Cal Newport's Blog, page 3

The Tao of Cal

Between this newsletter, my podcast, my books, and my New Yorker journalism, I offer a lot of advice and propose a lot of ideas about how the modern digital environment impacts our lives, both professionally and personally, and how we should respond.

This techno-pontification covers everything from the nitty gritty details of producing good work in an office saturated with emails and Zoom, to heady decisions about shaping a meaningful life amid the nihilistic abstraction of an increasingly networked existence.

With the end of year rapidly approaching, and people finding themselves with some spare thinking time as work winds down for the holidays, I thought it might be fun to try to summarize essentially every major idea I discuss in one short primer.

So that’s what I’m attempting below! I’m sure I’m missing some key points, but this should nevertheless provide a useful road map to my esoteric mental wanderings.

Knowledge Work

Treat cognitive context shifts as “productivity poison.” The more you switch your attention from one target (say, a report you’re writing) to another (say, an inbox check), the more exhausted and dumber you become.The biggest source of context shifts is digital communication. Move as much collaboration as possible out of chains of ad hoc, back and forth messaging and into something more structured.The second biggest source of context shifts is caused by working on too many tasks at the same time. Do fewer things at once. You’ll finish each task faster (and better) and therefore accomplish more over time.Focus is like a super power in most knowledge work jobs. Train this ability. Protect deep work on your calendar. Support these sessions through special rituals and spaces.You need specific systems to track all of your commitments. You need specific system to manage your time and attention. The pace and volume of modern knowledge work is too intense for you to casually handle it all in your head.Remote work requires more structure surrounding workload management and communication than regular office work. It’s not enough to simply give remote workers a Zoom account and a Slack handle and hope their efforts unfold as before.

Sources: Deep Work, A World Without Email, Slow Productivity, “Why Remote Work is So Hard–And How it Can Be Fixed”, “Why Do We Work Too Much?”, “Was Email a Mistake?”, “How to Have a More Productive Year”

Personal Technology UseYour phone should be used as a tool, not a constant companion. To accomplish this: (1) keep your phone plugged into the same spot when at home (instead of having it with you); and (2) remove all apps from your phone where someone makes more money the more you use it.Most people don’t need to use social media. If you really need to use it — e.g., for professional purposes — use it on a web browser on your laptop, and spend at most an hour a week logged in, as that’s enough for 99% of legitimate uses. There are better ways to be entertained, find news, and connect with people.Digital communication can be great, but be wary of communicating with people you’ve never actually met in person before. (That is, texting a friend is good. Arguing with a random Twitter user about presidential politics is not.)Fixing your relationship with digital tools requires that you fix your analog life first. It’s not enough to stop using problematic apps and devices, you must also aggressively pursue alternative activities to fill the voids this digital abstention will create: read books, join communities, develop hard hobbies, get in shape, hatch plans to transform your career for the better. Without deeper purpose, the shallow siren song of your phone will become impossible to ignore.Kids under the age of 16 shouldn’t have unrestricted access to the internet. Their brains aren’t ready for it.

Sources: Digital Minimalism, “Quit Social Media”, “Steve Jobs Never Wanted Us to Use Our iPhones Like This”, “Cal Newport on Kids and Smartphones”

The Deep LifeIn building a meaningful and fulfilling life, it’s usually better to work backwards from a broad vision of your ideal lifestyle than it is to work forward toward a singular grand goal (e.g., a “dream job” or radical location change) that you hope will make everything better.The best way to improve your professional life is to get good at something the market unambiguously values, and then use this “career capital” as leverage to shape your work in ways that resonate. No one owes you a great a job. You have to get great first before you demand it.Succeeding with big changes in your life requires that you first get your act together. Get comfortable with discipline (doing things that are hard in the moment but important in the long term), get organized, and reclaim your brain from constant digital distraction. Only then should initiate your ambitious plans.

Sources: So Good They Can’t Ignore You, “The Most Important Piece of Career Advice You Probably Never Heard”, “The Deep Life: Some Notes”, “Deep Life Stack 2.0”

The Internet and Future TechnologyWhen it comes to the internet, small is usually better than big. Niche online communities are more meaningful and less harmful (in terms of both content and addictive properties) than massive social platforms. Independent content formats, like podcasts and newsletters, are much better for creatives (in terms of stability, income, and autonomy) than attempting to become an influencer on a major platform. And so on.The age of massive social network monopolies is already coming to an end. We just don’t realize it yet.Generative AI won’t really change our daily lives in a massive way until it leaves the chatbot format and becomes more integrated into specific tools.The biggest technology story everyone is ignoring is the end of screens. Within the next decade, AR glasses will replace essentially every screen currently in our lives — phones, laptops, tablets, computer monitors, and televisions. The ramifications on the worldwide technology sector will be absolutely massive. It will also be the end of a fully differentiated analog reality as we know it.

Sources: “The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class”, “TikTok and the Fall of the Social Media Giants”, “Can an AI Make Plans”, “The End of Screens?”

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Speaking of books, my latest, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout , was named a best book of 2024 by The Economist , NPR , and Amazon . It’s also currently heavily discounted for Cyber Monday. Consider it as a great gift for yourself or someone else you know who could benefit from slowing down! (The photo used for this article was taken by Greg Kahn for a recent profile of me published in El Pais.)

The post The Tao of Cal appeared first on Cal Newport.

After You Vote: Unplug

I’m writing this post about eighteen hours before the first polls open on Election Day, and it feels tense out there. The New York Times, for example, just posted an article headlined: “How Americans Feel About the Election: Anxious and Scared.”

Based on extensive interviews conducted over this past weekend, the Times concludes:

“Americans across the political spectrum reported heading to the polls in battleground states with a sense that their nation was coming undone. While some expressed relief that the long election season was finally nearing an end, it was hard to escape the undercurrent of uneasiness about Election Day.”

These results probably come as no surprise.

The question then becomes what to do with this anxiety. The first step, of course, is to vote — and not just vote, but to approach your decision honestly and dispassionately. By the time you read this, you’ve likely already completed this step.

But then what?

Here I have a suggestion that I think could be healing for all points of the political spectrum: use the stress of this election to be the final push needed to step away from the exhausting digital chatter that’s been dominating your brain. Take a break from social media. Stop listening to news podcasts. Unsubscribe, at least for a while, from those political newsletters clogging your inbox with their hot takes and tired in-fighting.

I suggest you switch to a slower pace of media consumption. Don’t laugh at this suggestion, because I’m actually serious: consider picking up the occasional old-fashioned printed newspaper (free from algorithmic optimization and click-bait curation) at your local coffee shop or library to check in, all at once, on anything major going on in the world. I think I might setup a Sunday-only paper subscription as my main source of news this winter.

Equally important is how you redirect your newly liberated attention. Consider aiming it toward real community, with real people who actually live near you, to retrain your brain to stop thinking of the world as hopelessly fractured into vicious tribes. (If right now you’re scouring this post to seek evidence as to whether I’m friend or foe, then you’re already severely suffering from this malady. )

Consider reading books again. There’s a pleasure in the conquest of deep ideas that’s been lost as we thrashed in a digital sea of churning distraction. Spend more time in nature to discover that despite the apocalyptic tenor of the online world, its analog counterpart persists, and is beautiful.

The Republic will still stand without our constant digital vigilance. But it’s unclear if our mental health can survive the status quo.

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Two announcements to share…

For the past twelve years, my longtime friend Joshua Fields Millburn, of The Minimalists fame, has been teaching a fantastic online course called How to Write Better. It’s open this week for a new session, so if you’re interested in improving your writing ability (which you should be), please check it out! If you’re still on the fence about whether or not to read my new book, Slow Productivity , check out this insightful new review from Real Clear Books that was published last week.

The post After You Vote: Unplug appeared first on Cal Newport.

The Perfect Cheating Machine?

Many predictions and concerns tumbled into the slipstream trailing ChatGPT’s dazzling, turbulent entrance onto the technology scene in late 2022. Few of these initial warnings felt more immediate than those of imminent disruptions to higher education.

“Could the chatbot, which provides coherent, quirky, and conversational responses to simple language inquires, inspire more students to cheat?”, asked an NBC News article, published only a week after ChatGPT’s initial launch. Several months later, a professor in the Texas A&M system took this warning to heart and failed his entire class after convincing himself that every one of his students had used AI to write their final assignments. (It turns out that his method of detection—asking ChatGPT itself whether it produced the submissions—was unreliable. He later changed the grades.)

“AI seems almost built for cheating,” explains Ethan Mollick, in his recent bestseller, Co-Intelligence. He predicted, in particular, that paper writing as a pedagogical tool might be on the way out, forcing institutions to adapt to other methods to teach composition: “In-school assignments on non-internet-enabled computers, combined with written exams, will ensure students learn basic writing skills.”

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost two years since we first started hearing these concerns about ChatGPT providing students the perfect cheating machine. As a professor and writer myself, these issues interest me, especially when it comes to academic compositions. So in my most recent article for The New Yorker, published earlier this month, and titled “What Kind of Writer is ChatGPT?,” I set out to understand how these tools are currently being put to work by students tackling writing assignments.

My approach was to move beyond speculation and watch actual students use AI on actual assignments, with a particular focus on a graduate student I called Chris, who was using ChatGPT to write a significant anthropology paper.

As I explain in the article, what I observed Chris doing was more complicated than you might have guessed:

“He was not outsourcing his exam to ChatGPT; he rarely made use of the new text or revisions that the chatbot provided. He also didn’t seem to be streamlining or speeding up his writing process. If I had been Chris’s professor, I would have wanted him to disclose his use of the tool, but I don’t think I would have considered it cheating. So what was it?”

I recommend that you read the full article to learn the full answer. But to preview what I discovered: students aren’t simply outsourcing their writing to tools like ChatGPT, but they’re also not using them in clearly harmless ways either. The reality is something different and new; less a method to speed up the task of writing and more an approach to reducing its cognitive burden.

The bigger point to be made here, however, is about how we think about this new age of artificial intelligence in which we’ve been enveloped since late 2022. These tools are undeniably powerful. Accordingly, they will undeniably end up changing some things about our lives in major ways.

But predicting these changes has proven exceedingly difficult. If you’re interested in these trends, spend less time listening to people explaining how the next version of some model is going to change everything all at once, and instead directly observe what people are doing with the versions of the technology they have access to right now. The stories are less flashy, but as you look deeper you’ll find interesting things going on.

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In the latest episode of my podcast, Deep Questions, released earlier today, I take an unconventional look at the idea of discipline and how to improve it (listen | watch)

Have you read my new book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout? If not, here’s yet another reason to consider doing so: Goodreads just listed Slow Productivity as #1 on their recently released list of the “Most Popular Self Help Books of 2024.”

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When Time Management Was Easy

In 1973, an author named Alan Lakein published a book titled How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. It wasn’t the first book about professional time management — my library contains a first edition of James McCay’s 1959 classic, The Management of Time — but it’s arguably the first book to talk about the topic in a recognizably modern way, with a focus on personalized tools like daily to-do lists. It went on to reportedly sell more than three million copies, and was even shouted out by Bill Clinton, who cites its influence on his early career in his autobiography.

Revisiting Lakein’s advice today provides a glimpse into office life fifty years ago. And the encounter is shocking.

One of Lakein’s more famous suggestions is to write down everything you need to do on a single task list. He then says to label each task with one of three priorities: “A” for things that are important and urgent, such as those with impending deadlines; “B” is for tasks that are important but not urgent, and can therefore be postponed if necessary; “C” is for things that are small, easy, and don’t require attention at the moment.

You start by completing the A tasks, crossing them off your list as you go. Then you move on to the B category. If you finish the B tasks, you can tackle some of the C. Lakein notes that these task priorities might evolve. An important obligation with a distant deadline, for example, might start at B, but then, as the deadline approaches, upgrade to A. Lakein’s intention is to help you make sure that you make progress on the things that most require your attention.

Part of what’s shocking about this system is its finitude. In 2024, can you imagine fitting everything you need to do on a single list? Your email inbox alone could likely contribute several hundred items at any given moment. Also notable is Lakein’s assumption of task stability; that your list would more or less stay the same as you carefully worked your way through it during a full workday. Modern work is instead defined by constant new demands — chats, questions, meeting invitations, requests to “jump on a call” — that require timely answers.

Here’s the question that began to fester as I revisited these older ideas: is what we’re doing today any better?

The fact that our modern workflows would swamp Lakein’s quaint system of simple lists and priorities is perhaps more an inditement of us than him. To have more work, arriving with much more urgency, than we can possibly get our arms around is not a good recipe for getting useful effort out of human brains. It is, however, a good recipe for burnout.

A point I often make on my podcast, as well as in my new book, Slow Productivity, is that in my own work on these topics, I describe more complicated time management strategies with reluctance. My bigger wish is to help reform office work to the point that they’re no longer needed, and something like Lakein’s basic ABC system is more than enough.

We’re not there yet, but in the meantime, it helps to realize where we are now isn’t working.

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If you want to learn more about what’s (regrettably) required to manage your time in our current moment, check out the latest episode of my podcast, Deep Questions , where I tackle three advanced time techniques ( listen | watch ).If you haven’t yet read my latest book, Slow Productivity, you should! Some more encouragement: (1) it was recently named an official selection of The Next Big Idea Club [meaning it was chosen by a panel consisting of Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Dan Pink, and Susan Cain as one of the two best idea books of the season]; and (2) it was selected for the shortlist for SABEW’s Best Business Book of 2024 award.

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Dispatch from Herman Melville’s Farm

Growing up in New York, first in the city and then later in Albany, a young Herman Melville made frequent trips to stay with his uncle, Thomas Melvill, who lived on a farm near Pittsfield, in the Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts. In 1850, Thomas decided to sell his property. Melville, now with a young family of his own, arrived that summer for what they believed to be his final visit to the area.

It was during this fateful trip that Melville learned that the Brewster farm, consisting of 160 acres abutting his uncle’s plot, was up for sale. Fueled by impulse and nostalgia, he borrowed $3000 from his father-in-law and bought the property. He would come to call it Arrowhead in reference to native artifacts he found in its fields.

Melville’s plan for his time at Arrowhead was to write. He had recently published a series of bestselling adventure novels, drawing from the half-decade he spent wandering the Pacific as a sailor. He felt confident that his literary success would continue and the time was right to fully invest in this vision.

A few days ago, I travelled down to Arrowhead, now preserved by the Berkshire Historical Society, to better understand the writing-centered life that Melville constructed.

The original house is small, its second floor needing to fit Melville’s own family, as well as his mother and multiple sisters. He none-the-less claimed a sizable east-facing room for his office. Melville used a dining table to write, giving him ample room to spread out his books and notes. He pushed the table against a window offering a direct view of the hump-backed Mount Greylock in the distance:

(Legend has it that the whale-like appearance of the mountain inspired Moby Dick. We know this can’t be true because Melville conceived the novel before moving to Arrowhead, but his orientation toward the mountain, both physically and psychologically, clearly marks it as an important source of poetic inspiration for his work.)

Melville’s desk is flanked by bookshelves. A fireplace behind him boasts a poker forged from a whaling harpoon. According to the docent who led us on a tour, this setup, impressive as it is, was only temporary. Melville’s eventual plan was to raze the house and build a grander structure featuring a “writing tower.”

How did Melville make use of these spaces? We can gain some insight into his daily routine from a letter he wrote to a friend during this period:

I rise at eight–thereabouts–& go to my  barn–say good-morning to the horse, & give him his breakfast…My own breakfast over, I go to my work-room & light my fire–then spread my M.S.S. on the table–take one business squint at it, & fall to with a will.  At 2 1/2 p.m. I hear a preconcerted knock at my door, which (by request) continues till I rise & go to the door, which serves to wean me effectively from my writing, however interested I may be. . . .

The thirteen years Melville would spend at Arrowhead, writing half of each day at his dining table desk overlooking the mountains beyond, were the most productive of his career. The works he completed at Arrowhead included, most notably, Moby Dick, but also Pierre, the Confidence-Man, and Israel Potter, not to mention some of his best-known short stories, such as I and My Chimney, Benito Cereno, and Bartleby the Scrivener. (Tragically, these works were largely critical and commercial failures during Melville’s lifetime, leading him to eventually fall into debt before returning to New York to take a desk job. They wouldn’t become recognized as American classics until the early twentieth century.)

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a dispatch from the writing shed I was working from this July to help jumpstart a new book project. Melville’s Arrowhead provides a nice example of these same creative principles pushed toward a more notable extreme. Melville wanted to write, and knew that to do so at the level that could produce something of the caliber of Moby Dick would require great attention paid not just to what he was working on, but also where these efforts took place.

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In other news…

On the most recent episode of my Deep Questions podcast, I explored small habits that can lead to big results in the quest to find depth in a distracted world. (watch | listen)Meanwhile, for those who are still curious about my new book, Slow Productivity , Big Think just published a useful video in which I explain the book’s main principles.

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Dispatch from a Writing Shed

I’m writing this from a rental property, on a hillside overlooking the northern reach of the Taconic Mountains. A key feature of this property is a small outbuilding, designed and built by the current owner as a quiet place for visitors to work. Spanning, at most, twelve feet square, it features a daybed, a heating stove, and a desk arranged to look outward toward the distant peaks. A ceiling fan moves the air on muggy afternoons.

Here’s a view from the desk:

This rental property, in other words, includes a canonical example of one of my all-time favorite styles of functional architecture: the writing shed. (Indeed, as the owner told me, I’m not the first professional writer to use this space for this purpose in recent years.)

In my daily life in Takoma Park, Maryland, I don’t lack for interesting places to write. We designed the library in our house, which includes a custom-built Huston & Company library-style desk, specifically with writing in mind. (If you’re interested in what this looks like, the Spanish newspaper El País recently published a profile that includes a nice shot of me at my desk.) When I need a change of scenery while at home, I’ll also write on my front porch, where, during the grossest days of the DC summer, I’ll use a large floor fan to blow away the mosquitos and moderate the temperature. I also spend a considerable amount of time working amid the comforting din of our local coffee shop.

But as long-time readers of this newsletter know, I’ve always felt that there was something particularly special about the idea of writing in a quiet shed nestled in a quiet piece of natural property, such as what was enjoyed by Michael Pollan, David McCullough, and, perhaps my favorite example, E.B. White:

Which is all to say that I was excited, on arriving at this rental property, to spend a few weeks wrangling the early stages of a new book in a writing shed of my own.

So what have I learned so far?

Writing sheds don’t make the specific cognitive act of writing easier. It’s tempting to believe that the right aesthetics will usher in the muse and transport your efforts into a time-warping flow-state. But this doesn’t happen. Writing is still hard, requiring you to marshal multiple parts of your brain to work in synchronized and focused tandem toward the impossibly demanding task of producing well-crafted sentences.

But these sheds do seem to improve many of the general factors that surround this act. For example, they’re wonderfully effective at dampening the siren call of distraction. These rooms are used for a single purpose, so they lack the associations with other activities or interests that can so easily hijack your attention. The calming, natural environment beyond their windows also has a way of lulling the parts of your brain uninvolved in the writing task at hand into a harmless quiescence. Meanwhile, the novelty of their setting seems to lower the energy investment required to convince your brain to slip beyond its cacophonous inner-chatter and enter a deeper state more conducive to focus.

This all combines into a notable increase in mental stamina. Sessions that might have lasted ninety minutes at home can easily stretch to two or three hours amid the slow quiet of the shed. The writing is still hard, but it’s a more sustainable sort of hard.

There’s a lesson lurking here that extends beyond just writing: when it comes to cognitive work more generally, psychological factors matter. Whether you’re writing a book, or crafting computer code, or solving a business problem, or analyzing noisy data, you’re attempting to coax sustained abstract focus from a human brain not necessarily evolved for such intensely symbolic processing.

Of course elements like setting should really matter, as should other subtle elements such as how many total tasks you’re juggling, or the degree to which your day is necessarily fragmented by distraction. In knowledge work, productivity is about psychology as much as it is about tools and process. But we often ignore this reality.

As I can attest from personal experience, as I sit writing this essay, watching the clouds of an early morning rain shower clear off the distant mountains: If you really care about producing quality work, these softer factors matter.

The post Dispatch from a Writing Shed appeared first on Cal Newport.

On Ultra-Processed Content

When I visited London last month, a large marketing push was underway for the paperback edition of Chris van Tulleken’s UK bestseller, Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food…and Why Can’t We Stop? It seemed to be prominently displayed in every bookstore I visited, and, as you might imagine, I visited a lot of bookstores.

Unable to ignore it, I eventually took a closer look and learned more about the central villain of van Tulleken’s treatise: ultra-processed food, a term coined in 2009 as part of a new food classification system, and inspired by Michael Pollan’s concept of “edible food-like substances.”

Ultra-processed foods, at their most damaging extreme, are made by breaking down core stock ingredients such as corn or soy into their basic organic building blocks, then recombining these elements into hyper-palatable combinations, rich in salt, sugar, and fat, soaked with unpronounceable chemical emulsifiers and preservatives.

As Chris van Tulleken points out, the problem with ultra-processed foods is that they’re engineered to hijack our desire mechanisms, making them literally irresistible. The result is that we consume way more calories than we need in arguably the least healthy form possible. Give me a bag of Doritos (a classic ultra-processed food) and I’ll have a hard time stopping until it’s empty. I’m much less likely to similarly gorge myself on, say, a salad or baked chicken.

I was thinking about this book recently as Scott Young and I were prepared to re-open our course, Life of Focus, for new registrations next week. One of the three month-long modules of this course focuses on implementing ideas from my book Digital Minimalism to help you regain control of your attention from the insistent attraction of screens.

It occurred to me that in this concept of ultra-processed food we can find a useful analogy for understanding both our struggles to disconnect, and for how we might succeed in this aspiration going forward.

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To elaborate this claim, I want to be more specific in analogizing food to media content. To start, we can connect passive text-based media, such as books and articles, to minimally processed whole foods. Linguistic encoding was the first information-bearing media our species developed; something we’ve been working with for over 5,000 years.

This timeframe, of course, is too short for evolutionary forces to apply, but it’s plenty long for us to have culturally adapted to this format. As with whole foods, consuming writing tends to make us feel better, and we rarely hear concerns about reading too much.

We can next compare twentieth-century electronic mass media — that is, radio and television — to moderately-processed food like white bread, dry pasta, and canned soups. As with processed foods, we weren’t prepared for the arrival of new mass media forms that where much easier to consume and much more superficially palatable.

As a result, for the first time in our species’s interaction with media, over-consumption became a problem. (In the 1960s, the average household television viewing jumped past five hours per day.) Many social critics and educators began to rightly lament this sudden intrusion of electronic media into our cultural landscape (see, for example, this and this and this).

Many of the new media forms built on the consumer internet that subsequently emerged in the late 1990s can be similarly classified as moderately-processed. These include podcasts, newsletters, and blog posts. As with television and radio, the content itself can be valuable, but often times it’s not, and the ease of its delivery requires vigilance to protect against over-consumption.

This then brings us back to ultra-processed foods, which as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, began to increasingly dominate our diets with their lab-optimized hyper-palatability. The clear analogy here is to digital information offered through the social media platforms that vaulted into cultural supremacy in the 2010s.

As described, ultra-processed foods are created by first breaking down cheap stock foods into their basic elements, and then recombining these ingredients into something unnatural but irresistible. Something similar happens with social media content. Whereas the stock ingredients for ultra-processed food are found in vast fields of cheap corn and soy, social media content draws on vast databases of user-generated information — posts, reactions, videos, quips, and memes. Recommendation algorithms then sift through this monumental collection of proto-content to find new, hard to resist combinations that will appeal to users.

A feedback loop soon develops in which the producers of this stock content (that is, those posting to social media) adapt to what seems to better please the platforms, simplifying and purifying their output to more efficiently feed the algorithms’ goal of hijacking the human desire mechanisms.

In this way, the users of social media platforms simulate something like the food scientist’s ability to break down corn and reconstitute it into a hyper-palatable edible food-like substances. What is a TikTok dance mash up if not a digital Dorito?

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This analogy between food and media is useful because it helps us better understand responses to the latter. In the context of nutrition, we’re comfortable deciding to largely avoid ultra-processed food for health reasons. In making this choice, we do not worry about being labelled “anti-food,” or accused of a quixotic attempt to reject “inevitable progress” in food technology.

On the contrary, we can see ultra-processed good as its own thing — a bid for food companies to increase market share and profitability. We recognize it might be hard to avoid these products, as they’re easy and taste so good, but we’ll likely receive nothing but encouragement in our attempts to clean up our diets.

This is how we should think about the ultra-processed content delivered so relentlessly through our screens. To bypass these media for less processed alternatives should no longer be seen as bold, or radical, or somehow reactionary. It’s just a move toward a self-evidently more healthy relationship with information.

This mindset shift might seem subtle but I’m convinced that it’s a critical first step toward sustainably changing our interactions with digital distraction. Outraged tweets, aspirational Instagram posts, and aggressively arresting TikToks need not be seen as some unavoidable component of the twenty-first century media landscape to which we must all, with an exasperated sigh, adapt.

They’re instead digital Oreos; delicious, but something we should have no problem pushing aside while saying, “I don’t consume that junk.”

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In other news…

As mentioned, my online course Life of Focus (co-developed with Scott Young) is open for new registrations next week between June 24-28. This course draws on wisdom from my books Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, as well as Scott’s book Ultralearning. (Learn more here)In Slow Productivity news: As we reach the half-way point of 2024, my new book was selected by Amazon’s editors as their #1 Business Book of the year (so far)! I was also pleased to see it featured in a list of the nonfiction books “NPR staffers have loved so far this year” as well as in a New York Times article on “productivity books time-management experts actually use.” If you haven’t yet checked out my book yet, do so now…

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Manchester United Embraces Pseudo-Productivity

Earlier this month, Jim Ratcliffe, part owner and operations head for the storied English football club Manchester United, announced an end to the flexible work-from-home policy that the club’s approximately 1,000 employees had enjoyed since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. “If you don’t like it,” he said in a recent all staff meeting, “please seek alternative employment.”

Ratcliffe is not necessarily wrong to view remote work with skepticism. Having covered this topic extensively for The New Yorker, I don’t align myself with the crowd that automatically associates telecommuting with a self-evident pro-labor progressivism. Though I agree that flexible work arrangements will play an important role in the future of the knowledge sector, I also think that they’re hard to get right, and that we’re still in the early stages of figuring out how to implement them well — so for the moment, wariness is justified.

My problem with Ratcliffe’s return to office plan is instead the evidence he used to justify it. As reported by The Guardian, Ratcliffe supported his new policy by noting that when he experimented with a work-from-home Fridays program with another one of his companies, they measured a 20% drop in email traffic.

Here we find a pristine example of the central villain of my new book: a management philosophy called pseudo-productivity, which leverages visible activity as a crude proxy for useful effort.

Pseudo-productivity instantiates a double negative. Employers like Ratcliffe fear the idea of their employees not working at all; Tango dancing, so to speak, while still on the clock. If they see evidence that you’re doing something — anything, really — work related, then at the very least they know it’s not the case that you’re not working at all.

But in defending against this negative possibility, pseudo-productivity caps the ability to do something notably positive.

This follows because the easiest and most consistent way to demonstrate visible effort is to engage in rapid back-and-forth digital communication. This frenetic tending of inboxes and chat channels, however, makes it significantly harder to actually produce meaningful results.

Pseudo-productivity might prevent brazen slacking, but in doing so it impedes the type of results that ultimately matter most. It’s also exhausting for those caught in its twisted logic.

Ratcliffe’s goal shouldn’t be to increase his employees’ email traffic, but instead to find smarter measures of productivity that allow such a flawed metric to safely be ignored.

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Speaking of Slow Productivity, as well as storied British institutions, I just returned from a media tour in London, where, among other stops, I had a great conversation about my book on Chris Evan’s Breakfast Show (watch here).

The post Manchester United Embraces Pseudo-Productivity appeared first on Cal Newport.

Do We Need AI to Revolutionize Work?

In recent months, I’ve been doing a fair number of interviews about my new book, Slow Productivity. I’m often asked during these conversations about the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the world of knowledge work.

I don’t talk much about AI in my book, as it focuses more on advice that individuals can put into place right now to escape busyness and find a more sustainable path toward meaningful accomplishment. But it’s a topic I do think a lot about in my role as a computer scientist and digital theorist, as well as in my recent journalism for The New Yorker (see, for example, this and this).

With this in mind, I thought I would share three current thoughts about the intersections of AI and office productivity…

First, the large language model tools drawing the bulk of the attention at the moment, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, will not, on their own, revolutionize knowledge work productivity.

Language models can help speed up administrative tasks. For example, you can use them to write initial drafts of an email or fix the language on an email you wrote quickly. They can also create a summary of what was discussed in a long chat transcript or help you brainstorm ideas.

This is useful, but not necessarily transformative. Other technologies have previously sped up the execution of administrative tasks (think: every major breakthrough of the personal computer revolution), but speeding up these tasks has a way of inducing even more to fall into their slipstream. The result is less a new productivity utopia than an even more intense level of freneticism.

(There are some interesting exceptions here. These models’ ability to produce ready-to-use computer code and bespoke images, as well as fully automate certain customer support interactions, could lead to immediate disruption in certain fields.)

Second, the real impact will come when artificial intelligence tools gain the ability to plan, including future prediction and the simulation of other minds. As I reported for The New Yorker (and summarized here) this will involve the combination of language models with other types of (non-neural network) models, like those used to explore moves in game-playing programs.

Such multi-strategy systems can go beyond speeding up administrative tasks and instead fully automate them. For example, instead of helping you draft an email, such a program might respond to an email entirely on your behalf. This would be a game changer.

(Mustafa Suleyman has argued that the real Turing Test that matters is whether a given AI can go off and earn $100,000 for you on the internet. I would argue the test that’s more relevant — and consequential — is whether an AI can empty your inbox.)

Third, while it’s true that the major players in this space are certainly working on these types of planning-enabled systems, there’s no need to wait for these new technologies to improve our professional lives. We can achieve their promised revolutions right now; not with fancy computer programs, but with new common sense rules and processes for how we manage workloads, and how we communicate about our efforts. I don’t need a trillion-parameter model to empty my inbox if I can prevent my inbox from getting so full in the first place.

My new book, this newsletter, and my podcast, among many other sources, all contain practical ideas for achieving such an overhaul of knowledge work. None of these ideas depend on radical new tools. They rely instead on new perspectives and common sense. Put another way: We don’t need transformer-based neural networks to revolutionize work, we just need a willingness to try something new.

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Speaking of books, my longtime friend and collaborator Scott Young has a fantastic new title out this week called: Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery. I think Scott has written the ultimate (and approachable) guide to getting better at the stuff that matters. If you’re interested in engineering a deeper life, you need this book in your proverbial toolkit. (Learn more.)

The post Do We Need AI to Revolutionize Work? appeared first on Cal Newport.

Two Chances to See Me Next Week

I really enjoyed meeting so many of you at my Politics and Prose event a couple weeks ago. It was meaningful for me to be talking about my books in person again after having to launch my last title during a pandemic.

It was also a great opportunity to thank people for their support of Slow Productivity, which just yesterday landed #4 on the NYT’s monthly business bestseller list. (If you haven’t bought Slow Productivity yet, you should! If you read this newsletter, you’ll love it…)

It’s with all this in mind that I wanted to briefly share two upcoming opportunities to come meet me and hear me talk about Slow Productivity in the DC area next week!

On Monday (4/8) at 5:30pm I’ll be giving a book talk on campus at Georgetown University. The event, which is open to the public, will be held in the Fisher Colloquium (in the business school building on main campus), and will include plenty of time for questions. If you’re in the Georgetown area, please come attend! (Details.)

On Thursday (4/11) at 6:00pm I’ll be recording a “live” podcast at People’s Book, in my hometown of Takoma Park, MD (which is right at the DC border and easily accessible from metro). I’ve been looking forward to this event! I’ll do a deep dive segment, then producer Jesse and I will take live questions from the audience. This is also a chance to support my favorite independent bookstore (which is literally right around the corner from my podcast studio). This event is free and open to the public, but you should RSVP here if you’re planning on coming. (Details.)

The post Two Chances to See Me Next Week appeared first on Cal Newport.