Cal Newport's Blog, page 14

Michael Lewis Doesn’t “Do” Social Media

Last May, Tim Ferriss interviewed the writer Michael Lewis. Early in the episode, Lewis said that people often describe him as “one of the happiest people they know.” Toward the end, we encounter one of the reasons why this is true.

As the podcast wraps up, Ferriss asks the standard question: “are there any other websites, or any other resources, social media handles, anything you would like to mention if people want to learn more about what you are up to?”

Lewis’s response is refreshing:

“I wish I could say ‘yes,’ but I don’t do social media. So the answer is ‘no’…I have no way to be found. Except through my work.”

The formula here is so simple that it’s easy to overlook: Do less, do what you do better, don’t get distracted along the way. But its value shouldn’t be ignored.

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Speaking of living deeply, due to popular demand, Scott Young and I are opening up a new session of our online course Life of Focus. If you want to find out more about the new session, sign up for the waiting list. Next week, Scott will be publishing to this list a series of articles on what we learned from the first session of the course, which we ran this fall, and was a great success (not to mention a lot of fun) .

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

David Mellinkoff’s Productive Lack of Productivity

A reader recently pointed me toward the 1999 obituary of the respected legal scholar David Mellinkoff. He flagged, in particular, this passage:

“After the war, David developed a successful law practice in Beverly Hills. He early discovered, however, that, in his words, “the law thrived on gobbledygook.” He wanted to learn how this had happened, but after searching for answers in standard sources, he concluded, ‘there wasn’t a single book that wove it all together.’ David decided to write that book. He closed his law office, sold his house, and moved to the woods of Marin County. Seven years later he published The Language of the Law (1963), the book by which he will be chiefly remembered.”

In 1956, at the moment when Mellinkoff decided to retreat into the woods, his decision to trade all the busyness, urgency, and, of course, remuneration of running a Beverly Hills law firm for the monasticism of Marin must have seemed shockingly unproductive. And yet, when considered through the distance of history, Mellinkoff’s nurturing of what became The Language of the Law  becomes self-evidently the most productive use of his talents.

I don’t think everyone should retreat to a quiet cabin. Probably most people would find such a commitment to intellectual minimalism intolerable. But I’m convinced that this option should be more common, especially among those with Melinkoff’s cognitive gifts. When you expand the time horizon for what you mean by “productive,” the options for crafting a deep life similarly expand.

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

A World Without Email

I’m pleased to officially announce my new book: A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. It comes out March 2nd in the US (and March 4th in the UK).

I started working on this book in 2016, almost immediately after Deep Work was released. At some point, I put the manuscript on pause to write Digital Minimalism, then returned my attention to grappling with its central ideas.

In many ways, this book is my magnum opus on the topic of technology and the workplace. If you’ve been following my articles for the New Yorker over the past year or so, or listening to my podcast, you’ve encountered a sampling of the rigorous new thinking at the core of this effort.

I’ve divided A World Without Email into two parts.

The first part, which is titled “The Case Against Email,” provides the definitive treatment on how the world of work transformed after the introduction of digital communication tools, and what unintended consequences these changes created.The second part, which is titled “Principles for A World Without Email,” introduces a framework I call attention capital theory that can be deployed to radically rethink how we work, pushing us toward a vision in which ceaseless, ad hoc messaging is replaced with much more sustainable and structured approaches to producing valuable output with our brains.

The advice in this book is designed to be relevant for several different audiences, including employees, entrepreneurs, and executives. This breadth is captured in the endorsements, which include:

Dropbox cofounder Drew Houston, who says “A World Without Email crystallizes what so many of us feel intuitively but haven’t been able to explain: the way we’re working isn’t working.”Kevin Kelly, who says “Cal Newport is on a quest to uncover better ways for knowledge workers to collaborate.”Harvard Business School Professor Leslie Perlow, who says “This book is a call to action”Greg McKeown, who calls the book ” bold, visionary, almost prophetic.”

I will, of course, be talking about the book more as we approach the publication date. If you preorder the book, hold on to your email receipt, as I’ll be announcing soon a way for you to redeem it to receive a pre-order bonus.

But until then, I’m just excited to finally be talking publicly about something I’ve been working on for so long on my own…

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Speaking of my books: if you live in the UK, the kindle version of Digital Minimalism is currently on sale for only 0.99p…if you haven’t read my latest yet, this is the absolute best time to do so!

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

Projects vs. Tasks: A Critical Distinction in Productive Scheduling

In a recent episode of my podcast, an Australian doctor named Nathan asked an interesting question regarding some difficulties he had maintaining and organizing his task list:

“David Allen asked ‘Is it actionable?’; separating tasks from ideas. But I also find that there are different types of tasks. The easiest to deal with are what I’m taking to calling ‘concrete’ tasks, such as taking out the rubbish, or submitting a final report. These are defined, necessary tasks that are cognitively easy to deal with. However, I’m also aware of ‘aspirational’ tasks, such as ‘summarize War and Peace,’ which are open-ended, and don’t really matter if you accomplish them by a specific time…they tend to just pile up.”

This is an important question because it touches on the rare productivity topic that’s both crucial to my personal process, and something that I haven’t already written much about. I thought, therefore, it would useful to briefly review the answer I gave Nathan.

In the influential world of Getting Things Done (GTD), all work eventually reduces to specific and unambiguous “next actions,” an idea David Allen adapted from the business consultant Dean Acheson (unrelated to Truman’s Secretary of State). In GTD, you might have a list of broader “projects,” such as Nathan’s example of summarizing Tolstoy, but these are just reminders that should spur you to add relevant next actions to your task list during your next review; perhaps, in this case, “buy notebook for book summary,” or “read the next 10 pages.”

As I told Nathan, I do not strictly subscribe to this philosophy of task essentialism. For me, some projects are never translated into tasks. Instead, I place them on my quarterly plan. I’ll then see the project when setting up my weekly plan. At this point, I work out what progress, if any, I want to make on it during the upcoming week. Finally, I see these notes each day as I setup my time block schedule, leading me to allocate the specific minutes the project needs during the upcoming hours.

For the sake of example, let’s tackle how I might schedule Nathan’s War and Peace case study:

Description of the project in my Quarterly Plan: “One of my goals this winter is to finish reading War and Peace, while taking good notes on each chapter.”
Sample Weekly Plan note about this project: “Put aside 30 minutes for lunch each day this week, and work on War and Peace while eating. The one exception is Thursday, as I have a lunch scheduled with Diana.”
Sample time block schedule: Every day of the week, with the exception of Thursday, includes a 30-minute time block labeled “lunch + W&P.” When I get to that block, I know exactly what I need to be working on.

For projects that require an ambiguous but significant amount of deep work, this planning flow from quarterly to weekly to daily is how I ensure that the sheer volume of cognitive effort required to accomplish something hard actually occurs. If I instead simply added the equivalent of “read the next 10 pages” to an overflowing task list, I doubt I’d ever make much progress on the things that matter.

To be clear, most of the obligations on my plate exist as concrete items in my task lists (which, as my podcast listeners know, I maintain using Trello). But most of the projects that move the needle in my career — working on a research paper, writing a major article — never get discretized into bite-size actions on a list. I instead treat them with the level of intention that their formidable difficulty deserves.

This distinction between tasks and projects is subtle, but it’s also critical to how I think about my work, so I thought it was worth discussing as we enter a new year and begin pondering how to make the most out of this annual return to a proverbial clean slate.

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

Theodore Roosevelt’s Focused Advice

One of my colleagues at Georgetown recently pointed me toward a 1902 letter that Theodore Roosevelt sent to his son Kermit, who at the time was at boarding school.

Here’s the passage that caught my attention:

“I am delighted at all the accounts I receive of how you are doing at Groton. You seem to be enjoying yourself and are getting on well. I need not tell you to do your best to cultivate ability for concentrating your thought on whatever work you are given to do—you will need it in Latin especially.”

As readers of Deep Work know, I’ve previously highlighted Teddy’s fabled powers of focus as playing a critical role in his rise, so it’s not surprising that he’s emphasizing this same skill to his son. What strikes me, however, is that this recommendation isn’t standard for all students.

The connection between concentration and effective thinking is well-understood by this point, and yet few curriculums, at any level of education, aim to help students cultivate this ability. I can think of few meta-skills more important in an increasingly symbolic and complex culture than the ability to lock in on an abstract challenge and see it through to a useful conclusion. But we rarely talk about what it actually feels like to think hard, and how to get better at it.

Teddy prefaced  his letter to Kermit by saying “I need not tell you.” The implication being that his advice on concentration was well-worn. I’m not sure that it remains so obvious in our current moment.

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

Andrew Gelman’s 4 pm Rule (a Knowledge Work Reverie)

Andrew Gelman is a professor at Columbia University with a joint appointment in the department of statistics and political science. To say he’s productive is an understatement. He’s written six book, has been cited over 120,000 times, and wields an h-index over 100 (if you’re not sure about this last statistic, ask a professor friend to explain why it’s impressive).

The reason I’m mentioning Gelman is a blog post he published earlier this week. As pointed out by the eagle-eyed reader who sent me the article, in the second paragraph, Gelman casually admits: “I never check my email before 4.”

Rationally, this is exactly what you want from a professor at a major university like Columbia: someone who is perhaps not that responsive to emails, but generates six books and 120,000 citations.

And yet, I can tell you from my own experience, and those of the many professors who send questions to my podcast or emailed me in response to my infamous 2019 article on this topic for the Chronicle of Higher Education, this noteworthy habit of Gelman’s is much more the exception than the rule in academia.

An interesting thought to ponder in the days ahead, during which the Christmas break gives us all a temporary inbox reprieve, is what the world of work would be like if Gelman’s email habit was much less exceptional. What if we were all given the cognitive space needed to pursue our field’s equivalent of 120,000 citations?

I’ll have a lot more to say about this idea in the new year, but for now we can set this up as a pleasant thought experiment; a knowledge work equivalent of dancing sugar plum dreams.

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

Unpacking Our Dialectical Relationship with Slack

Earlier this week, I published an essay in the New Yorker about Salesforce’s proposed $28 billion acquisition of Slack. You might assume that my feelings toward this slick-interfaced interruption machine are purely negative, but as I admit: “I do not dislike Slack as much as people assume given that I wrote a book titled Deep Work.”

What interests me more than easy criticism here is the knowledge sector’s dialectical relationship with this tool. People hate it, but they also kind of love it. Slack fragments your attention into minuscule shards, but it also solves issues that make email nearly untenable as a means of organizing work.

As I elaborate in the essay, it’s in this dual reaction that we find the truly important insight. Slack optimized the hyper-communicative, ad hoc, message-driven workflow that email helped make ubiquitous. We love it because it improves this approach to work, but we hate it because this approach doesn’t scale, and therefore ultimately makes us miserable — an observation succinctly captured in the piece’s title: “Slack is the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work.”

Anyway, as always, I recommend you read the original article for a fuller take on my thinking.

The post Unpacking Our Dialectical Relationship with Slack first appeared on Cal Newport.

From Instagram to Insistent Goats: Another Life After Social Media Case Study

Not long ago, I received a note from a reader named Shandel who wanted to share her experience with social media. She began by noting that she used to “love” these services:

I loved meeting new people and adding them to my friends list. It was a thrill!…I joined a running group and felt super cool to be posting with them and to be tagged in their photos. I was proud of my life and wanted to show it off.”

Then, like many, she began to feel “some unrest.” She worried that she was looking at photos of her kids more than she looked at them in real life, and found herself adjusting her family like models to produce better posts. She started to feel creeped out that “friends” were commenting on these photos even though they’d never actually met.

A breaking point came when the family car got stuck in the snow. Shandel’s instinct was to jump out and begin filming her husband’s efforts to free the tires, as it seemed like a scene that could yield a good haul of likes. “Can you help me!?”, he finally called out in exasperation.

That was the final push: Shandel quit social media. When she wrote me, it had been six months since she made the decision.

“It’s okay. I’m okay. I don’t need to know everything that’s going on. My kids have stopped asking me to put down my phone. I am busier now than I’ve ever been, and I feel more peace in my heart about how I spend my time. I’m currently working full-time from home, raising my kids, raising my goat kids, and gardening.”

Shandel hasn’t abandoned using technology to stay connected, but now does so on her own terms. She still takes pictures of her kids, for example, but instead of posting them to Instagram, she texts them directly to her “actual friends and family.”

The thought of Shandel and her children out in their fields (she sent me a picture of their land: it’s bucolic), feeding the goats, tending the garden, looking toward the horizon and not a screen: made me happy.  It’s a nice reminder that although social media can offer diversion from a lot that’s tough in life, it disrupts what’s good as well, and that’s rarely a fair trade.

The post From Instagram to Insistent Goats: Another Life After Social Media Case Study first appeared on Cal Newport.

Rethinking the Internet, Again

In October, I wrote a blog post suggesting a framework for the social internet in which users own their own data, including social links, original content, and descriptions of their interests. In my proposal, social networks would compete to offer you the best experience using this common pool of information.

If you don’t like how Instagram is observing your behavior to sell ads, for example, you can now turn to an alternative site that has access to the same pictures and social connections, and can therefore show you the same material, but now with more privacy.

Similarly, if you don’t like Twitter’s content policies, you can turn to any number of alternative applications that have access to the same mini-posts, but can apply their own house rules about what they’ll display or recommend.

A lot of interesting things can happen, in other words, once individual companies can no longer horde your information.

As many readers helpfully pointed out in response to my October post, I was not the first person to have this idea. I was particularly pleased to discover an open source project that attempts to implement something more or less exactly in line with this vision, and that’s headed by someone who knows a thing or two about the world wide web because, well, he invented it.

The project is named Solid and it was started by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who I used to occasionally see in the elevator at MIT, as his World Wide Web Consortium was headquartered on the floor below my office in the Stata Center.

The core idea of Solid is that people house their digital data in decentralized servers called Pods. You can run your own Pod server, or use a third-party server hosted by a company you trust. The key is that no one organization controls everything. Instead, as with the classic web, all servers can be accessed using a common protocol.

When a web site or application wants to use some of your data, it must now ask you for permission. Using cryptographic tools, you can then grant the requester access to exactly the information you want it to have, and it can use your permission to go gather this data from the relevant Pods. The reverse can also happen: with the right permission, a service can write new things to one of your Pods, such as adding a new social link, or a note from a healthcare provider.

No one company owns your information, and no company can use your information without you knowing. (Indeed, though not specifically referenced by the Solid project, this scheme might even enable Jaron Lanier’s provocative idea of micro-payments in exchange for monetizing your information.)

My short summary here doesn’t do justice to the complex technology underpinning Solid. You can find out more at the official project web site, or in this recent profile from Tech Crunch, which includes helpful case studies.

The larger point I want to emphasize is that we don’t have to settle for the current configuration of our online existence. There’s nothing inevitable about a setup in which a few mega-companies own all of our data and therefore dictate our digital culture.  We can do more than boycotts and legislative threats.

Thirty years ago, one man, working as a technology fellow at CERN, had an idea that completely changed the trajectory of the internet. Why couldn’t he — or someone like him — do it again?

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My friends at Mouse Books (as featured in Digital Minimalism) are at it again. They just launched a kickstarter for a special edition 3-book holiday collection dedicated to the topic of hell. Seems about right for 2020. If you’re looking for a high quality analog alternative to numbing yourself with your phone, check out this new series.

The post Rethinking the Internet, Again first appeared on Cal Newport.

On Technology and Focus: ASMR, VR, and the First Steps Toward Immersive Single Tasking

Around 2010, a curious new term arose in obscure but energetic internet chatrooms: autonomous sensory meridian response. ASMR, as it was soon abbreviated, described a peculiar form of paresthesia experienced as a tingling that starts in the scalp and then moves down the back. It’s often triggered by specific sounds, like soft whispering or a paintbrush scraping canvas. Not surprisingly, those sensitive to ASMR sometimes found Bob Ross reruns to be a reliable source of the effect.

What makes ASMR relevant to our interests here is that it happened to emerge as a topic of discussion just as YouTube emerged as a cultural force. Soon a cottage industry arose of AMSR videos featuring meticulously recorded trigger sounds. One such video opens on a straw stirring seltzer water. A little later it zooms in on a knife scraping dried blush on a make-up tray. It’s been viewed over four and a half million times.

The reason I know about ASMR is that as these “tingle videos” grew in popularity, they spawned a sub-genre called ASMR rooms. The goal in these videos was no longer to trigger the classical tingling response, but instead to invoke a sense of meditative calm and focus.

One such video, for example, is a mostly static shot of Charles Dickens’s victorian-style writing room, with animated flames crackling in the fireplace and a storm raging outside the windows. The scene runs for close to two hours. The only thing that changes is the intensity of the rain:

A popular variety of ASMR room scenes recreates locations from the Harry Potter universe. A couple days ago, a reader pointed me toward one of her favorite examples of this category, a recreation of the magical workshop of Newt Scamander from the Fantastic Beasts movies:

This video features both rain and glowing oil lamps. Extra touches include a glass vessel containing gelatinous, glowing, magical ephemera, and a writing quill that ever so slowly rotates in its inkwell.

The reader told me that she plays the video full screen on her computer while positioning a word processor document in front of it. She listens to the stereo sound in high quality noise cancelling headphones. Though she works out of a “small and noisy urban flat,” the video and sounds help her fall into a state of concentration when she needs to write.

I mention this all because I’m increasingly convinced that something interesting is happening here. 

I’ve written before about immersive single tasking, my term for applying technology to induce states of productive and rewarding concentration. It seems like the thriving ASMR room community may currently hold something close to a lead in investigating this possibility.

To me, the next logical step is to figure out how to make this work in a virtual reality context, where the effect of the immersion would be significantly amplified.

The connection between ASMR and virtual reality is at least a half-decade old. And more recently, people have begun porting the ASMR room experience into this new medium as well:

The big problem with the latter trend, however, is that you cannot easily work if you have a large plastic rig covering your eyes. To immerse yourself in a 3d virtual reality recreation of Hogsmeade village on a snowy evening might indeed put you into a state of creative contemplation, but it’s a waste if you can’t also craft any useful artifacts during your moments of techno-induced concentration.

Which brings me to a recent idea: why not integrate automated speech recognition? Perhaps we’re just one small step into the adjacent possible away from actually deriving a strong immersive single tasking benefit here. What if, in other words, we augmented a VR ASMR room with basic speech recognition functionality?

Here’s what I roughly imagine: While you sit in Newt Scamander’s magical workshop, listening to the rain, and examining the haphazard cabinets of curiosities that surround you, a simple click of your VR controller puts you in transcription mode, and your speech automatically appears fleetingly in the scene as lines on the piece of parchment arranged on the desk. When you’re done, your notes are stored safely in a text file.

This would not be an efficient way to polish a chapter of your complex novel, but it could be just what you need to figure out the outline that gets you past a tricky plot point, or, in another context, unstick a new business strategy for your company, or capture an insight that unlocks a recalcitrant proof.

I don’t know whether or not VR AMSR rooms combined with voice recognition technology would actually provide a useful amplification of our latent deep work capabilities, but in a moment in which we’re temporarily stuck in our homes due to a pandemic, eager to produce things that matter, while also constrained by the prosaic limitations of our “small and noisy” surroundings, the time has never been better to start experimenting with the role technology can play in unlocking our cognitive potential.

The post On Technology and Focus: ASMR, VR, and the First Steps Toward Immersive Single Tasking first appeared on Cal Newport.