Cal Newport's Blog, page 23

Edward’s Analog January

It’s been about a month since I proposed the Analog January Challenge. Accordingly, I’ve begun to receive reports from those who’ve made it through a full four weeks of enhanced analog activity.

I thought it would be interesting to share one of these case studies…

One of the first reports I received was from Edward (not his real name), a young man living in London, who ended up traveling to Florida to visit family during the month.

Edward claimed that jet lag complicated the READ piece of the challenge, but he still managed to finish two biographies, a non-fiction book on psychology, and Gone With the Wind. He also started Little Women, as he figured it was probably smart to have read the book before going to see the Greta Gerwig film.

As for the MOVE piece, Edward noted that “London really does save my butt on this one.” While in the city, he found it both easy and enjoyable to walk its historic streets, observing his surroundings and allowing his own thoughts to keep him company. When the “crazy city noise” got overwhelming, he’d find refuge in Hyde Park.

Edward’s time in Florida, on the other hand, was a different story. As he explained, unless you live in one of the Sunshine State’s big cities, “the incentive to move for any reason is severely curtailed.”

As an extrovert living in a city for most of the month, the CONNECT piece of the challenge was easy. He told me he had no trouble finding twenty people with which to hold conversations. He even ended up in a deep conversation with the flight attendants on his flight to the states.

As for MAKE, Edward took on an unusual, but frankly awesome challenge: memorizing London’s famously complicated street layout. “When I have a free afternoon,” he explained, “I do this by riding a bus route for its entire length.” He adds the obvious coda: “it’s a great exercise in mental solitude — nothing to think about but the road ahead.”

Reflecting on the MAKE challenge, Edward noted that part of the difficulty of pursuing any skilled hobby is that it will likely require some sort of regular practice routine, which is not always an easy addition to an already busy schedule.

On the other hand, he found deeper value lurking in his struggles to decipher London’s streets: it sharpened his appreciation for how hard it is to actually do things that are worthwhile.

“I’m seeing people who are having a bad time managing their expectations about their world,” he mused. “There’s a confusion about how much effort someone needs to put into something in order to find success.” A few afternoons lost among London’s labyrinthian road system cured this hubris.

Finally, there was the JOIN piece of the challenge. “HUGE progress,” Edward summarized. He had been worried about this part of Analog January as he couldn’t think of anything that he might want to actually participate in on a regular basis.

Then a friend of his asked him to join a weekly Dungeons and Dragons group. “This really isn’t my cup of tea,” Edward explained, but because he was participating in the challenge, he figured he would give it a shot.

He now find himself every Sunday, from 1 to 5, sitting with a group of friends in an office boardroom, rolling the dice and slaying orcs. “I still don’t quite understand the game,” Edward admits, and it’s occasionally a touch boring, but it provides four hours every week when he knows he’ll be sitting in a room with real people, in no particular rush, just being present, and talking, and passing snacks and trying to figure out those damn weird dice.

“It’s now easily the most fixed routine I have,” he said.

What strikes me about Edward’s story are not the specific ways with which he filled his time during his Analog January Challenge — as these are unique to his particular situation — but instead the sheer volume and variety of non-screen related activities in his life during this month.

So many have allowed the contours of their existence outside of work, family obligations and school to shrink down to the comforting numbness of a screen, that it can be bracing at first to encounter the intense engagement of a life that’s lived free from passive consumption, and instead rich in so much that’s so real.

(Photo by Rodrigo Galindez)

The Platform Exceptionalism of YouTube

The major social media services are often described as fundamental platforms of the internet age. The companies that control these services use this argument to justify their astronomical valuations, and their critics use it to validate the need for regulatory intervention.

As longtime readers know, I’m often skeptical of this digital deification.

Services like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram aren’t really platforms: instead of providing core functionalities on which others can build a diversity of useful applications (the standard definition of a platform), they instead offer closed ecosystems in which they carefully monitor and control user behavior.

These services are also far from fundamental. Nothing about web teleology, for example, implies that Twitter’s arcane mix of short-message formats, ampersands, and retweet ratios is an unavoidable technological advance. If Jack Dorsey shut down his Frankenstein’s monster tomorrow, few would wake up a year from now really missing what it added to the online universe.

Recently, however, I’ve been grappling with the idea that there’s one immensely powerful social service about which my skepticism doesn’t seem to neatly apply. I’m talking about YouTube.

To start with, unlike tweets or tagged photo sharing, streaming video is fundamental. The original HTML- dominated version of the web democratized and decentralized the publication of the written word. Online streaming video is doing the same for the moving picture, an equally, if not more important form of media for many people.

Furthermore, YouTube, unlike its peers in the pantheon of social media giants, really can act like a platform. Though it still offers a purposefully addictive and creepily-surveilled user experience at YouTube.com (few rabbit holes run deeper than those excavated by their algorithmically-enhanced autoplay suggestions), the service also allows its videos to be embedded in third-party websites, enabling it to behave like an actual platform that can support a wide array of non-affiliated communities.

I was thinking about this the other day when visiting Tested.com, a technology-oriented web site, primarily built around original videos hosted on YouTube.

A site like Tested could never exist if they had to develop their own reliable, international, low-latency, multi-platform delivery network. But with YouTube providing these core services, the site’s founders could instead focus on innovating content.

And with the advent of low-cost HD cameras and tunable LED light boards, the content on sites like Tested is starting to get pretty damn good, rapidly approaching the quality and user engagement of an old-fashioned cable channel, but at a fraction of the price. I’m equally happy watching the always fantastic Adam Savage in a One Day Build video on Tested.com as I am watching an episode of his current Discovery Channel show, Savage Builds, and yet the former cost thousands of dollars to produce while the latter required many millions.

(There’s still a lot of innovation required before these independent video sites reach their full potential — replacing a blog-style timeline format with a Netflix-style interface , for example, might go a long way to encouraging more engagement — but the potential is clearly there.)

YouTube, of course, would probably prefer that this long tail challenge to television would occur entirely within their own chaotic, and often wildly uneven web site, but this isn’t crucial to their survival: they can still play ads on videos embedded elsewhere and split the revenue.

I don’t mean to be an apologist for YouTube, as there’s a lot I don’t like about how their core web site operates, which somehow both numbs your mind while pushing your buttons, and has a way of leaving you feeling vaguely uneasy after too much time spent browsing offerings that bounce chaotically from solid to sordid.

But nonetheless, something interesting is happening with its platform functions. Whereas Facebook, Instagram and Twitter built their fortunes trying to tame the decentralized energy of the original web, forcing users into their walled company towns where behavior is tightly controlled, YouTube might just end up eclipsing them all in importance by enabling the opposite; boosting instead of dampening the ability of the individual to try their hand at building something original.

The Analog January Challenge

One of the surprising lessons I learned working on Digital Minimalism is that when it comes to reforming your relationship with your devices, successful outcomes are less about deciding to stop harmful digital behaviors than they are about deciding to start committing to meaningful analog alternatives.

If you simply resolve to quit social media, and end up sitting on your coach, bored, white knuckling the urge to check Twitter, you’re unlikely to experience lasting change.

On the other hand, if you fill your life with hard but satisfying analog alternatives — activities that resonate with our primal urges to connect, to move, to reflect, to be surrounded by nature, to manipulate elements of the physical world with out hands — you’ll find the appeal of animated GIFs and ASCII snark to be greatly diminished.

With this in mind, I’m introducing the Analog January Challenge. It’s a collection of five commitments that last one month. They’re designed to provide you a crash course introduction to the types of satisfying analog activities that will reduce the anxious attraction of your screens.

(Note: you don’t have to begin exactly on January 1st; just block off four weeks starting on whatever day in the month you initiate the challenge.)

Here are the five commitments that make up the Analog January Challenge:

READ
Commit to reading 3 – 4 new books during the month. It doesn’t matter if they’re fiction or non-fiction, sophisticated or fun. The goal is to rediscover what it feels like to make engagement with the written word an important part of your daily experience.

MOVE
Commit to going for a walk every single day of the month. Try to make it at least 15 minutes long. Leave your phone at home: just observe the world around you and think.

CONNECT
Hold a real conversation with 20 different people during the monthlong challenge. These conversations can be in person or over the phone/Facetime/Skype, but text-based communication doesn’t count (you must be able to hear the other person’s voice). To hit the 20 person mark will require some advance planning: you might consider calling old friends or taking various colleagues along for lunch and coffee breaks.

MAKE
Participate in a skilled hobby that requires you to interact with the physical world. This could be craft-based, like knitting, drawing, wood working, or, as I’ve taken to doing with my boys, building custom circuits. This could also be athletic, like biking, bow hunting, or, as is increasingly popular these days, Brazilian Ju Jitsu. Screen-based activities don’t count. To get the full analog benefit here, you need to encounter and overcome the resistances of the physical landscape that surrounds you, as this is what our minds have evolved to understand as productive action.

JOIN
Join something local that meets weekly. For many people, this might be the hardest commitment, but it’s arguably one of the most important, especially as we enter a political season where the pseudo-anonymity and limbic-triggers of the online world attempt to bring out the worse in us. There’s nothing more fundamentally human than gathering with a group of real people in real life to work on something real together. This has a way of lessening — even if just briefly — the sense of anxious despair that emanates from the online upside down.

You might be wondering how you’re going to fit these commitments into your already busy life. The answer is simple: by spending less time online. This was another one of interesting discoveries I made working on my book: people were often surprised by how much free time they had once they stopped treating their phone as a constant companion.

To take advantage of this reality, I recommend that for the duration of the challenge that you dumb down your smartphone by following the rules I outlined here (summary: use your phone only for calls, texts, maps, and audio — as Steve Jobs originally intended).

Furthermore, I’d suggest that when you access social media on your computer, you always log out when you’re done, and un-save your password — introducing the crucial extra friction of typing in this information every time you want to check your account.

Finally, if you have a YouTube habit, you might consider temporarily deploying an internet blocking tool (like Freedom) to strictly limit the times during which you’re allowed to wander down streaming video rabbit holes.

If you’re unhappy with the out-sized role your phone plays in your daily life, I highly recommend trying this challenge, as it builds upon a powerful but often overlooked truth: We fall into the traps of the digital only when we distance ourselves from the attractions of the analog.

If you do attempt the challenge, send me an email at author@calnewport.com, or leave a comment below, to let me know how it’s going. And, of course, if you complete the challenge and feel fired up about making more permanent changes to your digital life, then I have a book to recommend that you might find useful…

(Photo by Dennis Jarvis.)

Charles Dickens’s Deep Christmas Strolls

A few days ago, I took my two older boys to a small stage production of A Christmas Carol. Afterwards, me being me, I decided to read up on Charles Dickens and the backstory of his famed novella. In doing so, I came across a neat deep work-themed holiday nugget (the best type of nugget).

According to biographer Claire Tomalin, Dickens crafted much of the tale in his head while engaged in nighttime walks that covered 15 to 20 miles. As a result of this ambulatory cogitation, the entire story took only six weeks to complete in the late fall of 1843.

I like this anecdote: it provides a reminder of what’s possible when you’re able to devote hour after hour of deep thinking on one focused target.

Social Media’s Shift Toward Misery

My friend Eric Barker recently pointed my attention to an intriguing paper published earlier this fall in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. It presented a careful meta-analysis of 124 studies looking at the connections between digital media and well-being.

There’s been a lot of academic ink spilled on this subject recently. As I wrote in Digital Minimalism, correlational behavioral studies are exceedingly tricky — you can’t expect slam dunk consistency, but must instead look for general trends in the literature pointing toward some underlying signal in the noise.

Which is all to say, you shouldn’t don’t take any one study too seriously. Even with these caveats, however, I did find this one interesting, as it featured some heavyweight authors, and was clearly written to offer some authority on where the noisy literature seems to be trending at the moment.

The analysis was complicated and contained multiple noteworthy findings, but there was one result in particular I wanted to highlight:

“[D]ifferent [social media service (SNS)] activities have quite different relationships to well-being…Interactions and online entertainment had significant, positive links to well-being. Self-presentation also correlated positively with well-being, but the effect was very small. The largest effect we found in our entire meta-analysis was the negative correlation between well-being and SNS content consumption.”

Here’s what struck me about these observations. Early social media focused on the behaviors that make people feel better: you would post things about yourself and check in/interact with your friends.

Modern social media, which largely displaced the individual feed model with the algorithmically-generated timeline, instead emphasizes passive content consumption, as the amount of times you can check on your friends in a given week is relatively small, while the time you can dedicate to content consumption is boundless.

This seems like a house cards. How much worse can these services make us feel about ourselves before we realize there are other ways to get the things we used to love about the social internet?

The Advice I Gave My Students

Toward the end of class today, one of my students asked me what advice inspired by my books I’d give them as they headed into the university’s final exam period.

I thought about it for a second before recommending a simple hack that I’ve been experimenting with recently and finding useful:

Use your smartphone only for the following activities: calls, text messages, maps, and audio (songs/podcasts/books).

I suggested that my students try this for one week while studying for their exams. I further suggested that they actually record on a calendar or in a journal whether or not they succeeded in following the rule 100% for the day. One slip to check social media, or glance at email, or look up a website, and they don’t get to mark the day as a success.

They can still do all of these online activities, but only on their laptop. When they’re away from their computer, their phone is still useful for basic operations, but it ceases to act as a crutch that helps them avoid the world around them.

This hack is lightweight — far less aggressive than what I recommend in Digital Minimalism, and therefore easier to convince people to try.

But if you give it a chance, it’s still disruptive enough to your normal routines to provide key insight into just how dependent you may have become on mediating your experience through a constant background hum of digital intervention.

How Social Media Hacked Civic Conversation

The most recent issue of The Atlantic includes a fascinating article by Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell. It’s titled, “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks.”

In Digital Minimalism, I argued that our relationship with social media was transformed when the major platforms updated their designs to make these services less about checking on other peoples’ status, and more about checking incoming “social approval indicators,” which arrive in the form of likes, retweets, shares, hearts, streaks and tags.

This key shift, which took place between 2009 and 2012, is largely responsible for retraining us to think about social media as something to check all the time. Our current moment, in which we both accept and lament the status of our phones as constant companions, was a direct consequence of these tweaks to social media technology.

(For more on this idea, see also my New York Times op-ed on Steve Jobs’s original vision for the iPhone.)

In their new article, Haidt and Rose-Stockwell trace another unintended consequence of the introduction of social approval indicators to social media: the breakdown of online civility.

Drawing from the work of philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, the authors argue that adding quantifiable approval to a public forum leads to what’s known as moral grandstanding, an activity in which speakers take turns, each trying to out do those who came before them in whipping up approval from the crowd:

“Grandstanders tend to ‘trump up moral charges, pile on in cases of public shaming, announce that anyone who disagrees with them is obviously wrong, or exaggerate emotional displays.’ Nuance and truth are casualties in this competition to gain the approval of the audience. Grandstanders scrutinize every word spoken by their opponents—and sometimes even their friends—for the potential to evoke public outrage. Context collapses. The speaker’s intent is ignored.”

This definitely sounds familiar.

As Haidt and Rose-Stockwell point out, this grandstanding isn’t somehow fundamental to our times, or an unavoidable side effect of public conversation, or even a necessary tactic for aggressive advocacy. It is instead an unexpected consequence of a small number of design choices made by the major social media companies a decade earlier.

These companies added easy ways to share and approve of posts to improve the experience of timeline-style content consumption, a new concept at the time. They ended up accidentally short-circuiting our brains.

The one place where I diverge from Haidt and Rose-Stockwell, however, is when it comes to solutions. At the end of their Atlantic article they offer three fixes to this current state of affairs. All of them focus on changes to existing social media platforms that would minimize the conditions that spark moral grandstanding.

What was missing from their list is an even more powerful solution that can actually create real improvement right now: encourage people to use social media much less.

The problem with Haidt and Rose-Stockwell’s suggested solutions is that they would require social media companies to make changes that would almost certainly reduce their revenue. For those who barter in attention, moral grandstanding is good business

My solution, on the other hand, can be put into action immediately and yield significantly positive results, as it has for the increasing number of people embracing a more minimalist approach to these tools.

The sooner those who write about social media accept that the current importance of these technologies are inflated, and that for most people these platforms don’t need to play a major role in their civic or personal lives, the sooner we can get about repairing the damage that we’re only now beginning to fully understand.

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Photo by Kheel Center.

Reflections on the Disconnected Life

Not long ago, an Australian media professor named Robert Hassan boarded the CGM CMA Rossini, a container ship, at a dock in Melbourne. He had arranged to stay on the ship for its five week passage to Singapore. He brought a handful of books, but no phone, no computer, no digital media at all. The crew didn’t speak English either, so it would largely just be Hassan alone with his own thoughts on the sea.

This solitude was, of course, the point. He was conducting an experiment on himself as part of the research for his book, Uncontained, published by an Australian university press last June. What he discovered was poignant.

After reading through his small book supply too quickly, he was faced with endless hours with nothing concrete to do, and soon found his relationship with the world around him began to change.

First, there was his memory.

“I began to think about my own history and my life and things that have happened and to begin to explore those memories [and] think about what was around them, what was behind them,” he told an interviewer on an Australian radio program. “And I began to make discoveries.”

New details emerged. A particular t-shirt someone was wearing, the jokes told, the specific sound of the laughter.

“It is amazing to think that [these details are in] there, in all of us, mostly undisturbed unless we devote the time to concentrate and go looking.”

Then there was his relationship to the world around him on the ship.

He contemplated a screwdriver mark on a hinge. “He or she was standing exactly where I am now, like a ghostly presence who leaves a permanent trace,” he remarked about the phantom source of the mark.

Dust became a preoccupation.

“It’s the stuff that literally falls away from us and our things, traces we don’t even realize we leave.”

He took apart a chair just so he could rebuild it. He became an expert observer of the sea surrounding the ship. (For more on the deep pleasures of observation, there’s no finer source than my favorite minimalist manifesto: Walden.)

Finally, his sleep changed. Operating on an unconstrained schedule, Hassan fell into a biphasal pattern, in which you sleep for a while, wake up and do some activity, and then go to sleep for a while longer.

(Such patterns were common in earlier eras. I remember reading about American colonists who talked about “first and second sleep,” and would be up writing letters, or visiting neighbors, in the middle-of-the-night hours between the two sessions.)

“I woke up and didn’t feel that I had to try and get back to sleep or feel the stress of needing to sleep. I was relaxed about sleep,” he recalls.

Hassan’s experiment (by design) was extreme. But it implies some troubling questions about our current, artificial, digitally-mediated lifestyles.

The screens we carry with us as constant companions don’t amplify or support our natural ways of being, they instead push us into an entirely new mode of existence.

This is not de facto bad; our understanding of the naturalistic fallacy leads us to distrust the assumption that the evolutionary factory presets are always necessarily best. But it would be wildly optimistic to hope that these new behaviors, which are largely driven by the profit motives of attention economy monopolies and device manufacturing giants, would just coincidently happen to also make our lives richer.

Which brings us back to digital minimalism. Most of us don’t have the ability to drop everything for a disconnected life at sea. But we do have the ability to deploy careful experiments and reflection to figure out what we really value, and then — and only then — work backwards to figure out how best to deploy technology to support these aspirations.

Perhaps the most telling clue that there’s somethings off about our current configuration, is that after his five weeks of self-imposed solitary confinement Hassan landed on a simple conclusion.

He’d do it again if he could.

(Photo by Simon Matzinger.)

The Danger of Exaggerating the Political Importance of Social Media

Photo by Matthew G.

The Pew Research Center recently released a new study on American Twitter use. As Jennifer Rubin reported in the Washington Post, one of the most striking findings from the report is that only 2.2% of the population currently produces 97% of political tweets.

As Rubin notes, these findings run counter to the core belief held in media and political circles that these services play a critical role in our democracy. She describes the fact that campaigns and reporters take Twitter so seriously as “bonkers.”

I noticed something similar during my book tour for Digital Minimalism. Most of the readers I met didn’t use social media for political reasons and wouldn’t describe this technology as playing an important role in their civic life. Accordingly, most of these readers didn’t care much about what content was spreading on social media, or even which data were used to target this information.

What they did care about was how much time they were spending staring at their phones. There was a widespread sense that these services had become so distracting that they were starting to take time away from activities that were clearly more important, diminishing the quality of their lives.

There exists, in other words, a gap between media/political types and normal users when it comes to understanding the role of social media in political life. The former see this technology as being inextricably intertwined in the fabric of our democracy, while the latter see it more as a distraction run amok.

I used to just find this gap curious. I’ve come to believe that it’s actually quite serious.

When you’re convinced that social media is essential, you tend to accept that it’s up to the political system to ensure that this public good properly serves the public (much in the same way we trust regulators to ensure our water is safe to drink).

The problem with this frame is that it diminishes the autonomy of individual users. While they sit around hoping that the system keeps social media behaving properly, they continue to suffer from the much more prevalent problem: overuse taking them away from more important activities.

If we instead acknowledge that for many people social media is much more superfluous, we empower users to start pushing back, making aggressive changes in their life right away — leading to immediate improvement in many aspects of their daily experience.

This is not to say that social media plays no role in political life, or that there’s no role for the political system to help monitor how these services do things like collect data or target content, but it’s counterproductive to pretend that this is the whole story.

I have no doubt that for those who work in journalism or politics, or for those who depend on YouTube viewership for cultural relevance, that social media really is at the center of their participation in public life. But for most users, it’s not. If we keep ignoring this reality, we’ll unnecessarily impede our culture’s ability to improve our relationship with these tools.

A Subtle Mistake About How to Acquire Useful Career Skills

As promised, here is the second post written by Scott Young about lessons learned from the many years we’ve run our Top Performer online course, which we’re re-opening next week. This post is about a mistake we made with our curriculum in the early pilots of the course.

If you’re missing Cal content this week, fear not, I’ll be back to my regularly-scheduled programming next week. In the meantime, you can take a look at my recent New York Times op-ed on 5-hour work days. My basic thesis: it’s hugely surprising that we don’t have many more knowledge work organizations aggressively experimenting with novel approaches to work.

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In our early Top Performer pilots (before we even called the course “Top Performer”), Cal and I made a subtle mistake about the process we taught for acquiring career skills. It’s one I’ve seen many people make when thinking about improving their career, so I think it’s worth exploring here in case you might be making it too.

A big part of our course is executing a skill-building project. The goal is to cultivate rare and valuable skills which form the foundation for a successful career.

What we hadn’t recognized in early iterations of our course is that there are actually two different ways to go about these project, one of which tends to be much more effective.

The Difficulty with Drilling Down

The first way you can design a project to upgrade your career skills is to drill down on some aspect of your work that’s important to your job. One of our students, for example, was an academic philosopher who decided to get better at logic. Another student was an architect who decided to deepen his understanding of design.

On the surface, these kinds of projects sound like they should be helpful. Indeed, the entire idea of deliberate practice, on which our course is based, seems reflected in these projects—pick an aspect of your work, and then design an effort to focus on improving it deliberately. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that a lot of these projects didn’t generate spectacular results. Sure, the person might have felt good about deepening a skill, but these were rarely the projects that resulted in promotions, raises or transformations of a person’s work.

True, there were some exceptions. One person decided to dig deep on their understanding of a programming language, and later translated that into landing his dream job.

But even then, this particular success didn’t come from improving a skill alone. In his particular case, the student got the job because his practice activity (making online quizzes about the language he specialized in) brought him to the attention of experts in his field. Had those quizzes not been published (or acknowledged) and it’s unclear how big an impact his project would have had.

Benchmarking Success

A different style of project, however, does seem to work better: benchmark projects.

Benchmark projects are also about improving skills. However, instead of picking a skill and just trying to get better at it, you first pick a clear benchmark accomplishment that defines success. Examples of successful benchmark projects could be:

Writing: Creating a blog and producing 100 articles.Programming: Designing a useful open source library. Academia: Producing a paper that attracts multiple citations. Entrepreneurship: Creating a new product that will sells a certain amount.

Why are these projects (often) more successful than projects which are strictly about drilling a particular skill?

My experience tells me that there are two distinct advantages at play here. The first is that by tying your project to a benchmark, you can’t avoid the uncomfortable work. A deliberate practice project that’s disconnected from real-world results can unintentionally be steered away from hard efforts that move the needle, allowing you instead to wallow in that pleasing state of “tractable hardness” — a state that feels good, but generates minimum growth.

Second, benchmark projects produce a recognizable achievement at the end. This helps by allowing you to point at something concrete when trying to articulate your newly acquired skill. Good work alone can propel you forward, but making your skills more legible to outsiders is often a key part of translating those skills into actual career benefits.

How You Can Create Benchmark Projects to Grow Your Career

The way I like to think of benchmark projects is to pick something that I can’t do right now, but I might be able to do, if I improved my skills and worked at it.

These projects tend to work better when the benchmark itself
suggests what kind of efforts you might take to improve. Improving as a writer,
for instance, it would be better for me to pick a project like, “Get published
in a national newspaper or magazine” rather than “Sell one million books,”
since the former will suggest a lot of specific actions I need to take to get
my writing to the level where I could be published in a prestigious place, but
the latter doesn’t really suggest anything concrete.

Good benchmark projects are often scarier than drill-down projects. “Getting better at research” is a lot more comfortable a goal to set than, “Get my work published in a Top-5 journal.” Yet that uncomfortableness also encourages you to take a hard look at your own work.

What are some benchmarks you could strive to attain in your own work? How would those look different than attempts you’ve made in the past to simply “get better” at your work?