Cal Newport's Blog, page 15

When Did Productivity Become Personal?

My latest article for The New Yorker, published on Tuesday, is titled “The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.” It’s not, however, really about David Allen’s productivity system, which longtime readers (and listeners)  know I really admire. It’s instead about a deeper question that I hadn’t heard discussed much before: Why do we leave office workers to figure out on their own how to get things done?

With the notable exception of agile software development teams, companies in this sector largely leave decisions about how work is assigned, reviewed, and organized up to individuals. We promulgate clear objectives and construct motivating corporate cultures, but when it comes to actually executing these tasks, we just hook everyone up to an email address or Slack channel and tell them to rock and roll. This has led to a culture of overload and fragmented attention that makes everyone involved miserable.

I don’t want to spoil too much of the piece, but here are two big picture conclusions:

First, our current commitment to autonomy in knowledge work is more arbitrary than we realize. It largely comes from a single, influential management theorist who shaped the evolution of this emerging sector in the mid-twentieth century.
Second, if companies got more involved with the workflows organizing how things actually got done, they could likely increase both their profitability and their employees’ satisfaction.

If you combine this article with my preceding two efforts for The New Yorker, which focused on the topics of remote work and email, respectively, you’ll encounter, in increasing high fidelity, hints of my rapidly-maturing critique of knowledge work, and my optimism for its future.

The post When Did Productivity Become Personal? first appeared on Cal Newport.

The Time Blocking Revolution Begins…

I’m excited to announce that my new Time-Block Planner is now available everywhere books are sold online.

I first described my time blocking practice on this blog back in 2013. The idea began to gain traction after I popularized it in my 2016 book, Deep Work. In the years since, it’s been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and Lifehacker.

I often claim time blocking is the secret to my productivity. In my experience, time blockers accomplish roughly twice as much work per week as compared to those who use more reactive methods, and enjoy a much clearer separation between work and non-work time, significantly reducing professional stress and anxiety.

Now for the first time, this system has been captured in a daily planner that makes it easy for anyone to implement these ideas in their own professional life. (To learn more about the system and exactly how the planner works, check out the dedicated site I launched at TimeBlockPlanner.com.)

There are two reasons why I decided to publish my own planner:

The first was convenience. I was tired of hand-formatting blank notebooks. I was also frustrated by paper quality issues and the lack of page marker ribbons that help quickly identify the current page. This planner solves those problems, reducing the friction required to implement daily planning.
The second, and more important, was motivational. It’s one thing to read about a productivity system, but it’s another thing to actually invest in and own an artifact that’s dedicated to implementing that system. I want more people to time block. Buying this planner signals to yourself that you’re a time blocker. It’s also an attractive aesthetic object, with nice paper and detailing. It’s a pleasure to use, especially with a micro-ball liquid ink pen (like this one). These factors might sound small, but they make a big difference when it comes to the challenge of consistently overcoming your mental resistance to stay organized. I think of the planner like a gym membership or Peleton subscription for your time and attention.

To find our more about the planner check out the dedicated site. You can buy the planner at the standard places: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powells, Hudson Booksellers, Books-a-Million, etc., and for readers in the UK, it’s available at Amazon UK.

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Staying Productive on Distracted Days

I don’t normally spend much time reading information online, so I definitely noticed this morning the unusual degree to which I was distracted by breaking election news. This points to an interesting question that I’ve seen discussed in some articles in recent days: what’s the best way to keep getting things done on truly distracting days?

My answer: don’t.

“Productivity” is a slippery term. It’s often used to refer exclusively to the rate at which you produce value for your business or employer. I tend to apply it more broadly to describe the intentional allocation of your time and attention toward things that matter to you and away from diversions that don’t.

A lot of days, this probably involves a solid push on professional activities, as craft is an important part of cultivating a deep life. But not every day. If there are consequential national events transpiring, or you’re dealing with a crisis in your personal life, or you’re not feeling well, a productive day doesn’t necessarily require steady progress through a task list.

The tools I talk about here and on my podcast, like time-block planning, are really powerful, and offer the ability to help you to execute intentional, high impact schedules. This doesn’t, however, eliminate the philosophical question of what exactly a “high impact” schedule means on any given day.

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The Stone Carver in an Age of Computer Screens

A reader recently pointed me toward a short video titled “A Continuous Shape.” It profiles Anna Rubincam, a stone carver from South London who works alone out of a utilitarian studio; sliding doors open to a tree-lined patio.

The video follows Rubincam’s efforts over three weeks to produce a stone carving of a young woman’s head. It starts with her taking measurements from a live model. These are then translated into a clay figure, and subsequently engraved, one precise chisel hit after another, into a solid chunk of stone.

The reader who sent me the video titled his message: “Epitome of deep work.” I think he’s on to something.

When you watch Rubincam in action, it’s hard not to feel an intimation of wistfulness. Something about her efforts, in which she stands alone in a minimalist chamber, and hour after hour, with hard-won skill, manifests cognitive abstractions into concrete reality, seems about right.

I think the reason portrayals of physical craft are instinctually compelling is that they present a conception of “work” that closely aligns with our species’ wiring. Part of what separated us from our primate ancestors is our ability to understand the world symbolically; allowing us to make an abstract plan that we then translate into something real. We’re rewarded for this final step with a sense of satisfaction, and punished for its absence with a sense of anxious hollowness.

When contemplating these realities, I can’t help but wonder about the psychic toll of replacing the simplicity of such craft with email, and Zoom, and half-hearted PowerPoint. As I elaborate in Digital Minimalism, a brain forged in the Paleolithic doesn’t fully understand the digital, and is easily overwhelmed by a notion of work defined by constant, unstructured, unceasing electronic pings and dings.

Late in the video, Rubincam looks to camera and explains:

“Once you’ve created something it takes up a physical space in the world and it has a permanence that will hopefully outlast you.”

Here’s to hoping that as the world of work evolves beyond its tactile foundation, we can find a way to extract similar levels of calm human contentment from our daily efforts.

The post The Stone Carver in an Age of Computer Screens first appeared on Cal Newport.

A Modest Proposal: Deweaponizing Network Effects

I recently read an important new article titled “Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction.” It was written by  Vikram Bhargava and Manuel Velasquez, two professors from Santa Clara University, and published earlier this fall in the journal Business Ethics Quarterly.

The article applies a rigorous ethical analysis to purposefully addictive social media platforms. In one section, for example, the authors deploy Martha Nussbaum’s influential capabilities approach to demonstrate that these platforms impair many of the elements required for a dignified human life. Their conclusion is that from a strictly philosophical perspective, service like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram present a “serious moral problem.”

This article is an important academic adjunct to the topics explored in the recent Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, and I highly recommend reading it.

I was also, however, intrigued by the concluding section, which explored implications and solutions (and cited Digital Minimalism, which I appreciated). This got me thinking about more radical responses to these present moral problems. I thought it might be fun to share one such,  admittedly half-baked, notion here, with advance apologies to the originators of the many similar ideas I’m almost certainly inadvertently overlapping.

What if we got more serious about ceding users ownership over all of their social internet data: both what they’ve posted, but also their links; followers, friends, etc.?

Major legislative responses, such as the European Union’s GDPR, have tried to enforce data ownership, but what I have in mind is both simpler and more extreme.

In my hypothetical scheme, everyone has a cross-platform universal identifier. Every stable social connection on a given service can be imagined as a labelled edge in a social graph that contains a node for every universal identifier.

The key in this scheme is that these edges are owned by the user and must be easily portable to any service.

If, for example, you join a new social internet platform, you should be able, with a click of a button, to import all of your existing social connections from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter .

Furthermore — and here’s where the proposal gets more fanciful — all such services must provide APIs that make it easy for one to connect to another. The new social internet service you joined, for example, should be able to easily pull in all new Tweets you would have seen in your Twitter timeline, or all photos your Instagram friends have recently posted. (For more on some fledgling attempts at such standards, see my New Yorker piece on the “indie social media” movement.)

As argued in the Business Ethics Quarterly article cited above, one of the major moral issues with existing social media platforms is their ability to trap you in their walled garden, at which point they can, without restraint, wield attention engineering to exploit every last morsel of monetizable attention or data from your distracted husk of a digital body. You can’t leave the walled garden, because everything you care about is locked inside.

But in a scheme like the one proposed here, the locks are opened. If you don’t like Twitter’s addictive interface, or the outrage-inducing Tweets its algorithms push into your timeline, you can jump over to another service that doesn’t try to addict you; perhaps one that charges a modest subscription fee and instead curates a timeline of “deep thoughts” on selected topics, or shows you only the best or most originally twisted comedic memes of the day.

If we want to follow this train of thought to its radical but rational terminus, one might even imagine a publicly-funded technology consortium that stores all social links and all data posted or received on this social graph. In this scenario, every service works with the same public database, forcing them to compete only on the experience and value they bring to their users.

When you’re not trapped in the garden, in other words, you’re not compelled to put up with abuse.

To be fair, I can already think of a dozen issues with this particular, admittedly sketchy proposal. But there’s a broader point lurking underneath that I feel stronger about. Too many of the “solutions” proposed for the moral calamities induced by existing social media platforms focus on directly forcing those platforms to behave better.

But if we owned our social internet destiny, we wouldn’t need Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or (God forbid) Tik Tok,  to behave better. We could just turn to an easily accessible, better alternative.

The post A Modest Proposal: Deweaponizing Network Effects first appeared on Cal Newport.

My New Planner + The Time Block Academy

Longtime readers and recent podcast listeners know that I’m a massive advocate of a productivity technique called time-block planning, which is at the core of my strategy for getting important things done in an increasingly distracted world.

After years of hand-formatting generic notebooks to satisfy my time-block planning needs, I decided to design my own planner optimized for exactly this activity.

Here’s the result…

The Time-Block Planner will be available everywhere books are sold online on November 10th and can be pre-ordered today.

I’ll share more details on the planner and the method it encodes as we get closer to the publication date. In the meantime, however, I wanted to discuss a special event I’m organizing for those hardcore time blockers who pre-order the planner before November 10th.

The event is called Time Block Academy.

It’s a live Zoom webinar that will be held November 13th at 3pm eastern. During the event, I’ll answer both live and pre-submitted questions about time blocking, productivity more generally, or whatever else is on your mind — sort of like a live episode of Deep Questions attended by a select crowd.

To gain admission, pre-order the Time-Block Planner at your preferred retailer, and email your proof of purchase to timeblockplanner@prh.com. My publisher will email you back with details about the webinar, as well as a link to a video tutorial I created that gives you a sneak peak of the planner and how it works.

(US Residents, 18+. Ends November 09, 2020. See terms at this link.)

The post My New Planner + The Time Block Academy first appeared on Cal Newport.

Churchill’s D-Day Task List

Last week, I received an email from a reader who had just returned from a trip to the Churchill War Rooms, a London museum housed in the bunkers, built underneath the Treasury Building, where Winston Churchill safely commanded the British war efforts as the Blitz bombarded the city above.

The reader had photographed an artifact he thought I might find interesting: a to-do list labeled “D Day,” written by one of the secretaries serving Churchill.

Here’s a detail shot:

Superficially, I was intrigued because I’ve been consuming a lot of WWII history recently. (At the moment, I’m concurrently reading The Splendid and the Vile along with David Roll’s excellent new George Marshall biography.)

But it also resonated at a deeper level.

On my podcast, I’ve been talking a lot about the notion of “facing the productivity dragon.” The idea is that when you’re confronted with a seemingly untenable set of obligations — as so many are right now during these pandemic times as jobs disappear, or force us to somehow juggle mounting work responsibilities with closed-school childcare — it’s still best to enumerate the full scope of the challenge.

Don’t retreat into frustration and despair. Write down everything that’s demanded of you, even if you can’t possibly satisfy all of the obligations. Then make the best plan you can given the difficult circumstances. The comfort comes from the plan, not the achievable outcomes.

Face the dragon, in other words, even if it’s terrifying. You’ll end up calmer and with more resolve than those who flee.

This is what came to mind when I looked at the above artifact images from the Churchill War Rooms. Even when forced to deal with something as hopelessly complex, and fraught, and impossible, and insanely high stakes as the reconquest of Europe, the first step was to write down, in humble script, the full scope of the tasks required for such an overwhelming endeavor.

You cannot slay the dragon until you can see it.

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On the Neurochemistry of Deep Work

Andrew Huberman is a neurobiologist at Stanford Medical School. His lab specializes in neuroplasticity, the process by which the human brain changes its neuronal connections.

A reader recently brought to my attention a fascinating discussion about learning. It’s from a podcast episode Huberman recorded with Joe Rogan back in July.

Around the two minute mark of the clip, Rogan provides Huberman with a hypothetical scenario: “You’re 35, and want to learn a new skill, what is the best way to set these patterns?”

As someone who is in my thirties and makes a living learning hard things, I was, as you might imagine, interested to hear what Dr. Huberman had to say on this issue. Which is all to preface that I was gratified to hear the following reply:

“If you want to learn and change your brain as an adult, there has to be a high level of focus and engagement. There’s no way around this…you have to lean in and focus extremely hard.”

As longtime readers know, I made this same argument in Deep Work, where I noted that “the ability to learn hard things quickly” was one of the two main advantages of training your ability to concentrate.

But Huberman blows past my simplistic explanations and dissects the complex neurochemistry behind learning. I won’t try to replicate all the details of his impromptu lecture, but I’ll elaborate one particularly interesting point.

Huberman notes that to attain significant brain rewiring requires that you induce a sense of “urgency” that leads to the release of norepinephrine. This hormone, however, will make you feel “agitated,” like you need to get up and go do something. It’s here that you must apply intense focus to fight that urge, ultimately leading to the release of acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter that in combination with the norepinephrine can induce brain growth.

I’m probably bastardizing some of these biological details, but regardless, they point to a narrow example of a broader point. The ability to focus is more than just an anachronistic novelty. It’s at the core of how us humans adapt and thrive in a complex world.

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Speaking of Deep Work, as I write this, it’s currently one of Amazon’s Daily Deals, meaning that the Kindle version is available for only $3.99. If you haven’t yet taken a deep dive into deep work, now is a great time to do so!

The post On the Neurochemistry of Deep Work first appeared on Cal Newport.

Do Smartphones Make Us Dumber?

A reader recently pointed me toward an intriguing article published in 2017 in the Journal for the Association of Consumer Research. It was titled, “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.”

The authors of the paper report the results of a straightforward experiment. Subjects are invited into a laboratory to participate in some assessment exercises. Before commencing, however, they’re asked to put their phones away. Some subjects are asked to place their phone on the desk next to the computer on which they’re working; some are told to put their phone in their bag; some are told to put their phone in the other room. (The experimenters had clever ways of manipulating these conditions without arousing suspicion.)

Each subject was then subjected to a battery of standard cognitive capacity tests. The result? Subjects measured notably lower on working memory capacity and fluid intelligence when the phone was next to them on the desk versus out of sight. This was true even though in all the cases the subjects didn’t actually use their phones.

The mere presence of the device, in other words, sapped cognitive resources. The effect was particularly pronounced in those who self-reported to be heavy phone users.

I think we’re only scratching the surface on the damage caused by our current technology habits. As I argued in Digital Minimalism, these tools are both powerful and indifferent to your best interests. Until you decide to adopt a minimalist ethos, and deploy technology intentionally to serve specific values you care about, the damage it inflicts will continue to accumulate.

The post Do Smartphones Make Us Dumber? first appeared on Cal Newport.

Eric Posner Thinks It’s a “Serious Mistake” for Law Professors to Use Twitter

Eric Posner is arguably one of the most influential and prolific law professors in the country at the moment. Which is why I paid attention when around the 39 minute mark of a recent interview, Posner was asked his thoughts on law professors using Twitter.

“I’ve thought about this a lot because it now seems like every law professor wants to have this public presence,” Posner replied. “And I increasingly think this is a serious mistake.”

As he elaborates, becoming a “good” academic who is “serious” about research is a hard job:

“It requires a huge amount of work, especially at the beginning, to absorb the literature, to absorb the norms…I think a lot of junior people who are on Twitter…should be educating themselves.”

As he then clarifies, most of what transpires on Twitter is people “ranting” and reading other peoples’ “rants.” Participating in that culture, he says, doesn’t contribute in a meaningful way to the public debate.

The interviewer then presents Posner with another standard argument for why academics should engage with social media: it’s a way to “establish prominence in a field or establish name recognition.”

Posner doesn’t buy it:

“They’re wrong. You see. It’s a classic mistake. They don’t realize that everyone else is thinking that as well…you think you’re going to get name recognition, and you’ll get known, because you’re sending out these really clever and incisive tweets that are going to get the attention of the world. But you’ve forgotten that a thousand other people are doing exactly the same thing.”

As Posner elaborates with acid precision, his experience with Twitter taught him that what it’s really good at is “tricking” you into thinking that “the whole world is waiting for you to pronounce on some important issue.” This sense of importance is intoxicating. But as he argues, with the exception of a very small number of outliers, the audience for most users doesn’t extend far beyond bots and some friends.

Even I don’t fully escape Posner’s derision, as he also briefly mentions blog posting as a similar waste of time. (The irony!) But I think it’s his take on Twitter that rings particularly true. I wrote some about this “illusion of influence” concept in Deep Work. These services don’t hook you because they’re interesting; they hook you because they make you feel like you’re interesting.

Which is all well and good, until you look up five years later at your tenure review and lament about all the high impact papers you could have written instead.

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