
Each chapter, while in the thick of writing it, always felt like:
a) THE MOST important point in the book and
b) such a big subject that surely it could be a book in itself!
I am sure this is a pretty normal author experience because whatever we pay attention to expands – that's just how attention works. (Read Chapter 2 of Part 3 of our book for more on the nature of attention!) Because of this one of the biggest challenges of writing the book was repeatedly coming back to "What's the main point of this book again?" Identifying the red threads that hold it all together.
The main creative constraint, of course, was the word count and page numbers because of the physical nature of a book. We were always conscious that if we added this extra bit of research or story, we'd have to remove something elsewhere because even though we had hundreds of pages to play with, every word was a trade-off. The two images below show two different ways of thinking about the structure of the book and it was crazy hard to think about both at the same time.
The artwork was another huge dimension for us we are both visual thinkers, and wanted the book to look the part. The publishers decided to print in full colour, and we were lucky enough to be working with an illustrator we loved: Greg Clarke who draws for the New Yorker. We sent him a summary of what each chapter was about. Not just the words, but the feeling that we wanted readers to have when they opened the chapters up.
The title was suggested to us by our editors, and is a perfect example of the advantage of a third-party perspective who is close enough to understand the book, but far enough to care more about market-facing clarity than our feelings! My main objection was that this is about living your best life, not your best digital life, but I guess that's the point – for nearly all of us, our lives are "digital lives" these days, and this book is for all of us that are immersed in tech in this way.
In the end, the cover, title, subtitle and back all make a single package which has just one aim: to spark the curiosity of the kind of person who will genuinely benefit from what's inside. To get that person to open the door, and check out the contents page. Let's see how well it achieves that when the book hits the shelves. 🤞🏼
Speaking of covers, here are some of the early iterations of the cover. It's a bit like naming a baby – after a few months none of the other shortlisted names you had once considered sound right at all! But, I still dig those app icons in Cover 2.
