Cal Newport's Blog, page 41

Write an Attention Charter

Ambiguous Distraction

In the war to reclaim your attention, some battles have clearer fronts than others. It has become clear to me that these differences matter.

Social media, for example, is digital nicotine. It’s engineered to hook you so you can be sliced and diced into advertising fodder. It’s not worth losing your cognitive autonomy over — unless your job depends on it, you should probably quit.

But the real issues seem to arise not from the obvious whimsies, but instead from the commitments that are less obviously harmful, and in fact, in the right dose, might actually be vital.

Consider, for example…

an invitation to speak at a compelling conference,
a request to hop on a call with an interesting person,
a long email asking a question you know something about,
an offer to collaborate on a project that fits your interests, or
a new service that might make parts of your working life better.

To place a blanket ban on such activities would induce a monasticism that would likely stall your career, or, at the very least, make it unbearably monotonous.

(Even my deep work idol, Neal Stephenson — who has no public email address, and only ventures into public for book launches — ended up involved in a sword fighting video game and consults for an augmented reality pioneer.)

And yet, in my own experience, I find that the occasions when I most despair about the tattered state of my schedule are almost always the result of the accumulation of a dozen yeses that each made perfect sense in isolation.

So how do you balance these competing concerns?

The Attention Charter

It’s this question that has driven me recently to consider the potential of what we might call an attention charter.

The idea is simple…

An attention charter is a document that lists the general reasons that you’ll allow for someone or something to lay claim to your time and attention. For each reason, it then describes under what conditions and for what quantities you’ll permit this commitment.

For example…

You might decide that for you to consider attending a conference it must have at least three speakers whose topic really interests you, and then, among the conferences that meet this criteria, enforce a hard cap on attending no more than two per year.
You might decide that you’ll only allow one call per month with someone you don’t know.
You might decide that you can make one major change to the technologies you use (apps, gadgets, websites) per season.
You might decide to fix in advance the slots you’re available for work meetings (and, by doing so, solidify all the other times as those when you’ll be working deeply), and then when a request comes in from a colleague or collaborator you don’t want to reject, you can reply: “sure, here’s all the times I’m available this month: pick one.”

My model for this idea is Harvard computer scientist Radhika Nagpal. In my new book, I profile how she became a full professor while avoiding the overwork that most junior faculty assume is necessary to progress.

At the core of her strategy was something like an attention charter that helped her figure out how to stay involved in necessary professional activities without ceding full control of her time and attention.

Among other declarations, she placed a hard limit on the number of papers she would review per year and the number of times she would travel to give talks or attend conferences.

A Hard Limit

The reason I suspect strategies like an attention charter work, is that it acknowledges that certain time fragmenting activities are necessary, but it gives you the hard limits you need to engage in these activities without losing control.

It’s hard to say “no” to a reasonable request without providing yourself a good reason. An attention charter gives you that reason.

I’m still monkeying around with my own attention charter. In other words, you’re hearing about an idea before I’ve even had a chance to try it. But I think there’s something lurking here that’s important for those of us whose battle against distraction is both unavoidably important and unavoidably nuanced.

(Photo by storebukeebruse)

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A semi-related note that I wanted to share. I recently did a podcast interview with Barry Carter. As we were about to record, he told me about how the ideas from my book helped him double his reading speed. Anyway, he recently posted an article about how this happened. A great case study.

The Mind is Like a Locomotive

Deep Thwings

Charles Franklin Thwing is a largely forgotten but impressive figure from the early twentieth century. He graduated Harvard in the 1870s, entered seminary, became a pastor in Massachusetts, then an academic, eventually ending up president of Western Reserve University.

He came to my attention because of a book he wrote in 1912 titled, Letters from a Father to his Son Entering College. In this insightful volume is the following wisdom:

“To save time, take time in large pieces. Do not cut time up into bits…The mind is like a locomotive. It requires time for getting under headway. Under headway it makes its own steam. Progress gives force as force makes progress. Do not slow down as long as you run well and without undue waste. Take advantage of momentum. Prolonged thinking leads to profound thinking.”

Thwing, it seems, was a disciple of deep work a century before the term was coined. Good ideas, I suppose, are timeless.

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Hat Tip to Morry, who turns 80 next month, and who brought this book to my attention. Morry, inspired by Thwing, has followed this advice for decades by deploying 4 hour stretches of deep work to get important things done. 

(Photo credits)

 

The Killer App of the Knowledge Economy

A Deep Diversion

I wanted to share some brief updates about how my new book, Deep Work, is faring since its release a couple weeks ago. It seems to have hit a nerve. This excites me — not just because it’s good news for my book, but because I think it points to a bigger shift in our cultural conversation. People seem increasingly ready to move past self-deprecating humor about how they check their phone too much, and instead seek concrete changes that will improve their cognitive life.

Anyway, here are some highlights from the book launch:

The book debuted as a Wall Street Journal bestseller and was selected as one of Amazon’s best business & leadership books for the month of January.
The New York Times wrote: “As a presence on the page, Newport is exceptional in the realm of self-help authors…”
The Wall Street Journal called the book: “engaging and substantive…”
The Economist wrote: “deep work is the killer app of the knowledge economy…”
The Globe and Mail wrote: “This is a deep, not shallow, book, which can enrich your life…”
800-CEO-READ named Deep Work the best business book of the week and wrote:  “[Newport presents] a wonderfully entangled, intertwined, and erudite series of strategies, philosophies, disciplines, and techniques to sharpen your focus and dive deep into your work.”

If you want to learn more, read my original post about the book launch. In addition, my publisher has posted two long excerpts. The first is about how deep work helps make you massively more productive and the second tackles the inanity of open offices.

I am, of course, most grateful for your support here over the years as I developed these ideas. I can’t thank you enough.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

Email Zero Is Easier Than Inbox Zero

The Attack of the Inbox

Not long ago, I was listening to Pat Flynn’s podcast. Pat is an excellent podcaster, so it doesn’t take much to convince me to listen, but this time I was particularly interested because the episode title caught my attention: 9000 Unread Emails to Inbox Zero.

Pat tells the story about how his email inbox grew along with the success of his online brand. He used to try to empty his inbox. After a while, he began to consider “only” 100 unread messages as a victory. Then, one day, he looked up and his inbox had expanded to 9000 unread messages.

Something had to give.

Pat’s solution was radical: he hired a highly-trained executive assistant who could devote many additional hours to sorting through the communication deluge before it reached Pat. He still spends a lot of time on email, but at least now it’s tractable.

Longtime readers will not be surprised to learn that the subtext of this story depresses me.

I am, as you know, a big proponent of deep work — as I think this activity can produce a professional life that’s both successful and deeply meaningful. But as Pat’s experience seems to attest, our current digital economy has perverse incentives: forcing you, it seems, to fragment your time into increasingly small, anxious slivers as recognition for your skill grows.

To me, the idea of needing to hire assistants to increase the amount of one-to-one communication you can fit into a single day is, to steal a relevant phrase from George Packer, a truly “frightening vision of the future.” 

But then Brett McKay came along and gave me hope…

The Deep Life of Brett McKay

Brett and his wife Kate run the Art of Manliness (AOM) website and Brett hosts the accompanying podcast (which is a favorite of mine). AOM is famous for its smart, detailed, and above all, long posts on fascinating topics.

Brett and Kate sometimes spend weeks researching just a single article. It’s a site, in other words, that built its success on a foundation of deep work.

Which is why I was not at all surprised (though relieved) when Brett recently revealed to me, in a podcast interview about my new book, their unorthodox strategy for dealing with the massive flow of emails that their popular site used to generate.

Here’s a screenshot from their contact page:

Brett mentioned that before they removed their email address from their site, the time he spent answering emails — like Pat also experienced — become unwieldy. Eliminating that task freed up massive mental resources.

I asked him whether this shift away from a publicly available email address hurt the traffic to his site.

“It didn’t make a difference,” he replied.

This case study warms my heart.

We spend so much time figuring out better ways to filter, automate, outsource and otherwise manage the sources of seemingly mandatory distraction in the digital age that we forget to step back and ask whether these distractions really need to be in our lives in the first place.

(Photo by Lisa Leggio)

The Book Facebook Doesn’t Want You to Read

A Focus Opus

It’s official, today is the release of my new book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. 

The book argues that deep work (focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task) is becoming more valuable in our economy at the same time that it’s becoming more rare.

The implication: if you’re one of the few to take advantage of this trend and cultivate a deep life, you’ll thrive.

Not only will you produce at quantity and quality levels that stun your peers, you’ll also find your work more meaningful and less exhausting.

To make this claim more concrete, consider me as a case study. As a longtime devotee to depth, I’ve been able to publish close to 50 peer-reviewed papers as an academic (earning over 2500 citations), write five books as an author (selling over 200,000 copies), and build a popular blog (300,000 page views last month) — all without working at nights and rarely working on weekends. The secret is my fanatic commitment to deep work.

This highlights an important point that I want to emphasize: This book isn’t a cranky screed about how kids these days spend too much time on the Facebook, and it isn’t a collection of warmed over suggestions about how you should turn off notifications on your phone and not check email first thing in the morning.

It instead calls for a radical transformation to your work life in which focusing with great intensity becomes your core activity, not an occasional indulgence.

With this in mind, the book then details specific strategies, divided among four “rules,” that you can use to accomplish this transformation — covering topics from focus training, to effective scheduling, to rituals and routines, to aggressive tactics for taming the tide of shallow obligations that constantly threaten to drown the typical knowledge worker’s day.

Give Yourself the Gift of Depth

To help you learn more about the book, I’ve included below an annotated table of contents and a link to a long excerpt.

In the meantime…

If this topic sounds interesting to you — whether you’re a longtime reader of my writing or new to the party — please consider buying a copy of this book.
If you already bought the book and found it useful, please consider buying copies for your friends or colleagues (if you do buy multiple copies, send me an email so I can thank you personally).

I’m proud of this book and believe it can have an impact on how we think about work in a digital age.

Deep Work is available now at Amazon (kindle and hardcover), Audible, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound, or anywhere else books are normally sold.

Annotated Table of Contents

The book is divided into two parts. The first part makes the case for deep work, while the second part teaches you how to become better at this skill.

(Note: An extended excerpt from Chapter 1 is available here.)

Introduction

In the introduction, I define the key terms deep work and shallow work and then detail the deep work hypothesis summarized above. I also tell the story of my own history with depth, starting with my arrival as a new graduate student at the Theory Group at MIT and continuing until the present day.

PART 1: THE IDEA

Chapter 1: Deep Work is Valuable

In this chapter, I make the argument that deep work is like a super power in the new economy, as it allows you to learn hard things quickly and produce output at high levels of quality and quantity. (Read an excerpt.)

Chapter 2: Deep Work is Rare

In this chapter, I address the elephant in the room: if deep work is so valuable, then why are so many organizations encouraging behaviors that discourage it (e.g., open office plans, constant connectivity, mandatory social media use)? I introduce the ideas of The Principle of Least Resistance, Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity, and The Cult of the Internet to help explain this self-defeating trend.

Chapter 3: Deep Work is Meaningful

In this final chapter of Part 1, I draw from neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy to make the argument that deep work is intrinsically satisfying and provides a much more meaningful work experience than jumping frenetically from one shallow task to another.

PART 2: THE RULES

Rule #1: Work Deeply

This rule details multiple strategies for regularly making time for deep work in your schedule and getting the most value out of these sessions. Among other things, you’ll learn how to find a philosophy for scheduling depth that fits the constraints of your particular job, how to build effective depth rituals, and how and why to implement shut down routines for the end of your day.

Rule #2: Embrace Boredom

This rule details multiple strategies for training your ability to concentrate. It’s motivated by the claim that focus is a skill that must be developed before you can do it with any effectiveness. Among other things, you’ll learn why it’s more important to schedule distraction than to schedule focus, how to meditate productively, and why you should approach your work like Teddy Roosevelt.

Rule #3: Quit Social Media

This rule details multiple strategies for aggressively limiting the sources of carefully-engineered distraction in your life. A core idea of this rule is that most people select digital tools using the any benefit mindset, which claims that you should use a tool if it can provide any benefit. This rule argues that you should instead use the craftsman mindset in which you only select the tools that provide the most substantial benefits to the things you find most important. Or, to simplify greatly: vastly fewer people should be using Facebook.

Rule #4: Drain the Shallows

This rule details multiple strategies for reducing the number of shallow obligations in your professional life and then tackling those that remain with much greater efficiency. The motivating idea for this rule is that if you have too many shallow obligations on your plate, you’ll have no time or energy left for the deep work that really matters. Among other things, you’ll learn why you should negotiate a deep-to-shallow work ratio with your boss, why you’ll get more done if you stop working at 5:30 each day, and how to significantly reduce the time you spend in your email inbox.

Conclusion

I conclude the book with an unexpected take on Bill Gates’s rise to success (hint: he’s really good at deep work), and a final pitch for the value of a deep life as compared to the increasingly exhausting, and increasingly fruitless, swirl of shallow busyness that’s so common today.

Resolve to Live a Deep Life

A Deep Omission

In preparation for the upcoming release of my new book, I’m doing a lot of interviews about deep work. This process of talking about depth again and again helped me identify a shortcoming in my treatment of this skill here on Study Hacks.

I realized that I spend a lot of time explaining the importance of intense focus and detailing strategies to help you focus better, but I’ve neglected the big picture questions about what it really means to prioritize this skill in your life; e.g.,

What are the major changes to your life required by a commitment to deep work?
What are the large scale goals you should be striving to achieve using the types of small scale habits and strategies I so often discuss?
What, in other words, is the sixty-second summary of what it means to live a deep life?

In this post, I’ll try to answer these questions…

A Deep Life

To me, to live a deep life is to embrace the following three general commitments:

You systematically train your ability to concentrate intensely. Focus is a skill that must be practiced, and therefore, most people are not very good at it. Those who train themselves to concentrate intensely, however, produce at a level that can seem superhuman to their peers.

To be more concrete: At any given point, you should be able to describe your current cognitive calisthenics routine just as you might describe your current exercise routine.
You build your workweek around protecting and supporting many occasions to work deeply. Most knowledge workers rarely stumble into long blocks of uninterrupted time in their schedule. If you want to work deeply on a regular basis, you have to fight for it. The deep life requires, in other words, that you invest the effort needed to hold back time for depth despite the ever-encroaching pressure of the shallow.

To be more concrete: Start with the goal of having five hours per week protected on your calendar for deep work. Each session should be at least 90 minutes long.
You take bold measures to demonstrate respect for your attention. Deep work wields your attention like a well-honed tool. To be serious about this craft you need to be serious about how you treat your attention, much like professional athletes are serious about their physical health. This might mean that you quit social media, or lock away your phone after dinner, or take up meditation, or spend more time outside each day. The details don’t matter as much as the intention.

To be more concrete: Make one non-trivial change in your life that demonstrates to yourself that you prioritize your attention over more superficial activities.

There are many ways to act on the three commitments above. Depending on your situation different strategies might be more appropriate than others.

For example: one way I train my focus is to regularly use an outdoor office; one way I protect deep work in my week is to schedule it on Monday morning on my calendar like any other inviolable appointment; and one way I demonstrate respect for my attention is that I’ve never had a social media account.

For some, my approach to the deep life might work well, while for others, it might be completely unworkable.

But what I strongly believe is that for most skilled knowledge work positions, if commit to the three general ideas above, and find ways to act on these commitments that work for your life, you will thrive — not only will you experience significantly more success, you’ll also find your work more meaningful and your mind less cluttered and anxious.

A Deep Resolution

I end my new book on deep work with a quote from science writer Winifred Gallagher:

“I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.”

As you make your New Year’s resolutions this week, consider accepting Gallagher’s conclusion and committing to depth. A deep life is a good life, if you’re willing to put in the effort.

(Photo by Hernan Pinera)

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A brief administrative note: On Wednesday, January 6th, at 3 pm ET, I’ll be doing a live Ask Me Anything chat for Product Hunt about my new book on deep work. This is a chance for you to ask me live any question you want about deep work, productivity, or any other topic. To attend simply go to this page at 3 pm ET on January 6th.

Final Chance to Learn How I Manage My Work

A Brief Reminder

A few weeks ago, I announced that on January 3rd, I’ll be hosting a webinar in which I’ll walk through all the details of how I integrate deep work into my professional life, and then answer your questions on the topic.

To gain access to the webinar, you need to pre-order my new book DEEP WORK (readers in the UK  should pre-order here), and then enter your information at this online form.

If you’re one of the 1300 people who have already signed up for this webinar, I want to thank you for supporting my new book and let you know that I look forward to speaking with you on the 3rd.

The purpose of this post, however, is to note that if you’re thinking about pre-ordering the book and signing up for the webinar, then you only have until Christmas Day to do so  — as on the 26th I’m going to begin the process of exporting all the names of people who signed up from the form and into my webinar system, after which, it will be too late.

 

Deep Habits: The Danger of Pseudo-Depth

Depth Deception

A difficulty I’ve faced in promoting the practice of deep work is that many people think they engage in this activity regularly (and don’t get much out of it), even though what they’re really doing is far from true depth.

To better understand this possibility, consider the following two hypothetical scenarios:

Scenario #1: Alice has to write a difficult client proposal. She decides to work away from her office for the first half of the day. She begins by going for a long walk to clear her head and play around with the different proposal pieces. She ends up at the local library, where she settles into a quiet corner for an hour and tries to write a rough draft. She feels the pitch is still too muddled, so she walks to a nearby coffee shop for more caffeine and works the outline over and over on paper. Finally she hits a configuration she likes and returns to the library to work it into the draft. After another hour she has something special. For the first time that day, she checks her e-mail before heading into the office.
Scenario #2: Alice has to write a difficult client proposal. She checks her e-mail, sends off some replies, then drives into work. At the office she closes her door to work on the proposal. She finds it hard going, but sticks with for a couple hours. She only checks her e-mail a few times an hour during this period (much less than normal) and peeks at Facebook to relieve her boredom only once. She does take a break halfway through to gripe about an unrelated manner in the office kitchen with a colleague.

In both scenarios, Alice dedicated a good stretch of time to working on a cognitively demanding task. Many people, new to the concept, would therefore consider both scenarios to describe deep work.

But they would be wrong.

Pseudo-Depth

Here’s the key observation about this example: in the second scenario, Alice never went more than twenty minutes or so without switching her attention away from her primary task to something else. It’s tempting to dismiss these breaks because they’re so fleeting — lost in the standard background noise of knowledge work — but their cost is substantial.

Something that came up again and again when I was researching my book on this topic, is that switching your attention — even if only for a minute or two — can significantly impede your cognitive function for a long time to follow.

More bluntly: context switches gunk up your brain.

This effect has been validated from many angles in academic psychology and related fields, spanning the work of Bluma Zeigarnik, Clifford Nass, Gloria Mark and Sophie Leory (whose theory of attention residue I write more about here).

In the first scenario, by contrast, Alice gives herself the time required to really let her brain get up to speed on the demanding problem and then stay in high gear long enough to make progress.

Having studied and experimented with deep work for years, I can tell you with confidence that the session described in the first scenario has the potential to produce an outcome an order of magnitude more compelling and effective than what Alice could produce in the state of pseudo-depth described in the second scenario. The former also describes a more satisfying work experience.

I try to put aside one day per week to spend a stretch of six to seven hours straight without distraction — no e-mail, no Internet, lots of walking (some in the woods), too much coffee — all focused on a small number of crucial, hard work tasks. This week I managed this on two different days.

It was a good week.

The bottom line is that if you’re intrigued by depth, give real depth a try, by which I mean giving yourself at least two or three hours with zero distractions. Let the hard task sink in and marinate. Push through the initial barrier of boredom and get to a point where your brain can do what it’s probably increasingly craving in our distracted world: to think deeply.

(Photo by Luis Marina)

Tony Schwartz’s Internet Addiction (and Why You Should Care)

Schwartz’s Important Admission

Last weekend, Tony Schwartz published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Addicted to Distraction.” It soon topped the list of the paper’s most e-mailed articles.

Schwartz begins the essay with an admission:

“I fell last winter into an intense period of travel while also trying to manage a growing consulting business. In early summer, it suddenly dawned on me that I wasn’t managing myself well at all, and I didn’t feel good about it.”

Determined to improve matters, he launched an “irrationally ambitious plan” to simultaneously correct multiple deficiencies in his lifestyle, spanning from excessive alcohol and diet soda consumption, to bad eating habits, to the addictive e-mail checking and web surfing that fragmented his day.

What struck me is what happened next…

Through great determination Schwartz was able to stop consuming both diet soda and alcohol. He also eliminated sugar and refined carbohydrates from his diet, and he began exercising regularly.

But there was an addiction he couldn’t shake. As he explains: “I failed completely in just one behavior: cutting back my time on the Internet.”

A New Beast

When attempting to dismiss the threat that tools like e-mail and social media pose to our attention (and perhaps even our sense of autonomy), Internet apologists like to point to previous “scares” that turned out to be not so scary.

Perhaps most common among these examples was the threat of television — a concern which reached its apex with Jerry Mander’s 1978 book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.

But as Schwartz’s story confirms, the Internet is a more fearsome beast. It’s true that people perhaps spent too much time watching television. But, for the most part, people…

…didn’t bring their televisions to work and watch them so incessantly throughout the day that they lost their ability to complete demanding professional tasks at anywhere near their full potential.
…didn’t bring portable televisions on dates or to movies or to bowling night, and sneak so many glances that they had a hard time participating in the socialization.
…didn’t watch television out of the corner of their eye while trying to listen to a college lecture or keep glancing at the latest program while attempting to study in the library.
And so on.

My point is that we should no longer treat the impact of the Internet on our cognitive personhood as a quirky issue that is at best, to quote a commenter on the Schwartz article, a “tempest in a tea cup.”

There’s something serious going on when someone like Tony Schwartz, who has made a career helping people reach their full potential, has an easier time kicking alcohol and sugar than his compulsive Internet habit.

I don’t have a specific prescription to offer here. But I do predict that we’re heading toward an era where more drastic responses to this issue will become socially acceptable.

An era, perhaps, when tools that are engineered by highly-paid psychologists to form addictive attractions (ahem, Facebook) are widely shunned, and the idea that everyone has a single universal e-mail address that everyone can access for every reason seems absurd.

Or maybe the best response will look completely different. But the fact that a major response is needed is something that deserves more careful discussion.

Tony Schwartz would likely agree. He ends his piece by telling a story about how he recently found himself eating a meal with his family in a restaurant. As he ate, he noticed a man enter with an “adorable” child.  As Schwartz recalls:

“Almost immediately, the man turned this attention to his phone. Meanwhile, his daughter was a whirlwind of energy and restlessness…[attempting many things] to get her father’s attention…she didn’t succeed and after a while, she glumly gave up.

The silence felt deafening.”

What more motivation do we need to begin considering radical solutions to an unacceptable status quo when it comes to the quality of our mental life?

I Want to Show You Exactly How I Prioritize Deep Work in My Busy Life

A Look Inside My Systems

I’m committed to the idea that deep work is the key to a successful and meaningful professional life. Not surprisingly, I back up this commitment with a complex set of battle-tested systems that ensure I spend a non-trivial amount of time in a state of intense depth each week.

At the moment, due to these systems, I average between 15 – 20 hours of deep work per week. I manage this even though I’m professor with a full course and service load, an active blogger and writer, a father of two young boys, and someone who rarely works in the evening.

Now I want to let (some of) you inside my world and explain exactly how I make this happen…

In more detail, I’m going to host an exclusive, invite-only webinar on Sunday, January 3rd where I will walk through the details of my deep work systems and answer any and all questions on this general topic from the webinar attendees.

Here’s the catch: invitations to the webinar will be limited to people who pre-order my new book DEEP WORK (which will be released on January 5th). 

Once you’ve pre-ordered the book (of if you’ve already done so): simply click here to access an online form where you’ll be asked to enter your e-mail address and some order confirmation information.

Once we’ve confirmed all the entries, I’ll e-mail this pre-order list the information needed to access the webinar. After the webinar, I’ll also send this pre-order list a full recording of the event for those who cannot attend live.

Why am I limiting this event to people who pre-order the book?

Pre-orders carry a great weight in the modern book business. Major retailers such as Barnes & Noble, for example, now use pre-order numbers to determine how seriously to take a new release.

I’m using this event, therefore, for two reasons:

To try to convince those who think they’ll buy the book anyway to consider pre-ordering it.
To thank those of you who have supported my efforts over the years to spread the gospel of deep work.

This offer will only be available for the next few weeks, as we’re planning on processing all the entries before the Christmas vacation. So if you’re thinking about taking advantage of this invitation, don’t procrastinate too much.

Enough about this. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…