Cal Newport's Blog, page 47

It’s Okay to Be Bad at E-mail

The Internet Heretic

I previously admitted that I don’t web surf and that I’ve never had a social media account. This next admission might be the final straw that leads to the permanent revocation of my internet privileges: I’m bad at answering e-mails.

I sometimes go a whole day without looking at my inbox (and sometimes even longer). I ignore messages. People I know well tend to call me when they really need to know something.

I’m not bad at e-mails on purpose. If anything, I’m apologetic and ashamed about it and try to be more responsive when I can. But I only have so many hours to work each day, and I tend to block as much as I can get away with for deep efforts.

This philosophy is a boon to my role as a theoretician trying to solve interesting problems, but a bane to my role as a member of a bureaucracy.

Accepting E-mail Mediocrity

If I step back for a moment, however, it becomes clear that this trade-off makes sense. As a professor at a research institution it’s okay to be bad at e-mail. Indeed, it’s much better that I be bad at e-mail and good at research than the inverse.

And I think this observation generalizes.

At some point in the 1990’s, we (knowledge workers) all seemed to internalize this ethic that any e-mail arriving in our inbox was crucial and important and demanding immediate attention. We were transformed into human network routers fiercely fighting to improve our throughput.

We began to strive for an empty inbox and the most efficient possible strategies for quickly processing this deluge. The twenty-minute response time became an aspirational standard.

But I want to propose an alternative: Not everyone needs to be easily reached by e-mail.

Some people, such as those who deal with clients all day or manage large teams that crave frequent guidance, should be pros at this skill. But other people, like computer programmers, writers, advertising gurus and professors, should be free to suck at e-mail just as much as they might suck at other skills that aren’t that relevant to their core value proposition.

I know this is a basic thing to say, but I suspect it’s worth reiterating.

If you disagree, you could e-mail me about it, but bear with me, it might take me a while to respond.

Deep Habits: Obsess When Needed

An Obsessive Digression

For the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to prove a bothersome theorem. It’s not particularly flashy, but I need it for a paper. More importantly, it felt like it should be easy and I took it personally that it’s not.

Predictably, I began to obsess about this proof — by which I mean I took to returning to the proof again and again during breaks in my working day. It became a staple during my commutes to and from work, and began to hijack blocks of time from my otherwise carefully constructed schedules.

Earlier this week, the weather was nice, so while waiting out the traffic at home in the morning I sat outside in my backyard with my grid notebook (something about grid rule aids mathematical thinking) and, as I had been doing, noodled on the theorem.

Except this time: something shook loose.

I scribbled notes for an hour, drove to campus, and set about trying to formalize my new idea.

It didn’t work.

But now I had the scent. Long story short, six hours later I had a proof that seems to work for a more or less reasonable version of the problem (time will tell).

I started that day with a pretty elaborate time block schedule. It was ignored; as was my e-mail inbox; as were several pretty important administrative obligations. But the important thing is that I think I finally tamed that damnable theorem.

Obsession as Productivity Tool

In my work as a theoretician, (bounded) obsession of this type plays an important role in productivity.

A main theorem in this 2014 paper, for example, was finally proved on the metro, whereas the main theorem in this 2013 paper was cracked on a speaking trip to Canada (I started working on it when I arrived at the airport in D.C. and had the key points nailed down by the time my limo arrived at the hotel in Waterloo) . In an interesting coincidence, the breakthroughs in this 2014 paper and this 2011 paper both happened while stuck at home during (different) snow storms.

In all cases, if I hadn’t allowed the relevant problem to evolve into an obsession, I might not have solved it. They required lots of hours of deep thinking under lots of conditions: both products of obsession.

With this in mind, my contention in this post is that this trick of the theoretician is relevant in many more fields.

Important things are hard to do. Obsession supports hard accomplishment.

The challenge, of course, is keeping the obsessions under control (a somewhat oxymoronic task), and learning when to unobsess when progress stalls too much (at best, 1 in 3 of my obsessions yield theorems).

In the final accounting, however, obsession remains a tool that’s not talked about much but should be, as it often plays a key role in elite level knowledge work.

Warren Buffett On Goals: If It’s Not The Most Important Thing, Avoid It At All Costs

A Buffett of Advice

My friend Eric recently sent me an article describing advice Warren Buffett once gave an employee.

In the article, Buffett wanted to help his employee get ahead in his working life, so he suggested that the employee list the twenty-five most important things he wanted to accomplish in the next few years. He then had the employee circle the top five and told him to prioritize this smaller list.

All seemed well until the wise Billionaire asked one more question: “What are you going to do with the other twenty things?”

The employee answered: “Well the top five are my primary focus but the other twenty come in at a close second. They are still important so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit as I’m getting through my top five. They are not as urgent but I still plan to give them dedicated effort.”

Buffett surprised him with his response: “No. You’ve got it wrong…Everything you didn’t circle just became your ‘avoid at all cost list.'”

An Important Reminder

I read this story on Scott Dinsmore’s site, where Scott explains he heard it from a friend who heard it from the employee in the story: so some details have likely been mutated during this multi-hop dissemination.

But the story nevertheless resonates because it promotes a truth that I think is vital to remember in our current networked age: spending time on lower priority goals, even though they’re helpful and generate value, can leave you worse off than if you had avoided them all together.

The logic supporting this observation is simple.

Your highest priority goals return significantly more value per unit time invested than your lower priority goals.
In addition, your time and attention are limited.
It follows that effort invested on your lower priority goals steals effort from your higher priority goals.
If you spend time on the lower priority goals, therefore, your total quantity of value produced is reduced.

The reason I describe this lesson as particularly vital to our current age is that the behaviors that consume more of our time and attention — e.g., social media, web surfing, chronic networking  — often fall onto the low priority end of Buffett’s List of Twenty-Five.

These behaviors are sold to us with the promise that they offer some benefit (e.g., “you never know, the contact you make on Facebook might end up bringing you new business”) – but they do so at the cost of stealing time from the harder efforts that are guaranteed to return a lot of benefit (e.g., make your product too good to be ignored).

It’s with this in mind that it’s useful to remember Buffett’s caution: Don’t just prioritize what’s most important, but support this prioritization by avoiding everything that’s not.

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For another take on this idea see Tip #2 in my 2008 article on the Steve Martin Method — the article, interestingly enough, in which I first mentioned his advice to “be so good they can’t ignore you.”

(Photo by Javier)

Deep Habits: Forget Your Project Ideas (Until You Can’t Forget Them)

An Idea About Ideas

A graduate student recently sent me a note asking how I keep track of potential projects in my academic work. This got me thinking, and after some consideration I decided I had two answers.

The first answer is literal…

Since September, 2004, I’ve always kept an idea notebook with me to capture spontaneous thoughts relevant to many different areas in my life, including potential professional projects. (The picture above is a sampling of my large collection of full idea books.) I try to review my current notebook every couple of months.

The second answer is more honest…

Keeping track of project ideas, in my experience, is usually a waste of time. I used to fear that if I didn’t capture and review my sparks of brilliance I’d forget them and an opportunity for impact would be lost.

The reality, however, is that most people (myself included) have way more ideas for things to work on than they have time to work. Forgetting ideas is not your problem. Having too many ideas competing for your attention to execute any one well is a more pressing concern.

(This notion that ideas are cheap and execution valuable is not, of course, new: it’s been circulating through Silicon Valley start-up circles for a while; c.f., here and here.)

But my dismissal of tracking project ideas is about more than the relative unimportance of ideas compared to execution. I argue that the refusal to implement a system for curating these ideas provides an active strategy for figuring out what to work on.

In more detail, in recent years I’ve found that a useful criteria for selecting an idea to deliberately attack (both in academia and my book writing) is that it won’t leave me alone; it keeps coming back to my attention even though I’m not trying to remind myself about it.

This act of subconscious selection is not arbitrary. Indeed, there’s a growing body of evidence that for certain types of decisions your unconscious mind is better at sifting through conflicting variables and reaching a sound decision than more systematic conscious thought.

This approach works well for me. I expose myself to lots of different ideas and I dabble in many of them (a conversation here, a few equations scratched out there, a commute dedicated to noodling an interesting theorem), all the while not worrying too much about capturing every potential concept in some convoluted Evernoted nonsense.

I don’t mind if I forget moments of inspiration. The important piece is that I won’t deeply commit myself to a project until the damn thing won’t leave me alone.

Doing What it Takes Versus Taking What You Already Know How to Do

The Unexpected Nobel

Eric Betzig is a research leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia. Last month he received a surprising and life changing call: he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on high resolution microscopy (see the video above).

Everyone who wins the Nobel is impressive, but what makes Betzig particularly worthy of attention is his unlikely path to the prize. One thing that any non-partial observer will confirm is that if you had met Betzig in 1994, the idea that he would one day win the most prestigious award in science would seem strictly absurd.

The Retreat

As scientists go, Betzig had a strong start. As he recounts in a Washington Post profile, as a child Betzig was captivated by the space race. “I can still you the names of the astronauts on every flight from Mercury to Apollo,” he said.

This motivated him to study physics at Cal Tech. After he graduated in 1983, he went on to earn his PhD in applied physics at Cornell.

At this point, the excitement surrounding the space program had waned, so Betzig ended up studying high resolution microscopy for his dissertation — a field that was becoming hot as new technology enabled breakthroughs in the resolution of microscopes.

In 1988, Betzig moved to Bell Labs to continue his work on microscopes. At Bell Labs, Betzig helped improve a pioneering procedure for detecting the light absorption of single molecules to work at room temperature (the original experiments had required temperatures near absolute zero).

At some point, however, Betzig began to feel “restless.” Technology wasn’t ready to capitalize on the techniques he was helping to develop.

“Science goes through fads and there are big ups and crashes,” Betzig recalled in the Post profile. “[The] microscopy we were using was going through one of those fad phases, which disturbed me. It was being grossly oversold.”

In 1994 he quit Bell Labs to join his father’s Michigan-based tool and die company, where he would remain for the next seven years.

The Return

In the early 2000’s, Betzig was someone who had been involved in promising research a decade earlier, but not anything that was Nobel-worthy. He had subsequently spent the last seven years helping his dad’s company optimize procedures for large-scale production of machine parts.

Nothing about this his resume predicted what would happen next.

Betzig decided that he “missed the basic curiosity of the lab.” He wanted to return to academia, but he also knew that his seven years working in industry and not publishing made that almost impossible.

The keyword being “almost.”

Betzig concluded that his only way back into the world of academic science was to hit a home run. So he began searching for a good pitch to swing at.

This search, at one point, led him and Harald Hess, an old Bell Labs collaborator, to Mike Davidson’s lab at Florida State where he learned about a new technique for fluorescing proteins. Though the details of the explanation are complicated, this breakthrough, Betzig noticed, made it theoretically possible to advance the research he had started in the 1980’s.

Working in Harald Hess’s living room, the pair began making phone calls and begging for some fluorescing proteins. They then started cobbling together different prototypes of microscopes that would use these proteins to achieve unprecedented resolution.

Their final result was attention-grabbing in the field: a microscope able to visualize the biological processes of living cells, in real time, without damaging the organisms. A major breakthrough.

The year was 2006. Within a month, Howard Hughes Medical center offered Betzig a research position to continue the work. In 2014, this work won him the Nobel.

The Lesson

Soon after Betzig won the prize, several readers sent me versions of his story. When I read it, I was struck by the following observation: When Eric Betzig wanted to return to academia, he asked, “what would this take?”  The answer was daunting — a breakthrough too good to be ignored — but nonetheless he hustled to make it happen.

This strategy sounds obvious, but it differs from how most of us approach professional advancement. When faced with an ambitious goal, most people defer instead to the question”what do I know I how to do and how can I make it look better?”

We take what we can do, in other words, instead of facing the reality of what it would take to get where we want to go.

I don’t exempt myself from this vice, and for this reason it fascinates me. Why is it so rare to honestly confront what would guarantee success with a goal ? Why do we instead default to tweaks and polishes on what we already know how to do? Why, for example, don’t more academics obsessively pursue the type of home run swings that Betzig identified as being necessary when he decided to return to the world of science?

There are some obvious answers to these questions, chief among them being discomfort with the answers that such honesty reveals, and there are some mysteries as well.

But what’s clear is that these questions remain something that I think anyone seeking an elite level of accomplishment must, at some point, confront. I also suspect that one of the main filters between those who end up changing the world and those who don’t is how they answer this unavoidable prompt.

On the Obsessive Focus of Bill Gates

The Gates Riddle

Why was Bill Gates so successful?

In answering this question, different biographers have emphasized different traits.

Stephen Manes, in his excellent 1994 book, Gates, underscores the Microsoft founder’s fierce (sometimes bordering on sociopathic) competitive instincts.

In his 2008 bestseller, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell points out the exceptional circumstances that provided teenage Gates near unlimited access to computers on which to hone programming skills on the eve of the personal computer revolution.

I was particularly struck, however, by a quintessential Gatesian trait highlighted in Walter Isaacson’s new book, The Innovators.

Here’s a quote from the chapter where Bill Gates and Paul Allen are working on the project (a BASIC interpreter for the Intel 8080) that will give rise to Microsoft:

One trait that differentiated [Gates and Allen] was focus. Allen’s mind would flit between many ideas and passions, but Gates was a serial obsessor.

“Where I was curious to study everything in sight, Bill would focus on one task at a time with total discipline,” said Allen. “You could see it when he programmed. He would sit with a marker clenched in his mouth, tapping his feet and rocking; impervious to distraction.” [emphasis mine]

Enough said.

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(The above quote comes from minute 10 of Chapter 6 of Part 2 of the Audible audio version of The Innovators.)

Deep Habits: Create an Idea Index

Brain Picking

I’m a professional non-fiction writer which makes me by default also a professional reader of sorts (the photo above shows my nightstand). I read (most of) five to ten books per month on average in addition to quite a few articles.

One thing that has often frustrated me in this undertaking is the inefficiency of my notetaking. My standard strategy when reading a physical book is to mark interesting passages with a pencil and then put a check on the upper right corner so I can later skip quickly past non-annotated pages.

The problem with this strategy is that if time passes after I read a book the only way to recreate what I learned or find a useful quote is to skim through all the marked pages.

This is why I was excited the other day to learn a better way.

The Idea Index

The source of this insight was an interview on the Tim Ferris Show with Brain Pickings’s Maria Popova, who is one of the world’s most prolific readers (fifteen books per week!?) and hardest working bloggers (three long posts per day!?).

Around thirty-one minutes into the interview, Popova explains how she takes notes on books:

As she reads, she creates an index at the front of the book that lists its most interesting ideas.
Every time she encounters a passage relevant to one of these ideas she adds the page to the relevant line in the index. If its a new idea, she creates a new line for it.
As she reads more, the index grows.

Here’s what’s great about this idea index method: When you pick up a book read long ago, you can quickly recall what it has to offer by glancing at the index. Then, if you want to grab some quotes about one of these ideas, the index tells you exactly where to look (no more reading every annotation!).

I haven’t had a chance to try this habit yet, but I look forward to deploying it the next time I dive into an idea-dense title.

How to Win a Nobel Prize: Notes from Richard Hamming’s Talk on Doing Great Research

You and Your Research

In March 1986, the famed mathematician and computer scientist Richard Hamming returned to his former employer, Bell Labs, to give a talk at the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series. His talk was titled “You and Your Research,” and it’s goal was straightforward: to deliver lessons for serious researchers about how to do “Nobel-Prize type of work” (a topic familiar to Hamming given the large number of Nobels won by his colleagues during his Bell Labs tenure).

This talk is famous among applied mathematicians and computer scientists because of its relentlessly honest and detailed dissection of how stars in these fields become stars — a designation that certainly applies to Hamming, who not only won the Turing Prize for his work on coding theory, but ended up with an IEEE prize named after him: the Richard W Hamming Medal.

A problem with his talk, however, is it’s length and density. It’s easy to lose yourself in its transcript, nodding your head again and again in agreement, then coming out the other side unable to keep track of all the ideas Hamming outlined.

My goal in this blog post to help bring some order to this state of affairs. Below I’ve summarized what I find to be the major points from Hamming’s address. To identify the sections of the speech that correspond to each point I use the  wording from this transcription.

I can’t claim that the following is comprehensive (among other things, I do not annotate the questions after the talk), but I’m confident that I capture most of what’s important in this seminal seminar.

Idea #1: Luck is not as important as people think.

[location: see the section that starts with the sentence "let me start not logically, but psychologically..."]

Hamming notes that luck is a common explanation for doing great research. He doubts this explanation by noting that great researchers — like Einstein — do multiple good things in their career.

As an alternate explanation, he cites the following Newton quote: “If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.”

Idea #2: Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest

[location: "Now for the matter of drive."]

Hamming notes that “most great scientists have tremendous drive.” He emphasizes the value of working hard by noting that the benefits of extra effort compound over time like interest. If you’re reading a little bit more and thinking a little bit longer than your colleagues, over time the gap between you and them grows.

He then supplies, however, a crucial caveat: you have to apply this effort intelligently. “That’s the trouble,” he elaborates, “drive, misapplied, doesn’t get you anywhere.” He illustrates this axiom by discussing former colleagues who worked harder than he did but have nothing to show for it.

Idea #3: Become comfortable with ambiguity

[location: "there's another trait on the side which I want to talk about..."]

Hamming notes that great scientists form an “emotional commitment” to the theories they pursue and are able to carry on despite doubts and identified flaws.

He adds, however, that they are still careful about tracking and later addressing these shortcomings that arise along the way.

Idea #4: Creativity requires focus

[location: "Now again, emotional commitment is not enough..."]

Hamming notes his belief in the theory that “creativity comes out of your subconscious.” To make a breakthrough, he believes, you must focus without distraction on the problem long enough for your subconscious to start working it over.

As he summarizes: “If you’re deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem.”

Idea #5: Important work comes from important problems

[location: "Now Alan Chynoweth mention that I used to eat..."]

After talking about his efforts to seek out big thinkers in the Bell Labs cafeteria, Hamming emphasizes: “If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work.” He notes that the “average scientist” does not work on important problems but instead plays it safe. He wanted to avoid such mediocrity in his interactions.

He clarifies that for a problem to be important, not only most its impact be clear, but you must also possess a “reasonable attack.” He estimates that most great scientists will keep 10 to 20 great problems in mind at any one time, and if they learn a technique that might apply to one of them, they’ll “drop all the other things and get after it.”

Hamming recalls that he blocked off his Friday afternoons as “Great Thoughts Time,” and spent them only discussing and thinking about “great thoughts.”

Idea #6: Keep your door open

[location: "Another trait, it took me a while..."]

Hamming notes that at Bell Labs the scientists who kept their doors shut got more done in the short term. By contrast, the scientists who kept their doors open were distracted more often but ultimately this increased exposure to other people, problems, and ideas led them to more important work in the long term.

Idea #7: Transform isolated problems into general problems

[location: "I want to talk on another topic..."]

Hamming notes that early on he used to work on isolated problems. This depressed him: “I could see life being a long sequence of one problem after another after another.”

This changed his approach to focus on bigger, more general ideas that others could build on. “By changing a problem slightly” he clarifies, “you can often do great work rather than merely good work.”

He goes on to add that you should never work on an isolated problem unless it is “characteristic of a class.”

Ideas #8: Sell you results

[location: "I have now come down to a topic which is..."]

Hamming notes that the idea of marketing your results is “distasteful” and “awkward” to discuss. He also notes, however, that it’s necessary because “the fact is everyone is busy with their own work,” and you cannot expect them to discover your work on their own.

He suggests three things you must do to bring you ideas to other peoples’ attention: (a) “learn to write clearly,” (b) “learn to give reasonably formal talks,” and (c) “learn to give informal talks” (and know which type of talk is appropriate and when.)

He emphasizes that when giving a talk, in most venues, “most of the time the audience wants a broad general talk and wants much more survey and background than the speaker is willing to give. As a result, many talks are ineffective.”

Deep Habits: Conquer Hard Tasks With Concentration Circuits

A Writing Tour of Georgetown

Today I needed to finish a tough chunk of writing. The ideas were complicated and I wasn’t quite sure how best to untangle the relevant threads and reweave them into something appealing. I knew I was in for some deep work and I was worried about my ability to see it through to the end.

So I packed up my laptop and headed outside. Here’s where I started writing:

Once I began to falter, I switched locations:

 

 

As I neared the end my energy begin sputter, so I switched locations one more time for the home stretch:

 

In this third and final location I finished.

The Concentration Circuit

Combined, the chunk of writing took me two hours: less time than I had expected. The key to this efficiency, I’m convinced, was the frequent location switching.

Something about arriving at a new and novel location — somewhere different than where you normally work — provides a boost to your motivation and aids concentration. Over time, this effect will wane. But if you keep switching locations, you can keep re-stimulating this reaction again and again, maintaining an average level of concentration that’s potentially much higher than if you had slogged through the deep task in one (literal) sitting.

I call this approach the concentration circuit as it cycles you through a circuit of locations to keep your concentration levels elevated.

To be clear, most of my deep work sessions are decidedly less interesting. They take place in my office with the door closed.

But sometimes I need something extra. If I’m feeling uninspired or the task is particularly complicated, I look for ways to scrape together any advantage I can find (c.f., here and here and here). The concentration circuit is an important tool in this deep work toolbox.

How We Sent a Man to the Moon Without E-mail and Why it Matters Today

The NASA Paradox

In 2008, Dan Markovitz was meeting with a group of R&D engineers at a high tech company. The engineers began complaining about e-mail.

They were overwhelmed by the hundreds of messages arriving every day in their inbox, but at the same time, they agreed that this was unavoidable. Without such intensive e-mail use, they reasoned, their teams’ efficiency would plummet.

This conclusion led one of the engineers to ask an interesting question:

If this is true, “how [did] NASA’s engineers manag[e] to put a man on the moon without tools like email?”

Think about this question for a moment. The Apollo program was massive in size and complexity. It was executed at an incredible pace (only eight years spanned Kennedy’s pledge to Armstrong’s steps) and it yielded innovations at a staggering rate.

And it was all done without e-mail.

How did the Apollo engineering teams manage something so complicated and large without rapid communication? Fortunately for this particular group, an answer was available. It turned out that a senior engineer at this high tech company had also worked on the Apollo program, and someone asked him this very question.

Here’s how the Apollo engineer remembered working:

His team met from 9  – 10 am, three days per week.
They spent the rest of their time “actually working on solving this enormous puzzle of landing on the moon.”
If someone got stuck and needed someone else’s input, “they actually talked to each other.”

To quote Intel engineer Nathan Zeldes (as Markovitz does in summarizing this approach):

“These guys were plan-driven, not interrupt-driven.”

I find this anecdote fascinating. I’m not implying, of course, that organizations should abandon e-mail altogether and fall back on Apollo-era carbon copies and secretary pools.

But hearing this story induces a key insight: the way we currently use e-mail technology  — in which our day is interrupt-driven and quick responses are expected — is not a necessary condition to successfully manage teams and organizations tackling hard problems.

If you’ll excuse some uninformed speculation, my guess is that if we could go back in time and outfit the Apollo engineers with e-mail terminals,* two things would have happened. First, their work lives would have become more convenient. Second, it would have taken them longer to get a man on the moon.

Or maybe not.

But at the very least, we should use this story to remind ourselves that the statement, “I have to be constantly connected to effectively manage my team/company/project,” is not a tautology; it’s a hypothesis — one we can and should continue to rigorously investigate.

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* Let’s be honest, if we went back in time to give these engineers e-mail terminals, the first thing they would do is pry open the cases and hijack the processors to replace the creaky technologies they were stuck using (the Apollo guidance computer ran at a stately 1 Mhz and had all of 2k of memory to work with).