Cal Newport's Blog, page 19

Building a WWII Bunker in an Office Building

A reader recently sent me another entertaining example of the deep life in action.

He runs a design firm with an office in a warehouse-style building that included a cool feature: a “patio,” cantilevered high above the main floor, where he could relax or chat with coworkers.

“While visually very compelling this was a disaster,” he explained. “I basically had thin glass separating [it] from a warehouse where lots of people used, ate lunch, etc…a space with absolutely no functional use.”

Then last summer, on a visit to London, he toured the Churchill War Rooms, a warren of bomb-proof underground bunkers where Winston Churchill and his war cabinet plotted out the Second World War (see above photo). It resonated.

“I was blown away by how focused Churchill and the British leadership was, in these dark, small, and smoky rooms running World War II,” the reader told me.

On his return, he remodeled the office patio into a closed off space inspired by the War Rooms. Here’s an exterior view:

The room has no windows and (crucially) no computers. The walls are covered in whiteboards and the lights are in an early 20th century style:

To honor its source of inspiration, some framed World War II maps adorn the wall:

“I use my [regular] office to do all my managerial, email, and meeting work (lots of Zooms!),” he explained. “Then I move to my War Room for creation, focus, music, and deep work!”

For those who embrace the deep life, form and function become intertwined, while moderation is minimized.

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A brief note: I really enjoy hearing these stories of finding solace in depth during hard times — both in professional and personal contexts. If you have a similar tale to share, I’d love to hear it at author@calnewport.com. (Accompanying photos are welcome when relevant.)

Bring Back Blogs?

My latest article for WIRED offers a suggestion about improving our information response to the current pandemic.

In the piece I acknowledge that Twitter’s algorithms, in particular, have actually been pretty useful in helping to surface otherwise obscure experts who are suddenly intensely relevant to the moment (I document, for example, how virologist Trevor Bedford jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 followers since February).

But convoluted Tweet threads and thumbnail screenshots of longer articles are a poor way for these experts to explore evolving, complicated ideas.

My solution:

“We need to augment social platforms with a surge in capacity of the original Web 2.0 technology that these upstarts so effectively displaced: blogs. We need WordPress-style sites featuring both easy-to-update static pages and chronological posts. These sites could be hosted by institutions with some degree of public trust and a reasonable technology infrastructure, such as universities, medical centers, and think tanks. Some mild gatekeeping could be performed on the experts granted blogs by these institutions, and critically, IT support could be provided so that the experts could start publishing with minimal overhead.”

I’m not sure if this particular idea will take hold or not. I do believe, however, that we need innovative thinking not just about medical treatments, but also about how we handle the deployment of information relevant to our response.

You can read more here.

Building a Deep Work Cabin…in an Apartment

I recently received an attention-catching email from a 29-year-old professional trumpet player. He told me that during his first year studying at a well-known music conservatory his girlfriend convinced him to join Facebook. “Somehow I had a feeling that the whole thing robs me from practicing the trumpet and getting things done,” he said.

So between 2013 and 2015, he took a two-year break to focus on his training, and ended up writing a Master’s Thesis and graduating with a very high grade point average. “These results are directly linked to abandoning social media,” he explained.

In 2015, he rejoined Facebook, pressured by the idea that professional musicians must promote themselves online to get ahead. “It did more harm,” he wrote, “sucking me back into compulsive clicking and wasting time.”

After coming across Deep Work and (later) Digital Minimalism, he decided to leave social media for good and prioritize focused work on a small number of important pursuits. “To take back control and stay true to my own nature,” he summarized.

The decision paid off. He recorded four albums in four years, and more recently, in just two months, made it 30 chapters into a textbook he’s writing on trumpet methods.

Then came our current disruption.

“The strange thing is,” he told me,  “I don’t feel negative.” As he elaborated:

“Instead of feeling sad and restricted, I have build a wooden cabin in my living room. (I used to practice for hours in this cabin as a teenager). The cabin was in storage for ten years…but now during the pandemic I finally found the courage to make the decision to build it once again [in my apartment!]. It is my own “Distraction Free Zone” or I also call it: ‘The Deep Work Cabin,’ ‘Unwired’ or ‘Trumpet Laboratory.”

Here’s a view of the interior:

This is not only a good case study of digital minimalism in action, but it points to a broader point that’s intensely relevant at the moment. A deep life, in addition to being satisfying, is also resilient.

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A brief note: I really enjoy hearing these stories of finding solace in depth during hard times. If you have a similar tale, I’d love to hear it at author@calnewport.com. (Accompanying photos are welcome when relevant.)

More on Cultivating a Deep Life: Mindset

In yesterday’s post, I discussed an approach for systematically increasing the depth in your life. It involved creating a monthly plan that identifies specific behaviors designed to amplify things that matter and reduce the things that distract you from these values.

Today, I want to add a caveat. In my many years experimenting (often publicly) with the elements of the deep life, I’ve come to accept that the right mindset is just as important as the right plan.

You can have a well-designed checklist of meaningful activities you’re trying to integrate into your routine, but if your background hum of activity is still oscillating wildly between frenetic stress and numbing distraction, your life is anything but deep. You need instead to see your entire day differently.

This mindset is well-summarized by the advice I’ve been giving off and on since the early days of this blog:

Do less.
Do better.
Know why.

Let’s elaborate the elements of this self-improvement catechism one by one:

To “do less” is to slow down. Focus on one activity at a time. Do less total activities. Be willing to pass through occasional interludes of full non-productivity. Who first comes to mind when you ponder meaningful living? If you’re like most people, it’s probably someone who, in the spirit of Thoreau, approaches life deliberately, doing a small number of things, but each with full focus (often somewhere scenic).

To “do better” is to direct your focused energy toward quality activities, when possible. Given the same scraps of weekend free time, you could either painfully coax a garden irrigation system into efficient operation (see above), or you could binge Netflix. In their book All Things Shining, philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly note that the appreciation of quality — especially once refined — can provide a source if sacredness in an otherwise de-romanticized world.

Finally, to “know why” is to get at the very core of the deep life mindset. Working backwards from your values to determine your activities creates a lifestyle dramatically more meaningful than working forward from whatever seems appealing in the moment. It’s the difference between resilience and anxiety; satisfaction and distraction. As I argue in Digital Minimalism, the fight to “know why” has been made harder in recent years due to the engineered compulsion of the attention economy. But, in a way I never could have imagined when I was writing that book, we now find ourselves in a circumstance where the shallowness of these diversions is being made unmistakably clear as our hunger for something greater increasingly gnaws.

The deep life is not an ambitious one-shot goal, like completing a marathon, that you work hard at until you one day obtain it all at once. It’s a state of being with which you become increasingly comfortable. A process that starts with your mind.

Cultivating a Deep Life

 

Craft


Community


Contemplation


Constitution




Amplify

Learn AirTable; produce application for inventory system.
Volunteer for local Meal on Wheels chapter.
Observe Shabbat.
Eat clean; 10,000 steps a day.



Reduce

Using meeting scheduling software to control ratio between deep and shallow work.
Take Instagram off of your phone; prune down accounts you follow to people you really care about or inspire you.
Eliminate negative tweeting.
Alcohol only on weekends.

I’ve been writing off and on recently about the notion of the deep life, in which you focus with energetic intention on things that really matter, and avoid wasting too much attention on things that don’t.

We find ourselves now in a moment when many people are beginning to question the suboptimal aspects of their life that they had previously been tolerating through some combination of momentum and convenience.  It is, in other words, a good time to explore various strategies for injecting more resilience and meaning into your existence.

With this in mind, I’ve been thinking about ways to evolve towards a deeper life. One observation that rings true from my experience is that you should resist the urge to try to build a master plan that, once implemented, will transform everything for the better in one dramatic moment. This optimism is quixotic. It’s much more realistic to experiment with smaller shifts, one after another, to discover what sticks and what ends up superfluous.

My recommendation is to think in increments of roughly one month. For a given 30-day period, attempt a limited number of changes to the four components of the deep life (craft, community, constitution, and contemplation). Focus on these changes and see what works and what doesn’t. Keep the former in place and abandon the latter. If you repeat this long enough you’ll notice a marked shift toward the deeper end of the spectrum.

To be more concrete, consider focusing on two things for each component of your life that you’re trying to improve:

A high-impact habit that will significantly amplify the value you’re deriving from this component.
A commitment for reducing sources of distraction or unnecessary effort diverting your attention within this component.

At the top of this post is an example table showing what a deep life plan of this type might look like for a hypothetical individual. The details here matter less than the general strategy: month after month, relentlessly look to amplify habits that matter while reducing behaviors that don’t. Stick with this approach long enough and the qualitative experience of your life will be significantly improved. You can’t control what happens to you — is there any period in recent history in which this axiom has been made more clear? — but you can control how you respond, and ultimately, this is what makes all the difference.

Beyond To-Do Lists

I was talking recently with a friend who is a project manager at a tech company who happens to also be particularly interested in productivity strategies. He told me about a fascinating habit he’s been deploying with great success in his own work life. Instead of maintaining endless to-do lists, when he takes on a new obligation, he puts it on his calendar: scheduling a specific date and time when he will tackle it. As he clarified, this approach applies even if the obligation is just to “think some about this topic.”

This might sound extreme, but it shouldn’t. What my friend is really doing is acknowledging that he has a limited amount of total time to spend on tasks. By scheduling each obligation, he’s confronting the reality of how much time each item will actually take, and identifying where these mental cycles will come from.

In knowledge work, we often ignore these realities. We pass around obligations like hot potatoes, via dashed-off emails and Slack eruptions, often pushing ourselves beyond what we can realistically accomplish, compensating by dropping things or completing them at a low quality level. This can’t possibly be the best way to organize cognitive work. And as my friend demonstrates, it’s not the only way.

I’ve been writing all week about how the disruptions in knowledge work we’re facing in the current moment might be an opportunity to spark radical new ideas about how this sector operates. This particular issue, confronting how we’re actually allocating our attention, is as good a place as any to start.

The Dichotomy of Email

I want to add a quick addendum to my recent series of posts about avoiding email overwhelm in our current moment of total remote work. Though longtime readers have heard me talk about this before, it’s important to emphasize the dichotomous nature of this tool:

On the one hand , email is a massively useful way to send text and files to individuals or groups. It’s much better than voicemails or memos. If we had to go back to these older technologies it would be a major pain.
On the other hand , email makes us miserable.

How are both true at the same time?  The problems with email are less about the tool than they are about how we deploy it. We run more and more of our work through a single undifferentiated inbox, which means we constantly feel overloaded, and end up context-shifting frenetically between dozens of concurrent but unrelated asynchronous conversations (which, as I argue in Deep Work, is a cognitive disaster).

I mention this only to help diminish any nagging cognitive dissonance. It’s perfectly consistent to love the convenience of shooting off a digital file to your team in an efficient message, while at the same time dreading what awaits you in your inbox.

(Photo by Phil Roeder.)

Beyond the Inbox: Rules for Reducing Email

In my last post, I warned that a sudden shift to remote work could inadvertently push knowledge workers into a state of inbox capture, in which essentially all of their time outside of Zoom calls ends up dedicated to sending and receiving email (or Slack messages). As I hinted, I think the best solutions here require radical changes to how these organizations operate. In the short term, however, I thought it might be useful to provide a few ideas about what individuals can do right away to avoid the perils of this state of capture.

It’s important to first bust a popular belief. The key to spending less time in your inbox is not simply to check it less often. This advice is out of date, echoing a simpler time when emails were novel. In recent years, of course, this technology has (unfortunately) become the medium in which most work now unfolds. Ignoring your inbox for long stretches with no other accommodations might seriously impair your organization’s operation.

What’s instead imperative is to move more of this work out of your inbox and into other systems that better support efficient execution. You can’t, in other words, avoid this work, but you can find better alternatives to simply passing messages back and forth in an ad hoc manner throughout the day.

Here are three concrete rules along these lines to help clarify what I mean…

Rule #1: Never schedule a call or meeting using email.

In our current moment in which casual conversations in the hallway or impromptu office visits are impossible, you have to be using meeting scheduling services that allow people to select a time from your list of available times. Use calend.ly, use Acuity, use the features built into Microsoft Outlook,  and if you’re setting up a group meeting, use Doodle. But do not let this coordination unfold as a slow back-and-forth exchange of messages, as this is guaranteed to keep you in a state of constant, agitated inbox checking.

Rule #2: Immediately move obligations out of your inbox and into role-specific repositories.

I currently inhabit four professional roles: writer, teacher, researcher, and director of graduate studies for my department. For each of these roles, I set up a Trello board that includes a column for: things I’m working on actively, thing I’m waiting to hear back about from someone else,  things on my “back burner” that I’m not yet ready to tackle, and  a list of ambiguous or complicated things that I need to spend some time on figuring out. Every email I receive immediately gets moved to one of these columns in one of my Trello boards.

This might seem arbitrary, but it’s actually critical to keeping me away from endless inbox wrangling. It means, among other benefits, that I can focus on one role at a time. For example, when I’m spending time on my role as director of graduate studies, I’m only exposed to information about this role — preventing energy-sapping context shifts. I can see the whole picture of what’s on my plate, and make smart decisions about what I want to work on in the moment.

Seeing the status of my obligations in one place also significantly simplifies the process of consolidating multiple tasks and identifying systems that might make work more efficient in the future (I’m in the process, for example, of launching an FAQ page on our departmental web site that instructs our graduate students how to execute many common activities without needing to send me ambiguous emails).

This approach is an order of magnitude more efficient than instead collapsing all of these obligations into a haphazard jumble piled up in a single undifferentiated inbox.

Rule #3: Hold office hours.

Setup a recurring Zoom meeting for set times every week where you guarantee to be present. As much as possible, when people send you an ambiguous request or initiate a conversation that will require a lot of back and forth, point them toward your office hours schedule and tell them to stop by next time they can to discuss. It’s a simple idea, but it can reduce the number of attention-snagging back-and-forth electronic messages in your professional life by an order of magnitude.

Us professors, of course, have long used this strategy to moderate student interaction into more sustainable patterns that work better for all parties involved. In our current period of widespread remote work, however, this should be much more common. (I actually proposed this idea in a 2016 article I wrote for the Harvard Business Review; it’s also promoted in Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s 2018 book, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work).

Task Inflation and Inbox Capture: On Unexpected Side Effects of Enforced Telework

I’ve spent years studying how knowledge work operates. One thing I’ve noticed about this sector is that it tends to treat the assignment of work tasks with great informality. New obligations arise haphazardly, perhaps in the form of a hastily-composed email or impromptu request during a meeting. If you ask a manager to estimate the current load on each of their team members, they’d likely struggle. If you ask the average knowledge worker to enumerate every obligation currently on their own plate, they’d also likely struggle — the things they need to do exist as a loose assemblage of meeting invites and unread emails.

What prevents this system from spiraling out of control is often a series of implicit friction sources centered on physical co-location in an office. For example:

If I see you in the office acting out the role of someone who is busy, or flustered, or overwhelmed, I’m less likely to put more demands on you.
If I encounter you face-to-face on a regular basis, then the social capital at stake when I later ask you to do something via email is amplified.
Conference room meetings — though rightly vilified when they become incessant — also provide opportunities for highly efficient in-person encounters in which otherwise ambiguous decisions or tasks can be hashed out on the spot.

When you suddenly take a workplace, and with little warning, make it entirely remote: you lose these friction sources. This could lead to extreme results.

In some roles, for example, in the absence of this friction task inflation might become endemic, leading knowledge workers to unexpectedly put in more hours even though they no longer have to commute and are freed from time-consuming business travel obligations.

This inflation might even collapse into a dismal state I call inbox capture, in which essentially every moment of your workday becomes dedicated to keeping up with email, Slack, and Zoom meetings, with very little work beyond the most logistical and superficial actually accomplished — an incredibly wasteful form of economic activity.

What’s the solution to this particular issue? Knowledge work organizations might have to finally get more formal about how tasks are identified, assigned, and tracked. This will require inconvenient new rules and systems, but will also, in the long run, probably be a much smarter way to work, even when we can return to our offices.

More generally, I think this is just one example among many where the sudden disruption that defines our current moment will force us to confront aspects of knowledge work that up until now have been barely functional, and ask: what’s the right way to get this work done?

(Photo by Corley May.)

Nick Saban Just Got Email

By most measures, Nick Saban is one of the most successful college football coaches in the history of the sport. As revealed in a recent interview with ESPN, however, he’s not exactly tech savvy. During this discussion, Sabin revealed that up until the last few weeks, when unavoidable remote work forced some changes, he had never used email.

I think this is an important story. Not because Saban’s specific work habits can be widely replicated (Saban, who was paid $8.6 million last year, has a staff who handles incoming requests), but because it underscores a point that we often forget. Low friction communication makes a lot of modern work easier, because it allows you to avoid the pain of setting up and optimizing systems that organize your efforts. But easy is not the same as effective.

We’re in a moment right now in which a lot of knowledge workers, dislodged from their normal routines, are forced to look at their work from a fresh perspective. There’s an opportunity lurking here among the abundant negatives: we might notice that our current commitment to unrelenting, uncontrolled, attention-devouring incoming communication is not necessarily the sine qua non of digital age productivity.

Saban didn’t need to check an inbox every five minutes to win six championship titles. This might be less exceptional than we realize.

(Image by Photographer 192)