Cal Newport's Blog, page 16

Michael Connelly Starts Writing Before the Sun Comes Up

One of the notable realities of my life, given the topics I write about, is the regularity with which people send me various articles about the work habits of the novelist Michael Connelly. Here’s a representative sample from an interview published in The Daily Beast: 

“I get up to write while it’s still dark, 5 or 5:30. I start by editing and rewriting everything I did the day before, and that gives some momentum for the day. I get to new territory when the sun is coming up. I take a break to take my daughter to school…then I get back to it. If it’s early in a book, I’ll only write til lunch, because it can be hard for me to get that momentum going. If it’s late in a book and really flowing, I’ll just keep writing and writing until I’m either too tired or have been called to dinner.”

He later elaborates that he uses blackout shades to transform his writing office into a space beyond time. “You don’t know if it’s light or dark,” he explains. “I just try to put everything else out of focus and look only at the screen of my laptop.”

This routine is common among popular genre fiction writers (see, for example, John Grisham or Lee Child). To fulfill the economic necessity of publishing one book per year — which, as I can tell you from experience, is really hard — they strip down their work habits to support maximum cognitive output.

For the rest of us, drowning in our inboxes and Zoom invites, this should be more than a source of aspirational escape. It represents a reminder that getting the most out of the messy jumble of neurons known as the human brain requires sacrifices. To instead orient work around pleasing everyone who might need you in the moment is to ultimately please no one with the quality of what you produce.

The post Michael Connelly Starts Writing Before the Sun Comes Up first appeared on Cal Newport.

Life of Focus: Now Open

 

The first session Life of Focus, the online course I created with Scott Young, is now open. The registration period will last until Friday, September 4th (midnight Pacific Time).

Click here to join.

As I elaborated last week, this course is designed to help you transform both your professional and personal lives so that you focus more on things that really matter, and spend less of your day mired in distractions that don’t. It will then help you train your brain to make the most of the time you put aside for these important pursuits.

Drawing on ideas first explored in our bestselling books, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and Ultralearning, the course is divided into three months, each built around a concrete project that pushes you forward in your transformation into a life of focus. You’ll be guided in these efforts by video lessons, worksheets, and community support from your fellow students.

We’re proud of this course. We’ve been working on it for well over a year and have integrated into its construction the hard-won experience gained from serving over 5,000 students in our last online offering, Top Performer.

You can find out more details about the course and register here.

We’ll be closing registration on Friday. I hope to see you in the course!

(And if this is not of interest, worry not: this is the last blog post you’ll see about this session of the course. I will be sending some more information to my email list this week, but I’ve added a link to these emails that allows list subscribers to easily opt-out of receiving these course-related emails.)

The post Life of Focus: Now Open first appeared on Cal Newport.

Focus Week: Take Control of Your Time

In the first lesson of our Focus Week series, I suggested that you unplug to give your brain and emotions a breather in our current moment of constant, agitating distraction. In the second lesson, I suggested that you implement a daily deep reading habit to retrain your neural networks to sustain and find satisfaction in unbroken concentration. In this third and final lesson, I want to talk about how to leverage this newly reclaimed clarity to focus your life.

At the heart of my advice is a simple recommendation: take control of your time. To be more concrete, when thinking about your work day, I suggest that you give every minute a job.

I call this technique “time blocking,” and I’ve been talking about it here since at least 2013. I also popularized it in my book, Deep Work, discuss it often on my podcast, Deep Questions, and am even releasing a planner dedicated to the method in November. Which is all to say: I’m a fan of this strategy.

Here’s the basic idea…

Most people tackle their work day using what I call the list/reactive method. This casual approach has you fill the time between scheduled meetings and calls reacting to emails and occasionally, when the mood hits you, trying to make progress on items plucked from an unwieldy task list.
The time blocking method, by contrast, has you partition your days into blocks of time and assign specific work to these blocks. Maybe, for example, you’re working on a strategy memo from 9:00 to 10:00, then after a 10:00 to 10:30 meeting you put aside thirty minutes for checking email, followed by ninety-minutes, from 11:00 to 12:30, when you’ll try to complete a project report that’s due soon, and so on. Every minute gets a job.  (What if you get knocked off your schedule by an unexpected crisis or task that takes longer than expected? Not a problem. You just build an updated time block schedule for the remainder of the day the next time you get a chance. The key is maintaining intention about your time, not perfection in your planning.)

There are two problems with the list/reactive method. First, because you’re letting other peoples’ needs drive your activities, the balance between the urgent and the important becomes skewed. You feel busy and exhausted, but you’re not really moving the needle on the things that matter.

Second, because you have no plan beyond just “trying to get things done,” it’s easy for your mind to keep deciding it needs ad hoc internet “breaks,” which have a way of transforming into time-devouring rabbit holes. This decreases the total amount of work you’re able to accomplish.

Time blocking, by contrast, gives you fine-grained control over the balance between the urgent and the important. In addition, because you know what you’re supposed to be doing at any given moment, you’re much less likely to take unplanned breaks. Time blockers, in other words, don’t web surf.

This scheduling commitment also provides you hard evidence on how much time you really have available, and how long things really take. This reality check can be bracing at first, but ultimately it’s crucial. It leads to a more vigorous essentialism (e.g., as I recently discussed on Greg McKeown’s podcast), and more conservatism on how early you start projects.

A word of warning, however, is that this strategy is cognitively demanding. Part of the reason time blockers get so much more done is because their average intensity of focus is quite high compared to their semi-distracted peers. Such concentration, however, takes a toll. So you do not want to extend this blocking discipline to your time outside of work, as this excessive rigidity will eventually lead to burn out.

Escaping from the noise of a distracted world and becoming reacquainted with the pleasures of presence and concentration are crucial preconditions to a focused life. To achieve this state in full, however, ultimately requires that you take the final step of actually focusing your attention with intention and purpose.

Time block planning will move you in this direction. It’s important to note that it’s not enough by itself. A life of focus also needs, for example, regular time to reflect about what to focus on in your work, and a more serious commitment to directing your free time toward higher quality and more rewarding activities. Beyond these concerns, solitude is important, as is aggressive community engagement and cultivating high quality leisure.

But time blocking will set the needed tone; a signal to yourself that you take seriously how you direct your newly empowered attention.

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If you’re looking to go beyond the advice offered in this Focus Week series, and take even more radical action toward reclaiming your life from the forces of distraction, then I invite you to stay tuned to find out more about Life of Focus, the new online course that I co-created with Scott Young.

The course takes students through a three-month, guided training. The first month is about gaining more focus in your work life, the second month is about increasing focus in your life outside of work, and the third month is about training your brain to focus at levels of intensity that enable astounding feats of cognitive accomplishment.

We’re opening the course for registration on Monday, August 31st. I’ll post a note on my blog and email newsletter on Monday pointing you to where you can learn more.

I hope to see you in the course. But regardless, hopefully this week has already injected a new appreciation of focus in your life. Stay deep!

The post Focus Week: Take Control of Your Time first appeared on Cal Newport.

Focus Week: Rediscover Depth

When I was a young graduate student at MIT, I was impressed by Alan Lightman, a one-time physicist, who turned toward essay and novel writing and ended up accepting a humanities professorship and starting the school’s science journalism program.

What initially caught my attention about Lightman was the following line, which to this day remains defiantly perched at the top of his academic homepage:

“I do not use e-mail, but you can reach me at my MIT office: [mailing address]”

But what really captured my imagination was when I heard about Lightman’s island.

In his late 30’s, at a time when the was looking for a quiet place for him to write and his wife to paint, Lightman stumbled across a 30-acre island in Casco Bay, Maine, shared by six families. There are no bridges or ferries servicing the island; no electricity; no plumbing; no internet or phone. Lightman and his wife spend their summers at this isolated outpost decompressing and creating.

“The world is moving at much too fast a pace: everybody is plugged in 24/7, everything is rush rush rush,” he said in a recent interview. “The island in the summer is a place where we can unplug, slow down, listen to ourselves think.”

I was reminded of Lightman while recently reading about Mary Somerville, the 19th century polymath who was among the first women to be elected to the Royal Astronomical Society. As Somerville recalls in her autobiography, as a child, she would find ways to evade the chores and social activities that defined the lives of women of her social station to instead explore the nearby sea coast:

“When the tide was out I spent hours on the sands…I made collections of shells, such as were cast ashore, some so small that they appeared like white specks in patches of black sand. There was a small pier on the sands for shipping limestone brought from the coal mines inland. I was astonished to see the surface of these blocks of stone covered with beautiful impressions of what seemed to be leaves; how they got there I could not imagine, but I picked up the broken bits, and even large pieces, and brought them to my repository.”

Her collection, begun during those childhood expeditions, is now housed at the college named in her honor at the University of Oxford.

Lightman and Somerville’s lives were defined and elevated by regular exposure to depth: extended periods of undistracted time during which the mind can focus intensely on one thing, or purposefully on nothing at all. In both cases, this depth was hard-won. Lightman’s island was remote and offered primitive living conditions. He had never used a boat before committing to a house that required one to access. Somerville, for her part, had to battle the gender expectations of her era to carve out a deeper life. It never came easy.

But they invested the effort because, as I argue in Deep Work, we can find evidence from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and theology that all supports the same conclusion: humans thrive on concentration and presence.

Which brings us to the last five months: a period in which such moments of depth were lost to the daily waves of anxiety and uncertainty.

In my previous Focus Week essay, I recommended unplugging to provide your brain some breathing room. Here I’m recommending that you put this breathing room to good use by reintroducing yourself to the pleasures of concentrating without distraction on something difficult but rewarding; to rediscover, in other words, the necessity of depth.

There are many ways to execute this reintroduction. For the sake of concreteness, here is one specific strategy among many that I’ve found to be effective: read two chapters from a book every day; with at least one of the chapters read in a scenic or otherwise interesting setting.

If you’ve been splashing in a world of distracting shallowness since March, you may need to ease back into regular engagement with complicated material. I would suggest starting with books that are easy to read, such as popular novels, or narrative non-fiction, or advice writing. As you complete each book, however, raise the difficulty of the next. Your goal is to get to a place where the two chapters consumed each day really push your mind.

(In my own practice of this discipline, for example, which I started over the summer, I’m currently working on the famed Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy’s 600-page tome, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours.)

The addendum about finding a scenic or interesting location is meant to help your brain ritualistically context shift. This will help your concentration and increase the satisfaction of the exercise. A nearby park works well for this purpose. If you have access to woods, especially woods with a stream, that’s even better. Sitting outdoors at a cafe can be equally effective. The goal is to distinguish the activity from everyday life, providing that moment of presence enjoyed by Lightman on his island or Sommerville by the seashore.

Finding time to read is not easy, especially for those of us juggling remote work with a lack of childcare. You might have to use early mornings, or late evenings, or 20-minute”meetings” put on your shared work calendar that secretly protect time for you to dash outside and knock off some mid-day pages. The specific quantity of two chapters was selected to be easy enough that most people can fit it in most days, but hard enough that it still generates a benefit.

It’s important to emphasize that this commitment is no indulgence. You cannot exist in a persistent state of agitated distraction. A regular dose of depth will do more than provide you a fleeting moment of calm, it will begin a more lasting process of rewiring your brain back toward a state of concentration, and insight, and creativity that’s much more compatible with a satisfying and meaningful life, even in times of struggle.

The post Focus Week: Rediscover Depth first appeared on Cal Newport.

Focus Week: Give Your Brain Some Breathing Room

I opened my book Digital Minimalism with an excerpt from an Andrew Sullivan essay, published in New York magazine in 2007. “An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts,” Sullivan warned. “It broke me. It might break you, too.”

I noted that Sullivan’s experience as a burnt out professional blogger was extreme, but that a diminished echo of his distress was beginning to spread through a culture increasingly glued to its phones. Over the past five months, this diminished echo has exploded into full out replication. We no longer just feel hints of Sullivan’s distress; we’re living it completely.

The anxious uncertainty of the pandemic, combined with social and political unrest, combined with an information landscape dominated by a tribalized social media, is breaking us. Our days are fragmented by a fast drip of insistently panicked content that wrings anxiety, outrage, and fear from our autonomic nervous systems until we’re left exhausted and emotionally dry.

If you’ll excuse the understatement: this is not good.

It is with these observations in mind that I think a fitting place to start Focus Week is with an urgent plea to unplug — to allow the fragments of your attention to coalesce back into meaningful stretches of presence, and your emotions to re-stabilize. You cannot reclaim a life of focus until you reclaim your brain from the distractions that have ensnared it in recent months.

I have two concrete pieces of advice to offer. The first concerns news consumption. To abstain from all information about the world at this current moment would be a betrayal of your civic duty. On the other hand, to monitor every developing story in real time, like a breaking news producer, is a betrayal of your sanity.

I suggest the following compromise: check in on the news for 45 minutes, once a day, preferably in the morning.

You can listen to one of those popular news round up podcasts while you perform chores or go for a morning walk. You can browse the main headlines of a newspaper. You can have the radio news on in the background while you make breakfast.

If there’s a hurricane heading your way, this is your moment to check on the latest cone of uncertainty from the National Hurricane Center. If there’s an activist cause in which you’re engaged, this is the time to check in on the writers or publications whose work on the topic you admire.

Do not watch cable news. Do not look to Twitter. It’s better, if possible, to find sources that do not so directly attempt to access your amygdala.

It’s important to recognize that many people find value from social media that goes beyond the news, such as inspiration or connection. During this current moment, however, these services must be treated with particular care. Which brings me to my second piece of unplugging advice: remove all social media apps from your phone; isolate the browsing of these services to a set period of time in the evening; avoid angry posts.

Do not allow these tools to become a background source of diversion that you turn to throughout your day. Access them instead only on your computer, only during a set time (perhaps one hour each evening). Be intentional about what you browse: focusing on the positive, and avoiding posts whose primary goal is to get you angry, or deliver the Faustian satisfaction of watching your team dunk on the other.

To summarize, in my proposed scheme, you engage with the world of digital information only twice a day: once in the morning, and (perhaps) once in the evening. Outside these brief moments of anxious consumption, you focus instead on living well.

Give your work the concentration it needs, be present with your family, rediscover the hard-won joys of high quality leisure, even experience those necessary moments of gratitude, once common during the lazy heat of late summer, but more recently lost to the insistent growl of the glowing screen.

You cannot reclaim a life of focus when you’re wallowing in a stream of insistent negativity. Learn what you need. Recognize its gravity. Then get on with living deeply.

The post Focus Week: Give Your Brain Some Breathing Room first appeared on Cal Newport.

Returning to a Life of Focus

Last fall, Scott Young and his team flew down to Washington D.C., to join me in a Capitol Hill film studio to begin production on the long-awaited sequel to our popular Top Performer online course. Whereas that previous course helped people take action on the career advice from my book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, this new course was motivated by the ideas explored in the trio of bestsellers on concentration and distraction that Scott and I have published in the years since: Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and Ultralearning.

We decided to call it: Life of Focus.

When production began, we had no way of predicting the upheaval the world was going face just a few months later due to the coronavirus pandemic. As we put the finishing touches on the course over the spring and into the summer, it became clear that the need to reclaim a life of focus had suddenly become perhaps more important than any time in recent memory.

The world is mired in disruption and distraction. The past six months have been defined by a constant, unrelenting, emotionally-draining stream of news, and clips, and tweets, and texts competing with the frantic emails and endless Zoom meetings generated by a knowledge economy haphazardly stumbling into a virtual format.

We’ve lost solitude. We’ve lost a sense of control over our time and attention. We’ve lost the ability to read a hard book, or think through a complicated thought, or enjoy a quiet moment. We’re lost in a world of screens.

It’s time to push back.

When thinking about when to launch Life of Focus, Scott and I decided that August 31st would be the perfect date. On the calendar, it marks the end of summer, and the return to more serious work. Symbolically, it also marks the point where the urgency and novelty of the pandemic has ebbed, and the time has come to figure out how to adjust to a less than optimal new normal.

Not everyone, of course, is interested or able to take an online course. To reach a larger audience with this concept of reclaiming your your life this fall, I plan to publish a series of three posts this week that outline a DIY curriculum for shifting from a life of distraction back to a life of focus — in work and at home.

I call it “Focus Week.” And I couldn’t think of a more important time to tackle this topic.

The post Returning to a Life of Focus first appeared on Cal Newport.

Ray Bradbury Got It Exactly Right

Ray Bradbury’s short story, The Murderer, first published in his 1953 collection, The Golden Apples of the Sun, begins with a psychiatrist arriving at a mental hospital. He’s there to see a prisoner named Albert Brock, who calls himself: “The Murderer.”

When the psychiatrist enters the interview chamber, he frowns. “Something was wrong with the room.” He soon realizes the problem: the wall-mounted radio has been torn down and smashed.

As the psychiatrist sits down, Brock reaches out and quickly steals the visitor’s wrist radio, crunching it in his teeth like a walnut, before handing back the ruined device with a smile, explaining: “That’s better.”

It’s soon revealed that Brock is not imprisoned because of any harm he caused to other people. His crime was instead the wanton destruction of all the information, entertainment, and communication devices in his life: he fed his phone into his kitchen garbage disposal, shot his television with a gun, poured water into his office intercommunication system, stomped his wrist radio on the sidewalk, and spooned ice cream into his car’s FM transceiver.

As Brock elaborates, he’d become fed up with the constant communication, distraction, manipulation and digital anxiety that defined the near future world in which Bradbury’s story is set:

“It’s easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you’ve made an enemy. Then, of course, the telephone’s such a convenient thing; it just sits there and demands you call someone who doesn’t want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn’t any time of my own. When it wasn’t the telephone it was the television, the radio, the phonograph…When it wasn’t music, it was interoffice communications, and my horror chamber of a radio wristwatch on which my friends and my wife phoned every five minutes.”

These changes were not the result of an Orwellian imposition, but had instead emerged naturally; unexpected cultural side effects of innovations that were celebrated when first introduced:

“It was all so enchanting at first, the very idea of these things, the practical uses, was wonderful. They were almost toys, to be played with, but the people got too involved, went too far, and got wrapped up in a pattern of social behavior and couldn’t get out, couldn’t admit they were in, even.”

It becomes clear that the psychiatrist cannot relate. “Can I go back to my nice private cell now, where I can be alone and quiet for six months?”, Brock finally asks.

Confused, the psychiatrist heads back to his office, where he renders his dismissive prognosis: “Seems completely disoriented, but convivial. Refuses to accept the simplest realities of his environment and work with them.”

He recommends commitment of an “indefinite” length, before his attention is drawn away:

“Three phones rang. A duplicate wrist radio in his desk drawer buzzed like a wounded grasshopper. The intercom flashed a pink light and click-clicked. Three phones rang. The drawer buzzed. Music blew in through the open door. The psychiatrist, humming quietly, fitted the new wrist radio to his wrist, flipped the intercom, talked a moment, picked up one telephone, talked, picked up another telephone, talked, picked up the third telephone, talked, touched the wrist-radio button, talked calmly and quietly, his face cool and serene, in the middle of the music and the lights flashing, the phones ringing again, and his hands moving, and his wrist radio buzzing, and the intercoms talking, and voices speaking from the ceiling…”

All the while, The Murderer relaxes in luxurious silence.

If we could bring Bradbury forward into our current moment, he’d look around, nod his head with resignation, then quip: “Yep. This looks about right.”

George R. R. Martin’s Pandemic Writing Retreat

As discussed in a blog post published earlier this week, Game of Thrones scribe George R. R. Martin is trying to take advantage of the pandemic to help finish The Winds of Winter,  the long awaited (and long overdue) next title in his epic fantasy series.

Years earlier, Martin bought the building across the street from his Santa Fe home to provide some separation between his personal and professional lives (“no longer would I write all day in my red flannel bathrobe”), but more recently he found even that space had become too distracting to properly concentrate.

So he’s now relocated to a remote mountain cabin with a bad internet connection where he can really get serious about writing.

To avoid needing to make his own coffee, he even has poor assistants — whom he regrettably calls “minions — take two-week shifts at the cabin. Because Martin is not exactly a specimen of peak physical fitness, and therefore rightly concerned about Covid, he has them self-quarantine for two weeks at home before their shifts begin.

Like a gearhead gawking at Jay Leno’s $50 million car collection,  I always find it fascinating, if not at times unnerving (minions!?), to read about how rich professional thinkers support concentration when money is no object.

At times like these, I think a lot of us could probably get a lot out of an isolated mountain cabin. Even if we had to make our own coffee.

Don’t Delegate Using Email

On the most recent episode of my podcast, Deep Questions, a listener asked for my advice about delegation. This is an important topic that I haven’t talked a lot about before, so I thought it might be useful to sharpen and elaborate the answer I gave on my show.

In the office setting, most delegation occurs over email. You need something done that you either don’t have the time to do, or don’t want to do, or don’t know how to do: so you shoot off a quick message to put in on someone else’s plate. Our current moment of remote work has made these electronic hand-offs even more frequent.

As I explained on my podcast, however, I think this is a problem. You’d probably be better off if you instead worked backward from a simple rule that will make your life more annoying in the short term, but significantly more productive in the long term: don’t delegate using email.

Before we discuss how this is even possible, let’s touch on why it’s important.

When handing off tasks, email’s extreme efficiency can become a liability. It nudges you toward temporary relief of psychic discomfort. You think of something that you don’t want to forget, so you dash off an email: look into this and get back to me! Something new arrives in your inbox, creating a brief moment of obligation — oh no, something else I have to make time for — that can be dispelled with a quick forward of the message to a colleague.

I call this relief temporary, however, because you haven’t actually dissipated the discomfort. A quickly composed, ambiguous delegation email only passes this discomfort onto its recipient, perhaps even increasing the distress, as you’ve likely left out details clear to you, but not to the person grappling with your hasty missive. To make matters worse, this ambiguity will then require many more additional back-and-forth messages to try to approximate some clarity, further multiplying and spreading the cognitive toll of the original task.

When you instead enforce a simple no email delegation rule, this instinct to sacrifice the greater good for a smaller personal respite is stymied. Solutions that are overall more productive suddenly become necessary.

On my podcast, for example, I talk a lot about task board software, like Trello, Flow, or Asana. Instead of allowing tasks to exist implicitly among emails buried in an inbox, why not instead isolate and clarify them as standalone cards on a virtual task board? Now it’s clear who is supposed to be working on what, and all the information relevant to a given task can be appended to its card, instead of fracturing itself among impromptu email threads.

The person doing the delegation must now clarify what exactly they’re delegating. When creating a new card for a task, as opposed to dashing off a message, you’re forced to actually think through and articulate exactly what it is you want, when you need it, and what information will be required to get there.

These tasks boards also make it difficult to escape exactly how much you’re asking someone to do. It’s easy to shoot off a dozen emailed requests to a colleague throughout a busy day without thinking much about it. But when you instead see each card piled on top of another in that person’s column on a task board, the magnitude of what you’ve dispensed is unavoidable.

For quick tasks that arrive in the form of emails, I’ve also found ticketing systems to be useful. This allows messages to be transformed into tickets that can be assigned to specific team members, appended with notes, and labeled with their current status. This is how, for example, in my capacity as the Director of Graduate Studies for my department at Georgetown, I coordinate incoming email issues with my Graduate Program Manager (we use FreshDesk).

I can tell you from personal experience that the extra hassle in the moment of moving questions and requests into this system is absolutely worth it. The added structure of the ticketing system significantly reduces stress as compared to the alternative of attempting to juggle all of these obligations through an amorphous and ever-increasing tangle of undifferentiated emails.

I don’t want to fall too far down a productivity process rabbit hole here. My main observation is that when it comes to delegation, don’t be seduced by the promise of a temporary fix to the momentary crisis of having something new to wrangle. Email doesn’t have enough friction. It’s better to embrace a more structured system for identifying, describing, assigning and reviewing tasks that trades slightly more work right now for a significantly decreased cognitive toll for your organization in the future.

On the Subtle Network Science of Optimal Office Communication

Consider the following workplace scenario. The manager of an R&D lab needs her engineers to solve a complex problem. There are many possible approaches and it’s unclear which will end up best. What is the best way to structure their communication?

For at least the last twenty years, the accepted answer to this question within knowledge work has been to introduce the maximum amount of communication with the minimum possible friction. Email makes it simple for engineers to swap ideas and results. Instant messenger tools like Slack reduce friction even further and increase transparency. Progress!

The logic driving this consensus is straightforward: more information is strictly better than less; a veritable axiom of the burgeoning Information Age that has been widely accepted ever since Bill Gates touted his early-adoption of email as a strategy to broaden the incoming stream of ideas and insights on which his algorithmic brain could churn.

But is this answer always right?

Many knowledge work sages may have overlooked a classic 2007 paper from the network science literature. It’s titled “The Network Structure of Exploration and Exploitation,” and it’s authored by two Harvard researchers, David Lazer and Allan Friedman (Lazer has since been hired away to Northeastern’s impressive network science group).

Early in the paper, Lazer and Friedman acknowledge the maximal information consensus:

“Services to increase the efficiency with which we exploit our personal networks have proliferated, and armies of consultants have emerged to improve the efficiency of organizational networks. Implicit in this discourse is the idea that the more connected we are, the better: silos are to be eliminated, and the boundaryless organization is the wave of the future.”

As they elaborate, however, the research supporting this view tended to focus on scenarios that measured individual welfare in solving a problem. In such settings, more connectivity was better, as it ensured that solutions better than your own would diffuse into your awareness as quickly as possible.

Lazer and Friedman, by contrast, were interested in the problem-solving ability of the overall group. The question they asked, in essence, was how the structure of the underlying communication network impacted a group’s ability to come up with the best possible solution to a problem.

The details of the experiment get a little tricky. They used a round-based agent simulation and focused on the NK problem space, a set of abstract problems, introduced by evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman, in which “solutions” are modeled as sequence of numbers, and nearby solutions (e.g, those that differ by only a small number of changes) have at most small differences in their fitness values. This creates a “rugged landscape” where you might have to explore worse answers to get to better options.

Lazer and Friedman assumed that individuals were “myopic,” meaning that in a given round they could only examine solutions that were slightly different than their best known current solution. They can also, however, explore their neighbors in the network and discover their best solutions, adopting them if better than their own.

They then studied how different network structures impacted the quality of the best solution arrived at in the network as a whole. To return to our original example, they wanted to know what type of communication network would lead our hypothetical engineers to the best possible outcome.

Here’s a crude summary of their otherwise complex results:

Well-connected networks, in which information flows quickly, arrive at pretty good solutions fast, but then get stuck.
Poorly-connected networks, in which information flows slowly, arrive at much better final solutions, but it takes longer.
This trade-off between quality of final solution and speed at which solutions are reached can be tuned by taking a poorly-connected network and then adding more and more shortcuts to the information flows.

The underlying dynamic behind these results is easy to understand. In a poorly-connected network, more solutions are being examined in parallel before the best of the bunch is able to spread enough to enforce a consensus. In the well-connected network, the first reasonable idea quickly takes over.

I mention this paper to underscore an important reminder. We should be cautious about any early confidence that the way we work today is in any sense optimal. Hooking everyone up to low-friction digital communication channels and telling them to rock n’ roll is flexible, convenient, and cheap. But it might be far from the best approach to taking a collection human minds and extracting from them the best possible results.

We still, in other words, probably have a lot of work to do in figuring out the best way to work.