Cal Newport's Blog, page 13

On Slow Productivity and the Anti-Busyness Revolution

Seven years ago, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang was a typical overworked, multitasking, slave to the hyperactive hive mind, Silicon Valley consultant.  Feeling the symptoms of burnout intensify, he arranged a three-month sabbatical at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Here’s how he later described this period:

“I got an enormous amount of stuff done and did an awful lot of really serious thinking, which was a great luxury, but I also had what felt like an amazingly leisurely life. I didn’t feel the constant pressure to look busy or the stress that I had when I was consulting. And it made me think that maybe we had this idea about the relationship between working hours and productivity backward. And [we should] make more time in our lives for leisure in the classic Greek sense.”

The experience led him to ultimately publish a book titled, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. I remember this book because it came out the same year as Deep Work, and the two volumes were often paired as variations on a common emerging anti-busyness theme.

In the half-decade that has since transpired, an increasing number of new books have taken aim at our accelerating slide toward overload in both our work and our personal lives. Many of these new titles, somewhat in contrast to my writing, or that of Pang,  have adopted a more strident and polemical tone — not only underscoring the issues, but also pointing a defiant finger at the forces which are supposedly to blame. Clearly the overwhelmed and overscheduled manner in which we currently operate isn’t working.

Which brings me to a question that more and more has been capturing my attention: What can we do about this unfortunate state of affairs?

It’s here that the insightful work that has probed this question in recent years falls somewhat short of sparking major change. The genre is currently dominated by economic materialist arguments: We work too much because of exploitive capitalist imperatives, and then overload our personal lives because we’ve internalized these narratives.

There is, of course, a crackling, subversive energy in this materialism — every new generation seems to rediscover for themselves the trapdoor excitement of the varied theoretical descendants of Marx  —  and this energy is not entirely misguided: there are many areas in which a constant scrutiny of labor relations is warranted, and the allure of consumerist affluence is far from benign. But a pure materialist interpretation of overload culture severely limits our responses, leaving us, if you’ll excuse some mild facetiousness, with only the option to occasionally engage in non-instrumental activities as an act of resistance while waiting for others to overthrow the capitalist market economy.

I beleive we can do more right now.

My thinking in this area is still half-formed, but I’ve become increasingly convinced that what this conversation needs are alternative definitions of “productivity” that believably deliver on the promises of profitable value generation in businesses and resilient satisfaction in our personal lives, while rendering the excesses of overload culture as unnecessary at best, and profoundly harmful at worse.

In my research on such matters, I’ve come to learn that a lot about how we work and live right now is more ungrounded and arbitrary than many might assume, driven more by a novel mix of autonomy and ambiguity than deterministic dynamics of exploitation. We may need a slow productivity revolution more than we need an economic revolution.

I don’t know exactly what these new definitions of productivity might look like, but we can certainly do better than our current haphazard approaches, in which work descends into performative busyness on Slack, and our personal lives are digested into air-brushed social media moments. The human attraction toward some notion of productivity isn’t the problem. The real issue is neglecting to figure out what specific notions actually make sense for our current moment.

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

In Defense of Thinking

I recently came across a Hemingway quote that caught my attention:

“My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.”

It reminded me of a time I used to spend each spring as a young professor, back when my schedule allowed it, giving short talks at so-called “dissertation bootcamp” events. The point of these multi-day affairs was to help graduate students gain some momentum on their doctoral theses. I would stop by to talk about productivity and focus, and when possible, grab a free lunch.

Attending these bootcamps, I was often struck by how much the conversation centered on “writing.” The informal advice passed around was about “getting in your writing hours,” or making sure “to write every day,” or committing to “hit your target word count.”

I always found this somewhat confusing, as my experience with writing — both popular and academic — matched Hemingway’s self-description, in that the actual act of putting words on the page came only after many more hours  spent thinking through what I wanted to say. This contemplation was where the real intellectual action was to be found.

Part of the disconnect, I eventually became convinced, comes from the reality that we’ve lost our familiarity with the concept of “thinking” as a concrete and isolatable activity; something that can be prioritized, and trained, and even cherished as a valuable pursuit in its own right.

In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle identified rational contemplation as the highest and best of all  human activities. In The Intellectual Life, Thomastic scholar Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges spends over 200 pages detailing how the serious thinker should organize their process of thinking.

Today, we’re not nearly as comfortable with this most fundamental of activities. We talk a lot more about information — how we can get more of it, how we can spread it faster — than we do its processing. 

We see this in education systems built more around content than training the meta-activity of making sense of content. We see this in a techno-media landscape that emphasizes expression over cogitation, and tribal Sophism over Socratic grappling.

In his 2009 modern classic, Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matt Crawford argued that we were overlooking the ennobling nature of skilled manual work. I increasingly believe a similar manifesto could be penned about our lost appreciation of thinking.

There’s a great satisfaction and steadiness in the general application of Hemingway’s advice. We cannot make sense of ourselves or the world around us without putting in the mental cycles necessary to wrestle this frenetic information into useful forms. Thinking — true, hard, energizing thinking — is not yet another healthy activity to add to a long list of such commitments. It’s better understood as a way of life; one that’s become even more radical in an increasingly shallow world.

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

On Robert Heinlein’s Analog Autoresponder

A reader recently pointed me toward a fascinating post on Kevin Kelly’s CT2 blog. It concerned the fan mail received by the famed science fiction author Robert Heinlein. Unable to keep up with the deluge of incoming correspondence, Heinlein devised a form letter (pictured above), which included responses to twenty-one common questions and requests.

These canned replies include, for example, a pointer to the book Writer’s Market for more information on how to prepare manuscripts for submission, and an apologetic note explaining that Heinlein is unable to participate in class assignments. (I empathize with this last one. I’m honored by the surprisingly large number of classes that assign my books or articles, but to my regret, I rarely have enough time to participate in evaluating this work.) To answer fan mail, Heinlein would simply check the box on the form letter next to the most appropriate response.

If we fast forward a few decades later, we find a further refinement on this idea from Neal Stephenson, a literary descendent of Heinlein, who stopped these messages before they arrived by posting an essay on the “contact” page of his website that explains why you shouldn’t bother trying to bother him. It’s called “Why I’m a Bad Correspondent,” and it includes one of my all-time favorite passages about communication:

“If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. What replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, and that will, with luck, be read by many people, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons, and a few speeches given at various conferences.”

The rules by which we communicate have a big impact on our ability to do useful work. Too often we just accept whatever seems standard or easy in the moment. It’s nice to remind ourselves that not everyone accepts this fate.

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

Combating Zoom Overload with Reverse Meetings

In a recent episode of my podcast, I dove deep on the topic of meeting overload during our current moment of pandemic-induced remote work. I want to expand here on one of the more radical (but intriguing) solutions I mentioned: the reverse meeting.

First, a little background. Why are we suddenly spending so much more time in meetings now that we’re working from home? There are multiple factors involved.

For example, the sudden shift out of the office created a lot of unexpected new questions that had to be answered. In the moment, scheduling a meeting is an easy way to relieve the anxiety of having these new and pressing demands on your plate.

(Remember: the one productivity system that is universally trusted is the calendar, so if a meeting related to a new issue is scheduled, you can trust that it won’t be forgotten, and you therefore no longer have to keep track of it in your head. This grants immediate relief.)

Another factor is a reduction in the energy and social capital expended when organizing online gatherings. Pre-pandemic, setting up a meeting meant reserving a conference room and requiring your colleagues to physically relocate themselves at your request. There’s enough of a cost here that you might think twice before casually convening these conversations.

In a remote setting, however, we’re all just on our laptops all day anyway, so the cost of shooting off a digital calendar invite for a Zoom discussion is much lower. It takes only a couple clicks and the social consequences seem minimal. The result: we setup many more meetings.

This brings us to the question of how to reduce this overload, and therefore back to the idea of reverse meetings. Here’s the concept:

Everyone maintains regular office hours: set times each week during which they’re always available via video conference, chat, and phone. During these times you can digitally stop by and chat without a prior appointment. (For more on office hours, see this excerpt from A World Without Email on the topic.)If you have a topic you want to discuss with a group of your colleagues, instead of gathering them all together in a new meeting, you instead visit each of their office hours one-by-one to talk it through.In many cases, these one-on-one conversations should be sufficient for you to reach a resolution on the issue, or at the very least, reduce it down to a very targeted set of questions that can be much more efficiently addressed.

The attention economics of reverse meetings can be much more favorable than our current standard. Consider, for example, a hypothetical scenario where I need to make a decision on a new marketing campaign and need feedback from five of my coworkers. The easy solution is to schedule a meeting to discuss. Let’s say it takes about an hour. This eliminates six people hours —  360 total minutes — of potential attention.

In a reverse meeting scenario, by contrast, I might take only 10 minutes from each colleague, taking up 50 minutes total of my time, and 50 minutes total of their time, for an overall demand of 100 minutes of attention, which is 3.6 times less cost.

As an added bonus, the reverse meeting also reverses the asymmetric consequences of these gatherings. It is now significantly more costly to initiate a meeting than it is to attend. The result? Less meetings are convened in the first place.

There are, of course, many scenarios where this approach doesn’t work, and there are many other strategies that might also help reduce meeting overload. (Another favorite of mine is the meeting quota: each person has three afternoon slots every day for meetings, and that’s it; so once you’ve filled the slots for a given day you have to move on to another day, enforcing an artificial scarcity on collaborative attention and ensuring enough focus is left over for other types of work.)

The broader point, however, is that we need to respond to the current moment with more radical thinking about how we organize our work. For if not now, when?

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

One Step Closer to a World Without Email

My new book, A World Without Email, was released two weeks ago. I’m pleased to announce that it was an immediate New York Times bestseller, so I want to thank you, my long time readers, for supporting this launch.

I thought before I return to my regularly scheduled programming (trust me, I’m eager to start writing on topic others than just email), it might be useful to round up a few of the more interesting articles and interviews about the book from the launch week.

So here we go…

Featured Articles Written By Me“Email is Making Us Miserable,” The New Yorker“Email and Slack Have Locked Us in a Productivity Paradox ,” WIRED“Had It With Email? Give Personal Office Hours a Try,” Fast Company“Stop Giving Clients Your Personal Email. Here’s Why,” EntrepreneurFeatured Reviews“The Battle with the Inbox,” Wall Street Journal“Email Broke the Office. Here’s how to Fix It.” GQ“Technology has Turned Back the Clock on Productivity,” The Financial Times“The Scourge of Work Email is Far Worse Than You Think,” The Financial Times“Can we really banish email from the workplace? Author Cal Newport says yes,” Fortune“How to drastically reduced the time you spend on emails,” Fast Company“The Man Who Thinks We Should Ignore Our Email,” The Sunday Times“A World Without Email by Cal Newport review — overthrowing the tyranny of email,” The Times of LondonFeatured InterviewsThe Ezra Klein ShowThe Lex Fridman PodcastNPR: Innovation HubRisingThe James Altucher ShowThe Art of ManlinessThe RealignmentBiggerPocketsThe post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

Email is Making Us Miserable

On Friday, the New Yorker ran an excerpt from the second chapter of my new book, A World Without Email. This chapter focuses on an aspect of the email revolution that’s often overlooked in our discussion of this tool: the ways in which it makes us miserable.

I open the piece by reviewing studies that quantify what many of us have learned through personal experience, which is that the more time we spend emailing, the less happy and more stressed we become.

As I then elaborate:

“Given these stakes, it’s all the more surprising that we spend so little time trying to understand the source of this discontent. Many in the business community tend to dismiss the psychological toll from e-mail as an incidental side effect caused by bad in-box habits or a weak constitution. I’ve come to believe, however, that much deeper forces are at play in generating our mismatch with this tool, including some that get at the very core of what drives us as humans.”

These deeper forces include a fundamental mismatch between the social circuits etched in our brains through evolution and the artificial communication environment cultivated by email. As I detail, our brains take one-on-one interaction extremely seriously, as maintaining strong tribal bonds was critical to Paleolithic survival.

Email, by contrast, creates a setting in which these conversations arrive faster than we can keep up, as demonstrated by our ever-growing inboxes. To our ancient social circuits this is an emergency, leading to a gnawing sense of impending, amorphous danger.

You can, of course, tell yourself that emails are not life and death, but according to research I cite, it’s hard to convince the rest of your brain that this is really true:

“When you skip a meal, telling your rumbling stomach that food is coming later in the day, and therefore that it has no reason to fear starvation, doesn’t alleviate the powerful sensation of hunger. Similarly, explaining to your brain that the neglected interactions reflected by your overfilled in-box have little to do with the health of your relationships doesn’t seem to prevent a corresponding sense of background anxiety.”

We shouldn’t ignore the psychological impacts of the way we work. A successful professional environment is one in which not only do we get things done, but we’re able to do so in a manner that’s sustainable to the human brains involved.

“We’re miserable,” I conclude, “because we’ve accidentally deployed a literally inhumane way to collaborate.”

The solution here is clear, we have to build specific alternatives to the hyperactive hive mind workflow that conquered the knowledge sector once tools like email and Slack arrived.

Now if only someone had written a whole book about what that might look like…

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Speaking of A World Without Email, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one more time that if you order the book today (Monday) or tomorrow (Tuesday), you’ll gain access to my Email Academy video series that walks you through how to put the main ideas of the book into immediate action (see here for details on how to register your order). We even made the video clips sharable, so you can use them to try to convert your colleagues into a more enlightened way to work.

More importantly, of course, these early orders really help a book gain momentum, so the even larger “bonus” here is my sincere thanks.

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

Jason Fried and I Explore A World Without Email

A Deep Discussion

Jason Fried is one my favorite thinkers about workplace innovation. Basecamp, the company he co-founded, has been an inspiring incubator for knowledge work experimentation, from reduced work weeks, to office hours, to remote work, to the development of custom-built communication tools. Fried has documented these ideas in the bestselling books he co-authored, including Rework and (the suddenly timely) Remote, and on the famed Signal v. Noise blog. I featured Jason in Deep Work, and he’s featured again in A World Without Email.

Which all underscores my excitement to announce that to celebrate the launch of my new book, A World Without Email, the Politics and Prose bookstore here in Washington DC will be hosting a live virtual conversation between me and Jason at 6:00pm ET on March 4th.

Tickets are free but you have to register in advance here.

We will be discussing our current moment of overload and what might be required to solve it. We’ll dive deeper into my book, learn from Jason’s real world experiments, and even get into some friendly debates on the areas where our visions’ differ. Should be an exciting conversation.

To help support Politics and Prose, if you order A World Without Email directly from their store, you can get a copy signed by me (while supplies last). Details are on the event registration page. 

A Request for Help

I would also be remiss if I didn’t remind you of the pre-order campaign I’m currently running. If you pre-order a copy of the book (in any format, from any retailer) by March 2nd, and register it here, you’ll be immediately sent a long excerpt from the book and access to the Email Academy video series I recorded exclusively to thank my longtime readers for supporting this title.

(Putting aside the “bonuses” for a moment, the main reason I’m emphasizing pre-orders is that it really helps the book launch by indicating to book buyers, bestseller lists, etc., that there are people out there who are interested in these types of ideas. So you have my deep personal appreciation as well if you’re willing to help out in this way.)

You can find out more about the pre-order campaign here…

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

Steinbeck’s Productive Inactivity

Good news: if you have $17.9 million available, John Steinbeck’s 1.8 acre waterfront retreat is now for sale. It’s tucked onto a grassy peninsula in Upper Sag Harbor Cove, and features a pool, a long pier,  and two cozy guest cottages. Arguably most important is the hexagonal, 100-square-foot “writer’s house” overlooking the water.

Encountering this real estate listing sent me down a brief but entertaining Steinbeck-at-Sag-Harbor rabbit hole. He bought the house in 1955, I discovered, 16 years after The Grapes of Wrath. He subsequently split his time between his apartment on the Upper East Side and his Sag Harbor retreat, which he inhabited mainly in the summer, and eventually dubbed “my little fishing place.”

Steinbeck would write in the morning, often in his waterside hexagonal shed, but as revealed in letters, he’d sometimes instead escape out into the harbor in his fishing boat. “I can move out and anchor and have a little table and yellow pad and some pencils,” he wrote a friend. “Nothing else can intervene.”

With his writing done, Steinbeck would then relax:

“Afternoons were spent fishing or hobnobbing at Sal and Joes or Baron’s Cove resort, or with Truman Capote, Kurt Vonnegut, and other writers at The Black Buoy, his beloved standard poodle in tow.”

Another source talked of how he would wander over to the docks in rubber boots to chat up the local fishermen.

Though it’s easy to be distracted by the more gaudy elements of Steinbeck’s summers, like his deep work on an anchored boat, it’s actually these final details — the languid afternoons — that stuck with me. Steinbeck represents the tail end of a period during which many intellectual types embraced a sort of heroic inactivity. They understood overload to be the foe of inspiration, and put their non-professional lives into an uneasy but necessary alliance with productive output.

It’s hard during our current moment of Zoom-schooled pandemic overwhelm to imagine anything more distant than the hard-drinking, free-flowing, Parisian idleness of the Lost Generation, but their underlying suspicion of busyness is worth highlighting. We shouldn’t strive to literally replicate Steinbeck’s summer lifestyle — though, admittedly, there have been more than a few times in recent months when day drinking at The Black Buoy seems just about right — as it’s ensconced in its own cultural moment. I don’t imagine, for example, Steinbeck ever worried about interrupting his conversations with Truman Capote to take his kid to urgent care.

But in these specific rhythms is a metaphor for something more generally true.

Steinbeck was “productive” in any practical sense of the word: he wrote 33 books and won a Nobel Prize for his efforts. But he wasn’t busy. In our current moment, by contrast, ambition is intertwined with overload — as if aspirations can only be alchemized in the heat generated by frenetic, hyper-connected digital motion.

An afternoon spent admiring Steinbeck’s little fishing place hints that we might not have this quite right.

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

Announcing The Email Academy

My new book, A World Without Email, which comes out on March 2nd, is available for pre-order.

For multiple reasons, pre-orders are much more useful than normal sales, so if you were already thinking about buying my new book, I want to humbly nudge you toward considering a pre-order.

To demonstrate my sincere thanks to those who take the time to help my book in this manner, I wanted to put together the coolest possible incentive. This is how I came up with the idea of creating a brand new online course, available only to readers who pre-order the book, that features me breaking down the main ideas of the book and giving concrete advice on how to put them into action.

I call this course The Email Academy. It features a collection of short video lessons, taught by me, that summarize the big ideas of my book, and then walk you through a step-by-step game plan for putting the ideas into action right away.

The game plan I outline lasts two weeks and aims to immediately reduce the amount of email you receive by 50%, with even bigger reductions to follow. I further break out and customize the advice for employees, small business owner/team leaders, and executives of bigger organizations.

I’m making this course available only to people who pre-order the book. On registering your pre-order using the form below, you will be given the website address and special access code needed to access The Email Academy starting March 2nd.

To further thank you for your purchase, you’ll also be immediately given a long excerpt from the book that outlines the main ideas, allowing you to get started moving toward a world without email while waiting for your copy of the book to arrive in March.

Instructions for Accessing these Bonuses

Step #1: Pre-Order the Book.

If you live in the US, you can pre-order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or a local bookstore (as well as many other retailers). If you live in the UK, you can pre-order the UK edition at Amazon UK.  (The book is also being translated into many other languages, but these will come out later.)

All formats of the book qualify for the pre-order promotion, though all things being equal, buying the physical book is the most helpful.

Step #2: Register Your Pre-Order.

Fill in your contact information and order number from your digital receipt using THIS FORM. Once your order has been verified, you’ll be provided access to a PDF that contains the information you need to access The Email Academy (starting March 2nd) and the bonus excerpt from the book.

(Questions or technical issues can be sent to CalNewport@penguinrandomhouse.com.)

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

On Beethoven and the Gifts of Silence

Writing in 1801, at the age of 30, Ludwig van Beethoven complained about his diminishing hearing: “from a distance I do not hear the high notes of the instruments and the singers’ voices.”

As Arthur C. Brooks recounts in a 2019 op-ed, published in the Washington Post, Beethoven “raged” against his decline, insisting on performing, pounding pianos to ruin in a futile attempt to hear his own notes. By the age 45, he was completely deaf. He considered suicide, one friend reported, but was held back only by the force of “moral rectitude.”

It’s here that Beethoven’s story veers toward legend. Cut off from the world of sound around him, working only with musical structures dancing through his imagination, at times holding a pencil in his mouth against his piano’s soundboard to feel the consonance of his chords, Beethoven produced the best music of his career, culminating in his incomparable Ninth Symphony, a composition so daringly new that it reinvented classical musical altogether.

“It seems a mystery that Beethoven became more original and brilliant as a composer in inverse proportion to his ability to hear,” writes Brooks.  “But maybe it isn’t so surprising.”

As Brooks elaborates, Beethoven’s diminished hearing limited the influence of “prevailing compositional fashions.” Whereas his earlier work was “pleasantly reminiscent” of his instructor, Josef Haydn, his later work was spectacularly innovative. “Deafness freed Beethoven as a composer because he no longer had society’s soundtrack in his ears.” 

There are multiple lessons lurking in this tale. In his op-ed, Brooks argues that Beethoven teaches us about the rewards that can be cultivated in response to loss; an important message, to be sure.

What struck me, however, was the degree to which silence paradoxically allowed Beethoven to hear something new.

In our current techno-cultural moment, we’re constantly connected to a humming online hive mind of takes and urgency and quantified influence. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told I was missing out because of my absence from this scrum. I needed to “build my brand,” or be exposed to more interesting people and important ideas, or plugged into the tick tock of the big events of the day.

But it’s also clear to me that much of my deepest work came from periods of relative disconnection; when I was living a life defined largely by the demands of my young family, a big stack of books, a deep leather chair, a few hours a week in front of new students on an old university campus, and endless miles walking and thinking — often in the woods.

Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls overlooking palm trees in sleepy Key West. Lincoln pondered the Emancipation Proclamation amidst the relative peace of the Old Soldiers’ Home. Rowling completed the Harry Potter epic ensconced in the opulent quiet of the Balmoral Hotel.

Sometimes, it seems, there’s long term advantage in removing “society’s soundtrack” from your ears, even if in the moment the absence is acute. As Beethoven so vividly demonstrates, you can’t really hear yourself until you’re able to turn down the volume on everyone else.

(Hat tip to Fabrice for sending me the Brooks column.)

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.