Cal Newport's Blog, page 37

Neil Gaiman’s Advice to Writers: Get Bored

Boring Advice

Earlier this summer, the beloved writer Neil Gaiman was a guest on Late Night with Seth Meyers to promote The View from the Cheap Seats.

At one point in the interview, Meyers asked Gaiman about boredom. Here was Gaiman’s response:

“I think it’s about where ideas come from, they come from day dreaming, from drifting, that moment when you’re just sitting there…”

“The trouble with these days is that it’s really hard to get bored. I have 2.4 million people on Twitter who will entertain me at any moment…it’s really hard to get bored.”

What’s the solution? Gaiman adds:

“I’m much better at putting my phone away, going for boring walks, actually trying to find the space to get bored in. That’s what I’ve started saying to people who say ‘I want to be a writer,” I say ‘great, get bored.'”

Given that I have a chapter in my latest book titled Embrace Boredom, I was pleased to hear Gaiman’s advice.

I have definitely found it to be true in the creative pursuits that dominate my professional life. If I want to crack a proof or polish an important idea there’s really no substitute for hours and hours of just thinking.

The relationship is so linear that it’s almost (to reuse the word) boring. The more time I spend just walking and cogitating and being bored in a given season, the more I produce.

#####

A quick administrative note, Deep Work was nominated as one of the best non-fiction books of the year by the Goodreads Choice Awards. The winners will be selected by reader vote. If you’re a Goodreads member and like Deep Work, consider stopping by the nomination page to cast your vote for depth!

Abraham Lincoln’s Advice to Voters Unhappy with this Election: Suck it Up.

The Lesser of Two Evils

In the early fall of 1848,  a little-known congressman from the frontier of Illinois set off to Massachusetts to address fellow members of his political party, the Whigs.

His name was Abraham Lincoln.

To put Lincoln’s trip in context, it’s important to remember that the issue dominating the 1848 presidential election was the expansion of slavery into the new territory won in the Mexican War. The Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass, was in favor of extending slavery to these new territories. The stance of the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor, was less clear, though it was generally assumed he would oppose the expansion.

This assumption was not enough, however, for the strongly anti-expansion Massachusetts Whigs. Taylor was a slaveholder and his refusal to definitively reject expansion made him, in their eyes, a sub-optimal presidential candidate — so they refused to support his nomination, and, during the summer of 1848, became riled up by Charles Sumner, a particularly well-spoken and energized young man who was pushing his fellow party members to vote instead for a dark horse third party candidate, Martin Van Buren, who was emphatically against slavery.

Here’s Sumner talking to the Whigs in Worcester in June, 1848:

“I hear the old saw that ‘we must take the least of two evils’…for myself, if two evils are presented to me, I will take neither.”

This should sound familiar.

Many voters in our current election, on both the left and the right, are attracted to Sumner’s argument. Spurned Bernie Sanders supporters, for example, are looking to Stein as a way to protest attempts to push them into “settling” for the less inspiring Clinton, while disgusted Republicans, uneasy with Trump’s pliable relationship with truth and proto-fascist tendencies, are proudly declaring their intent to write-in a more favored candidate on the ballot.

Sumner would have applauded this commitment to one’s “duty” to do the right thing no matter what.

But not Abraham Lincoln.

He was sent to Massachusetts to push back against Sumner. As William Lee Miller summarizes in his exceptional book, Lincoln’s Virtues, the young Illinois congressmen came to preach an “ethic of consequences.”

Absent of divine revelation, Lincoln argued to the Massachusetts Whigs, the only responsible way to determine your “duty” as a voter is to leverage your “most intelligent judgment of the consequences.”

With respect to the 1848 election, Lincoln argued that votes for Van Buren would take away votes from Taylor and help ensure the election of Cass. That is, the ethical consequence of rejecting Sumner’s “two evils” would be to expand slavery — and to Lincoln, this couldn’t possibly be the right ethical decision for anti-slave voters, regardless of their personal feelings about Taylor.

As Miller paraphrases, Lincoln charges that we need to “discover our duty [through careful weighing of consequences], not [assume] duty to be self-defining, [or] to be taken for granted as revealed.”

I think, however, that Lincoln’s message to the Massachusetts Whigs can be condensed to something even more pithy: suck it up and get over yourself.

My reading of Lincoln (filtered through Miller) is that he found it immorally indulgent to use the voting both as a place to vent frustrations, or make a statement of principles, or send a message to your opponents.

While Sumner was consumed with self-righteousness, Lincoln was worried instead about the messy but necessary business of democracy: figuring out the option that gives the institutions of our fragile republic the best possible chance to keep functioning.

As we face an historically important election tomorrow, this message seemed particularly relevant.

#####

I don’t normally post about politics because this is not a blog about politics. Last night, however, I was having a hard time sleeping and was up late re-reading Miller’s book. This was the chapter I opened to. It seemed providential given tomorrow’s election: so I thought it worth a post. Later this week we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming. 

The Opposite of the Open Office

The Bionic Office

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Joel Spolsky’s claim that Facebook’s massive open office is scaring away talent. The comments on the post added many interesting follow ups; e.g., a pointer to a recent podcast episode where a Facebook developer claims the office is rarely more than a third full as people have learned to stay home if they want to produce anything deep.

A critique of open offices, however, inspires a natural follow-up question: what works better?

For one possible answer we can turn once again to Spolsky.

Back in 2003, when Spolsky was still running Fog Creek, they moved offices. Spolsky blogged about his efforts to work with architect Roy Leone to design “the ultimate software development environment.”

He called it the bionic office. Here a picture of a standard programmer’s space from the outside:

Notice it’s closed off. This is not an accident. Here’s the first item in the brief Spolsky gave his architect:

Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation.

Also notice that the office is attractive. The outside features translucent acrylic panels that glow with light. The inside is just as nice. Here’s a photo:

Each office has its own window. But in addition, in the wall behind the monitor, is a cut-out that frames the window in the next office. The goal is to allow the programmer’s eyes to gaze into the distance beyond the monitor, reducing strain. It also brings in light from two sides in every office.

This attractiveness is also not an accident. As Spolsky describes his motivation:

The office should be a hang out: a pleasant place to spend time. If you’re meeting your friends for dinner after work you should want to meet at the office.

This commitment to aesthetics is partly about recruiting, but also partly about the idea that environment impacts quality of work produced (c.f., my posts here and here on deep offices).

Bottom Line

I’m not an architect or an expert in office design. But if I was investing a large amount of capital into human brains, I think I would increase this investment by just a little bit more (relatively speaking) to give the brains an environment where they could produce for me the most valuable possible output.

Spolsky was on to something…

#####

(Open office photo by Juozas Kaziukenas)

A Famous Rabbi’s Advice for Getting Important Things Done

Kalonymous Kalman Shapira was an influential Polish Rabbi murdered by the Nazis in the Trawniki concentration camp. Before the war, Rabbi Shapira published a respected book on learning titled Chovas haTalmidim, which roughly translates to The Student’s Obligation.

A reader (and religious studies graduate student) named Daniel recently pointed my attention to the following excerpt from this book:

“[N]o amount of resolve will help a person unless he learns to budget his time and utilize it for accomplishment. For an undisciplined person’s days and nights are confusion, all of his time is confusion and is wasted. Every night he will say, ‘How did the day pass? I didn’t even feel it passing; it stole away from me and escaped.’ In this fashion, the next day and the following one will also slip away, wasted and used up on inconsequential matters.”

What is Rabbi Shapira’s suggestion to avoid undisciplined time confusion? This should sound familiar…

“If you have compassion on yourself, you will learn to budget your hour; every hour will have its own task. You should decide before you begin how much time you want to spend at even mundane matters…Your hours should not be left open, but should be defined by the tasks you set for them. Write out a daily schedule on a piece of paper and don’t deviate from it; then you will reach old age with all your days intact.”

If this computer science thing doesn’t work out for me, perhaps I should consider yeshiva…

#####

I’m pleased to announce that the audio version of So Good They Can’t Ignore You is now available to listeners in the UK. You can listen to an excerpt here or find our more here.

Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?

In Search of Silence

Joel Spolsky is a well-respected figure in Silicon Valley. He created the popular Trello project manager software and is currently the CEO of Stack Overflow.

He’s also one of the first Silicon Valley insiders to publicly and directly endorse the importance of deep work over the fuzzier values of connection and serendipity.

At the GeekWire Summit earlier this week, Spolsky made the following claim in an on-stage interview:

“Facebook’s campus in Silicon Valley is an 8-acre open room, and Facebook was very pleased with itself for building what it thought was this amazing place for developers…But developers don’t want to overhear conversations. That’s ideal for a trading floor, but developers need to concentrate…Facebook is paying 40-50 percent more than other places, which is usually a sign developers don’t want to work there.”

Spolsky argued that offering private offices and uninterrupted time to concentrate is perhaps one the most valuable benefits you can offer developers in our connected age.

In Deep Work, I noted that most businesses do not yet recognize this activity as a tier one skill, but that this would inevitably shift, and Silicon Valley, with it’s reputation for workplace innovation, would likely be one of the first places we would see the movement begin.

Hopefully Spolsky’s comments are an early indication of my prophetic prowess.

#####

I recently watched a screening copy of Minimalism, a great new documentary by my longtime friends, the minimalists. I was excited to learn that their movie is now the number #1 indie documentary of the year (as measured by box office return). If, like me, you like this type of cultural commentary, you can find the movie online here.

Nassim Taleb’s (Implied) Argument Against Social Media

Fooled by Shiny Apps

Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness is a classic in the genre of erudite idea books. It’s an extended discussion of the many different ways humans misunderstand the role of probability in their everyday lives.

The book is most famous for its attack on the role of skill in money management (Malcolm Gladwell called the book the Wall Street equivalent of Luther’s ninety-nine theses), but it touches on many other topics as well.

As a reader named Rainer recently reminded me, Taleb also includes a passage quite relevant to the dominant role new technologies like social media, or Apple watches, or the latest, greatest smartphone app play in modern life (see if you can sight the 1990’s-era Michael Lewis reference):

“The argument in favour of ‘new things’ and even more ‘new new things’ goes as follows: Look at the dramatic changes that have been brought about by the arrival of new technologies…Middlebrow inference (inference stripped of probabilistic inference) would lead one to believe that all new technologies and inventions would likewise revolutionize our lives. But the answer is not so obvious: Here we only see and count the winners, to the exclusion of the losers…I hold the opposite view. The opportunity cost of missing a ‘new new thing’ like the airplane and the automobile is minuscule compared to the toxicity of all the garbage one has to go through to get these jewels.”

In other words, the mere possibility that a new technology might prove important to your life should not be enough to motivate you to adopt it.

People who are driven by the fear of missing out or the dream of early adopter superstardom are deploying a “middlebrow inference” that examines only the maximum possible return, not the value derived in expectation.

It’s the rejection of such thinking that has led me to continue to abstain from Facebook and Twitter, among other popular pastimes in the rapidly evolving digital attention casino.

I’ll sign up for those new new things only once their expected value resolves to something significant enough to compete with the activities I already know pay out.

Both Taleb and I would urge you to consider the same…

######

Study Hacks is sponsored in part by Blinkist: a subscription service that provides you access to an archive of detailed summaries of important nonfiction books. I often use it to determine which books are worth buying (like Fooled by Randomness) and which don’t deserve further attention. To find out more and receive a subscription discount click here.

Quit Social Media

Anti-Social Grumblings

I recently gave a deliberatively provocative TEDx talk titled “quit social media” (see the video above). The theme of the event was “visions of the future.” I said my vision of the future was one in which many fewer people use social media.

Earlier this week, Andrew Sullivan published a long essay in New York Magazine that comes at this conclusion from a new angle.

Sullivan, as you might remember, founded the sharp and frenetic political blog, The Daily Dish (ultimately shortened to: The Dish). The blog was a success but its demands were brutal.

For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week…My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.

In recent years, his health began to fail. “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”, his doctor asked.  Finally, in the winter of 2015, he quit, explaining: “I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.”

This might sound like an occupational hazard of a niche new media job, but a core argument of Sullivan’s essay is that these same demands have gone mainstream:

And as the years went by, I realized I was no longer alone. Facebook soon gave everyone the equivalent of their own blog and their own audience. More and more people got a smartphone — connecting them instantly to a deluge of febrile content, forcing them to cull and absorb and assimilate the online torrent as relentlessly as I had once. Twitter emerged as a form of instant blogging of microthoughts. Users were as addicted to the feedback as I had long been — and even more prolific.

As he summarizes: “the once-unimaginable pace of the professional blogger was now the default for everyone.”

As I noted in my talk, one of the most common rationales for social media use is that it’s harmless — why miss out on the interesting connection or funny ephemera it might occasionally bring your way?

Sullivan’s essay is a 6000 word refutation of this belief. Social media is not harmless. It can make your life near unlivable.

Sullivan attempts to end with a note of optimism, saying “we are only beginning to get our minds around the costs,” before adding a more resigned coda: “if we are even prepared to accept that there are costs.”

I agree that we’re not yet ready to fully face this reality, and cheeky TED talks by curmudgeonly young professors like me probably won’t move the needle. But when heavyweights like Sullivan join the conversation, I can begin to feel a cautious optimism grow.

On Deep Breaks

A Break to Discuss Breaks

After last week’s post on attention residue, multiple readers have asked about taking breaks during deep work sessions. These questions highlight an apparent tension.

On the one hand, in my book on the topic and here on Study Hacks I often extol the productive virtue of spending multiple hours (and sometimes even days) in a state of distraction-free deep work. As I emphasized last week, these sessions need to be truly free of distraction — even quick glances at your inbox, for example, are enough to significantly reduce your cognitive capacity.

On the other hand, in my Straight-A book (published, if you can believe it, almost exactly a decade before Deep Work), I recommend students study in 50 minute chunks followed by 10 minute breaks. I cite some relevant cognitive science to back up this timing. Similar recommendations are also made by adherents to the pomodoro technique, which suggests short timed bursts of concentration partitioned by breaks.

Which idea is right?

Deep Breaks

The short answer to the above question: both.

Deep work requires you to focus intensely on a demanding task. But few can maintain peak cognitive intensity for more than an hour or so without some sort of relief.

This relief is necessary. But it’s also dangerous.

Most types of breaks you might take in this situation will wrench your attention away from the task at hand and leave you with a thick slather of attention residue.

If you’re careful, however, it’s possible to take a so-called deep break which will allow your mind a chance to regroup and recharge without impeding your ability to quickly ramp back up your concentration.

Anyone who regularly succeeds in long deep work sessions is almost certainly someone skilled at deploying deep breaks to keep the session going without burning out or losing focus.

There’s no single description of what constitutes a deep break, but here are some useful heuristics from my own experience:

Deep breaks should not turn your attention to a target that might generate a professional or social obligation that you cannot completely fulfill during the break (e.g., glancing at an email inbox or social media feed).
Deep breaks should not turn your attention to a target that your mind associates with time-consuming distraction rituals (e.g., many people have a set “cycle” of distracting web sites they visit when they surf that has become so ingrained that looking at one site sends their mind the message it’s time to look at them all).
Deep breaks should not turn your attention to a related, but not quite the same, professional task (e.g., if you’re trying to write a report, and you turn your attention to quickly editing an unrelated report).
Deep breaks should not turn your attention to a topic that is complicated, stressful and/or something that will sometime soon need a lot of your attention.
Deep breaks should not usually last more than 10 – 15 minutes, with some exceptions, such as for meals.

Breaks that avoid the above warnings should probably be okay. For example, here are some of my standard deep break activities:

Taking a short walk to get more water or coffee while trying to just observe my surroundings.
Day dreaming about the good things that could come from succeeding with the deep work task at hand (e.g., when working on a proof, I might day dream about how I would describe the result if I ended up publishing it).
Summarizing to myself what I already know about the task at hand and what I’m trying to accomplish.
Reading a book chapter or magazine article that has nothing to do with the deep task at hand.
If I’m working at home, doing something fun with my boys (who, fortunately for me, rarely bring up distributed algorithm theory when we play).
Complete a household task or short errand.

I don’t want to be too rigid in my description of these breaks. The key message is that when it comes to deep work, you shouldn’t feel like you’re required to maintain peak concentration for hours on end. (If you try to, you’ll fail.) On the other hand, be mindful about how you take your cognitive breathers as they play a key role in whether the deep work session as a whole will succeed.

#####

Thank you to the 200 – 300 people who showed up last night to listen to Scott and I discuss learning strategies. I enjoyed the discussion and your questions. If you missed the webinar, but want to learn more about Scott’s new rapid learning course (which was the inspiration for the event), you can visit the course website. 

(Photo by Ghislain Mary)

Join Me and Scott Young for a Live Conversation on Learning and Study Skills on Monday at 8:30 pm ET

Update: For those who asked about this, Scott’s Rapid Learner course website is now live. You can learn more about the course here. (Even if you’re not interested in the course, scroll down to the before and after pictures from Scott’s 30 day portrait drawing challenge. Crazy!)

A Learned Chat on Learning

My good friend Scott Young is finally about to launch his long promised Rapid Learner online course, which teaches you how to learn hard things quickly. This is something that Scott knows a lot about (c.f., his astonishing MIT Challenge).

To help Scott spread the word about his course, I agreed to join him for a free live webinar on Monday, September 12, at 8:30 pm Eastern time (to attend, sign up here).

We’re going to discuss learning and study skills and then take questions on these topics from the live webinar audience. At the end of the seminar, Scott will then explain his course and make a pitch for it.

A couple details…

I want to emphasize that this is not my course. It’s Scott’s course. I’m joining this webinar to help him spread the word (because it’s good content, Scott’s a good friend, and I thought it would be fun to talk about study skills with a live audience), but I don’t want anyone to end up enrolling in this course under the misunderstanding that I’m somehow involved in the course itself or its content.
As far as I know, there will be not be a recorded version of the webinar available for those who missed it.

Join Me and Scott Young for a Live Conversation on Learning and Study Skills on Monday at 8:30 ET

A Learned Chat on Learning

My good friend Scott Young is finally about to launch his long promised Rapid Learner online course, which teaches you how to learn hard things quickly. This is something that Scott knows a lot about (c.f., his astonishing MIT Challenge).

To help Scott spread the word about his course, I agreed to join him for a free live webinar on Monday, September 12, at 8:30 Eastern time (to attend, sign up here).

We’re going to discuss learning and study skills and then take questions on these topics from the live webinar audience. At the end of the seminar, Scott will then explain his course and make a pitch for it.

A couple details…

I want to emphasize that this is not my course. It’s Scott’s course. I’m joining this webinar to help him spread the word (because it’s good content, Scott’s a good friend, and I thought it would be fun to talk about study skills with a live audience), but I don’t want anyone to end up enrolling in this course under the misunderstanding that I’m somehow involved in the course itself or its content.
As far as I know, there will be not be a recorded version of the webinar available for those who missed it.