Cal Newport's Blog, page 24

The Obvious Way to Improve Your Career (That Might Not Be So Obvious)

Below is a guest post from my good friend Scott Young. (Which reminds me: thank you to everyone who came to see Scott and me speak live at Solid State Books in DC last Saturday: we had a great time!) In preparation for us opening back up our Top Performer course next week, Scott’s been trying to open the curtain, so to speak, and capture in article form some of the biggest ideas we’ve learned over the years running this course.

Take it away, Scott…

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Sometimes the obvious advice you need to hear isn’t obvious to you. Here’s an example of this that happened just last week.

A guy on Twitter asked me if I did coaching. He felt stuck in his career and wanted to pay me to give him advice. I don’t do individual coaching (at least for money) but, I was curious so I asked him to send me some details of his situation to see if I could help.

Here were his tweets:

What do you think his mistake was?

In my mind, the biggest mistake he made was simply that he was asking me what to do next. I’m not a singer, and I don’t even work in the music industry.

So, lacking specifics, I gave the advice that was obvious to me: you need to locate people who are 2-3 steps ahead of you in the kind of career you want to have. You need to talk to these people, not just random people on the internet you admire, to map out how your career actually works.

His response:

This seems obvious in retrospect, but it actually happens a lot.

In early pilots for our course, Top Performer, Cal and I had students work through an exercise of interviewing someone in their field for career advice. One person decided he wanted to pick Tim Ferriss, even though he was working an engineering job.

The problem is that Tim Ferriss isn’t an engineer. He’s an author, podcaster and investor. If you’re not in one of those fields, the advice Tim could give (if he was gracious enough for an interview) would have to be restricted to the highly generic.

In fact, even if you are an author, podcaster or investor, it may not be the case that Tim Ferriss will offer super helpful advice. Why? Because Tim Ferriss is incredibly famous! For most people, Tim Ferriss isn’t 2 or 3 steps ahead, but instead more like a dozen or more. His advice for a new podcaster is going to be hampered by the fact that when he launched his podcast, he was already a minor celebrity. A lot of his personal experiences won’t translate to someone just getting started today.

The Strategy and the Map

To succeed in your career—whether that’s becoming a singer, starting a business, earning tenure or just getting a job—you need two things:

A strategy. This is a high-level, abstract process for generating career improvements.A map. This is a low-level, detailed picture of what your career looks like, concentrating on the areas that surround you.

The strategy is important—it’s one of the few areas where having the right approach to your career can make a big difference. Top Performer, is geared towards providing this half—giving a set of tools for thinking about your career and making progress.

But, in addition to your strategy, the map is essential. Importantly, you need to have the details about your immediate vicinity.

Imagine if you had to plan a trip, but you had only the map below?

Now contrast that with a map where all the roads have been filled in:

Regardless of where you are heading, the second map is going to get you much further. You’ll get lost less. You’ll know which streets are dead-ends, and which routes have traffic jams and where the expressways are. Without a map, you’re just wandering in the general direction of your goal.

Mistakes You’ll Make When Drawing Your Map

Being able to draw an accurate map is one of the skills Cal and I emphasize in Top Performer. Indeed, we spend the first two weeks of our course on developing the skills to get it right. Over the last several years of teaching the class, we’ve noticed all sorts of common mistakes that would-be career mappers make:

Obvious Career Mistake #1: You mostly ask for general advice.

Finding the right people, those people 2-3 steps ahead in their careers, is the first step. However, when talking to these people, many would-be mappers get mostly general advice—work hard, make connections, don’t give up. What gives?

The answer is that if you want good answers, you need to ask the right questions. Asking someone what they did, rather than for abstract advice, is a better question because it focuses on specifics, not generalities.

Obvious Career Mistake #2: You copy the surface, not the cause.

What time does the person wake up? Do they have a kale smoothie for breakfast or oatmeal? Apple or Android? None of these things matter…

Another mistake you can make in your map is looking at surface characteristics—obvious habits, quirks or beliefs that the person you admire holds. Instead, you have to look at what is driving their results. What skills have they mastered? What assets did they build? What projects did they cultivate?

Obvious Career Mistake #3: You plan a route that’s easy, even if it’s not pointed at your destination.

Often the kinds of efforts that will move forward your business are hard. They are uncomfortable. They require doing things that you (currently) have no idea how to do.

Many people pass on these to pick hobby projects instead. Projects that are fun, seem related to their career, yet, ultimately deliver underwhelming results. Improving their social media marketing, rather than creating compelling content. Installing a new development environment, rather than becoming an expert in their language. Designing business cards instead of drumming up business.

How Can You Avoid These Pitfalls?

Knowing how to draw a detailed and accurate map of your career is the first step. The second is knowing how to navigate it. How to cultivate the skills, assets and signals that will move you forward in the direction you want to proceed.

Cal Newport and I are going to be reopening Top Performer, our course for improving your career, next week. If you’re interested in joining us on an eight-week program to develop the tools to understand your career and make progress towards what really matters, we’d love to see you in the class.

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Unrelated Note: I just discovered that another longtime friend, Srini Rao, is hosting a cool looking conference, called The Architects of Reality, in Nashville in April. The reason it caught my attention is a rule he’s put in place: no laptops, no smartphones, no social media. You have to just listen, think, and, you know, talk to actual people.

I don’t have any particular skin in the game here, I just enjoyed seeing that rule so much I couldn’t help share it. Makes me happy…

On Digital Minimalism, Loneliness and the Joys of True Connection

Photo by Markus Meier.

Earlier today, I came across a thoughtful essay written by someone just embarking on the digital declutter suggested in my most recent book. Summarizing the first day of his experience, the essay author was surprised by the sense of isolation he felt during his initial foray into public without his phone.

As he writes:

“Waiting in line for lunch is also usually an excuse for ‘productivity.’…but today I opted to leave it and simply look around the food hall. The first thing I noticed was that everyone was watching me — or I was scared they were, at least. While I generally enjoy being on stage, what I feared was that they were watching me be alone. And who wants to see that?”

He concludes: “And now I understand one potential uptake of embarking on a digital declutter — loneliness.”

In a previous post, I wrote about the challenge presented by the boredom that follows a commitment to paring down your online activity. Here, I want to tackle loneliness, as it’s another issue I hear about a lot when talking with those transitioning toward digital minimalism, especially younger people whose social lives have become intertwined with their phones.

As I write in chapter 4 of Digital Minimalism, in moderation, the loneliness felt in these moments of solitude is not necessary deleterious. I quote the following 1972 diary entry from the poet May Sarton:

“I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my ‘real’ life again at last. This is what is strange — that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone…”

Sarton highlights a crucial point. Loneliness is a strong human drive that not only pushes us toward deep connection, but establishes the background against which true connection pops in vivid importance.

To fill every moment of solitude with a droning hum of twitter timelines and pull-to-refresh swipes reduces the nobility of our social nature. To instead face that moment of aloneness, like our essay writer in the food hall, uncomfortable and self-aware, but then later contrast that to sitting down with someone you care about, and actually, truly talking, is to taste life fully.

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Earlier this month, my friend Ryan Holiday’s new book, Stillness is the Key, was released. You probably already know and enjoy Ryan’s work, but in case you don’t, here’s my blurb from the book jacket: “Some authors give advice. Ryan Holiday distills wisdom. This book is a must read for anyone feeling overwhelmed by the frenetic demands of modern life.” If that resonates: check this one out…

A Piece of Advice I Wish I’d Included in My Book

Photo by Roman Harak.

One of the questions I’m often asked during interviews for Digital Minimalism is what advice I’ve learned more recently that I wish I had included in the book. There are several candidates for this missing advice, but one I’ve found myself talking about a lot recently is what I call the phone foyer method.

This strategy was innovated by parents who were worried about the negative effects of using their phone too much around their kids, but it applies more broadly.

The idea is simple…

The Phone Foyer Method

When you get home after work, you put your phone on a table in your foyer near your front door. Then — and this is the important part — you leave it there until you next leave the house.

If you need to look something up, you go to your foyer and look it up there.

If you need to send a text message, you go to the foyer. If you’re holding a back-and-forth conversation, then you need to stand there while you do it.

If you’re expecting an important call, put on your ringer.

If you feel the urge to check in on social media, it’s waiting for you in the foyer.

And so on.

(The one allowable exception: listening to a podcast or audiobook during tedious household chores. Let’s be reasonable…)

This method, of course, doesn’t require that you have a foyer, I just liked the alliteration. The key is that your phone stays in a fixed location while you’re at home instead of traveling with you as a constant companion.

Many who have tried this technique are surprised to discover the degree to which having a phone with them at all times completely transforms their experience when at home. We’ve become so used to the persistent fragmentation of our attention during our leisure hours that we’ve forgotten how recently this behavior arose.

To be clear, it’s not self-evident that home life before smartphones was better. The phone foyer method will provide you the before and after comparisons needed to decide for yourself.

But if you’re like a lot of people who have tried this method and reported back to me, once you rediscover the improved presence, the strengthened interpersonal connections, the mind-settling moments of solitude, and the doses of boredom that motivate meaningful, but difficult action — you’ll probably become a believer in the power of the phone-filled foyer.

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Another podcast recommendation: I recently joined Jia Tolentino, who wrote about Digital Minimalism for the New Yorker last spring, on Charles Duhigg’s How To! podcast. It was an interesting discussion. If you’re looking for more of my recent podcast appearances, check out my media page, I’ve listed 45 or so interviews from the past year.

The Atomic Minimalist: My Conversation with James Clear

Last October, my friend James Clear published the breakout hit book, Atomic Habits. As we both discovered in the months that followed, we have many readers in common. James’s habit-building framework, it turns out, is quite useful for those looking to increase the quality of their deep work or succeed in a transition toward digital minimalism.

In recognition of this overlap, and in celebration of Atomic Habit’s one-year anniversary, James and I recently recorded a podcast in which we geek out on the details of our work and how they overlap.

If you’re a fan of James, or are interested in learning more about how his ideas and mine work together, I recommend you give this conversation a listen (you can use the embedded player above, or access it directly here).

Not All Emails Are Created Equal

Interviews are a common part of the book publicity process, especially as you become better known as a writer. Between television, radio, print and podcasts, I ended up doing well north of 100 interviews about Digital Minimalism since its release last February.

Given this volume of appointments (which is actually modest compared to many authors), I arranged things with my publicity team at Penguin so that they could book interviews on my behalf. Using a service called Acuity, I specified what times I was available, and they then put interviews directly on my calendar during these periods, all without requiring me to participate in the scheduling conversations.

Viewed objectively, this setup shouldn’t have made a big difference in my life. Scheduling an interview takes around 3 or 4 back-and-forth messages on average. This adds up to somewhere around 300 or 400 extra emails messages diverted from my inbox.

When you consider that these scheduling threads were spread over six months, and that the average professional user sends and receives over 125 emails per day, the communication I saved with this setup should have been be lost in the noise of my frenetic inbox.

But it did matter. Not having to wrangle those scheduling emails provided a huge psychological benefit.

The observation that explains this discrepancy is that not all emails are created equal. In my experience, the cognitive toll of three or four back-and-forth scheduling emails, spread out over a day, is much greater than three or four standalone emails that each require, at best, a one-time reply.

The back-and-forth emails hurt more because they conflict with a social brain that has evolved to prioritize back-and-forth conversation with members of our tribe. When we send an email to someone and are awaiting their response, there’s a corner of cognitive real estate occupied by this ongoing transaction, nervous about the open loop, fueling a gnawing background hum of minor anxiety.

Rationally, we know it’s not crucial that we catch and respond to the next message in the exchange right away, but to our more primal circuits, honed on a deep historical scale that predates asynchronous communication, such distinctions are irrelevant.

Before I fall too far down a treacherous evolutionary psychology rabbit hole, let me step back to emphasize the general point at play in this example. When we think about email as an abstract digital information delivery service, we miss many of the subtle ways in which it causes more pointed miseries. If we want to get a handle on our current age of communication overload and knowledge worker burn out, we must first explore the specific manner in which this form of modern interaction clashes disastrously with our paleolithic brains.

How Not to Be Alone: Jonathan Safran Foer on the Dangers of Diminished Communication

Photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões

In 2013, the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer gave the commencement address at Middlebury College. He subsequently adapted parts of it into a short but impactful essay published in the New York Times. It was titled: “How Not to Be Alone.”

In this piece, Foer explores the evolution of communication technology, writing:

“Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. One is not always home, so the answering machine made a kind of interaction possible without the person being near his phone.” 

From the answering machine we got to email, which was even easier, and then texting, which, being less formal and more mobile, was even easier still.

“But then a funny thing happened,” Foer writes, “we began to prefer the diminished substitute.”

This made life convenient, but introduced its own costs:

“The problem with accepting — with preferring — diminished substitutes is that over time, we, too, become diminished substitutes. People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little.”

Foer is underscoring a point I also elaborate in Digital Minimalism. We’re evolved to be highly social primates. Through the vast majority of our deep history, sociality meant analog communication, with vocal inflections, body languages, and a necessary investment of time and energy by both parties.

When you strip away these elements of interaction, you strip away a lot of what makes us human.

“We often use technology to save time,” Foer concludes, “but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich.”

Our Brains Are Not Multi-Threaded

Photo by Anders Sandberg.

In computer programming, it’s common to split your program into multiple different threads that run simultaneously, as this often simplifies application design.

Imagine, for example, you’re creating a basic game. You might have one thread dedicated to updating the graphics on the screen, another thread dedicated to calculating the next move, and another monitoring the mouse to see if the user is trying to click.

You could, of course, write a single-threaded program that explicitly switches back and forth between working on these different tasks, but it’s often much easier for the programmer to write independent threads, each dedicated to its own part of the larger system.

In a world before multi-core processors, these threads weren’t actually running simultaneously, as the underlying processor could only execute one instruction at a time. What it did instead was switch rapidly between the threads, executing a few instructions from one, before moving on to the next, then the next, and then back to the first, and so on — providing a staccato-paced pseudo-simultaneity that was close enough to true parallel processing to serve the desired purpose.

Something I’ve noticed is that many modern knowledge workers approach their work like a multi-threaded computer program. They’ve agreed to many, many different projects, investigations, queries and small tasks, and attempt, each day, to keep advancing them all in parallel by turning their attention rapidly from one to another — replying to an email here, dashing off a quick message there, and so on — like a CPU dividing its cycles between different pieces of code.

The problem with this analogy is that the human brain is not a computer processor. A silicon chip etched with microscopic circuits switches cleanly from instruction to instruction, agnostic to the greater context from which the current instruction arrived: op codes are executed; electrons flow; the circuit clears; the next op code is loaded.

The human brain is messier.

When you switch your brain to a new “thread,” a whole complicated mess of neural activity begins to activate the proper sub-networks and suppress others. This takes time. When you then rapidly switch to another “thread,” that work doesn’t clear instantaneously like electrons emptying from a circuit, but instead lingers, causing conflict with the new task.

To make matters worse, the idle “threads” don’t sit passively in memory, waiting quietly to be summoned by your neural processor, they’re instead an active presence, generating middle-of-the-night anxiety, and pulling at your attention. To paraphrase David Allen, the more commitments lurking in your mind, the more physic toll they exert.

This is all to say that the closer I look at the evidence regarding how our brains function, the more I’m convinced that we’re designed to be single-threaded, working on things one at a time, waiting to reach a natural stopping point before moving on to what’s next.

So why do we tolerate all the negative side-effects generated from trying to force our neurons to poorly simulate parallel programs? Because it’s easier, in the moment, than trying to develop professional workflows that better respect our brains’ fundamental nature.

This explanation is understandable. But to a computer scientist trained in optimality, it also seems far from acceptable.

On the Surprising Benefits of an Un-Mobile Phone

Photo by  Maarten van den Heuvel .

A college senior I’ll call Brady recently sent me a description of his creative experiments with digital minimalism. What caught my attention about his story was that his changes centered on a radical idea: making his mobile phone much less mobile.

In more detail, Brady leaves behind his phone each day when he heads off to campus to take classes and study, allowing him to complete his academic work without distraction. As Brady reports, on returning home, usually around 6:00 pm, “I [will spend] 20 minutes or so responding to emails, texts, and the like.”

Then comes the important part of his plan: after this check, he leaves his phone plugged into the outlet — rendering it literally tethered to the wall.

His goal was to reclaim the evening leisure hours he used to lose to “mindlessly browsing the internet.” Here’s Brady’s description of his life before he detached himself from his phone:

“I would just rotate between Reddit, Facebook, and YouTube for hours. I was never even looking for anything in particular, I was just hooked on endless low-quality novel stimuli. I felt like there was so much wasted potential…I didn’t want to get old and realize that my life was spent scrolling on a backlit screen for 4 hours a day.”

Like many new digital minimalists, after Brady got more intentional about his technology, he was confronted with a sudden influx of free time. Fortunately, having read my book, he was prepared for this change, and responded by aggressively filling in these newly open hours with carefully-selected activity.

Here’s his summary:

“I did careful weekly and daily planning to find events to go to on campus and to plan out hobbies to explore. As a result of this planning, I was able to go to tons of random events at [my college] like free concerts, musicals, comedy shows and more. I also improved my attendance on my improv comedy team…Additionally, cooking and mixing drinks became a big hobby of mine and I would make multiple new dinner recipes and new cocktails every week.”

Not surprisingly, Brady also became more productive (“I’ve been able to get much more work done”). Perhaps more surprising, this increased disconnection unexpectedly improved his connection with others:

“I’ve become much better at simply talking to people and meeting new people because I can’t just pull my phone out to get through periods of boredom or awkwardness. Instead I just talk to people more, and as a result, I’ve grown closer to my friends…and I’ve made new friends by talking to random people throughout the day.”

Everyone’s experience with digital minimalism is different. What I like about Brady’s story is that he didn’t abandon the benefits of the smartphone, he just rejected the behavioral addendum that specifies you have to access these benefits constantly. For him, this subtle shift in his engagement made all the difference.

“The biggest change is that I no longer feel like I’m wasting my life away,” he told me. “I feel like I’m experiencing the world and living the human experience.”

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On an unrelated note, as part of the research for an article I’m writing for a major national publication, I’m trying to get in touch with someone who worked with the Apollo program (or Mercury/Gemini). Given how long ago we’re talking about, I know this is a long shot, but if this describes you, or you know someone this describes who might be willing to chat, please send me an email at author@calnewport.com.

Is Our Fear of Smartphones Overblown?

Clip courtesy of the always amusing Pessimists Archive.

During interviews for Digital Minimalism, I’m frequently asked whether I think our culture’s concerns about new technologies like smartphones and social media represent a fleeting moral panic.

The argument goes something like this: There are many technologies that were once feared but that we now consider to be relatively tame, from rock music, to the radio, to the telegraph famously lamented by Thoreau. Isn’t our concern about today’s tech just more of the same?

This is a genuinely interesting question that’s worth some careful unpacking. My main issue with this approach to the issues surrounding smartphones and social media is that it implicitly builds on the following logical formulation:

A. There exist technologies that concerned us when new, but that turned out to be harmless.

B. Smartphones and social media are a new technology that concerns us.

C. It follows that we will later come to believe that smartphones and social media are harmless.

This syllogism, of course, is flawed. To make it correct, the existential quantifier in proposition A would need instead to be universal, as in every new technology that concerns us ends up tame.

But we know that this isn’t the case as there are many examples of technologies that sparked concerns that were ultimately validated. Think, for example, of nuclear weapons, unregulated industrial food safety, and television, which really did end up massively changing the American social fabric in the ways critics warned.

The real question then is what type of concerning technology are smartphones and social media: harmful or harmless? I don’t think we have a clear answer yet, but there’s enough evidence that it might fall into the former category that we can’t simply dismiss it without further interrogation.

Such nonchalance would be illogical.

“I Was Lacking in Enough Energy, Time and Attention”: Another Digital Minimalism Case Study

Something I’ve learned reporting on digital minimalists is that the definition of “minimal” differs greatly from person to person. As part of my effort to share more case studies about this philosophy, I thought it might be fun to visit someone who falls on the extreme end of this spectrum.

Robert (as I’ll call him) recently walked me through some of the major changes he instigated to reclaim his life from his devices. He summarized his reasons for this transformation as follows:

“I was lacking in enough time, energy, and attention to get the things done that I wanted or needed to do…I didn’t like getting insufficient sleep because I was browsing nonsense on my phone until the wee hours, or that I was stressed out with my professional work due to constant procrastination/distraction…or that I wasn’t exercising consistently because I’d happen to browse the same nonsense right when I was about to start.”

Driven by these somber realities, he came to a simple revelation: “life would be better if I cut back.” A decision, as it turns out, he took seriously.

Perhaps most notable among the many changes he executed, Robert replaced his smartphone with a Nokia 3310 (see the above image) — a popular alternative among the digital minimalists, as it boasts clean interfaces and its battery lasts forever.

He also setup parental controls on his main computer and gave the passwords to his wife. On most days, these controls are configured to provide him only 30 minutes to browse personal email and distracting web sites. He also moved his GTD productivity practice and workout logs to paper-based notebooks, and ditched his kindle for old-fashioned “physical” books.

As Robert explained, this extreme shift toward digital minimalism transformed his life:

“Time alone is better. I think I’m more productive, deliberate, calm, and mindful; better at professional work, and more consistent with exercise. I think I’m more present and in-tune with anyone that I’m interacting with, especially my kids.”

Like many others who make similar efforts to take back control of their life from technology, Robert found the experience somewhat disorienting: “I feel like an alien at times since the pace and nature of my day-to-day affairs is quite different from those that are not digitally minimalistic.”

But as Robert learned, the real alien behavior is arguably what everyone else is doing, with their heads buried in their phones, frantically tapping and swiping, saturated with anxiety and wondering why even after all this “busyness” they still feel like something is missing.