Cal Newport's Blog, page 42

The Feynman Notebook Method

Feynman’s Exams

After his second year of graduate school at Princeton, Richard Feynman faced his oral examinations. Feynman was not yet the famous physicist he would soon become (as his biographer James Gleick put it, “His Feynman aura…was still strictly local”), so he took his preparation seriously.

Feynman drove up to MIT, a campus familiar from his undergraduate years, and a place “where he could be alone.” It’s what he did next that I find interesting.

As Gleick explains:

“[He] opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote: NOTEBOOK OF THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT. For the first but not last time he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject.”

I might not have worked with any future Feynmans during my time at MIT, but I certainly had the privilege to watch the ascent of at least two or three future stars in the world of science. And one thing they all seemed to share with Feyman was his hunger to understand what he didn’t know.

If someone published something good, they wanted to understand it. If this good thing used some mathematical technique they didn’t know, they’d drop off the radar until they learned it. If you published an interesting result, they’d soon learn every detail and be able to replicate it easier than you could manage.

Their proverbial notebooks of things they don’t know where always growing, and as a result, they thrived.

The Feynman Notebook Method

I think there’s a general method lurking here. People resist learning hard things — be it a graduate student mastering fundamental physics or an online marketer taming a new digital analytics tool — because learning is hard and requires significant amounts of deep work.

Dedicating a notebook to a new learning task, however, can provide concrete cues that help you stick with this hard process.

At first, the notebook pages are empty, but as they fill with careful notes, your knowledge also grows. The drive to fill more pages keeps your motivation stoked.

(To see this Feynman Notebook Method in action, consider the image at the top of this post, which shows a page from the notes I took as part of my effort to learn the basics of information theory during a recent trip to San Sebastian, Spain.)

It’s a simple idea: translate your growing knowledge of something hard into a concrete form and you’re more likely to keep investing the mental energy needed to keep learning. But sometimes a simple idea is all it takes to unlock a new level of potential.

“When [Feynman] was done,” Gleick reports, “he had a notebook of which he was especially proud.”

You should seek that same pride in your own quest to become too good to be ignored.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

A New Book

I’m excited to announce my new book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.

The book will be published on January 5th (though it’s available now for pre-order). In this post, I want to provide you a brief sneak peek.

My Deep Work Mission

If you’ve been reading Study Hacks over the past few years, you’ve witnessed my increasing interest in the topic of deep work, which I define to be the act of focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.

I firmly believe that deep work is like a superpower in our current economy: it enables you to quickly (and deliberately) learn complicated new skills and produce high-value output at a high rate.

Deep work is also an activity that generates a sense of meaning and fulfillment in your professional life. Few come home energized after an afternoon of frenetic e-mail replies, but the same time spent tackling a hard problem in a quiet location can be immensely satisfying.

There’s a reason why the people who impress us most tend to be people who deployed intense focus to make a dent in the universe; c.f., Einstein and Jobs.

Focus is the New I.Q.

Which brings me to my new book…

Deep Work is divided into two parts. The first part is dedicated to making the case for this activity. In particular, I provide evidence that the following hypothesis is true:

The Deep Work Hypothesis.

Deep work is becoming increasingly valuable at the same time that it’s becoming increasingly rare. Therefore, if you cultivate this skill, you’ll thrive.

The second part of the book provides strategies for acting on this reality.

Drawing on my own habits, the habits of other adept deep workers, and reams of relevant science, I describe how to improve your ability to work deeply and how to make deep work a major part of your already busy schedule.

In this second part, you’ll also find detailed elaborations of some of my more well-known ideas on supporting deep work, from time blocking, to fixed-schedule productivity, to depth rituals — in addition to many more tactics that I’m revealing for the first time.

More Information

If you want to learn more about the book, the Amazon page includes the full flap copy as well as the nice endorsements it received from Dan Pink, Seth Godin, Matthew Crawford, Adam Grant, Derek Sivers and Ben Casnocha.

You can also read this extended excerpt on Medium that discusses how a star professor uses deep work to dominate his field.

The book will be released on January 5th but is available for pre-order today on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Shonda Rhimes Doesn’t Check E-mail After 7 pm

A Fellow Dartmouth Alum Discusses E-mail

Not long into a recent Fresh Air interview with Shonda Rhimes, Terry Gross brings up the last subject you might expect: e-mail habits.

Rhimes, it turns out, has the following signature appended to all her e-mails:

I don’t read work e-mails after 7 pm or on weekends, and if you work for me, may I suggest you put down your phone?

Gross and Rhimes discussed the details and implications of this e-mail habit for over four minutes, which is more than a tenth of the entire interview.

Listening to this exchange, I was struck by three points which I think speak to some of the larger issues surrounding work and distraction in a digital age…

Point #1: People are really exhausted by e-mail

The fact that Terry Gross brought up this topic (out of nowhere) so early in the interview, and discussed it for so long, indicates just how important the negative impact of e-mail has become: it’s a universal issue for knowledge workers.

Point #2: People equate e-mail with work

Here’s Gross investigating the reality of Rhimes’s e-mail free evenings:

How do you do that? The work day doesn’t end until after seven for a lot of people, how do you manage to just turn it off after 7 o’clock and on weekends?

What strikes me about this question (and the conversation that followed) is that it equates reading and responding to e-mails with working. In Gross’s formulation, once you stop receiving e-mails for the day, you’re done working for the day. And Rhimes agreed.

I think they’re completely wrong on this point, but this misunderstanding goes a long way toward explaining e-mail’s pathology.

Point #3: E-mail is not nearly as important as we think

Shonda Rhimes is important. Lot’s of important things cross her plate. Many are urgent. She receives over 2500 work e-mails every day. And yet, as she explains:

That’s what I found so interesting, since turning off my phone at 7 pm there’s never been a thing so urgent that I regretted having my phone off.

Gross pushed back at this point, asking if Rhimes simply passed the buck by hiring underlings to answer her e-mails for her after 7, but Rhimes quickly dispelled the notion. She says she built a culture in her production company where you work during work hours and then you’re done.

A Strong Finale

I was perhaps most taken by the simple force with which Rhimes dismissed the culture of connectivity. Here’s her summation:

Work will happen 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year, if you let it. We are all in that place where we are all letting it for some reason, and I don’t know why.

I couldn’t have said it better.

Richard Feynman’s Deliberate Genius

Gleick’s Genius

I’m currently re-reading Genius, James Gleick’s celebrated biography of physicist Richard Feynman.

I was particularly drawn to the opening chapters on Feynman’s childhood in Far Rockaway, Queens. It’s tempting when encountering a brilliant mind like Feynman’s to resort to cognitive hagiography in which the future Nobel laureate entered the world already solving field equations.

But Gleick, whose research skills are an equal match for his writing ability, uncovered a more interesting origin tale…

The Math Team Factor

Arguably, the seed of Feynman’s success was his participation in the New York City public school system’s Interscholastic Algebra League.

As Gleick explains, Feynman was on his school’s math team. The team competed in meets in which the competitors raced to solve algebra problems. The important thing to understand is that these problems were designed with “special cleverness…there was always some trick, or shortcut, without which the problem just takes too long.”

Feynman became hooked on the feeling of uncovering these mathematical insights. Here’s Gleick:

“The heady rush of solving a puzzle, of feeling the mental pieces shift and fade and rearrange themselves until suddenly the slid into their grooves — the sense of power and sheer rightness — these pleasures sustain an addiction. Luxuriating in the buoyant joy of it, Feynman could sink into a trance of concentration that even his family found unnerving.”

Hungry for his next insight fix, Feynman began seeking out classic results from a variety of fields, with a particular interest in infinite summations that yielded pi or Euler’s constant (see the above image of pages from his teenage notebook).

To simply learn by rote what was already known would not provide him the hit of insight he craved, so he began working out the results on his own:

“His notebooks contained not just the principles of these subjects but also extensive tables of trigonometric functions and integrals — not copied but calculated, often by original techniques that he devised for the purpose.”

The Magician

Feynman’s colleagues, according to Gleick, understood him to be a magician: someone whose results seemed to come out of nowhere. But Feynman’s childhood training clarifies that this ability to confidently dive to the essence of a problem was a skill he pursued and sharpened starting from an age when most were still focused on backstreet stick ball.

Put another way, by the time Feynman graduated MIT — en route to the Manhattan Project, then the Cornell faculty, where his devastatingly original work on quantum mechanics would win him a Nobel Prize — he had likely spent more hours practicing the hunt for deep insight than almost anyone in his generation.

I don’t doubt that Feynman’s brain was special. But to borrow some useful terminology from David Epstein, what mattered was that this high power hardware was matched with exactly the right software, developed through years of deliberate practice, to unlock Feynman’s genius.

Spend More Time Managing Your Time

Making Time for Time

Something organized people don’t often talk about is how much time they spend organizing their time.

I think this is a shame.

The past half-decade has seen a trend in (online) time management discussions toward simplification. It’s now accepted by many that it’s enough to jot down each morning a couple “most important tasks” of the day on an index card, and if you get those done, consider your day a success.

Think about this for a moment. This belief essentially cedes the majority of your working hours over to meetings separated by bursts of non-productive inbox shuffling and web surfing.

I for one am not yet willing to give up so many hours, as doing so would significantly reduce what I’m able to accomplish in the typical week. Which brings me back to time spent organizing time…

The Necessary Grind of a Good Weekly Plan

It’s not unusual for me to spend two or more hours at the beginning of each week playing with the puzzle pieces that are my commitments, big and small.

It’s hard work figuring out how to make a productive schedule come together: a goal that requires protecting long stretches of speculative deep thinking while keeping progress alive on long term projects and dispatching the small things fast enough to avoid trouble (but not so fast that the deep stretches fragment).

During today’s planning session, for example, I had to balance immediate obligations like a paper deadline this evening, with short term obligations like grading midterms, with the many medium range obligations mounting from my next book launch, to long term obligations, like the need to continue to make progress on the theorems needed for an important February deadline.

Sprinkle in a dash of appointments and a heavy dollop of tasks and it’s completely reasonable to expect that making sense of these pieces would require some serious thinking.

I’m telling you this mainly to provide another data point. It’s true that many people approach their days with flexibility, perhaps hunkering down when an immediate deadline looms, but otherwise letting their reactions to input drive the agenda. But I want to emphasize that there’s another group of us who take our time really seriously, and aren’t afraid to spend hours figuring out how best to invest it.

This level of organization is not for everyone; but everyone should know that it’s an option.

Deep Habits: WorkingMemory.txt (The Most Important Productivity Tool You’ve Never Heard Of)

Productivity Problems

Here’s a typical scenario. Looking at your daily schedule, you see that you’re entering a period of time that’s not dedicated to deep work or a specific large shallow task.

This seems like a good opportunity to tackle some of the small tasks that accumulate in most knowledge work schedules (e.g., e-mails, planning, bills, looking up information, arranging meetings, filling out forms, etc).

Tackling these administrative blocks in an effective manner, however, can be elusive for most people — especially if you find yourself arriving at the office after a weekend, or a trip, or any other instance when an overwhelming number of obligations have been piling up, waiting to ambush you.

It’s easy to start such blocks with a reasonable plan, such as “let me answer some e-mails.” But this will soon generate many more new obligations than you can fit into your limited working memory at one time.

At this point, you might start lurching around, perhaps trying to knock off the new obligations as they arise (so you don’t forget them), then giving up on this goal as futile, then seeing even more urgent messages, and having those generate even more things that you can’t quite finish all at once, and then, the next thing you know, you look up after an hour of frenzied e-mailing and feel more overwhelmed than when you began!

Whew.

The solution to such scenarios, I will argue, is to augment your limited neuronal capacity with some digital help…

The WorkingMemory.txt File

A few years ago, I stumbled onto the strategy of using a simple plain text file to augment my working memory during attacks on my mounting obligations.

For obvious reasons, I named the file WorkingMemory.txt. Whenever I enter an administrative block, I open this file and place it next to my browser (see the screenshot above) so I can access it easily as I check my e-mail, review my calendar, or browse my task lists.

To understand the power of a simple text file in this scenario, let me walk you through a typical Monday morning administrative block from a few months ago…

The Initial Dump

The first thing I did in the block is simply dump in the WorkingMemory.txt file all the things I already knew I wanted to get done:

The first two items are what I always tackle at the beginning of the week, while the other three items just popped to mind as things that seemed time sensitive.

Capturing New Obligations

I then began reading and responding to e-mails — the first item on the list. As I dived deeper into my inbox, many new obligations were generated at a fast rate. I didn’t have time to accomplish each new obligation as I encountered it, and (this is the important part) I didn’t have nearly enough working memory in my brain to remember them all, so I jotted them all down in my trusty text file:

You might counter that I should have carefully processed each of these new obligations into a clear next action and then listed them under the appropriate contexts in my well-maintained tasks lists (as recommended by David Allen).

But I wasn’t ready to put in that amount of effort yet.

At this point, I’m capturing things in a stream of conscious style as they pop up. I can figure out what they mean later: for now, I just want them captured in my digital memory so I can get through all the e-mails in my inbox quickly without worrying about forgetting things.

The Clarification

After I finished with my inbox, I was ready to make sense of what was now on my plate. It’s at this point that I began to manipulate and clarify the information stored in my WorkingMemory.txt file:

There are several things to notice here. The first is that I extracted a clear task list for the remainder of the morning dash, dividing the tasks between “large things” (more than 5 minutes) and “small things” (less than 5 minutes).

I also went through and organized the rest of the information dumped into the file. You can see, for example, that under “to capture in system” I have the full list of things that I need to transfer to my task lists for later treatment.

Notice, also, that under “to include in weekly plan” I have identified a subset of those items that I want to include in the weekly plan I’m going to construct as part of this morning dash (see the “large things” list).

At this point in my morning, my inbox is empty and my mind is 100% clear. Everything I need to do or know is captured and clarified in my WorkingMemory.txt file — allowing me to devote my full energy to executing.

Big Picture

A lot of the details of the above example were specific to my preferences and the demands of that particular morning. If you watched my WorkingMemory.txt file over a period of several weeks, you’d see a wide variety of creative uses.

But the general strategy behind this tool remains the same: use a simple text file to capture, organize, and ultimately clarify all relevant information during administrative blocks — leaving your brain free to execute.

It’s amazing how much more efficient you become when you’re not clogging up your brain’s working memory with open loops and unresolved obligations.

The Power of the Outdoor Office

The Weirdo in the Woods

I took this picture last week. While most people enter the woods with a hiking stick, or perhaps a dog, I was the weirdo carrying a cup of coffee and a notebook.

But I was stuck on some early stage problems and needed some serious deep thinking to try to shake things loose — so I grabbed the tools of my trade and headed into the wilderness.

After about a half hour of walking and thinking, I stopped here to organize and record my thoughts:

By the time I finished my meander, I had broken through my log jam. Ever since, I’ve been scrambling to catch up with the thoughts this unleashed.

The Outside Office

There’s a surprising power to retreating to an outside office when there is serious thinking to be done.

Part of this power comes from the lack of interruptions. I brought my phone to take these photos, but usually I wouldn’t, which means any attempt to steal my time and attention at my outside office would require hiking boots.

But an equally important part comes from the setting. Nature has a way of filling your senses without demanding your attention (c.f., research on attention restoration theory), which, when combined with the act of walking, behaves like a performance enhancing drug for deep work.

These experiences reinforce my belief that for professions that require creativity, our notion of what constitutes an “office” is one that can and should be productively expanded.

Top Performer is Now Open

After Three Long Years of Development…

As I mentioned last week, I’ve spent the last three years working with Scott Young and his education company to develop an online course called Top Performer. The course picks up where SO GOOD leaves off, providing a systematic curriculum for:

identifying the skills that matter most in your profession;
constructing a deliberate plan to improve them rapidly; and
finding the time in your already busy schedule to consistently make progress on this endeavor.

You can learn more about Top Performer at the course web site, which includes a detailed video walkthrough, curriculum information, frequently asked questions, testimonials, etc.

The key detail is that we’re only leaving the course sign-up open for this week. We will close down course registration on Friday October 23rd at Midnight (Pacific Time).

Outside of a brief reminder on Thursday, this is the last time I’m going to talk about Top Performer on this blog. It’s now back to our normally scheduled programming…

Join Me and Scott Young for a Live Conversation this Weekend

I’m trying something new this weekend: a live webinar, co-hosted with my friend and collaborator Scott Young.

During the first half of the event, we’ll be discussing ideas inspired by SO GOOD, including our personal experience with career capital, deliberate practice, and elite level productivity.

During the second half, we’ll explain more about this mysterious Top Performer online course that I’ve been hinting about recently. (I’ve spent the last three years developing this course with Scott for his online course company, so I’m excited to finally go public about the details.)

Key Details: The webinar will be held at 4 p.m. Eastern on Sunday. It is free and open to anyone. To sign up, just click on this link.

This should be interesting. Hope to see a lot of you there…

A Productivity Lesson from the Prison Debate Team that Defeated Harvard

The Underdog Debate

News broke wide earlier today about something unexpected that happened last month at a maximum security correctional facility near Dannemora, New York: a team of prisoners won a debate contest held against Harvard’s vaunted three-time national champion team.

As reported by the Washington Post, a twist that made this outcome even more unlikely is that the prisoner team completed their extensive preparation without access to the Internet.

They were forced instead to make formal requests to the prison administration for the books and articles they required, and to then wait for days — and sometimes even weeks — for approval.

The easy storyline here is that this underdog team triumphed despite the hardship of being less connected. While this description might be largely true, the Post’s reporting suggests that something more interesting might have also happened:

[I]t’s worth asking whether circumstance forced the prisoners to devise an approach — in which limited resources demanded sharper focus and more rigorous planning — that resulted in superior lines of argumentation.

This is an important point. Removing the prison team’s access to the Internet made their debate preparation harder, but because it forced them to focus without distraction on exactly what they wanted to say and how to say it best, it also produced better results.

Easy Versus Effective

I think this confusion is common in the professional world: we too often mistake the idea of making our working lives easier with making our work better. But these are two different things.

Slack makes life easier in the moment for computer programmers, but it also leads them to produce messy, distracted code.

General purpose e-mail addresses really simplify corporate communication, but the resulting inbox madness is burning out a whole generation of knowledge workers.

And so on.

I’m not trying to argue for something radical here, but am instead suggesting a subtle shift in mindset. Don’t just focus on what might become harder if you sidestep some new type of connectivity, but also ask what you might gain due to this adversity.

When it comes to digital work, in other words, easy is usually good, but sometimes harder is better.

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An Exciting Announcement

Given that this post is about how to master hard things effectively, I thought this might be a good opportunity to briefly mention something related that I’m really excited about.

Over the past three years, Scott Young and I have been developing an online course called Top Performer. This course teaches you how to identify the skills (e.g., career capital) in your career that matter the most, and then rapidly and massively improve them in a short amount of time by applying deliberate practice techniques.

We’re going to launch this course in a couple weeks. If you want to learn when the course opens, and answers to common questions, sign up for my e-mail newsletter (the form is at the top right of this page) where I’ll be sharing more details.