Cal Newport's Blog, page 35

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)

The Focused Rise of Wesley So

So Good They Can’t Ignore Him

Yesterday, Tyler Cowen published a blog post about the 23-year old chess grandmaster Wesley So. It begins: “[So] should be starring in a Malcolm Gladwell column”

As Cowen notes, just a few years ago So was seen as an up-and-coming player who lacked the strategic polish needed for elite play. Cowen was surprised to learn recently that So had risen to number nine in the world rankings. Since then, So won four top tournaments in a row including a win over world champion Magnus Carlsen.

“Arguably he is the second best player in the world,” Cowen writes, “and the one most likely to dethrone Carlsen.”

There are many explanations for So’s rise. But there’s one contributing factor, in particular, I want to emphasize. Here’s So in a recent interview:

“When I decided to try for a professional career…I thought about what I needed — more time to study and less stress. Both came immediately when I turned away from the internet.” [emphasis mine]

Not only does So restrict his internet use to email and chess game analysis, he also eschews other forms of distraction:

“There is only one cell phone in this family, and it belongs to my sister Abbey who is very capable of dealing with any unpleasantness that tries to enter through it. I have had no social media…for almost two years and I am alive, healthy and happy.”

I’m sure Wesley So has never heard the term digital minimalism, but his rise highlights an important principle of this philosophy: when evaluating new technologies there’s a difference between asking “what value can this bring me?”, and “what is its effect on the things I find most valuable in my life?”

(Photo of Wesley So by Abbey Key via Chess News; hat tip for this article idea: Ryan L.)

The Rise of the Monk Mode Morning

Productive Conversations

In my role as someone who writes about productivity, I enjoy the opportunity to discuss this topic with a variety of different people. Recently, something caught my attention about these conversations.

Several different accomplished people, all in distinct occasions, mentioned to me their adoption of the same bold deep work hack: the monk mode morning.

The execution of the monk mode morning is straightforward. Between when you wake up and noon: no meetings, no calls, no texts, no email, no Slack, no Internet. You instead work deeply on something (or some things) that matter.

What makes this hack particularly effective is its simple regularity. If someone wants to schedule something with you, it becomes reflexive to respond “anytime after noon.” Similarly, your colleagues soon learn not to expect you to see something they send until after lunch.

There’s no guesswork or inconsistency: everyone’s on the same page, and you make 3 to 4 hours of deep progress on valuable goals, every day.

From Theory to Practice

Clearly, spending the a.m. in monk mode is the type of hack that makes me swoon. But it’s also the type of hack that I would usually assume is not feasible for those in “normal” jobs with clients and employees and deadlines.

Which explains why it caught my attention when, as mentioned in the opening to this post, multiple different people in “normal” jobs told me that they employ the monk mode morning to great effect.

Earlier this week, for example, I was talking with a media personality who runs his own company and swears by the monk mode morning. He said: “if someone gets really upset that they can’t reach me in the morning, my first thought is that this guy is a spaz…not the type of person I want to work with.”

Not everyone is in a position to execute the monk mode morning (indeed, most of the people who mentioned this to me in recent months run their own companies). But the growing popularity of this bold hack is yet another indication that my long predicted shift away from the cult of connectivity, and toward depth, is perhaps beginning to pick up speed.

(Photo by Hanoi Mark)

Facebook Phreaks and the Fight to Reclaim Time and Attention

A Minimalist Trend

Last week, I sent a note to my email list asking readers about their personal digital minimalism strategies. I’ve only just begun wading through the more than 250 responses, but I’m already noticing an interesting trend: there seems to be a non-trivial subgroup made up of individuals who use Facebook in very narrow ways, and are very worried about this service’s attempt to manipulate their time and attention to bolster profit.

To accommodate both these realities, this group deploys aggressive tactics and tools to reshape Facebook into something that provides them exactly what they need, without all the other frustrating noise.

Reshaping Facebook

Members of this group, for example, often remove the Facebook application from their smartphone. Almost no important use of this service requires that you can access it at any time or place: loading the site through a web browser is typically sufficient.

Facebook pushes the mobile application mainly because it allows them to monetize your time attention in places that advertisers previously could not reach — standing in line, bored in a meeting, waiting for the metro. This is great news for Facebook investors, but bad news for those trying to maintain some autonomy over their time and attention.

Members of this group are also quite suspicious of the Facebook news feed — a source of engineered distraction sprinkled with injections of social inadequacy and annoyance.

Some respondents explained to me how they aggressively culled their “friends” down to essentially zero to neuter the feed. A surprising number deploy custom web browser plug-ins that block the feed altogether when they load the Facebook site.

Another common observation I heard from this group is that Facebook recently unbundled its messenger application from the rest of its services — allowing those who use the service mainly for communication to avoid having to see the feed altogether.

I’ve also received multiple notes from entrepreneurs who hired people to do the types of marketing related posts that seem necessary these days, while saving the entrepreneur’s more valuable time and attention from the Facebook vortex.

So what do these people use Facebook for? There seem to be three main reasons: participating in carefully curated Facebook groups, communicating with family and friends who are on Facebook but don’t use other communication tools as much, and marketing.

They reject the notion that any one of these reasons should require them to transform into a dehumanized gadget in the Facebook profit machine.

The Facebook Phreaks

I’ve taken to calling this group the Facebook phreaks, an homage to the phone freaks (including, famously, Steve Jobs) who used to hack the telephone network to place long distance calls for free. These modern day phreaks are doing something similar to Facebook’s massive network, except instead of avoiding paying a payphone quarter, they’re preserving the value of their time and attention.

I don’t know how widespread this movement is, but it provides me some hope. Just because a small number of companies have temporarily succeeded in monopolizing much of the Internet doesn’t mean we have to acquiesce to their dominance.

The phreaks are pushing back.

(Photo by Joe Piette)

From Tools to Tool Uses

Rethinking How We Think About Tools

In thinking about digital tools we naturally draw analogies to the physical world. In this latter context, tools are often engineered for a specific and clear purpose. A 3/4 inch ratchet wrench is used to secure bolts of that size, and so on.

The translation of this single use understanding of tools to the digital world, however, is creating havoc in our digital lives.

Many modern digital tools, especially those in the social media sector, are engineered to offer dozens of different features, and can be used in a wide variety of different ways. We lose significant control over our time and attention when we settle for thinking about these tools only in the binary sense of: “I use it,” or “I don’t use it.”

Consider, for example, a Facebook addict who checks his feed constantly throughout the day (the average American Facebook user spends over 50 minutes per day on the service — typically split into many, many small checks). Now compare him to minimalist Tammy Strobel, who only uses Facebook’s Fan Page feature as it offers an effective channel to share her online content with fans.

Both “use Facebook,” but the impact of this service on their time and attention is vastly different.

With examples like this in mind, I’m increasingly coming to accept that whether or not you use a tool is not the whole story — it also matters how you use a tool. If a particular social media service supports an important value in your life, for example, don’t let this be the excuse that allows the service full hegemony over your time and attention. Instead, think carefully about how  exactly you will use this service in such a way that optimally supports those values without hurting other things that matter to you.

Adapting to the digital world  is not just about curating your “tools,” but also carefully crafting your “tool use.”  Working with this latter concept greatly expands your options for cultivating a good life in a high tech age.

(Photo by Giorgio Montersino)

On Value and Digital Minimalism

The Complexities of Simple

The core idea of digital minimalism is to be more intentional about technology in your life. Digital minimalists carefully curate these technologies to best support things they value.

The idea sounds simple when presented at the high-level, but in practice it dissolves into complexities. One such complexity, which I want to explore here, is the notion of “value.”

Revaluing Value

Measuring whether a given digital tool provides “value” to your life can be a fruitless exercise — the term is simply too vague, and applies to too many things, for it to support hard decisions about what can lay claim to your time and attention. (Everything you use probably offers you some value; why else would you use it?)

With this issue in mind, I’ve sometimes found it helpful to introduce more variation into what I mean by “value” when assessing tools. Consider, for example, the following three different types of benefits a digital technology can provide:

Core Value. A technology offers you core value if it significantly impacts a part of your life that you couldn’t do without — a strand of activity twined around your definition of a life well-lived. For example, a soldier deployed overseas using FaceTime to chat with her family is deriving core value from this tool.
Minor Value. A technology offers you minor value if it provides some moderate positive benefits in the moment. For example, browsing a comedian’s Twitter feed for a laugh, or playing a round of Candy Crush for the distraction.
Invented Value. A technology offers you invented value if it solves a problem that you didn’t know existed before the tool came along. A Snapchat user, for example, might note that it’s the most convenient app for keeping friends posted on what you’re up to throughout the day (it doesn’t even require typing!). But this same user, in an age before SnapChat, probably didn’t even know he wanted constant updates from his friends — the app created the behavior that it optimizes.

The rational for injecting nuance into your definitions of value is that it allows you to inject nuance into your strategies for curating your digital life: you can treat tools differently depending on the value they provide.

Here, for example, is a sample curation strategy built around the above categories:

Actively seek out and enthusiastically embrace technologies that provide core value. Be selective about technologies that provide you minor value and place boundaries around how and when you use them. Avoid technologies that can only provide you invented value (you’re life is too important to be a gadget in some random start-up’s growth plan).

The above strategy is not definitive — it’s just an example. But it underscores the larger observation that figuring out which digital technologies brings value to your life is an effort aided by reflection on what exactly you mean by “value.”

(Photo by Dirk Marwede)