Cal Newport's Blog, page 32

Jocko Willink On the Power of Discipline

On Doing Less to Get More

Jocko Willink is an intimidating looking man (see above). He’s also intimidatingly impressive. He’s a former Navy Seal who was awarded a Bronze and Silver Star in Iraq while leading Task Force Bruiser: the most decorated special forces unit in that war. He recently wrote a business bestseller called Extreme Ownership and now does leadership consulting.

He has a new book out and its title caught my attention: Discipline Equals Freedom.

I haven’t read the book yet, but I did listen to Jocko’s interview with the always-sharp Ryan Michler. Here’s how Jocko explained his book’s theme early in the discussion:

“If you want freedom, then you need to have discipline…the more discipline you have in your life the more you’ll be able to do what you want. That’s not true initially; initially the discipline might be things you don’t want to do at the time, but the more you do things that you don’t want to do, the more you do the right things, the better off you’ll be and the more freedom you’ll have…”

Jocko’s examples of this idea in action mainly concerned personal development. More discipline with your finances, for example, will eventually yield more financial freedom, while more discipline with time management will allow you to do more interesting things with your time.

As I listened to the interview, however, I was struck by the thought that his concept might also prove relevant to the seemingly less related context of digital knowledge work.

The front office IT revolution granted the knowledge worker an amazing amount of apparent new freedom: email made communication with anyone about anything instantaneous; the world wide web put all information at their fingertips; the mobile revolution allowed them to take these promethean gifts with them everywhere.

But as I discussed in my recent post on stagnant economic productivity, this apparent freedom is yielding mixed results. And I can’t help but wonder if Jocko’s wisdom hints at an alternative vision.

The new economy does offer exciting new opportunities, but perhaps the most effective way to unlock this freedom in the long term is to be more disciplined in the short term, especially when it comes to your time and attention: to focus relentlessly on producing the things you know how to do best at the highest possible level of quality, while ignoring the attractive digital baubles that promise you conveniences and the potential of breakthrough connections and exposure.

As Jocko put it: “do things you don’t want to do…do the right things,” and trust this discipline now will eventually generate the freedom you seek.

On the Complicated Economics of Attention Capital

A Serious Consideration

In recent years, I’ve occasionally tackled an intriguing question: are distracting technologies partially to blame for our economy’s sluggish productivity numbers?

I’m often tentative about addressing this topic because I’m not an economist, and serious economists seem to have other explanations in mind (c.f., this column or this book).

This is why I was pleased when many of you forwarded me an article titled: “Is the economy suffering from the crisis of attention?” It’s written by Dan Nixon, a (serious) economist at the Bank of England.

In this article, Nixon explores the question I asked above. In doing so, he outlines two main “channels” through which the new technologies of the Network Age might impact economic productivity indicators:

Channel #1: These technologies can distract employees from their actual work. If you spend less time working, and more time skimming your Facebook newsfeed, you get less done.
Channel #2: These technologies can directly and permanently reduce the rate at which employees produce value using their brains. If your workflow requires you to constantly check emails, then your ability to create new value is dampened.

My suspicion is that the second channel is the main culprit. As I’ve argued before (c.f., this article I wrote for HBR.org), the front office IT revolution, in which we hooked knowledge workers together with high-speed communication networks, has been a mixed blessing.

We assumed that slow communication and inadequate information was a primary bottleneck for knowledge work. But reality proved more complicated. As we’re learning, extracting a good return on investments in “attention capital” (to use a term from Nixon) requires that you balance two things:

providing your employees’ brains timely access to the right information; and
providing these brains the right conditions under which to process this information effectively.

The front office IT revolution has focused almost exclusively on the first item from this list by prioritizing faster networks and more efficient communications tools — a movement that has reached an apex in our current age of ubiquitous mobile access to all people and all information.

And yet, even though we’ve pushed connectivity to daring new levels — a technological miracle built on numerous ingenious innovations — we haven’t become more productive. In fact, the better these tools get, the less productive we become! (See the above chart, which is from Nixon’s article).

A Tricky Balance

The problem, I conjecture, is that focusing exclusively on the first item from my list has generated a perverse counteraction: not only does it steal our attention from the equally important emphasis on optimizing cognitive operating conditions, it actually makes these conditions worse. The result: productivity stagnates.

I increasingly believe that it’s exactly this dynamic that makes it so hard to figure out how to make effective use of attention capital.

If we ignore the conditions in which we expect brains to produce value, we cannot expect productivity to increase. At the same time, if we focus only on enabling deep thinking, these brains might not have the right information to think about, also hurting productivity.

Figuring out this balance is perhaps the most pressing question concerning continued growth of the knowledge work sector.

Or maybe it’s not. Which brings me back to Dan Nixon. What I especially like about his article is that he ends with a call for serious experimentation to get to the bottom of these issues.

“Ideally we would want to observe directly how ‘attention capital’ and productivity vary across firms and over time,” he writes.

I agree. Writers like me have been pontificating cleverly on these issues for years, but real progress will require more data.

Hopefully there are some economists out there ready to take on Dan Nixon’s challenge.

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Speaking of attention capital, one of my favorite start ups, Mouse Books , just announced a Kickstarter campaign for their holiday edition. The perfect gift, in my opinion, for the deep thinker in your life.

The Woodworker Who Quit Email

The Disconnected Craftsman

Christopher Schwarz is a master furniture maker. In addition to working on commissioned pieces in his Kentucky storefront, he’s the editor of a press that publishes books on hand tool woodworking. In his spare time, he researchers traditional woodworking techniques.

In short, Schwarz is a classic craftsman. If you want to ask him about his trade, however, you’ll have a hard time getting in touch. In 2015, he stopped using (public) email. And he has no intention of going back.

As Schwarz elaborated in a recent essay, this decision upset some customers, some of whom tried to find ways around his no email policy by tracking down his personal address, or using the customer service address for his publishing company.

Here’s Schwarz’s blunt response to these efforts:

Please don’t waste your breath, your fingers or your 1s and 0s. These messages are all simply deleted. I know deleting them might seem rude. And some of you have told us how rude you think it is in long rants… which get deleted.

As he then explained:

Trust me. It’s not you. It’s me. I had multiple public email addresses for 17 years and answered every damn question sent to me…It was all too much. I was spending hours each day answering emails. It cut into my time researching, building, editing and writing (not to mention time with my family).

So he quit: he deleted his inbox, then deleted his accounts, and finally told people that if they really needed to ask him questions or solicit advice they could come by his store in Kentucky. If they couldn’t make the trip then they’d just have to move on with their life.

A Crafty Thought Process

Schwarz’s story heartens me. I don’t think that most people could replicate his decision to leave email. But I do think more people could follow the thought process that led to this decision (even if the specifics of their conclusions might differ).

In more detail, what impresses me about Schwarz is that he rejected the fear of missing out — on a new lead, on a new opportunity, on a new fan — that permeates so much of our digital age business culture, and started instead from a simpler question: how do I get better at what I do best?

Honest answers to this query rarely involve spending more time online.

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If you’re attracted to the idea of an artisan woodworker learning his craft, I recommend the surprisingly thoughtful (and quite aspirational) memoir, Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman.

The da Vinci Pause

Leonardo’s Life Hack

Last month, Walter Isaacson released his big new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I haven’t read it yet (though it’s inevitable I will). In the meantime, I listened to Brett McKay’s sharp podcast interview with Isaacson.

As the conversation winds down, McKay poses an intriguing question:

“[Leonardo] da Vinci lived 500 years ago, Twitter didn’t exit, Instagram didn’t exist, all these digital things that are distracting us, that make it hard to really observe, didn’t exist. So based on your research and writing on da Vinci: what can we learn from him about staying focused and observing intensely on things even in this crazy digital world that we live in?”

Isaacson, who spent years immersed in over 7000 pages of da Vinci’s brilliant, but also scattered and frenetic notebooks, dismissed the premise: “Yeah, he had distractions too.”

So how did da Vinci end up a creative genius still revered 500 years later? Here’s Isaacson’s explanation:

“What he was able to do is pause, and put things aside, and look at very ordinary things and marvel at them.”

In this observation about a past figure is a powerful suggestion for grappling with the endless information deluging our current moment. Technologies like the internet provide everyone the raw material to become a renaissance person, but to take advantage of this reality it helps to cultivate da Vinci’s ability to pause when something catches your attention, and to then give it the intense, deep concentration needed to transform a fleeting spark into something more substantial.

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As a self-proclaimed productivity nerd, I thought I’d seen it all when it comes to discussions of time management. But then my longtime friend Elizabeth Grace Saunders proved me wrong. Her new book, Divine Time Management, tackles personal productivity through a novel lens: Christianity. If you’re both Christian and overwhelmed by all you have to do, check out Elizabeth’s latest. 

Sean Parker on Facebook’s Brain Hacking

A Conscientious Objection 

Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, was interviewed onstage yesterday at an event held by Axios at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The topic was cancer innovation, but the conversation turned at some point to Parker’s time at Facebook during its early years.

Perhaps emboldened by social media’s recent PR problems, Parker, who told Axios co-founder Mike Allen backstage that he had become a “conscientious objector on social media,” was unusually candid.

Here are some of his remarks (as reported this morning by Allen):

“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'”
“And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments.”
“It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
“The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

As Parker left the stage, he joked that Mark Zuckerberg was going to block his Facebook account. Perhaps it’s just wistful thinking on my part, but it seems to me that it’s Zuckerberg who should be worried that more and more people might start carrying out this blocking all on their own.

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(Hat tip to Pawel and Nwokedi)

Arnold Bennett’s Fight Against Steampunk Social Media

How to Live

In 1910, Arnold Bennett published a short volume titled How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. He was alarmed with the way the newly emergent British middle class seemed to waste their time outside of work. The average salaryman of this era doesn’t live, he noted, but instead “muddles through,” wasting time — that “inexplicable raw material of everything,” the supply of which “though gloriously regular is cruelly restricted.”

Bennett being Bennett decided he could tell these muddlers how to live better. So he wrote this guide.

I come back to this book from time to time. If you look past the standard Bennett snobbery and occasional dash of Victorian ornateness — “inexplicable raw material of everything”…really?  —  it’s both surprisingly pragmatic and relevant to all sorts of contemporary issues.

In my latest skim, for example, the following passage caught my attention. It’s Bennett’s summary of the standard post-work evening for a British white collar worker:

“You don’t eat immediately on your arrival home. But in about an hour or so you feel as if you could sit up and take a little nourishment. And you do. Then you smoke, seriously; you see friends; you potter; you play cards; you flirt with a book; you note that old age is creeping on; you take a stroll; you caress the piano…. By Jove! a quarter past eleven. You then devote quite forty minutes to thinking about going to bed; and it is conceivable that you are acquainted with a genuinely good whisky. At last you go to bed, exhausted by the day’s work. Six hours, probably more, have gone since you left the office…”

To Bennett, these six wasted hours (“gone like magic, unaccountably gone!”) are a tragedy. What caught my attention about this vignette, however, is that he seems to be describing, in essence, an early-twentieth century version of killing time by messing around on your phone — it’s steampunk social media.

This interpretation is important because it underscores something I often overlook when I chastise people about mindless digital tinkering: this attraction toward the mindless is not new, but instead something that we’ve been struggling with since the initial introduction of leisure time.

Learning to live, then as now, is hard work.

I mention this not to offer a definitive solution, but to remind myself that the depth I preach, both in work and personal affairs, is not a default mode subverted only recently by new technology. It is instead an aspirational goal that requires intention, practice, and perhaps even some wisdom from an antiquated British social critic.

With this in mind, if you’re looking for some concrete ideas about how to train your mind for more substantive fare, you could do worse than to consider the following intriguing suggestion from Bennett: take just 90 minutes, only three nights a week, and dedicated them toward a quality pursuit.

“If you persevere [with this habit],” he writes, “you will soon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some sustained endeavour to be genuinely alive.”

Segment’s Systematic Quest for Depth

Segment’s Focus Problem

Segment is a typical Silicon Valley success story. It’s a data analytics software company started by three MIT dropouts in 2011. Last year it raised $64 million in its Series C funding round.

Things at Segment, in other words, were going well — with one exception: their employees were having a hard time focusing. Concerned, the company ran an internal team survey and discovered that the “chatter and noise” in their industry-standard open office was the biggest cause of distraction (not surprisingly, “group slack channels” was the second biggest cause) .

So Segment decided to do something about it.

In a move that you could only expect from an advanced data analytics company, they programmed an iOS app to measure office noise levels and ran it on the iPads mounted outside the office’s conference rooms. They then crunched the resulting data and found that some parts of the office were more noisy than others, with the loudest areas around a factor of two louder than the quietest (see above image, in which red corresponds to loud and green to quiet).

Armed with this data, they rearranged the seating in their open office. As they described on their company blog:

“The teams needing the most verbal collaboration — Segment’s sales, support, and marketing teams — moved to the naturally louder parts of the office. The teams needing the most quiet — engineering, product, and design — moved to the quietest parts of the office.”

They then re-ran their original survey and discovered that the total time people spent focusing increased from 45% to 60%. As they explained: “In a purely numerical sense, you could equate that to hiring 10–15 people.”

The Focused Future

What I like about this story is that the company identified the ability to focus as a tier one skill (indeed, they list it as one of their four “core values”), and then made concrete, data-driven changes to better support it.

In recent years, when interviewed about my writing, I often predict that a transformation away from our current ad hoc, noisy, distracted way of working into something much more structured and effective is not only inevitable, but will happen fast once it gets going.

When you see a company like Segment essentially find 15 free employees by rearranging their desks to support more deep work, you get a glimpse of the type of humble experiments that will spark a major revolution.

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My friend Rob Montz is an incredibly talented, up and coming documentary filmmaker based out of DC. On Wednesday (Nov. 1st), he’s hosting a sneak preview screening of his new documentary short, “The Quarterlife User Manual,” which, in his words, “lays out the core rules a newly minted college grad should follow to secure a meaningful job.” It also features yours truly, among many other more famous subjects. If you’re interested in seeing the sneak peak (which will be held in We Work — Manhattan Laundry, in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of DC), send an email to robmontz@gmail.com to request a spot on the guest list…I only ask that you applaud loudly whenever I appear on screen.

Andrew Wiles on the State of Being Stuck

A Persistent Answer

Ben Orlin is a math teacher who publishes the clever essay blog, Math with Bad Drawings. Last year, Orlin had the opportunity, during a press conference at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, to ask a question of Andrew Wiles, the Princeton Professor (now at Oxford) who in 1994 finally solved Fermat’s Last Theorem.

As Orlin reports on his blog, he asked the following:

“You’ve been able to speak to an unusually wide audience for a research mathematician. What are some of the themes you’ve tried to emphasize when talking to a broader public?”

Wiles’s answer, according to Orlin, can be summarized in six words: “Accepting the state of being stuck.”

As Wiles elaborated, research mathematics unfolds as follows:

“You absorb everything about the problem. You think about it a great deal—all the techniques that are used for these things. [But] usually, it needs something else. So, you get stuck.”

At this point, he explains, “you have to stop…let your mind relax a bit…[while] your subconscious is making connections.”

Then you “start again.” Day after day. Week after week. Until, one day:

“You find this thing…Suddenly you see the beauty of this landscape…[before,] when it’s still some kind of conjecture, it seems really far away…[but now] it’s like your eyes are open.”

Wiles admitted that the enemy he fights against most is “the kind of message put out by, for example, the film Good Will Hunting.”

And, in particular, the idea that for some people math comes easy (Matt Damon glancing at the chalkboard, and then dashing out the solution to the impossible problem), and for all others it’s hopeless.

The reality, as Wiles knows, is that math is just plain hard. Regardless of who you are. But it’s also amazingly rewarding if you’re used to the feeling of persisting even when you have no idea about how best to move forward.

A Good Response

I liked this answer (and Orlin’s commentary on it) for two reasons.

The first is personal. As a theoretical computer science I spend a lot of my professional life stuck on math problems. It’s hard to explain to outsiders what this is like, and Wiles’s  response does a good job of capturing the competing forces of frustration and joy that come from tackling such things on a regular basis.

The second has to do with my recent post about how we lack a good vocabulary for describing the varied cognitive efforts that comprise deep work. Wiles’s answer is a good step toward filling in some of those blanks.

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For more on Andrew Wiles’s attack on Fermat’s Last Theorem, see Simon Singh’s popular book, Fermat’s Enigma. For a more raw and technical treatment of what it’s like to do Fields Medal-caliber math, see the more recent Birth of a Theorem. The image above is taken from Wile’s proof, as it appeared in the Annals of Mathematics.

(Hat tip: Amin)

Jony Ive’s iConcern

Ive’s iConcern

At last week’s New Yorker TechFest conference, superstar Apple designer Jony Ive took the stage.

At some point during the presentation, Ive was offered a softball question about the ways the iPhone has changed the world. Ive’s response was surprising: “Like any tool, you can see there’s wonderful use and then there’s misuse.”

Asked what he meant by “misuse,” Ive responded: “perhaps, constant use.”

The fact that Jony Ive, the guy who designed the iPhone, is worried about the way people engage his creation, emphasizes an important point: there’s something broken about our current relationship with our technology.

Our culture was quick to accept the idea that we’d end up checking these things constantly. We shrug our shoulders and laugh about life in these modern times.

But Ive’s small statement sends a big message: you don’t have to accept this.

(Image by Kempton)

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When US Marine Akshay Nanavati returned from Iraq he struggled with fear. But instead of giving in to the negative forces dragging him down, he turned his life around. In his new book, FEARVANA, Nanavati tells his story and explains how anyone can follow his path in overcoming hard things in life. I was honored to blurb this book. If this topic resonates, find out more here.

Are You Using Social Media or Being Used By It?

A Social Experiment

If you, like many people, use social media and generally agree that it’s an important technology, try the following experiment.

Take out a piece of paper and list your most important uses for these services — the activities that social media is well-suited to provide and that unambiguously enrich your life. This list, for example, might include items like:

The ability to see new photos of your nephews, nieces, or grandchildren.
The Facebook Group used to run a local organization you belong to.
The  hashtag that keeps you up to date with the latest news from an activist movement that you support.

The social media industrial complex* likes to point to lists like these to justify its importance. “It would be crazy to dismiss our technology,” they cry, “look at all these useful things people do with it!”

But here’s the second part of the experiment: estimate honestly how much time it would take per week to satisfy these important uses. In my experience, for most people, the answer is around 15 – 30 minutes.

And yet, the average American adult social media user spends two hours per day on these services, with almost half this time dedicated to Facebook products alone.

This is the disconnect that the social media industrial complex doesn’t want you to notice. They want the conversation to stop at the assertion that social media isn’t useless, and then hope people move on without questioning the specific role these services have claimed on their limited and valuable time and attention.

The social media business model depends on this oversight.

To be more concrete, I claim that most users could probably reap 95% of the value they get out of social media by signing in twice a week, on a desktop or laptop, to catch up on the latest photos, or check their organization’s group, or to browse the most recent chatter relevant to a movement they care about. Let’s called this controlled use of these services.

Social media companies cannot reach multi-billion dollar valuations, or return consistent stock growth to their investors, based on controlled use. What they need is compulsive use, which is what happens when you launch the app on your phone with some important goal in mind, and then thirty minutes later look up and realize you’ve been snagged into an addictive streak of low-value tapping, liking, and swiping.

As former Google employee and whistleblower Tristan Harris explains, these companies carefully engineer their products — especially the versions readily available through apps on your phone — to exploit psychological weak spots to trap you into compulsive use. For example:

The “like” button? This was added to inject more intermittent reinforcement into the social media browsing experience — significantly increasing the amount of times people check their accounts.
The ability to “tag” people in your posted photos? The primary purpose of this feature (which, when considered objectively, is really pretty arbitrary) is to create a new stream of social approval indicators — something our tribal brains are evolved to take deadly seriously, and therefore induces people — surprise, surprise — to significantly increase the amount of times they check their accounts.

With this in mind, I’m going to stop short of asking you (yet again — I was chagrined to recently learn that I’m the top two results when you google “Quit Social Media”) to consider leaving these services altogether. Instead, let me make a suggestion that the social media industrial complex fears far more: change your relationship with these services to shift from compulsive to controlled use.

Still use social media, if you must: but on a schedule; just a handful of times a week; preferably on a desktop to laptop, which tames the most devastatingly effective psychological exploitations baked into the phone apps.

You have very little to lose, as controlled use preserves all of the things you seriously value from these services, but have so much to gain when you decide there’s a better use for that extra 13.5 hours a week than helping prop up real estate prices in Northern California.

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* This is my somewhat facetious term for the powerful combination of the massive social media platform monopolies, and the growing sector of the knowledge tech economy — gurus, consultants, online brand managers, etc. — that depends on the belief that social media is fundamental to modern commerce and life.