Cal Newport's Blog, page 35

Patrick Rhone is Nonline

Rhone’s Sabbatical

In March, writer Patrick Rhone posted a notice that he was taking a break from online publishing to work on his next book.

“This includes my websites and social media accounts,” he explained. “No blog posts, no tweets, no status updates.”

He concluded: “I’m nonline.”

This adjective caught my attention as I hadn’t heard it before. Here’s the definition Rhone linked to in his notice:

nonline (adj.): No longer found on, made available to, or primarily accessed or contacted through the Internet.

I like this phrase and hope it catches on as something that more and more people feel empowered to use to untether from digital distraction as needed.

Perhaps more important than the phrase itself is the trend it represents. Cultural revolutions, like the one we’re currently experiencing courtesy of the internet, are disorienting at first. New vocabulary — like nonline, or deep work, or attention merchants — can play a key role in helping people sort through this confusion and figure out how best to react and thrive in a changing world.

(Hat tip: Spencer S.)

James Michener’s Nomadic Pursuit of Depth

Method Writing

When James Michener was writing his epic 1978 novel, Chesapeake, he didn’t have to travel far for inspiration. At the time he lived in an old house, nestled on 25 acres, near the Choptank river on a creek that emptied into the eastern waters of Chesapeake Bay.

“He loved the sounds of the place,” explained Michener friend and collaborator Errol Lincoln Uys. “He would take long walks out to the end of the dock and stand there while he tried to figure something [about the book] out. He loved the sounds of the migrating ducks. He loved the nature of the place.”

By the time a couple from Baltimore bought the house from Michener in 1995, the novelist was long gone. In the early 1980s, he moved to Austin, to immerse himself in the rhythms of the Lone Star State while writing Texas.

These were not the only times Michener used location to inspire his work. After Texas, he moved temporarily to Sitka, Alaska, to work on his novel Alaska, and his original epic, Hawaii, was written during a period when Michener lived on the island.

There’s something aspirational about this idea of deploying grand gestures (to use a term from Deep Work) to push forward creative endeavors. I’m bringing it up here, however, because I think there’s a subtle point lurking in Michener’s nomadism that’s relevant to knowledge work in general…

Neuronal Productivity

Michener intuited that the human brain is not adapted to perform hour after hour of demanding abstract thinking. To finish his 1000-page novels required more than simply adding “write for five hours today” to a to-do list, nestled between more mundane tasks.

Michener knew he had to nudge and cajole his brain into a state where it was willing to do the herculean cogitation he needed from it. Dramatic location changes, tuned to the specific deep task at hand, was one of his core strategies for this purpose.

But here’s the thing: when it comes to hard mental tasks, there’s nothing special about fiction writing. Whether you’re painting a picture, writing computer code, or crafting a new marketing strategy — sometimes sweeping and smartly calibrated efforts are needed to get your brain ready to do what you need from it.

Clear plans and good intentions (to my chagrin) are not always enough.

This reality is largely ignored by the world of professional knowledge work: a setting that likes to imagine the human brain is a general-purpose task computer that can simply be fed little nuggets of effort (through emails and slack channels and end-of-meeting action items) to churn through each day, with the hope that these systematic efforts will add up to something significant.

But this approach ignores the messy reality of our gray matter, which is much more idiosyncratic and context dependent than the silicon processors we strive to mimic.

(For more on the danger of embracing this arbitrary brain as computer metaphor, see Douglas Rushkoff’s thought-provoking book, Present Shock.)

There is, I suspect, great value to be gained for both individuals and organizations that are enlightened enough to consider this more holistic form of productivity (what we might call, neuronal productivity?) when it comes to extracting value from human brains.

Michener was on to something. Deep work is hard. If you want to produce big things, you need to be willing to go big with your work habits.

(The above picture of James Michener and Errol Lincoln Uys at Michener’s Chesapeake home was taken by Uys.)

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A few weeks ago, a group of producers from a fascinating startup called Mentorbox spent a day at my house in Silver Spring, MD, filming me talk about my fourth book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You. The interview was for their subscription service in which they send you a new business book each month, along with detailed notes and both audio and video interviews with the author that dive deep into the core ideas. I was really impressed and honored to be involved. You can find out more here.

On Steampunk Productivity

The Steampunk Phenomenon 

Steampunk began as a fiction genre that imagines alternative histories in which technology never moves past the steam-driven industrialism of the Victorian Age. It portrays worlds ruled by retro-futuristic inventions, like heavy-geared automata and whirring Babbage-style mechanical computers.

It has since expanded into its own aesthetic, impacting both fashion and design, as well as a thriving community of makers who retrofit 21st century artifacts with the stained woods and brass knobs of the 19th century (c.f., the above picture of a steampunk modem).

One reason steampunk resonates is its intuitive physicality. Our modern world of plastic cases and digital chips is mysterious and sterile. A steampunk contraption, by contrast, is driven by pistons and valves that match our mental schema for how things function in the physical world.

This physicality is appealing (an idea fleshed out thoughtfully in Matthew Crawford’s wonderful manifesto: Shop Class as Soulcraft). Put simply, we’re attracted to things whose function we can concretely grasp.

From Novels to the Office

The reason I’m talking about steampunk is because I think its retro attraction can teach us something about modern productivity.

The standard knowledge work organization, like so many things in our contemporary world, runs in a mysterious and sterile fashion. Messages fly back and forth, comments are annotated to PDFs, Gcal invites flow freely — and somewhere in this digital busyness we march ambiguously toward getting things done.

If you’ll excuse the somewhat strained expansion of this term, the steampunk approach to professional effectiveness would eschew much of this sterile electronic freneticism and instead turn back to systems and artifacts that are more intuitively concrete.

I’m seeing this idea creeping into the world of productivity in the form of physical scrum boards, bullet journals, time blocks in high-quality paper notebooks and ink-marked deep work tallies.

I don’t quite yet understand the full contours of this steampunk productivity movement, but its basic motivation is clear: when we can embody our work in a clear, visual, physical manner, we can accomplish more, and do so with more satisfaction.

The answer to our economy’s distressingly stagnant non-industrial productivity numbers, in other words, might not be faster chat tools and better-featured shared documents, but instead a return to a more analog and hands-on relationship with our work.

The Life-Changing Magic of the Inbox Sort Folder

Back to Basics

It’s been a while since I’ve geeked out here on Study Hacks about the latest productivity hack to earn my enthusiasm. So it’s with some excitement that I bring up my latest favorite tip: the inbox sort folder.

It’s not uncommon for me to go two or three days without seeing my email inbox. When I subsequently return, the volume of its contents can be overwhelming. The inbox sort folder method is something I stumbled into that helps me tame this mess.

The idea is simple…

Create a folder in your email inbox named “sort” (if, like me, you use Gmail, then create a label with this name; as shown above).
Pick a topic that describes several of your unread messages. For example, there might be multiple messages related to a specific project, or multiple messages about a meeting you’re organizing.
Move all messages related to that topic into your sort folder.
Go into your sort folder and process through these messages until the folder is empty.
Return to your inbox and loop back to Step 2, looking for another topic that describes multiple messages. Repeat until the inbox is empty.

Logically speaking, this trick of moving a group of related messages to a temporary folder before processing shouldn’t make a big difference.

But psychologically speaking, it does help. A lot.

Tackling a stack of messages all related to the same topic, one after another, while watching the sort folder diminish toward empty as you go, somehow ends up much easier than tackling those same messages in a scattered order as you make your way through your chaotic inbox in a less structured manner.

I can’t explain the exact mechanism behind this hack’s effectiveness, but it certainly does help me maintain my sanity when I have to return to the world of workplace communication after travel or long deep work binges.

Give it a try. You’ll understand what I mean.

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My good friend Scott Young, of MIT Challenge fame, has developed a great online course about his tactics for rapidly learning hard things. It’s called Rapid Learner. He opens it once or twice a year for people to sign up. It’s open this week. If you’re curious, I highly recommend that you learn more about it here. 

(This is not an affiliate link. I don’t make any money if you sign up. I just think he put together a smart course on a topic I care about.)

Listen to Baseball on the Radio (with a Book)

A Deep Season Begins

Now that we’re entrenched in spring I can indulge one of my favored deep work training routines: listening to baseball on the radio.

America’s pastime unfolds slowly. The experience of listening to a game lacks the rapid, shiny stimuli that defines so much modern entertainment.

This is important. The more comfortable you become in the absence of such distractions, the easier you’ll find it to persist in the non-stimulating (but satisfying) pursuit of depth.

Baseball on the radio also requires sustained concentration. To really understand what’s happening in the game, you need to have followed every pitch in the inning that led to the current moment.

This requires that you to hold your attention on a single target for an extended period of time: another effective exercise to sharpen your ability to focus.

This is not the first time, of course, that I’ve written about the neuronal benefits of FM fandom. But this year I’ve cemented a new twist to my routine: I read a book during the commercial breaks.

Let me paint the (painfully geeky) scene: I sit outside at the table in my backyard, Sony analog-dial radio tuned into 106.7, an LED headlamp on my head, and a book in my lap. When the inning ends or the pitcher is pulled, I dive into another chapter of the book; then back to the game; then back to the book — the evening unfolding in a slow concentrated present.

If there’s a more pleasurable way to train one’s ability to achieve depth, I’m yet to find it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Bryce Harper just came up to bat against R. A. Dickey in a one-run game…this I’ve got to hear.

(Photo by Feches)

Tim Ferriss and the Rise of the Email Miser

The Spark

Tim Ferriss’s first book, The 4-Hour Workweek (4HWW), has been selling well in hardcover for almost a decade. In this time, it has resonated with so many audiences, and inspired so many trends, that it’s easy to forget the topic that first put the book on the cultural map: email.

In the spring of 2007, right around the time 4HWW was published, Tim gave a talk to a packed room at the SXSW conference. Though he covered many topics in the speech, there was one suggestion in particular that caught his audience’s attention: you should only check email twice a day (and explain this to your correspondents in an autoresponder).

This twice-a-day strategy created a buzz at SXSW: major business bloggers began to write about Ferriss, and his book soon became a phenomenon in Silicon Valley (the epicenter of communication overload). It was largely on this platform that 4HWW began to lay the foundations for its massive audience.

From Days to Weeks

The idea that you shouldn’t check email constantly sounds obvious to modern ears. It’s important to remember, however, that in 2007 this was bold.

(In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, people in the tech industry fully embraced the novel promise of rapid network communication. To check emails constantly was a mark of pride — an indication that you were cutting edge. By 2007, the excitement had diminished and the first adopters were growing weary. This is the context in which Ferriss’s message inspired a passionate response.)

I’m telling this story because I’ve noticed recently a growing number of people who are taking Ferriss’s original suggestion to a new level: checking email only once or twice a week.

These email misers, as I affectionately call them, have transformed their email inbox into something closer to a P.O. box — a collection of messages that build up until they occasionally stop by to sort through them, replying only when unavoidable.

These misers don’t make a big fuss about their lazy inbox habits. They don’t write autoresponders or issue elaborate apologies. When people complain, they simply note that they don’t always get to their email on any given day. After a while, their correspondents adapt.

To be fair, most knowledge workers would be fired if they followed this strategy, and to date I’ve only encountered a small number of these misers…but, keep in mind that in 2007 most people felt similarly worried about Ferriss’s much milder suggestions.

In other words, the fact that we’ve moved from a cultural moment in which Ferriss’s advice was revolutionary, to a moment where more and more people feel empowered to check email only occasionally throughout their week, is, to me, a sign of progress…

(Photo by Anne Helmond)

Why Are Maker Schedules So Rare?

A Tale of Two Schedules

In 2009, tech investor Paul Graham published an influential essay titled “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.” In this piece, he argued that the best types of schedules for people who makes things are different than the best schedules for those who manage things.

As Graham elaborates:

“The manager’s schedule is…embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour…”

“…But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.”

He then delivers the key conclusion: “When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster.”

Though Graham doesn’t mention it specifically in the essay, we might add that the need to keep up with an inbox or chat channel can be equally disastrous to a maker. The constant context switching, as we now know from research, also prevents the maker’s brain from fully engaging the creative task at hand.

In the years since this essay was published, it has spread widely. The (slightly modified) terms maker schedule and manager schedule are well-known, and most people who deal with both types of workers agree that Graham is speaking the truth: if you want someone to make something valuable, they’ll be most effective if you let them work in long, uninterrupted chunks.

But here’s the thing: almost no organizations support maker schedules.

The reasons for this reality are straightforward: (a) distractions like constant messaging and frequent meetings are often convenient in the moment for the person instigating them; (b) most organizations place no barriers around such behaviors; (c) without these barriers, convenience will almost always win.

To me, the more interesting question is what an organization could do if they decided they were ready to support Graham’s maker schedule concept. Here are two ideas off the top of my head; one moderate, and the other more extreme…

Moderate Option: Dual Schedules. A straightforward strategy is to have makers switch back and forth between maker and manager schedules. For example, Monday, Wednesday and Friday might be maker days: you cannot schedule meetings with makers on these days, and emails sent to them will be held by the server until the day is over. A special phone number is provided for emergencies. The other two days are manager days, and the expectation is that the maker will be checking inboxes constantly and is willing to fill every hour with meetings. I call this a moderate option because it doesn’t change a culture that forces makers to also act like managers (for the sake of convenience), it just grants them enough reprieve to get valuable things done on a regular basis.
Extreme Option: The Maker Firewall. A more aggressive approach is to declare a stark split between makers and managers. To enforce this split you need a strong barrier between the two worker types. My suggestion is to eliminate any general way for people to contact a maker: no email address, no slack handle, no phone. Instead, each maker is assigned a manager. All communication to and from the maker go through that manager. (The exception, of course, is that makers working in teams have ways to communicate within their team.) The manager handles all incoming requests, and in return brings to the makers each day a schedule of what they should be working on — otherwise leaving them to put their head down and craft valuable things. I call this an extreme option as it would require substantial shifts in an organization’s structure and how it operates. (I suspect, however, that it would also lead maker-centric organizations to become much more profitable, especially in sectors like tech, where the value of 10x code is massive.)

The above options are just speculation, but their motivation is important. I think Paul Graham is 100% right in his analysis of the different types of schedules, and in an increasingly competitive knowledge economy, the role of makers are more important than ever before (as most other knowledge activities are vulnerable to automation and outsourcing). There are, in other words, big advantages lurking for those organizations brave enough to take Graham’s analysis seriously.

The Obvious Value of Communication is Perhaps Not So Obvious

A Non-Obvious Question

In a recent podcast interview, the host asked me: “what’s something that seems obvious to you, but not to most other people?”

It was a good question because it spurred me to articulate an idea that has long lurked in the background of my thinking on work and productivity in a digital age. Here is (more or less) how I answered:

“When it comes to the world of work, more connectivity and more communication is not necessarily better. In fact, it often makes things worse.”

People are quick to admit that some of their habits surrounding workplace communication tools could use some improvement, but it’s widely agreed that the tools themselves — email, slack, smartphones — are a positive development. These technologies make communication faster and easier, providing a pleasing patina of industriousness and agility to your daily efforts.

To not use these tools would make communication slower and more difficult: how could that possibly be a good thing?

There seems to be wide agreement about this point, but as my above quote indicates, this consensus does not include me. There’s a good reason for this dissension: the idea that more communication is better goes against everything I’ve learned as a computer scientist.

Reducing Message Complexity

I should probably elaborate my previous statement. There are many types of computer scientists: I’m the type who studies algorithms that help distributed systems run reliably and efficiently.

Here’s the thing about designing these distributed algorithms: communication is something you’re almost always trying to minimize. The fewer messages you need to send or receive to accomplish your task, the better.

There are several reasons for this: communication tends to be slow compared to local processing, networks can be unpredictable, and sitting around waiting for messages to arrive, while your powerful processor sits idle, is frustratingly inelegant.

A well-designed distributed algorithm sends just enough of the right information to allow all parties to efficiently complete the task. And this goal is not always easy…

People in my field have written whole doctoral dissertations on how to reduce the number of back and forth messages required for a group of faulty agents to agree on a decision.
There’s a whole community of theoreticians who do nothing but try to prove the absolute minimum number of bits required for two agents to work together to solve various problems.
I co-authored a paper last fall that proved the surprising speed with which a rumor can spread through a crowd, even if people restrict themselves to talking to only a single neighbor at a time. This wasn’t easy to figure out.

As a distributed algorithm theorist, in other words, when I encounter a typical knowledge economy office, with its hive mind buzz of constant unstructured conversation, I don’t see a super-connected, fast-moving and agile organization — I instead see a poorly designed distributed system.

Implications

In discussing my perspective as a computer scientist, I’m not trying to claim that our approach necessarily applies to the workplace. I’m instead trying to underscore that some of the professional behaviors and trends that might seem so obvious in the moment, might be less obvious than most assume.

(Photo by Derek)

Our Ancient Attraction to Focus

The Focused Tribe

The Himba people of northwestern Namibia are semi-nomadic sheep and cattle herders that have largely avoided contact with modern cultures. Their villages consist of wooden huts organized around a sacred fire that connects them to their ancestors. Their living spaces are devoid of western artifacts.

It was against this backdrop that not too long ago a researcher named Jules Davidoff, from Goldsmith’s University in London, gained permission from a Himba tribal chief to bring in a team ladened with electronic equipment to conduct psychological experiments.

As detailed in a 2011 paper appearing in the journal PLOS ONE (also reported on by a recent BBC article), the results were surprising.

The Himba people, it turns out, literally see the world differently than westerners. But perhaps more important to our discussion here is their “striking” ability to resist distraction and to focus. As summarized in the BBC article: “they appeared to be the most focused of any groups previously studied [by Davidoff’s team].”

At the risk of drawing too broad a conclusion from narrow findings, these results might help explain an observation that I emphasized in Chapter 3 of Deep Work: human beings seem wired to find great satisfaction in concentrating intensely.

We can label ourselves “digital natives,” and extol the virtues of hyper-connectivity, but as the Himba people demonstrate, our affinity for deep concentration is ancient, and its attraction is something we cannot easily discard. Evolution shaped a mind optimized to concentrate, and our recent embrace of distraction is an exception to our past.

I think this observation is something we should keep in mind when reflecting on how best to build a meaningful life in an increasingly distracted world.

(Photo of Himba village by Tee La Rosa; citation hat tip to Michael V.)

Yuval Harari Works Less Than You

The Charmed Career of Yuval Harari

The 41-year old Israeli historian Yuval Harari has enjoyed a career rise that any academic would envy. He earned his doctorate at Oxford, specializing in medieval military history. He went on to publish a prodigious number of well-respected books and articles on the topic, winning, along the way, several important awards in his field, a place in the Young Israeli Academy of Sciences, and a tenured professorship at Hebrew University.

In 2011, he published (in Hebrew) his first work of “macro-history.” It was called, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (which I read and recommend), and it offers a sweeping history of our species organized, in large part, around our unique ability to make things up.

The book was a bestseller in Israel and was soon translated into 30 different languages, becoming an international phenomenon. In America, both Barack Obama and Bill Gates publicly recommended the title. Mark Zuckerberg choose it for his online book club. Last month Harari published his follow-up, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, which became an instant New York Times bestseller.

Given the magnitude of these accomplishments and the diminutive status of Harari’s age, you might assume that the young historian must be phenomenally busy.

But as he revealed in a recent interview on Ezra Klein’s podcast, he’s working less than you might expect…

A Mindful Schedule

In particular, during this interview, Harari revealed that he’s a serious practitioner of Vipassana mediation who spends 2 hours every day meditating, and goes on a 1 or 2 month meditation retreat every year.

Harari’s not exaggerating about the latter: he didn’t learn that Donald Trump was elected President until January 20th, when he arrived home from an off-the-grid session that began in early November.

What’s interesting to me about this story is not the power of meditation (though Harari makes an interesting point in the interview about his practice helping him identify problems that matter), but instead what it tells us about the reality of producing valuable things.

In his recent book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues from historical examples and scientific findings that a four hour “creative work day” is about optimal for producing important new things.

Beyond that, a busy workday consists primarily of busywork.

In other words, Yuval Harari can sacrifice a non-trivial fraction of his working hours without blunting his impact because the hours he’s sacrificing are not the relatively small number dedicated to cultivating his next big idea.

(It’s important to note that this concept is not confined to rarified fields like academic historians. In Deep Work, for example, I tell the story of a software company that observed no reduction in productivity when they dropped to a 4-day work week for most of the year: people simply sacrificed non-productive shallow work to compensate for the reduced schedule.)

I don’t have concrete advice to offer as an implication of this observation, but it’s something that has come up often in my research and writing in recent years, leading me to believe it’s worth re-emphasing.

We’re currently busier than ever before, but this doesn’t mean we’re more effective. As Yuval Harari teaches us: there’s a difference.

(Photo from Ted Conference)