Cal Newport's Blog, page 26

On the Utility Fallacy

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A few years ago, I wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review’s website about the excesses of email culture. In an effort to destabilize the perceived necessity of our current moment of hyperactive communication, I explored a thought experiment in which email was banished altogether and replaced with pre-scheduled office hours.

“Office hours might not work for every organization,” I wrote, “although, as I’ve argued, they would probably apply in more settings than you might at first assume.”

Given the semi-satirical undertones of this exploration, I gave a nod toward Swift in the article’s title: “A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email.”

I’m bringing this up now because a reader recently pointed me to a Reddit thread from last month that discusses this older piece. Overall, the thread is varied and fascinating. I want to highlight here, however, a few comments that I think are representative of a general line of resistance I often encounter — usually from fellow engineering types — when I write negatively about new technologies:

“…people seem to severely underestimate how valuable it is to search past conversations, not to mention having a timestamp of when assignments and decisions got made”“I am totally with you here. Email is THE SUPERIOR tool for communication. People simply lack the discipline to manage their inbox.”“Having lower cost, lower friction communication is an absolute positive development.”

These points are an example of what I’ve come to call the utility fallacy, which is the tendency, when evaluating the impact of a technology, to confine your attention to comparing the technical features of the new technology to what it replaced.

From this perspective, email is self-evidently better than the memos, voicemails, and fax machines that it superseded.

But as I’ve learned in my years thinking and writing about such issues, when it comes to consumer-facing technologies, the more important story is almost always how they end up mutating our socio-cultural dynamics.

No one argues, for example, that it’s better to send an email than a fax. But the modern knowledge worker now sends 125 business emails a day, which works out to one every 3.85 minutes — vastly more back-and-forth communication than what was common in the pre-email era. One could certainly argue that this new behavior is not “better” in any useful sense.

You could retort that knowledge workers are, en mass, acting stupidly when using this new tool, and if they’d simply talk to an enlightened engineer about inbox management we’d all be fine. But I find this explanation both unlikely and condescending.

More plausible is the hypothesis that the introduction of low-friction communication disrupted the finely-tuned dynamical system mediating inter-personal office interactions, creating both unpredictable and unfortunate results (c.f., Leslie Perlow’s work on the cycle of responsiveness).

I’ve noticed a similar conflict in recent discussions about social media. When viewed through the lens of the utility fallacy, these tools are unambiguously good at allowing people to connect with each other and share information with minimum effort.

But this observation misses the fact that almost everything interesting about our current struggles with social media concerns the impact of these tools on our lives beyond the screen.

The point too often missed in a cooly instrumentalist understanding of technology is that we don’t use these tools in a vacuum; we instead participate in complicated social systems that can careen in unforeseen directions when powerful new technological forces are introduced. Features are important, but they’re not the whole story.

On Monks and Email

Medieval monks thought a lot about thinking. As University of Georgia history professor Jamie Kreiner elaborates in a recent Aeon article:

“Their job, more than anything else, was to focus on divine communication. For these monks, the meditating mind wasn’t supposed to be at ease. It was supposed to be energised. Their favourite words for describing concentration stemmed from the Latin tenere, to hold tight to something. The ideal was a mens intentus, a mind that was always and actively reaching out to its target.”

To accomplish this goal “meant taking the weaknesses of their bodies and brains seriously.”

They used complex visual mnemonic techniques to help structure complex information in their mind’s eye.

They deployed heavy labor and moderate diet to keep their physiology in an optimal state for mental work.

Even the monastic renunciation of worldly goods and relationships supported concentration: the fewer things going on your life, they reasoned, the fewer things to distract you while trying to think about God.

What struck me as I read this article is that in our modern world, we still maintain positions in which the ability to concentrate is crucial to success: high skilled knowledge work jobs, like computer programmers, lawyers, doctors, consultants, journalists and professors.

Except unlike our deep working medieval forebears, the modern knowledge work organization seems to care little about cultivating and supporting this fundamental activity.

We hook people up to email inboxes and Slack channels because it’s convenient. We justify Twitter addictions on the grounds that we need to be “part of the conversation,” and compulsively post to Instagram to bolster our “social media brand.”

But few organizations think seriously about thinking, which, after all, really is the fundamental value-producing activity in knowledge work, just as divine communication was the metaphorical money-maker for the pious medievals.

The monks were on to something. Concentration is hard work. It requires, for lack of a better word, more serious attention.

AOC Quit Facebook. The Media Bungled the Story.

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Over the weekend, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced on a podcast that she was quitting Facebook as part of her efforts to cut back on her social media use more generally.

This was big news because the 29-year-old AOC is famous for her skilled leverage of these platforms to connect with her constituents and drive the national conversation on issues she cares about.

What captured my attention more recently, however, is the apparent disconnect between the way AOC explained her social media moderation and the way the national media reported the story.

My hometown paper, The Washington Post, for example, lumped AOC in with WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton and Steve Wozniak, noting:

“Both technologists parted ways with the social network amid a user boycott and as the company faced a congressional inquiry over the Cambridge Analytica controversy, when it was revealed that the political firm had improperly obtained personal information from millions of Facebook users.”

The same article then elaborated:

“After a rolling series of scandals involving the misuse of personal data, hateful content and misinformation, many Facebook users have also changed the way they use the platform”

Here’s the thing: misuse of personal data and hateful content were not the reasons emphasized by AOC for why she quit Facebook. She instead called social media a “public health risk” that too often leads to “increased isolation, depression, anxiety, addiction, escapism.”

I keep encountering this same mismatch between real social media users and the press coverage of these services when I’m out promoting Digital Minimalism.

The press coverage of our culture’s growing disillusionment with social media tends to focus — like the article cited above — on policy issues such as data privacy, or political issues such as the definition of hate speech.

By contrast, when you talk to actual users about their concerns with these services, they tend, like AOC, to instead talk about their addictive nature, and how this compulsive use keeps them away from activities they know are more meaningful.

When AOC mentions isolation, anxiety, addiction, and escapism, most heavy social media users know exactly what she’s talking about.

On the other hand, when the press reports on this issue, they’re more likely to turn their attention back to Cambridge Analytica — a phrase I almost never hear mentioned by the students, parents, teenagers, retirees, artists, coders, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and athletes I’ve been talking to about digital minimalism over the past three months.

Putting politics aside for the moment, we should applaud AOC for being so forthright about the complicated tensions generated by social media. These tools played a big role in her rise to national prominence, but they’re also diminishing the quality of her life (not to mention the quality of life of hundreds of millions of other users obsessively entangled with these apps). The issue here is not clear cut, but it also can’t be ignored.

To me, this is the real story about how the social media juggernaut is currently renegotiating its place in our culture.

I think we’ll all be better served once the national press recognizes this reality, and turns more of its attention from the spectacle of Mark Zuckerberg testifying about data privacy and AI-driven content review, and toward the more nuanced and more human issues encapsulated by the surprising story of a 29-year-old social media rockstar who finds it necessary to escape the very techno-world that made her.

In other words, the important story is not the fear that social media companies will improperly use our data; it’s instead the fear that they’ll subvert our primal drive to cultivate a meaningful life.

Digital Minimalism and Sports

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A couple weeks ago, I posted an article in reaction to the news that the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals now allows his players to take “phone breaks” during their team meetings.

“You start to see kind of hands twitching and legs shaking, and you know they need to get that social media fix,” he helpfully explained.

If you’re one of the many readers who joined me in thinking this move was a shortsighted capitulation, I’m hoping to help improve your mood by sharing some uplifting counter programming from the world of college basketball.

As reported by Time, earlier this season, the Texas Tech Red Raiders suffered a bad stretch during which they lost three road games in a row.

Looking for solutions, their captain, Norense Odiase, instituted a new rule: the night before away games, players would surrender their smartphones. The idea was to minimize distractions and improve sleep.

The team’s coach, Chris Beard, who had already banned smartphones at team meals, liked this idea and extended it even further: the phone ban held every night while the team was on the road, whether or not there was a game the next day.

It worked.

Texas Tech went on a 14-1 run after the ban, eventually making it all the way to Monday’s national championship game.

It’s possible, of course, that I’m too quick to connect the basic principles of digital minimalism with sports success, but there’s at least one well-known athlete on my side.

A few days ago, at his pre-tournament press conference, golfer Rory McIlroy, the odds-on favorite to win The Masters this weekend, was asked about the rule at the Augusta National golf course that forbids smartphones (around 21:30 in the above video).

“It’s refreshing,” McIlroy said, noting that “there’s something to learn from that.” He then cited what’s got him thinking about these issues, explaining:

“Actually, a book I’m reading at the minute is called Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.”

My work here is done.

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On an unrelated note, my friend Michael Hyatt has a new book out this week that I thought a lot of you might enjoy. It’s called, Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less. Fans of So Good and Deep Work will find a lot to like in this pragmatic guide. Take a look!

Digital Minimalism and God (Or, is Social Media Undermining Religion?)

Photo by Oliver Sjöström from Pexels

Those who know Martin Luther King Jr.’s story well, know that January 27, 1956, was a pivotal date for the young minister.

Only one month earlier, still a newcomer in town, King, to his surprise, was elected to run the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) formed in response to Rosa Parks’s arrest.

As King’s Pulitzer-prize winning biographer David Garrow recalls, King “mistakenly presumed that the boycott [organized by the MIA] would be relatively brief,” but he was wrong. A series of tense negotiating sessions made it clear that the city was reluctant to give up any ground.

As the bus boycott dragged on, and more attention was turned toward its leader, the situation became tense. According to Garrow:

“The increased news coverage had brought with it a rising tide of anonymous, threatening phone calls to his home and office, and King had begun to wonder whether his involvement was likely to end up costing him, his wife, Coretta, and their two-month-old daughter, Yolanda, much more than he had initially imagined.”

On January 26th, King was arrested and jailed for supposedly driving 30 mph in a 25 mph zone. The next day, after his release, he received another round of anonymous threatening phone calls. He tried to sleep, but couldn’t, so he returned to his kitchen table to make a cup of coffee and confront his mounting anxiety and fear.

As King recalled in a sermon given a decade later at the Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church:

“And I bowed down over that cup of coffee. I never will forget it…I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right…But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage.”

Then, clarity:

“And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.'”

Garrow describes this scene as one of the most important moments of King’s life.

* * * *

I first encountered this story in a book by Mike Erwin and Raymond Kethledge about solitude, and then expanded on it in Chapter 4 of Digital Minimalism, where I discuss what’s lost when we deploy devices to avoid every moment of time alone with our own thoughts.

For many in our modern context, this observation that reflection is critical might be novel, especially given the steady refrain of “connectivity = good” that we’ve been fed for the last decade. But to the spiritual, like King, it’s deeply familiar.

Common to many different religions is an emphasis on contemplative practices — turning one’s focus inward in search of transcendent insight (what Karen Armstrong calls “intimations of the divine.”)

Sometimes these practices are structured, as in the Islamic Salat, Buddhist mindfulness meditation, or, as is familiar around my academic home, Jesuit imaginative prayer. And sometimes they’re unstructured, like King’s experience at the kitchen table. Regardless of form, contemplative reflection is often intertwined with spiritual life.

I’m bringing this all up because it provides background for a surprising claim that’s been growing online in recent years, and which seems self-evidently worthy of unpacking: social media might be accidentally undermining religion.

* * * *

I stumbled across this growing tension between social media and religion in an admittedly ignoble manner: checking media hits for Digital Minimalism. I was surprised to discovered the amount of attention the book has started receiving in religious circles.

But as I looked closer at the coverage, the surprise dissipated. Though there are many ways in which tools like Twitter or Instagram might work against (or in some cases with) the traditional objectives of religion, the issue that kept arising is the way in which the ubiquitous distraction they provide corrodes the contemplative life.

Courage, reassurance, revelation: these require a quiet mind capable of apophatic insight. One of the unintentional consequences of innovating an algorithmically-optimized, always-present source of attention-snagging noise is that this quiet disappears.

The religious are increasingly concerned with this consequence as they notice more of their fellow adherents stumbling around in a state of unmoored anxiety, but it’s an effect that’s clearly important beyond just formal faith, as it gets at something fundamental about human flourishing in a hard world: if you’re constantly escaping, you’ll eventually end up lost.

At some point in Digital Minimalism, I remark that “humans are not wired to be constantly wired.” But perhaps a more vivid formulation of the stakes is to wonder (with a dash of anachronistic hyperbole) what would have happened to Martin Luther King Jr. at that kitchen table sixty years ago if, instead of turning inward to find wisdom, he had been distracted by his mentions?

The Arizona Cardinals Now Give Their Players Phone Breaks

Photo by Skitterphoto.

Earlier this week, at the NFL owners meetings, Kliff Kingsbury, the new head coach of the Arizona Cardinals, revealed a new rule for team meetings: “cellphone breaks.”

As reported by ESPN, Kingsbury introduces these breaks every 20 – 30 minutes during team gatherings. As he explained:

“You start to see kind of hands twitching and legs shaking, and you know they need to get that social media fix, so we’ll let them hop over there and then get back in the meeting and refocus.”

Many concerned readers sent me this article, and with good reason. It’s an extreme case of a techno-philosophy that I facetiously call the kids these days mindset, in which parents, educators, bosses and (it now seems) coaches shrug their shoulders when confronted with the impacts of highly addictive technology on young people.

This football example is useful because it so clearly highlights the shortsightedness of this strategy.

(Do you know what lasts much longer than 20 – 30 minutes? NFL games. And there are no phone breaks once you’re on the field.)

Instead of accommodating his player’s twitching hands, therefore, perhaps Kingsbury should see this reaction as a crisis. Elite level sports require phenomenal concentration. Even a small epsilon degradation in this ability can be the difference between a cornerback disrupting a play or being burned on a slant, which itself can be the difference-maker in a game.

Most coaches would never tolerate a habit that was clearly harming their players’ physical fitness, regardless of how popular it was in the general public. The same standards should hold for their players’ cognitive fitness.

The broader point here, however, is that these standards should also extend to less obvious applications of this mindset, such as when a teacher concedes to student demands to replace written book reports with YouTube videos, or a parent shrugs off a child’s Fortnite addiction.

Part of growing into a meaningful and impactful adult life is developing the ability to replace what’s fun with what’s important. This process is hard, and therefore requires, for lack of a better word, some good coaching.

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Unrelated administrative note: My friend Scott Young, who is soon to publish a book on Ultralearning , opened his famed Rapid Learner course this week for new students. If you’re interested in high performance learning techniques for professional or personal development reasons, it’s worth a closer look .

Mike Trout Doesn’t Care About His Online Brand. He Just Made $430 Million.

Photo of Mike Trout from 2013 by Keith Allison.

Mike Trout, the center fielder for the Los Angeles Angels, is finalizing a $430 million contract extension with his team. This is the largest deal in the history of professional sports.

One of the surprising elements of Trout’s story is that he’s reached these unprecedented heights while remaining, to quote Tom Boswell from today’s Washington Post, “a quiet, understated player, who has never tried to brand himself.”

I got in some hot water a few years ago for writing a New York Times op-ed in which I argued that young people needed to spend less energy desperately trying to build their online presence, and more energy quietly developing unambiguously valuable skills. (I even wrote a book about this.)

Trout represents this philosophy pushed to an extreme. When you average 9.0 WAR over six seasons, you don’t have to worry about your Instagram followers.

Trout’s talent, of course, approaches mythological levels, which made his commitment to fundamentals a safe bet. But as with any good myth, it conveys a deeper truth. In almost any professional endeavor, developing unambiguously rare and valuable skills trumps an amorphous commitment to cultivating followers or strengthening an online brand (with a small number of well-publicized exceptions).

It also helps if you can turn on a major league fastball thrown down and in.

Digital Minimalism and Ancestral Health (Or, Would Grok Tweet?)

The ancestral health movement argues that over long periods of time, evolution adapts species to their environments. It follows that when it comes to human well-being, we should pay attention to how we ate and behaved throughout the vast majority of our evolutionary history.

Like most lifestyle movements, ancestral health has spawned its share of hucksters and extremists, but the underlying logic seems self-evident, and the success stories can be compelling.

After recent appearances on Paleo Magazine Radio and Mark Hyman’s podcast, and my embrace of Mark Sisson’s advice to help stay lean and energized on book tour, I’ve begun to think more about the natural intersection of digital minimalism and ancestral health.

Consider these points, all of which I provide detailed arguments for in Digital Minimalism:

Humans have evolved to build strong social connections with family, close friends, and community through face-to-face interactions that require non-trivial sacrifices of time and energy. (For more on this, see Chapter 5, or the book Social .)The human brain requires regular periods of “solitude” in which it is alone with its own thoughts and observing the world around it. (For more on this, see Chapter 4, or the book Lead Yourself First .)Humans have a strong drive to see their intentions manifested concretely in the world, be it shaping a spear, starting a fire, or bending electrical conduit into an efficient pattern. (For more on this, see Chapter 6, or the book Shop Class as Soulcraft .)

A side effect of our current techno-culture is that it radically diminishes these ancestral drive in our daily lives.

Social media, for example, reduces our sociality to low-friction online likes and comments, which provide a simulacrum of connection, but are barely recognized by our primal brain as socializing at all — leaving us paradoxically lonelier.

Algorithmically-optimized distraction delivered through a ubiquitous screen provides a pleasant escape in the moment from the difficulties of our lives, but it also banishes every last vestige of solitude, throwing our brains into a shocked state of low grade anxiety.

As we become used to these spoon-fed digital trinkets, we also become less likely to put up with the friction involved in high quality leisure activities, like coercing your fingers to cleanly place a guitar chord — stymying our brains instinct to shape things with our hands.

Which is to all say that it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that if you’re serious about ancestral health, you should be as concerned about your iPhone and Instagram as you are about grain and sugar, as the former are equally as foreign to our evolutionary adaptations.

To live like Grok in our modern world, in other words, probably requires a minimalist’s skepticism toward new technology.

On Heidegger and Email

The hut near the edge of the Black Forest where Martin Heidegger developed his philosophy of Being.

I was in California last week promoting Digital Minimalism. One of the books I brought to keep me company was Sarah Bakewell’s insightful, and surprisingly entertaining, At The Existentialist Cafe.

In the third chapter, I came across a nice piece of focus porn concerning the philosopher Martin Heidegger.

During Heidegger’s first academic appointment, which was at the University of Marburg, his wife Elfride used an inheritance to buy some land near the Black Forest town of Todtnauberg. The plot overlooked “the grand horseshoe sweep of village and valley.”

As Bakewell elaborates:

“[Elfride] designed a wood-shingled hut to be built on the site, wedged into the hillside…Heidegger spent much time working there alone. The landscape criss-crossed by paths to help him think…in evenings or out of season it was silent and tranquil…when alone there, Heidegger would ski, walk, light a fire, cook simple meals, talk to the peasant neighbors, and settle for long hours at his desk, where…his writing took on the calm rhythm of a man chopping wood in a forest.”

Heidegger, of course, went on to become a controversial figure due to his later involvement with the Nazi party, but it’s hard to overstate the intellectual impact of his book Being and Time, which was written during this Marburg period, and helped shatter the rapidly ossifying structures of German phenomenology, ushering in a torrent of philosophical innovation.

In my more pessimistic moments of techno-contemplation, I worry about how many similarly deep thinkers we’ve accidentally “innovated” out of existed in recent years.

The metaphoric exemplar of Heidegger’s long days of writing in his Todtnauberg hut seems increasingly foreign in a world where academic life has been diminished toward the managerial by email, and social media increasingly tempts the rare egos large enough to produce something like Being and Time to pursue the immediate gratification of a righteous tweet over the tedious slog of writing an epochal book.

And yet, something about Heidegger’s purified intellectual life still appeals to us despite all these distractions. Electronic busyness offers fleeting satisfactions, but embedded in our cultural DNA is an appreciation of the deep ideas that last even after the servers power down.

Twitter is fun, but most of us would still rather our biggest minds quietly wander the paths surrounding their Black Forest hideaways, hunting transformation over retweets. We can hope that as long as this instinct persists, a correction to our current slide toward shallowness remains inevitable.

Digital Minimalism for Parents

One of the more interesting things about being on the road promoting Digital Minimalism is encountering readers and learning how they’re making use of these ideas.

One such group that’s particularly interesting to me is digital minimalist parents. I’m a parent, but the oldest of my three boys is only six, so I haven’t yet directly grappled with the serious issues surrounding kids in an age of smartphones, making me eager to hear from those who are waging this battle now.

As I’ve talked with more of these parents, a consistent reality has emerged:

Smartphones and social media are a major problem for adolescents. To ignore it with a “kids these days” shoulder shrug is becoming increasingly unacceptable. (For more on this, see my somewhat infamous interview with GQ where I speculatively compare teenage smartphone use to teenage smoking.) Any successful attempt to instill in your kids a healthier relationship with technology has to start with modeling this relationship in your own life.

This latter point is one that we parents sometimes don’t want to hear, but it keeps coming up in my conversations: if you carry your phone with you at all times, checking it constantly, it’s difficult to convince your kids not to do the same, no matter how many rules you set or warnings you deliver.

In my book, I give some cases studies of this parental modeling pushed to an extreme:

A father named Adam, for example, used his smartphone constantly at home, largely for professional reasons (his business relies on SMS for a lot of internal communication). He began to worry, however, about the example this set for his daughter as she approached adolescence, so he made a radical decision: he got rid of his smartphone.A mom named Laura made a similar decision. She has refused to ever buy a smartphone because quality social interaction with her kid, as well as her family and close friends, are a top priority, and she worried the addictive allure of an iPhone screen would distract her from the moments that mattered most.

As you might expect, these decisions were inconvenient. Adam complained to me at the time about the difficulty of trying to tap out a text message on a 9-digit flip phone keypad. Laura talked about printing out maps before going somewhere new as she doesn’t have an app to navigate her.

But I was also struck by how little Adam and Laura cared about these inconveniences. This makes sense in this context as basically everything parents do on behalf of their kids is inconvenient. I think if you look up “inconvenient” in the dictionary, there’s a picture of a sleep-deprived parent making a school lunch. 

What animated them more was the idea that they were doing something intentional to make their kids’ lives better.

Most digital minimalist parents I’ve talked with recently haven’t gone so far as to give up their smartphones, but they share the same serious interest in reshaping their digital lives — even if it’s a pain — to provide a better model for their kids. 

One interesting strategy I encountered, for example, is the so-called foyer phone method. In the evening, after work, you leave your phone in the foyer by the front door with your keys and wallet. If you need to look something up, you go to the foyer to use the phone. If you’re expecting a call or text message that you need to answer, you put on the ringer, and if it rings, you go to the foyer. If you’re bored during a commercial while watching TV, then you’re just bored.

It seems like a simple hack, but the result is that your interactions with your family become screen-free by default. You also avoid the micro-glances at your device as you go about your household business — glances you think are surreptitious, but that your kids are almost certainly taking note of and internalizing as a model of the phone’s importance. With this method, the smartphone becomes a tool that you deploy for specific uses, not a constant companion.

Another minimalist parenting strategy that caught my attention is making a strong commitment to analog social media — that is, real world social activities, like having friends over on a regular basis, visiting with neighbors, hosting community or religious groups at your house.

This demonstrates to kids through example the deep value of real world relationships, an important message for a generation that has attempted to relocate their entire social existence into the low-friction world of Snapchat likes and text messages. (c.f., Sherry Turkle’s excellent book on this topic).

A few weeks ago, Adam came to one of my book launch events in New York. He brought his daughter. The pride on his face underscored an important point: For most people, the embrace of digital minimalism is about improving the quality of your own life, but for parents, as I’ve been learning, it can be about something much deeper.