What is your work? What are you doing today? It's a hard question. It seems simple at first. Let me just check my list . We all keep some kind of list, whether paper, digital, or mental, of what we have to do. What we're doing today should be right in front of us. But let's be honest with ourselves. Just because a task is on the list doesn't mean we're doing it today. Some tasks we can't avoid, but others can be kicked merrily down the road or pushed guiltily to tomorrow.

That question -- What are you doing today? -- is loaded with problems. We may answer it earnestly in the morning, but by evening our answer might be wrong. Yet we all have to try and answer the question every day. What are you doing today? is staring us in the face the moment we wake up. We want to have a good answer. It gives us a sense of purpose to know what we're doing. We can lose our worries and doubts in action. When we know what to do, we are part of an active world.

When we don't know what to do, we feel alone. But we are not alone. There's something else that can help us figure out what to do. Something else that wants to. For more of us each year -- nearly half the world already -- there's a being in our lives who wants to know what we're doing today even worse than we do. Our computer. The relationship between person and computer is not even a generation old. At first, the computers didn't know how to have a relationship with us.

Now, they do. We're the ones out of our depth in this relationship now. Computers have the simpler job in this relationship. They know what they want from us. They know because we tell them. Computers want exactly what they are told to want. That's easy. But we have to know what we want from computers first, so we can give them the right instructions.

That's harder. So far, in the vast majority of computer-human relationships, what we've told computers to want is to help us with that hard question: What are you doing today? They've gotten very helpful. Computers help us remember what we're doing, they help us find new things to do, and they help us to do them. They help us any way they can. Computers are so helpful, they can help us in opposing ways. For example, your computer can help you remember what you're doing today by showing your tasks on a calendar. Let's say your next task is to write a message to your team. Your computer can help you do that by opening a new application in a new window, letting you focus on your message.

But while you're writing, someone else sends you a message: "Want to get pizza for lunch?" Your computer receives that message, and it does exactly what people told it to do: it delivers the message to you right away. The computer just wants to help you figure out what you're doing today. But by following its instructions perfectly, now it's interrupting you. It's stopping you from doing what you're doing. That's no help at all. But the computer is just doing what you asked it to do. It's helping you in two ways at the same time. Is that not what you meant? Do you and your computer have a communication problem? Then you'd better figure out how to explain yourself better.

That's the foundation of any healthy relationship. Maybe it's uncomfortable to think about your computer -- or computers -- this way. It's an inanimate object. It has an off button. It may have some kind of intelligence, but it's not a human . It's not even an animal . How can it have a relationship with a person? That's too intimate. But aren't we intimate with computers? We communicate with them through touch.

Sometimes we talk to them. Sometimes we gaze at each other. Computers are there for us during intimate moments. They facilitate our human relationships. They teach us wonderful things about our world. They monitor and protect our health. They help us with our hardest work. Computers also offer us endless distractions.

They indulge our vanity and our laziness. They disembody us and dehumanize us, turning flesh-and-blood people into flat boxes full of stereotypes. But they only do that to us because we tell them to. We've given them bad jobs to do. Our relationship with computers is certainly not one between peers. For now, at least, computers are more like employees than friends. They follow our instructions and do prodigious work. We may buy a computer or an app because of something we like about it, but ultimately, our relationship with a computer and its software is defined by how well it does the jobs for which we've hired it.

How do we know what jobs to give our computers? Some of them are obvious. It's our computer's job to do hard math problems for us. It's our computer's job to send email or browse the Internet. But when we're not careful, we give our computers bad jobs, often unconsciously or by accident. Is it our computer's job to help us procrastinate in some addictive game? Is it our computer's job to make us feel insecure by browsing our exes' photos? It is if that's what we told our computers to do. If we want our technology to help us, we have to be better managers. We have to hire the right tools for the right jobs. If you don't know what jobs you're hiring for, ask yourself this: What is your work? Ah.

There. Suddenly, we aren't talking about dry business stuff anymore. Now we're asking about life and meaning and purpose. Your work is the impact you make on the world. Whether technology helps you or hinders you in that work is in your hands. Work can be dry, sure. It can be boring. It can be painful.

So we should accept help. Technology is here to help us. That's why we created it. We just have to use it that way. Technology is part of life. It's there with us. If our life has spiritual meaning to us, technology is part of it, just like water and trees and animals and oxygen. We're here on Earth to do our work, and we've invented technology to help.

If we want to hire technology for spiritual life, we have to give it spiritual jobs. Spiritual work, spiritual jobs All technology stories are about work. But the word "work" has many layers. In the lowest-down, most physical sense, any force acting on any body is doing work. That's why we invent any technology, to help us increase our impact on the world. That's the sense in which work is the subject of every story of technology. In the economies of human societies, work is usually discussed on a more abstract level. Work is the activity people do for monetary compensation.

The market places a value on many kinds of work, denominated in money, and people try to find a job doing one of these kinds of work, so they can make money and survive. In high tech societies, technology stories are largely concerned with work in this sense, showing how new inventions and innovations can make people and companies more productive, efficient, and profitable. You are not reading one of those stories. This story is concerned with work of the highest human order. How can technology enable us, as individuals and communities, to do our greatest possible work? Not our work as a cashier or a machinist or a doctor or a writer, but the hard work of being a good person. This is the kind of work we can do all the time, whether in our jobs, with our friends and families, with strangers on the street, in the airport, on the highway, at the hospital, anywhere. It's the work of being present to the needs and wants of other people -- and ourselves, too -- so we can help each other thrive and be happy. The meanings of these words are colored by our various traditions, upbringings, and social environments.

Religions and moral philosophies are defined and distinguished from one another by the different values and practices they prescribe for a good life. But we have to translate across these lines in order to live together as neighbors. In a diverse and deeply interconnected society, there are best practices we can share to help us do our spiritual work, however we define it for ourselves. The task before us is to identify the qualities of good spiritual work for ourselves, as well as to isolate the bad kinds, the spiritually harmful kinds of work in which we nevertheless engage as we tread through the world. This is an ongoing evaluation requiring practiced mindfulness in all our work. Once we have a well-developed sense of good and bad work, we can apply the power of technology to help us reinforce our practice and discourage distractions. This is sometimes an uphill battle. The technologies we use day to day are sometimes not designed to help us do good work.

Indeed, some of them are designed to distract us. We will examine the reasons for this in later chapters. That may seem insane now, but as we'll find, the language of technology is always reasonable enough to understand. And once we understand why some technologies are designed for distraction, we are empowered to find better solutions. But even distracting technologies can be used for higher purposes. The kinds of distractions provided by the Internet are often nevertheless intended to connect u.