Cal Newport's Blog, page 22

The Deep Life: Some Notes

Over the past fifteen years, I’ve covered many different topics in my writing that all seem to roughly orbit ideas around productivity, technology, and meaning. Some of my readers have taken to unifying this prescriptive worldview with a simple description: the deep life. Giving its foundational role in what we do here, I thought it might be useful to summarize how I think about this philosophy at the moment.

To me, the deep life is about focusing with energetic intention on things that really matter — in work, at home, and in your soul — and not wasting too much attention on things that don’t.

Those who embrace the deep life often push some of these efforts to a place that seems radical to outsiders, but it’s exactly in this extremeness that they find the deep satisfaction. A life focused intensely on the things that really matter — even if it’s riddled with ups and downs — trumps a comfortable life that unfolds with haphazard numbness or excessive narcissism.

The tricky part in cultivating a deep life, of course, is figuring out what things matter. This will differ between different people. I strive to divide my focused attention among four categories:

community (family, friends, etc.),
craft (work and quality leisure),
constitution (health), and
contemplation (matters of the soul).

In each of these areas I keep striving to identify the big swings — the actions or commitments that will make the most difference — while clearing out the detritus that gets in the way (this latter goal giving rise to my obsession with productivity). They all interact: constitution enables better craft, while contemplation, as it so often does, provides a template for basically everything that’s important. Sometimes I’m more successful in these efforts than others. I’m better at it now than when I was at 25, and think I’ll be even better when I’m 45.

So there it is: a short summary of the underlying philosophy that gives rise to so much that I end up writing about, from the zen valedictorian, to career capital, to deep work, to the importance of digital minimalism. You’re only granted so much energy to expend in a lifetime. You’re almost certainly best off focusing it as intensely as you can on the targets that seem to really move the needle.

Text File Time Blocking

As longtime readers know, I’m a big advocate of time blocking as a productivity method. Running your day from a to-do list (or, God forbid, an email inbox) leads to sub-optimal returns on the energy invested. The superior method is to give every minute of your workday a job by actually blocking off your time and assigning specific work to the blocks. In my experience, a serious commitment to time blocking can roughly double your results. (For more details, see this article or Rule #4 of Deep Work.)

Anyway, this is all to say that I was excited when several readers pointed me toward a nice variation of time blocking implemented by Jeff Huang, a computer science professor at Brown University.

As detailed in a post he wrote about his method, Huang uses a plain text file to make his time block plan for the day. (Though I use a paper notebook for my time blocks, I too appreciate the versatility of plain text files.)

Here’s an example schedule provided by Huang:

2017-11-31

11:00am meet with Head TAs

– where are things at with inviting portfolio reviewers?

11:30am meet with student Enya (interested in research)

review and release A/B Testing

assignment grading

12pm HCI group meeting

– vote for lab snacks

send reminders for CHI external reviewers

read Sketchy draft Zelda

pick up eye tracker

– have her sign for it

update biosketch for Co-PI

3:15pm join call with Umbrella Corp and industry partnership staff

3:45pm advising meet with Oprah

4pm Rihanna talk (368 CIT)

5pm 1:1 with Beyonce #phdadvisee

6pm faculty interview dinner with Madonna

What makes Huang’s system particularly interesting is that he then annotates his time block schedule with notes about what actually happened during each block:

2017-11-31

11:00am meet with Head TAs

– where are things at with inviting portfolio reviewers? A: got 7/29 replies

– need 3 TAs for Thursday lab

– Redesign assignment handout will be done by Monday, ship Thursday

11:30am meet with student Enya (interested in research)

– they’re a little inexperienced, suggested applying next year

review and release A/B Testing assignment grading

12pm HCI group meeting

– automatically generate thumbnails from zoom behavior on web pages

– #idea subliminal audio that leads you to dream about websites

– Eminem presenting Nov 24

– vote for lab snacks. A: popcorn and seaweed thing

got unofficial notification ARO YIP funding award #annual #cv

read Sketchy paper draft

– needs 1 more revision

– send to Gandalf to look at?

Zelda pick up eye tracker

– have her sign for it

update biosketch for Co-PI

unexpected drop in from Coolio! #alumni

– now a PM working on TravelAdvisor, thinking about applying to grad school

3:15pm join call with Umbrella Corp and industry partnership staff

– they want to hire 20 data science + SWE interns (year 3), 4 alums there as SWE

3:45pm advising meet with Oprah

– enjoyed CS 33

– interning at Facebook

4pm Rihanna talk (368 CIT)

5pm 1:1 with Beyonce #phdadvisee

– stuck on random graph generating crash

– monitor memory/swap/disk?

– ask Mario to help?

– got internship at MSR with Cher

– start May 15 or 22

– will send me study design outline before next meeting

– interviewing Spartacus as potential RA for next semester

6pm faculty interview dinner with Madonna (Gracie’s)

– ask about connection with computer vision

– cool visual+audio unsupervised comparison, thoughtful about missing data, would work with ugrads (?), likes biking, teach compvis + graphics

– vote #HIRE

#note maybe visit Monsters University next spring, Bono does related work

Huang then saves the document, leaving a record of what he did and what he learned during the day.

I love the simplicity of this digital implementation and its use of of post-hoc annotation. It helps emphasize the reality that if you want to get more important things done, you don’t need high tech software or complex systems. The right strategy implemented in a low-friction manner can be more than enough.

Mikhail Botvinnik and the Invention of Modern Chess Training

Former world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik helped build the Soviet’s dominant chess system. His pupils included Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik: all world champions as well.

According to Wikipedia, perhaps Botvinnik’s biggest contribution was figuring out the right way to train people to get better at chess:

“Botvinnik’s example and teaching established the modern approach to preparing for competitive chess: regular but moderate physical exercise; analysing very thoroughly a relatively narrow repertoire of openings; annotating one’s own games, those of past great players and those of competitors; publishing one’s annotations so that others can point out any errors; studying strong opponents to discover their strengths and weaknesses; ruthless objectivity about one’s own strengths and weaknesses.”

This quote came to my attention when a reader pointed me toward a tweet about Botvinnik from Washington Post reporter Harry Stevens, who added the following commentary: “seems like a generally smart way to get good at just about anything.”

I agree. More to the point, this got me wondering how many modern endeavors, especially within the rapidly developing knowledge sector, are still waiting for their own Botvinnik to help figure out how to get serious about getting better.

On Irrational Numbers and Deep Thinking

Today is March 14th, which to us math nerds is also known as Pi Day, in reference to the first three significant digits of the mathematical constant pi (3.14).

Part of what makes pi interesting is that it’s one of the most famous irrational numbers, meaning that it cannot be expressed as the fraction of two whole values (though 22/7 comes pretty close). In honor of Pi Day, I thought I would learn more about the history of irrational numbers, so I turned to one of my bookshelf favorites, The World of Mathematics: a four-volume history of math, edited by James R. Newman, and published in a handsome faux-leather box set in 1956. (I picked up my copy at a used book sale five years ago.)

The first volume contains an extended essay (originally a short book) titled “The Great Mathematicians,” written by Herbert Western Turnbull, the late Scottish algebraist. Turnbull dedicates much of the essay to great innovations from ancient Greek mathematics. It was Pythagoras (570 – 495 BC), he notes, who is most often credited for discovering that irrational numbers exist.

We know something of the proof that Pythagoras used due to a later account by Aristotle. The proof is elementary by modern standards (indeed, it’s a common example in undergraduate-level discrete mathematics courses). It goes something like this…

Consider a square with sides of length one. Applying the Pythagorean Theorem (which, of course, was brand new in Pythagoras’ time), it follows the length of the diagonal of this square is the square root of 2. It is this common value that was shown to be irrational.

To make this claim, let us assume, for now, that the square root of 2 is a rational number. We can show this will lead to a logical contradiction. This march towards a contradiction unfolds as a rapid-fire sequence of basic number theory and algebraic claims:

If the square root of 2 is rational, then it can be written as x/y, for two whole numbers x and y that share no factors in common, which implies…
that if we square both sides, then 2 = x^2 / y^2, and therefore, x^2 = 2 * y^2, which implies…
x^2 is even (since it is expressed as 2 times another whole number), which tells us that x must also be even, because if you square an odd number you would get an odd number, which implies…
x^2 = (2k)^2 = 4k^2, for some whole number k, which, after doing some algebra, tells us that y^2 = 2k^2, which implies…
that y^2 is even, and therefore y is even (by the same arguement that we applied to x^2).

We have now shown that both x and y are even. But earlier we assumed they had no factors in common. If they are even, they would have a factor in common (namely, 2). This is a contradiction! Math cannot have contradictions, so our original assumption that the square root of 2 is rational must have been wrong.

We might think of this proof as easy, but as Turnbull argues, the result should not be dismissed:

“That will ever rank as a piece of essentially advanced mathematics. As it upset many of the accepted geometrical proofs it came as a ‘veritable logical scandal.'”

The discovery of irrational numbers turned out to be more than just a logical scandal, it also caused theological issues. Pythagoras’s cult had been convinced that everything in the universe could be reduced down to whole numbers. The idea that values existed that could not be expressed with whole numbers alone destabilized this understanding of existence —  spawning a number-theoretic crisis of faith.

It’s worth briefly visiting this history of irrational numbers because it’s interesting, and because today we celebrate one such value. But for anyone who shares my interest in cultivating a deep life, this story holds a more compelling layer. It reminds us that there was a time, almost 3000 years ago, when a select group of lucky ancient philosophers could build an entire system of meaning out of simply thinking hard and then marveling at what they discovered.

The mind, when properly cultivated, really does contain multitudes.

On Digital Minimalism and Pandemics

One of the more profound representations of the soul in the Western Canon is the Chariot Allegory from Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue:

“[T]he charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character.”

As elaborated by the character of Socrates in the dialogue, the charioteer represents our soul’s reasoned pursuit to cultivate a worthy life. This task requires the charioteer to allow the noble steed, representing our moral intuitions, to lead the way, while preventing its ignoble partner, representing our base instincts, from drawing the soul off course.

In Digital Minimalism, I use this allegory to help understand how to navigate both the promises and perils of modern technology. The minimalist, I argue, deploys technology in specific, intentional ways with the goal of empowering the noble steed. The maximalist, by contrast, deploys technology casually, allowing it to immeasurably boost the strength of the other horse.

I’m bringing this up now because it occurred to me that these ideas have probably never been more relevant than amidst the anxiety caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

In this current situation, for most people, the constant monitoring of online news about the virus is providing pure fuel to the ignoble steed, dragging the allegorical chariot away from what’s good and awe-inspiring about life — even during turmoil — and toward bottom-less anxiety and pseudo-paralysis. The ignoble steed always craves more of this attention-catching information. What if something extra terrible just happened? What if I find a link that makes me feel better? But in this feverish pursuit, the charioteer loses control.

There is, I propose, a simple two-part solution to this state of affairs.

First, check one national and one local new source each morning. Then — and this is the important part — don’t check any other news for the rest of the day. Presumably, time sensitive updates that affect you directly will arrive by email, or phone, or text.

This will be really hard, especially given the way we’ve been trained by social media companies over the past decade to view our phone as a psychological pacifier.

Which brings me to the second part of the solution: distract yourself with value-driven action; lots of action. Serve your community, serve your kids, serve yourself (both body and mind), produce good work. Try to fit in a few moments of forced gratitude, just to keep those particular circuits active.

This doesn’t mean abandon technology. This current moment reveals many ways to deploy tech to strategically boost the noble steed.  Our modern tools enable you to video conference more often with friends and family, or to dive into deep topics that have nothing to do with flu viruses, or to coordinate with your community and find out how you can be useful.

This, then, is what digital minimalism has to say about pandemics. You cannot take your technology lightly. You’re the charioteer facing two horses: it’s up to you which one you want to empower.

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To help practice what I preach, my plan is to post more often here in the near future, but on topics that have nothing to do with the coronavirus. With this in mind, if you have any questions you’ve always been meaning to ask me about any of the topics I write about — technology, productivity and the deep life — send them to author@calnewport.com, I’ll try to answer some of them in the days ahead.

More Evidence of Facebook’s Negative Impact

Last week, I wrote about a paper appearing in the American Economic Review that conducted a randomized trial to measure the personal impact of deactivating Facebook. A few days later, a different study was published, this one appearing in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, that also deployed a randomized trial to measure the impact of reduced Facebook use.

The authors of this new paper, a group of psychologists from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, in Germany, randomly split a group of roughly three hundred volunteers into an experiment and control group. The participants in the experiment group were asked to reduce their daily Facebook use, while the control group made no changes.

Personal impacts were measured with online surveys administered at regular intervals. To summarize the paper’s main findings:

“Life satisfaction significantly increased, and depressive symptoms significantly decreased. Moreover, frequency of physical activity such as jogging or cycling significantly increased, and number of daily smoked cigarettes decreased. Effects remained stable during follow-up (three months). Thus, less time spent on Facebook leads to more well-being and a healthier lifestyle.”

Based on what I observed researching Digital Minimalism, a key dynamic at play in these numbers is likely the shift from Facebook to more rewarding activities. This is what participants in my own study kept reporting: it’s not that the time they spent on social media was always negative on its own, the problem was instead the time social media took away from other activities that are more positive.

A deep life, in other words, tends to minimize the hours spent staring mindlessly at screens, but it does so not because the screens are bad, but because there’s too much else good going on to spare the attention.

Top Economists Study What Happens When You Stop Using Facebook

In the most recent issue of the prestigious American Economic Review, a group of well-known economists published a paper titled “The Welfare Effects of Social Media.” It presents the results of one of the largest randomized trials ever conducted to directly measure the personal impact of deactivating Facebook.

The experimental design is straightforward. Using Facebook ads, the researchers recruited 2,743 users who were willing to leave Facebook for one month in exchange for a cash reward. They then randomly divided these users into a Treatment group, that followed through with the deactivation, and a Control group, that was asked to keep using the platform. 

The researchers deployed surveys, emails, text messages, and monitoring software to measure both the subjective well-being and behavior of both groups, both during and after the experiment. 

Here are some highlights of what they found:

“Deactivating Facebook freed up 60 minutes per day for the average person in our Treatment group.” Much of this time was reinvested in offline activities, including, notably, socializing with friends and family. “Deactivation caused small but significant improvements in well-being, and in particular in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety.” The researchers report this effect to be around 25-40% of the effect typically attributed to participating in therapy. “As the experiment ended, participants reported planning to use Facebook much less in the future.” Five percent of the Treatment group went even farther and declined to reactivate their account after the experiment ended. “The Treatment group was less likely to say they follow news about politics or the President, and less able to correctly answer factual questions about recent news events.” This was not surprising given that this group spent 15% less time reading any type of online news during the experiment.“Deactivation significantly reduced polarization of views on policy issues and a measure of exposure to polarizing news.” On the other hand, it didn’t significantly reduce negative feelings about the other political party.

This study validates many of the ideas from Digital Minimalism (indeed, the paper even cites the book in its introduction). People spend more time on social media than they realize, and stepping away frees up time for more rewarding offline activities, leading, in turn, to an increase in self-reported happiness and a decrease in self-reported anxiety. 

The main negative impact experienced by the Treatment group was that they were less up to date on the news. Some might argue that this isn’t really negative, but even for those who prioritize current events knowledge, there are, obviously, many better ways to keep up with news than Facebook.

Perhaps most interesting was the disconnect between the subjects’ experience with deactivating Facebook and their prediction about how other people would react. “About 80 percent of the Treatment group agreed that deactivation was good for them,” reports the researchers. But this same group was likely to believe that others wouldn’t experience similar positive effects, as they would likely “miss out” more. The specter of FOMO, in other words, is hard to shake, even after you’ve learned through direct experience that in your own case this “fear” was largely hype.

This final result tells me that perhaps an early important step in freeing our culture from indentured servitude in social media’s attention mines is convincing people that abstention is an option in the first place.

Alfred North Whitehead’s Awe-Inspiring Focus

Alfred North Whitehead was an early 20th-century mathematician and philosopher. He’s known, among many contributions, for his magisterial three-volume treatise, Principia Mathematica, which was written with Bertrand Russell and attempted to reduce all of mathematics to implications of a master set of logical axioms (Kurt Gödel, of course, had other ideas about this particular endeavor).

Whitehead later turned his attention from mathematics toward the philosophy of science, and then on to metaphysics. In total, he published 23 books between 1898 and 1948.

What does it take to produce cognitive output at such a high level? Bertrand Russell gives us a hint in the following scene from his autobiography:

“[Whitehead’s] capacity for concentration on work was quite extraordinary. One hot summer’s day, when I was staying with him at Grantchester, our friend Crompton Davies arrived and I took him into the garden to say how-do-you-do to his host. Whitehead was sitting writing mathematics. Davies and I stood in front of him at a distance of no more than a yard and watched him covering page after page with symbols. He never saw us, and after a time we went away with a feeling of awe.”

One of the things that worries me about the shoulder-shrugging manner in which our current culture is diminishing uninterrupted thinking is that I can’t help but wonder how many potential modern Whiteheads, growing up in a world of fragmentation and connectivity-primacy, will never make it to writing their own masterpieces.

Sir William Osler’s Advice to Students: Practice Concentrating on Hard Things

Sir William Osler is one of the most important figures in the founding of modern medicine. In 1910, he published a book titled Aequanimitas: With Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses and Practitioners of Medicine. It builds on a farewell address he gave at the Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1889, and details his thoughts on what it takes to thrive in an intellectually demanding medical field.

As one of my readers helpfully pointed out recently, chapter 18 of this book contains the following prescriptive gem about how to succeed in an endeavor that requires you to create value with your mind:

“Let each hour of the day have its allowed duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise, so that the attention neither flags nor wavers, but settles with bull-dog tenacity on the subject before you. Constant repetition makes a good habit fit easily in your mind, and by the end of the session you may have gained that most precious of all knowledge—the power of work.”

What struck me about this quote, in addition to it being a nice endorsement of the deep life, is that it comes from an educator. To Olser, it was clear that training a new generation of thinkers required teaching students how to actually put their mind to productive use, which is hard, and requires “bull-dog tenacity” before it becomes a “good habit.”

We don’t teach this any more.

Modern educational institutions care a lot about content: what theories we teach, what ideas students are exposed to, what skills they come away knowing. But we rarely address the more general question of how one transforms their mind into a tool well-honed for elite-level cognitive work.

We have, in other words, largely given up talking explicitly about this element of the intellectual life. This might be in part because it seems too pragmatic and not sufficiently lofty. I suspect it’s also due in part to the fact that educators themselves, drowning in a sea of email and unchecked administrative obligations, don’t feel comfortable pushing a lifestyle they don’t themselves lead any more.

But regardless of the reason, this omission is almost certainly made to our culture’s detriment. I suspect (though can’t yet prove), that an educational institution that unapologetically made deep work a core principle, would not scare off a generation used to staring at screens, but instead find itself deluged with applicants hungry to taste a more meaningful mode of existence.

On Thomas Edison, Technophobia, and Social Media Criticism

I recently finished Edmund Morris’s epic new Thomas Edison biography. It took me a while to get used to his reverse chronology structure (he works backwards from Edison’s later years to his earlier years), but once I did, I found it riveting.

One thing that caught my attention from the book was the degree to which early 20th century Americans were exposed to rapid technological change. We think the arrival of the internet and smartphones were a big deal, but these innovations were trivial in magnitude compared to the arrival of electricity.

Constraints that had been constant throughout all of human history — the darkness of night, the slow pace of information dissemination — were obliterated in just a few decades.

Edison was born in an age of horses and sailing ships. He death was broadcast worldwide via radio waves, and whole cities — their streets clogged with cars and their skies blotted with steel-girded buildings — temporarily powered down their ubiquitous electric lights to honor his passing.

These changes naturally led to some reactionary technophobia (though, as I argued in a recent op-ed for WIRED, there wasn’t as much of this resistance as popular commentators like to imply). I’m interested in this historical moment of technophobia, as skeptical technology commentators such as myself, or Tristan Harris, Jaron Lanier, and Douglas Rushkoff, are sometimes associated with this tradition by our detractors.

But does this analogy hold up?

There are two problems with connecting the types of ideas discussed in books like Digital Minimalism to Edison-era technophobia.

The first is that many of the anti-technology voices from the early 20th century were disturbed in large part because they didn’t understand the new technology (a new phenomenon in a world in which tools had always before been physical and intuitive). Electricity seemed wholly mysterious and borderline occult.

Modern technology skeptics, however, tend to instead be technologists who are thoroughly familiar with new innovations. I trained in MIT’s Theory of Distributed Systems and Network and Mobile Systems groups: it’s hard to tag me as baffled by the operation of a modern social network or broadband wireless internet.

The second problem is the Edison-era technophobes tended to reject the entire program of new electrical technology as bad. The whole movement scared them, and they wanted nothing to do with it.

Modern skeptics such as myself, Lanier, and Rushkoff, by contrast, have been internet-boosters since its earliest days, and still hold semi-utopian visions about how internet technologies can improve the world. It’s hard to tag us as scared of change in a field where we’ve consistently supported positive disruption.

A better analogy from the time of Edison is his own battle against George Westinghouse to determine whether alternating current was superior to direct current for municipal energy generation. No one at the time thought Edison was anti-electricity or scared of change. They instead recognized he was debating what direction was best for this particular technology’s advancement.

This is the generous interpretation I give to my own critiques of social media. I love the internet, but worry that trying to consolidate it under the control of a small number of Orwellian conglomerates is a costly detour, impeding instead of promoting its advancement. Lanier, Rushkoff, Harris would almost certainly say something similar.

This doesn’t mean we’re right (Edison was wrong in his preference for direct current), but it also doesn’t mean that we were somehow duped by an ill-informed moral panic.

To summarize my take away from studying the life and times of Thomas Edison, be wary of confusing technophobia and techno criticism. The former is not as common as we like to think, and the latter has always been absolutely crucial — especially when delivered by fellow technologists — in the quest to unlock more and more human potential.

Now if I could only figure out how invent the 21st century equivalent of the light bulb…