Cal Newport's Blog, page 18

Answering Your Questions

In the early years of this blog, one of my favorite activities was answering reader questions. I used to put aside an hour almost every day for keeping up with these emails. Over time, however, the number of queries became too large to manage.

It occurred to me recently that the podcast format might provide a way for me to return to these roots while reaching many more people with my answers than what’s possible with one-on-one messages.

So this is what I did…

My new podcast, Deep Questions with Cal Newport, is currently available on Apple and Spotify (and soon to be available on other platforms as well).

The format is simple, I answer reader questions about the main topics we discuss here: work, technology, and the deep life. I do my best to avoid rants (spoiler alert: I usually fail).

I’ve released two episode so far (see above for the most recent episode), with a new one on its way. My plan this summer is to test out a season of the podcast between now and August: releasing a new episode roughly each week.

I’m soliciting these questions from my mailing list, so if you want to contribute, sign up for my list using the widget on the blog sidebar or on my homepage at calnewport.com.

And of course, if you like the podcast, leaving a review on your platform of choice helps spread the word…

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A Question of My Own: I’m trying to learn more about organizations that are having success working on police reform (eliminating abuse/brutality, improving community relationships, etc). If you know this field, and are willing to share some of your wisdom about which players seem to be efficacious, please send me a note at interesting@calnewport.com.

 

On Running an Office Like a Factory

I was recently browsing the archives of the MIT Sloan Management Review (as one does), when I came across a fascinating article from the Fall 2018 issue titled “Breaking Logjams in Knowledge Work.”

The piece starts with a blunt observation: “If you work in an organization, you know what it’s like to have too much to do and not enough resources to do it.”

This is not accidental:

“…many leaders continue to believe that their organizations thrive when overloaded, often both creating pressure and rewarding those who deliver under duress. It’s a popular but pathological approach to management.”

The knowledge sector, it turns out, wasn’t the first to deal with a misguided commitment to overload.

“U.S. manufacturers suffered mightily under this approach for decades,” the article’s authors write, “until many found a better way.”

In the 1980s, American factory managers believed that keeping every machine and worker perpetually busy was the key to productivity: “If everybody was busy, the thinking went, the plant would produce more.”

But then more advanced manufacturing techniques, originating in Japan, spread to American factories and replaced a simplistic commitment to busyness with a much more flexible and efficient approach to production.

Though the details of modern advanced manufacturing techniques are complicated (just ask any “six sigma blackbelt”), the authors claim that some of the basic ideas from this sector can be translated to the office setting to solve the problem of chronic overload and help everyone work more productively.

In particular, they focus on the crucial shift from push to pull.

A traditional way to build things is with a push system in which you move something along a production process to the next step as soon as you’re done with it. There are two problems with this approach:

It creates bottlenecks as certain steps in the process inevitably receive more work than they can handle, eventually slowing down everything else.
It complicates prioritization by distributing these decisions to the individual places where bottlenecks arise, leading to a jumbled approach that often doesn’t synchronize neatly, further delaying production.

The manufacturing sector eventually realized there were great advantages to instead move to a pull system in which you pull work to your step in the process only when you’re ready for it. This approach eliminates local bottlenecks because you don’t take on work you’re not ready to handle.  In addition, because backups are now concentrated at the beginning of the process, it simplifies the task of prioritizing efforts, as these decisions can be made up front in a more systematic fashion.

Factories that deployed a pull model ended up functioning more productively. The authors of this article argue that this model can deliver similarly positive results to office settings.

The specific case study they present concerned research and development at MIT’s Broad Institute. Before their intervention, Broad implicitly followed a push model in which ideas were haphazardly pursued and bottlenecks were common:

“When knowledge work processes are managed via push, it’s difficult to track tasks in process because so many of them reside in individual email in-boxes, project files, and to-do lists. Complicating matters, talented employees — particularly those in innovation-focused environments — have a knack for continually pushing more new ideas into an organization than it’s equipped to process”

To switch to a pull model, the R&D group mounted on the wall a flow chart that captured the steps required to move an idea from conception to deployment. They then represented projects as post-it notes on this flowchart, affixed to their current step in the process.

This visual tool made it simple to enforce limits on works in progress at each step by having projects be pulled from one step to the next, preventing overload. This shift made a big difference:

“The exercise led to two insights. First, there was an obvious lack of common prioritization: Nobody was aware of every project, there was little consensus about which ones mattered most, and many projects overlapped or competed with others. Second, the system had too much work in process. Comparing the number of current projects with recent delivery history showed that employees had at least twice as much work as they could complete in the best of circumstances.”

By implementing a pull system that made all of the ongoing work transparent, and placing limits on work in progress, the Broad Institute was able to significantly improve the efficiency with which they completed projects.

This shift from push to pull is just one idea among many that could help make better sense of the chaos that defines modern knowledge work. As I argued recently, the time has come to start seeking these ideas. We can no longer allow the efforts in this sector to unfold as a haphazard cascade of email messages and hastily organized Zoom calls. We need to take seriously not just how much we work, but how this work is organized.

Can Remote Work Be Fixed? My Latest Article For The New Yorker

Earlier today, I published my latest article for the New Yorker. It’s titled: Can Remote Work Be Fixed?

In this semi-epic long-form essay, I dive into the history of the remote work movement, documenting why, after decades of excitement, it ended up falling short of its potential.

I then tackle the big question on a lot of peoples’ mind at the moment: Now that all knowledge workers are forced to work remotely, will we manage to fix these issues? Now that it’s urgent, in other words, can we make remote work actually work?

As you’ll discover, I find some room for optimism. Drawing lessons from the analogous history of the introduction of the electric dynamo to early 20th-century factories (this is a New Yorker article, after all), I argue that the pandemic might end up a forcing function that solves many — though certainly not all — of the issues that arrested remote work’s original rise.

Ultimately, even after we return to a modified normal with more people once again working in offices, these fixes will continue to pay dividends. As I write:

“Before the pandemic, we were already suffering through a productivity crisis, in which we seemed to be working longer hours, glued to screens and drowning in e-mails. The solutions that make remote work sustainable—more structure and clarity, less haphazardness—may also help fix these other long-standing problems in knowledge work. Work that is remote-friendly for some may be better work for all.”

Anyway, you’ll have to read the whole piece to get the details. I have no doubt that fans of the type of stuff we discuss here will find a lot to like in it…

The Lost Satisfactions of Manual Competence

Chris Anderson opens his 2012 book, Makers, with a story about his maternal grandfather, Fred Hauser. Anderson recalls a childhood experience spending a summer with his grandfather at his bungalow in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“He announced that we would be making a four-stroke gasoline engine and that he had ordered a kit we could build together,” Anderson writes. Familiar with constructing models, Anderson assumed that the box containing the kit would be filled with numerous numbered parts and assembly instructions. “Instead, there were three big blocks of metal and a crudely cast engine casting. And a large blue-print, a single sheet folded many times.”

As Anderson recalls, his grandfather deployed the standard hobby machinist equipment kept in his garage — “a drill press, a band saw, a jig saw, grinders, and, most important, a full-size metal lathe” — to slowly extract and polish from the blocks the many pieces that ultimately fit together into a functioning engine. “We had conjured a precision machine from a lump of metal. We were a mini-factory, and we could make anything.”

There’s great fulfillment in applying skill to slowly create something useful that didn’t previously exist — a reaction that’s likely embedded in our genes as a lost nudge toward survival-enhancing paleolithic productivity. Matt Crawford perhaps summarizes this reality best in Shop Class as Soulcraft, when he writes: “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy.”

And then we consider our current moment.

For most “non-essential” workers, the past two months have delivered a professional experience that’s exactly the opposite of Fred Hauser running a metal lathe in his California garage. Instead of manifesting ourselves concretely in the world, we endlessly pass digital messages back and forth, taking breaks only to talk to each other about these messages over cramped video conference screens.

Before the pandemic, the ritual of traveling to a physical office helped obfuscate the disembodied nature of most knowledge work. But when this element was stripped away, the intrinsic abstraction of our efforts became impossible to miss. Fred Hauser ended his spring with a working four-stroke engine. We’ll end ours with an email inbox fuller than when we began.

This observation matters because as many consider a deep reset in response to recent events, work has emerged as an important topic.

There’s something uniquely misery-making about days spent in a Makework Matrix of ceaseless digital communication that doesn’t seem to generate much beyond additional digital communication — we’re simply not wired for this as a species. Not surprisingly, I’ve received an increasing number of messages from Office Space Neos, tumbled into a state of introspection by the disruption of the lockdowns, and now wondering if they can tolerate this digitized busyness for the decades that remain before their retirement.

I don’t have a comprehensive answer to offer at the moment, but here are a few thoughts that come to mind about the responses to this reality we might see in the months and years ahead:

More solo entrepreneurs and freelancers experimenting with radical work setups that prioritize focused craft and minimize the digital ephemera that they were told was critical to crushing it, but might instead be crushing their soul.
A shift in entrepreneurial circles aways from digital endeavors — apps, content production — and toward small-batch physical manufacturing (Anderson’s book offers a useful survey of this general shift; a good specific case study is my friend Forest Prichard’s recent book on starting a farm.)
Hopefully: larger knowledge work organizations will also finally start taking workflow seriously; moving away from communication free-for-alls that turn everyone into a mix of human network routers and glorified administrative assistants, and toward more structured and focused work (stay tuned on this: I have a big new book on this particular topic coming out next year).

In the meantime, our current pause presents a good opportunity to think critically about what “work” means to you now, and what it could mean in a reset life. Or at the very least, give you a push to dust off the metal lathe in the back of your garage.

Let Go to Grow: On a Blogger’s Decision to Trade Social Media for a Quieter Life

A reader recently pointed me toward an interesting essay. It was written by a blogger and podcaster named Mika. “I’ve thought about how to start this post FOR MONTHS,” she begins, before building to her reveal:

“When I hear my instincts from my heart, I have learned that it serves me well to listen.

So one day, when I felt a thud in my heart that said “Let social media go” – I paid attention. And then it came again, and again, and again. “Let it go.” I started to question it and ask why I was feeling this. So towards the end of last year, I started questioning the role of social media in my life, comparing and contrasting the pros and cons of it. I’ve even taken breaks before so I thought about those times, too. Then it pretty much dawned on me as the following words were impressed upon me in a real, gut-punching kind of way:

We were not made for this.

I have tears in my eyes just now typing that.”

It’s not that Mika hated social media; she notes that it allowed her to interact with “truly awesome, good-hearted people,” and has helped  her “achieve professional goals.” The problem is that it always demanded more:

“It’s endless opportunities of things I can do, share, say, discuss. It’s also an endless source of people I can serve in some way. It never turns off, the possibilities are infinite, and it just keeps going – and so does my mind and energy.”

One of Mika’s revelations during the past two months spent in lockdown was the degree to which “living a quieter, less hectic, more inwardly-focused life” resonated. She wanted to make this minimalist embrace of less permanent. But social media made that stillness impossible for her.

So she stopped using it. (“A blogger who is not on Instagram?? What’s the point?”, she jokes. My response: “Welcome to the club! You just doubled its size.”)

Mika is one of several stories I’ve heard recently about a  pandemic-induced departure from social media. A commitment to simplicity and presence is a key component to many peoples’ deep reset, and social media can prove a stubborn obstacle to achieving this goal. This reality highlights one of the trickiest aspects of cultivating a deep life: it’s not just about eliminating bad things; sometimes it’s also necessary to remove the merely good to gain better access to the great.

A concept that Mika summarizes towards the end of her essay with a simple phrase that helped guide her through this transition: “let go to grow.”

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I’m always interested in stories of people taking dramatic steps to cultivate a deeper life. Feel free to share at author@calnewport.com. Relevant pictures are welcome.

The Deep Reset

After ten years of waging war against the Trojans, Odysseus, king of Ithaca, set out on the wine-dark sea to begin his journey home. Storms thwarted an easy return voyage, and Odysseus found himself facing many additional years of tragedy and adventure, reaching a mythical nadir when he’s forced to descend into the underworld itself.

Broken down and exposed, Odysseus resists collapse. He instead pulls himself out of Hades, and persevering through additional trials, finally makes it home to his island kingdom, only to find both his family and throne threatened by a conniving horde of suiters. He fights them off.

But he’s not done. Following a prophecy delivered to him by the ghost of Theban Teiresias in the underworld (depicted above), Odysseus makes a humbling journey inland. He carries an oar — a symbol of the maritime world where he reined — farther and farther from the sea, until he arrives at a place where it’s mistaken for a farming implement by locals who have “never heard of crimson-painted ships, or the well-shaped oars that serve as wings.”

It is here, stripped of any of the recognitions on which he’d built his previous life, that he plants the oar in the ground and performs sacrifices to Poseidon, before returning home to live out his life in peace.

“The story of Odysseus is a classic transrational myth,” writes Richard Rohr in his underground classic, Falling Upward, “one that many would say sets the bar and direction for all later Western storytelling.” And for good reason. It’s one of the earliest extant works to describe a pattern absolutely fundamental to the human condition: hardship unlocking a deeper, more authentic, more satisfying life.

As Roher elaborates, Odysseus’s journey is a metaphor for the proper human response to unexpected difficulty. His first response, after arriving broken in the underworld, is survival and progress. He makes his way out of Hades, perseveres  through the trials that follow, and then once home, performs the work needed to get his life back in order.

But then — and this is the key to the entire myth — he humbles himself on an inland journey, where he ritually moves beyond the easy comforts of his old life, laying the foundation on which to build something more meaningful.

Once it’s brought to our attention, this pattern becomes visible everywhere. We see it in the travails of Dante, and Augustine, and even Luke Skywalker. Carl Jung argued that this storyline is an archetype, engraved in the collective human unconscious, as unavoidably fundamental as our intuitive repulsion to snakes or attraction to courage. Whether its origin is divine or evolutionary, it represents revelation all the same.

Which brings us to our current moment.

To varying degrees of severity, we’re all suffering through some version of Odysseus’s tragic journey. Many — too many — are struggling with devastating consequences to their health or livelihoods. Like Odysseus surviving the storm that destroyed his fleet, for them, all energy is dedicated to perseverance in the moment.

But for many others, including a large part of my audience here, the moment has brought severe dislocation to much of what we’ve come to trust and expect, but falls short of immediate peril. The question then is what those who find themselves in this situation — marooned on a Netflix-themed island of the lotus eaters — should do about it.

We can shake our fists at the Gods, as some are now acting out through increasingly furious and tragically futile battles fought on social media.

We can cower, marinating in dread, as some are now doing as they glue themselves to catastrophic news coverage, giving in to genuflections of despair.

Or, like Odysseus, we can allow the disruption — painful as it is — spark the resolve needed to find our way out of the underworld, fight to get our affairs back in order, and then, when the time comes, with a mix of humility and purpose: transform our lives into something deeper.

Essentially all of philosophy, theology, literature and history implies that the Odysseus approach is the one for which we as humans are wired. The best response to deep disruption, in other words, is often a deep reset.

This idea, that we should allow our current dislocation to instigate a move toward the deep life, is one that I’ve been implicitly exploring in recent posts (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11). I thought it was useful, however, to give this impulse a name and some historical context because I intend to keep returning to it — among other topics —  in the weeks ahead. I want to better understand how one acts on the impulse for the deep reset, while also acknowledging, with an eye toward Homer, that I’m hardly the first to ponder this ancient instinct.

When Technology Goes Awry

Last month, I published a peer-reviewed essay in the Communications of the ACM, one of the major trade journals in computer science. It’s titled, “When Technology Goes Awry.” At the time of its publication, in mid-April, there were a few other things going on in the world that were distracting me, so I didn’t mention it then. I want to circle back now and briefly highlight the piece’s big ideas, as they’re relevant to many of our discussions here.

This article provides a more academic foundation to some of the themes I explore in Digital Minimalism. In it, I point out that during the 20th century the formal study of the philosophy of technology split into two roughly competing camps: technological determinism and technological instrumentalism.

As I elaborate:

“Roughly speaking, the former philosophy [determinism] believes the features and properties of a given technology can drive human behavior and culture in directions that are often unplanned and unforeseen, while the latter [instrumentalism] believes tools are neutral, and what matters in understanding their impact is the cultural context and motivations of the people that develop and use them for specific purposes.”

In recent years, in academic circles, “the pendulum of power in the formal study of philosophy of technology…has swung in favor of the technological instrumentalists.”

I’ve come to believe that this is an issue: “instrumentalism, though intellectually interesting and often quite illuminating, is ill-suited on its own to tackle some of the more pressing issues we face in our current moment of rapid technological innovation”

The problem?

As I’ve observed and reported in a lot of my recent writing, technologies often do have unexpected impacts that aren’t intentional, or predicted, or serving some useful purpose (exhibit A: what happened when we introduced email into the business ecosystem).

It’s important that we recognize this reality as a society, and that my fellow engineers, in particular, keep a wary eye on what happens when their tools are released into the wild. Human and tech exist into a highly dynamical symbiosis that requires more observation and intervention than we often realize.

Anyway, see the full article for a longer treatment of these ideas…

Another Tale of Finding Depth in a Locked Down Life

In my last post, I profiled a novelist who took advantage of the lockdown to slow down; giving herself more than enough time and space to inhabit her manuscript revisions. This shift allowed her to tap a “mysterious” source of creativity and finish her work ahead of schedule.

In response, a reader sent me some notes on how he had similarly leveraged the disruption induced by the lockdown to experiment with a deeper, more deliberate lifestyle, despite the fact that he has a typical email-bound knowledge work job and two young kids at home.

Here’s his schedule:

Monday-Friday from 5-7 am: I do my morning routine (push-ups, sit ups, squats, meditation, and reading The Daily Stoic prompt for that day). This takes about 30 minutes, depending on how slow I’m moving that morning.

Following that I spend at least an hour and a half of writing the novel I’m working on.

Then an hour of tasks/admin for my day job.

At 9am, I take over child care while my wife works her job. We have lunch and nap time. I’m back to my day job processing various tasks/admin from about 1-5pm.

I only check email three times a day (personal and work) and I have those times set on my Google Calendar which enforces a limit for dealing with those emails to a half hour per session.

When I’m done with my afternoon tasks, this is when I’m available for phone calls and meetings. (I treat this like office hours.)

I shutdown work around 4:30-5pm.

Social media is blocked during my work hours. There’s no social media or email apps on my phone.

There’s a vague uneasiness that comes from a life overfilled with busyness and distraction. We crave something deeper, in which we spend more time on things that matter and are more ruthlessly efficient about the things that don’t.

But change is hard, and it’s easier in the moment to mindlessly scroll the iPad, or play email ping-pong, wondering, in true Office Space style, what it is that you really do here.

Most of what’s going in our current moment is terrible. But there is a sliver of light among the darkness: sometimes hard changes require a hard disruption.

More on this to follow…

On Doing Less to Produce More: A Novelist Embraces a Minimalist Lockdown

I recently received an email from a writer in New York City who sold her debut novel right before the coronavirus lockdown. She had until mid-April to finish her first round of revisions. In an effort to make the process more “fun and fluid and intuitive,” and feature less of the stressful long hours she had experienced working on the first draft, she deployed the following routine:

Around 10pm, I put my phone on a shelf in my living room.

After waking up naturally the next morning, I would eat breakfast and then go to my desk and work on my revision.

At first, it was for around 1 hour. Later, I worked until lunchtime. I always stopped while I still wanted to keep going, so that I would be excited to return to it again the next day.

I only looked at my phone and emails after lunch.

I mostly stopped using social media.

I really cared about resting.

She was convinced that this minimalist approach — a process personification of my exhortation to “do less, do better” — would prove inferior to a more familiar, frenetic work style. She began planning out in her head how she would ask for an extension.

“But then an interesting thing happened,” she told me. “Solutions to my manuscript problems started coming to me as I was falling asleep, waking up, or taking a shower. I would jot them down in a notebook, then try to implement them during the 1-3 hours in the morning. They worked out perfectly every time.”

She ended up handing in her revisions early.

“I felt like I unlocked something so valuable in my creative process, something that still feels mysterious to me.”

Obviously, this specific schedule is not something that most of us can replicate at the moment (especially those of us with school-aged kids stuck at home). But there’s a more important broader point lurking here that extends beyond our current disruptions. The human mind craves deep, difficult challenges, and can find real satisfaction in the process of sticking with something intricate but important for a long period of time.

And yet we’ve created a world in both our professional and personal lives where such long-form thinking is nearly impossible.

Email. Zoom. Social Media. Texting. Back to Social Media. Email. Zoom. All of this creates a sugar-rush sense of busyness. But when’s the last time you felt that “mysterious” sensation of the pieces of something deep finally starting to click into place. This requires a certain minimalist head space that’s becoming increasingly rare.

The Chaotic Factory

Imagine that you walk into a car factory and encounter a chaotic scene.

Half-built vehicles are scattered across the floor. Workers wander frenetically, grabbing each other as they pass, shouting out random requests.

“Do you know where the wrenches are?”

“When you get a chance, come show me how to install a steering wheel.”

“What happened to those lug nuts I gave you yesterday, did you use those?”

Some of the workers strain under the weight of materials piled high in their arms. Others lounge in the corner.

Vague but emphatic posters on the wall encourage everyone to “hustle” and the shop managers stand on ladders yelling out slogans, trying to inspire intrinsic motivation.

If you saw this, you’d be astounded. Surely this factory wouldn’t be in business for long. The company down the street that knows about computer-controlled assembly lines and Kaizen and inventory supply chain logistics will eat it for lunch.

And yet, in knowledge work, a lot of organizations run more or less like the chaotic car factory. If you replace the half-built cars with shared Google Docs, and the shouted requests with emails and Zoom, it’s the same haphazard dynamics.

Which leads to the interesting question underlying our current state of disrupted affairs: how long until the “smarter company down the street” — with its more disciplined, thoughtful, demanding processes — becomes a reality in the knowledge sector, forcing rapid change in how we work?