Cal Newport's Blog, page 48

Deep Habits: Don’t Web Surf During the Work Day

Swimming to the Offline Shore

By 2004, I was an expert web surfer. I had memorized a sequence of web site addresses that I could cycle through, one after another, in rapid succession. I would do this once every hour or so as a quick mental pick me up to help get through the work day.

At some point, soon after starting graduate school at MIT, I dropped the habit altogether. It’s been close to a decade since I considered the web as a source of entertainment during my work day.

Indeed, I’m so out of practice with web surfing, that I’ve found on the few occasions that I’ve recently tried to relieve some boredom online, I wasn’t really sure where to go or what to do. (Most of the articles I end up reading online are sent to me directly by readers, not encountered in serendipitous surfing.)

To illustrate this point, the image at the top of this post is a screenshot of my complete browser history for today, taken at 2 PM. (Note: I doctored the list slightly to remove redundant entries for a given visit to a given site.)

A Replicable Feat

Imagine what would happen to your efficiency and depth if you dropped all non-work related web use during your work day.

No clickbait. No Facebook. No blogs (except, of course, Study Hacks, which is immensely relevant to everyones’ professional success!) From my experience, the impact of such work day prohibitions is massively positive.

When you eliminate the chance of web surfing, you tend to be more efficient in processing your work. (The way I see it is that I’d rather finish my day an hour early than sprinkle an hour of time wasting throughout.)

Of equal importance, the simplicity of the rule — no web surfing, no exceptions — makes it easy to avoid this temptation when trying to work deeply, thus preventing unnecessary ego depletion.

Some might worry about the need to be in the loop. At least for me, however, this has never been an issue. As the computer scientist Don Knuth put it: “[Frequent connectivity] is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.”

To conclude, we’ve become so enmeshed in the attention economy that it can seem impossible to fathom leaving it for a large part of your day. But this is why I’m telling you my story.

It is hard at first.

But after a while, you don’t miss it.

Should You Work Like Maya Angelou or Eric Schmidt?

A Focused Digression

David Brooks’s most recent column ends up on the subject of geopolitics, but it begins, in a tenuous but entertaining fashion, with a long digression on the routines of famous creatives (which Brooks draws from Mason Currey). For example…

Maya Angelou , we learn, was up by 5:30 and writing by 6:30 in a small hotel room she kept just for this purpose.
John Cheever would write every day in the storage unit of his apartment. (In his boxer shorts, it turns out.)
Anthony Trollope would write 250 words every 15 minutes for two and a half hours while his servant brought coffee at precise times.

To summarize these observations, Brooks quotes Henry Miller: “I know that to sustain these true moments of insight, one has to be highly disciplined, lead a disciplined life.”

He then offers his own more bluntly accurate summary: “[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.”

Or, to put it in Study Hacks lingo: “deep insight requires a disciplined commitment to deep work.”

Keeping these insights in mind, now consider the following article posted on Time.com the day before Brooks’s column: 9 Rules for Emailing From Google Exec Eric Schmidt.

The piece offers an excerpt from Schmidt’s new co-authored book, How Google Works. Here’s the first piece of advice it offers:

“1. Respond Quickly. There are people who can be relied upon to respond promptly to emails, and those who can’t. Strive to be one of the former. Most of the best—and busiest—people we know act quickly on their emails.”

This juxtaposition represents a trend that puzzles me.

We know, as Brooks observed, that brilliant creative work requires repeated long periods of uninterrupted depth.

We hear often that brilliant creative work is incredibly valuable in our current business culture.

And yet this same culture ignores depth and continues to glorify connectivity (as Schmidt exemplifies).

(Some might argue that you can do both, spending most of your time responding quickly to communication, then carving out additional time to go deep when needed: but the research shows our mind doesn’t work that way; and most people probably intuitively understand this.)

To explain this trend, it might just be the case that in business, the impact of constant connectivity on one’s marginal productivity outpaces the impact of deep work.

But at the same time, if one is feeling a bit cynical, it might seem like a lot of this preference for connection over depth is due to the fact that although the Eric Schmidts of the world like the idea of creative insights, in the moment they like even more the convenience of getting a quick response to their messages.

And I would suspect that Maya Angelou was probably terrible at e-mail.

 

Deep Habits: Use Dashes to Optimize Creative Output

Obsessing About Selection

I’m currently trying to solve a fun problem that’s captured my attention and refuses to relent. Here’s the basic setup:

A collection of k devices arrive at a shared channel. Each device has a message to send.
Time proceeds in synchronized rounds. If more than one device tries to send a message on the channel during the same round, there’s a collision and all devices receive a collision notification instead of a message.
The devices do not know k.

In this setup, a classic problem (sometimes called k-selection) is devising a distributed algorithm that allows all k devices to successfully broadcast in a minimum number of rounds. The best known randomized solutions to this problem require a*k rounds (plus some lower order factors), for a small constant a > 2.

What I am trying to show is that such a constant is necessary. That is: all distributed algorithms require at least b*k rounds for some constant b bounded away from 1 (and hopefully close to 2).

The Dash Method

What I’ve noticed in my thinking about this problem over the past week or two is that at the beginning of each deep work session, I’ll typically come up with a novel approach to attempt. As I persist in the session, however, the rate of novelty decreases. After thirty minutes or so of work I tend to devolve into a cycle where I’m rehashing the same old ideas again and again.

I’m starting to wonder, therefore, if this specific type of deep work, where you’re trying to find a creative insight needed to unlock a problem, is best served by multiple small dashes of deep work as oppose to a small number of longer sessions.

That is, given five free hours during a given week, it might be better to do ten 30-minute dashes as oppose to one 5 hour slog.

My Experiment

So I’m going to try this. For the next week or so, I am going to limit my thinking on this problem to under 30 minutes at a stretch, and try to sprinkle such dashes throughout my week.

Of course, if I make a breakthrough in one of these sessions, I will then default to the more standard long stretches required to work through the tricky details of any such proof. (In other words, I want to make clear that the brevity I am pitching in the dash method is really only well-suited to this quite specific type of work.)

I must admit that I approach this technique with some trepidation. My main concern is that once the dash gets too short I’ll start to leverage the impending termination to excuse my tendency to sidestep the annoying math that is sometimes necessary to verify whether or not an idea works. (My mind much prefers “eureka solutions” in which the applicability is self-evident, to the point where it will sometimes ignore potentially good but hard solutions in hopes of a eureka lurking around the neuronal corner.)

We’ll see.

In the meantime, if you have a solution to the above problem, let me know.

(Photo by Kacper Gunia)

How the Best Young Professors Research (and Why it Matters to You)

Lounging in Lauinger

Today I spent the morning in the library. As often happens, I arrived with a specific book in mind, but soon a long trail of diverting citations lured me in new directions.

I’m a sucker for libraries.

One such happy discovery was the book, The New Faculty Member, by Robert Boice, a now emeritus professor of psychology at Stony Brook. This book summarizes the findings of a multi-year longitudinal study in which Boice followed multiple cohorts of junior professors, at multiple types of higher education institutions, from their arrival on campus until their tenure fate seemed clear.

(He also wrote a non-academic version of this book called Advice for New Faculty Members, which I haven’t read, but assume is similar in its conclusions.)

I was particularly drawn to his chapter on research productivity. It turns out that Boice hounded his subjects on this topic year after year. He didn’t trust self-estimates of work accomplished and instead required the young professors to produce newly written pages to verify progress.

After four years, only 13% of these professors had produced enough (and had good enough teaching evaluations) to make tenure seem highly probable. Here are some of the main differences Boice identified in the research habits of these “exemplary young faculty” as compared to their peers:

The exemplary faculty did not wait for “ideal” times to write.

As Boice explains: “waiting for ideal times such as binges induces more than mere uninvolvement…[i]t can also bring procrastination and dissatisfaction.”
The exemplary faculty instead maintained a regular writing habit.

As Boice explains: “[they] pay close attention to regiment…[those who] did not establish a regiment of writing regularly did not establish productivity.”
The exemplary faculty put thought into how to be more productive.

As Boice explains: “[new faculty] would do well to take more notice of knowledge, usually untaught in open systematic ways, about survival, including self-management.”
The exemplary faculty looked for outside help in improving their academic productivity.

As Boice explains: “The quick starters depicted here, unlike their counterparts, were proactive in soliciting collegial advice. They were quick to dismiss the idea that they had to figure out the subtle rules of productivity on their own.”

The advice in this short but dense guide is undoubtedly useful to people like me who are young professors hoping to inch into the exemplary category. But I noticed that Boice talked a lot about how his subjects struggled with both the autonomy and loneliness of their position — in which much is expected but little guidance is provided.

These seem like obstacles common to many entrepreneurial endeavors, which leads me to speculate that many of Boice’s findings should resonate well beyond the Ivory Tower. Put another way: if you replace above the word “write” with whatever verb captures the core value producing activity in your own entrepreneurial endeavor, Boice’s findings will likely seem suddenly quite relevant.

Deep Habits: Jumpstart Your Concentration with a Depth Ritual

In Search of Depth

Aaron is a PhD student. This requires him to spend a significant fraction of his time thinking about hard things.

To accommodate the necessity of depth in his working life, Aaron developed a ritual he uses to quickly shift his brain into a state of concentration.

Here’s how it works:

Aaron puts on headphones and plays non-distracting meditative music (this track is a favorite).
He launches FocusWriter, a stripped-down text editor that hides all the features of your computer (not unlike George R. R. Martin’s use of Word Star).
He loads up a template that contains seven questions about the deep task he’s about to begin. These questions force him to specify why the task is important and how he’s going to tackle it (see the above screenshot of the template taken from one of Aaron’s work sessions). The issues addressed in this template come from a classic Steve Pavlina post titled “7 Ways to Maximize Your Creative Output.”

Getting through these steps takes around five minutes. As soon as Aaron’s done typing in his final answer he turns immediately to the scheduled deep task.

The Results of Ritual

Here’s how Aaron describes the impact of this ritual:

“Every time I have done this (well, nearly every time) I [entered] a deep thinking phase quite effortlessly. I think the reason why it works is that the barrier to entry is quite small (filling out the template) and the returns (clarity on session objective, momentum) are tangible.”

Aaron (not his real name) sent me a note about these habits only recently, but the idea of a depth ritual is one that I’m encountering more frequently as I continue my research into the topic of deep work.

I don’t know exactly why such rituals work but it doesn’t surprise me that they do.

Achieving unbroken concentration is not like flossing — an action you can just choose to do — it’s instead a mindset: and a non-natural one at that! To slip into a state of depth, we need all the help we can get.

The Need for Ritual

Which brings me to my own habits. I don’t currently deploy a depth ritual, but I’m increasingly convinced that such a commitment would benefit me greatly.

Indeed, with this in mind, I experimentally deployed Aaron’s specific set of steps before I wrote the blog post you’re currently reading.

It’s now exactly 29 minutes since I turned on my computer, and I’m now about to hit publish on this piece which I wrote, formatted (including imaging processing), and edited from scratch all during this single session.

For me, these results are, for lack of a better word, deeply impressive.

 

A Personal Appeal

I don’t often allow my non-professional life to seep into this blog, so this post represents a rare violation of this habit…

This Saturday, I’m participating in a fund raising event called the Race for Every Child. My team in this event is raising money for a foundation started by our friends Gabi and John Conecker.

The Conecker’s son, Ellliott, was born almost two years ago (the same time as our son, Max) afflicted with a devastating genetic disorder virtually unknown to science. They soon discovered that families all over the country are going through something similar each year (c.f., this New Yorker article).

Their foundation helps raise awareness and more importantly fund research to better understand and treat these disorders. (The foundation directly supports the research efforts of a world class neurogeneticist at Children’s National Medical Center who is making real progress into understanding the impact of these mutations.)

Anyway, if this type of cause resonates, please consider donating something to the effort sometime between now and Saturday. You can learn more about the foundation and donate here.

If you do donate, please send me an e-mail at personal@calnewport.com so I can thank you personally.

If this type of cause doesn’t resonate, please disregard. We’ll return shortly to our regularly scheduled programming.

Deep Habits: When the Going Gets Tough, Build a Temporary Plan

The Temporary Plan

As I’ve revealed in recent blog posts, there are two types of planning I swear by. The first is daily planning, in which I give every hour of my day a job. The second is weekly planning, where I figure out how to extract the most work from each week.

These are the only two levels of planning that I consistently deploy.

But there’s a third level that I turn to maybe two or three times a year, during periods where multiple deadlines crowd into the same short period. I call it (somewhat blandly, I now realize) a temporary plan.

A temporary plan is a plan that operates on the scale of weeks. That is, a single plan of this type might describe my objectives for a collection of many weeks.

When a lot of deadlines loom, I find it’s necessary to retreat to this scale to ensure things get started early enough that I can coast up to the due dates with the needed pieces falling easily into place. If I instead planned each week as it arose, there is too much risk that I would find myself suddenly facing a lot of uncompleted work all due in the next few days!

Logistically speaking, I typically e-mail myself the temporary plan and leave it in my inbox. My general rule is that if a temporary plan is in my inbox while I’m building my weekly plan, I read it first to make sure my weekly plan aligns with the bigger picture vision.

A Temporary Plan Case Study

To help make this strategy more concrete, let’s consider a temporary plan I developed last spring to make sure that the papers I was working on for a May deadline would come together in time while I still made progress on some other efforts that also had looming deadlines. I replicated this plan below. (I added my commentary in square brackets):

DISC abstract registration is May 9th. Final submission is May 14th. Here is my plan until then…

[Note from Cal: "DISC" is the name of the conference I wanted to submit my papers to. (This is a good time to remind the reader that in computer science most publication activity happens at competitive peer-review conferences with submission deadlines.) I put the deadlines at the top of this plan so I wouldn't forget where I was relative to them.]

April 21 – April 27

Finish full technical draft of Radio Networks (including related work); double check relevant details with .

Big push on full technical draft of Unreliable Links paper.

Talk to about SDN paper.

[Note from Cal: "Radio Networks" and "Unreliable Links" were two papers I was working on for DISC. The "SDN" paper was not for DISC, but I wanted to keep it active.]

April 28 to May 4

Finish full technical draft of Unreliable Links paper.

Resubmit Wireless Survey as soon as that is done

Make PODC CR plan

[Note from Cal: These last two elements have nothing to do with DISC. But I needed to address them.]

May 5 to May 11

Go back and forth between polishing DISC papers and PODC CR work

[Note from Cal: "PODC CR" refers to the fact that I had to submit camera-ready versions of papers for another conference called PODC. It was bad luck that this deadline fell so near the DISC deadline. Most people would probably just leave the PODC CR work until the last minute, but my fixed schedule productivity commitment requires me to be more thoughtful about such efforts to avoid late nights.]

May 12 to Deadline on May 14th

Final polishes.

This is the place to really . Also a time to add  any

Notice, the plan is informal and concise. I just include a few sentences for each week, but a few sentences was enough to guide me through that month of work in an efficient and effective manner. I ended up making it to the relevant deadlines above without spending a single late night working and ended up with a nice result for these carefully scheduled efforts.

A Tool of Last Resort

I call this type of plan “temporary” because I want to emphasize that they’re short-lived and used only when the circumstances absolutely require them. To plan at this level regularly would be, in my opinion, overkill.

But when the going gets tough, I’ve found this bigger picture view to be an immense advantage.

P.S. I’ve been calling these “temporary plans” for years, but I do recognize that this is a terrible name. Let me know in the comments if you have a better term for them.

#####

My friend Chris Guillebeau’s new big deal book, The Happiness of Pursuit, comes out today. I’ve known Chris since the beginning of his blogging days and have always been impressed by his thinking. This book is no exception. His main thesis is that the pursuit of grand goals generates great satisfaction somewhat independent of the content of the goals. This is an idea I toyed with in Rule 4 of SO GOOD, but Chris takes it somewhere more concrete and compelling. He also lived it with his personal quest to visit every country in the world. Check it out…

 

John Cage on the Necessity of Boredom

Words of Wisdom

A reader recently pointed my attention to the following quote from the composer and artist John Cage:

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”

She thought I would like it and she was right. Cage captures something fundamental about deep work on important things: there’s a stage — sometimes a long stage — that’s tedious.

The good news, of course, is that over time, tedium gives way to glimpses of potential that then grow into something downright eudaimonic.

Once you recognize this reality, your potential to do things that matter is unleashed.

Deep Habits: Pursue Clarity Before Pursuing Results

Shallow September

I track my deep work hours using a weekly tally, so I have a good sense of how my commitment to depth varies over time. A trend I’ve noticed is that my deep work rate hits a low point around this time of year.

The obvious explanation is that the start of the fall semester adds extra time constraints. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. My deep work tends to increase as the fall continues, even though my teaching commitments also increase during this period (i.e., once there are problem sets and exams to grade).

In thinking about this mystery I’ve begun to better understand a crucial but often ignored aspect of working deeply on important things: the necessity of clarity.

My Research Cycle

In my life as a distributed algorithm researcher, I experience a rapid-fire set of important research deadlines that begin in the late winter and end mid summer. If all goes well, this period clears out my research larder, leaving me, by mid-July, ready to start a new research cycle.

This reality explains why my deep work dips around this period: it’s not clear what I should be working on.

When I have a well-developed problem, and I have a sense of what the solution should look like, and I can feel that my attacks are getting closer to the core: it’s easy to obsessively accumulate hour after hour of deep thinking.

By contrast, when I have only a hazy idea for a type of problem that might be interesting, but am not sure exactly how to define it or if it’s something I can solve: it’s easy to push aside deep hours for other more concrete concerns.

In the fall, in other words, I’m rich in haziness and poor in clarity.

There’s nothing wrong with this. All projects require this haziness stage. High output rates, therefore, will force you into this stage frequently.

Prioritizing Clarity

The conclusion I’ve been developing is that I need to think more systematically about minimizing the time to get from haziness to the level of clarity that accelerates depth. In more detail, when in a period of haziness, I’m becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea that much of the time that I might usually spend on traditional deep work (concentrating without distraction on a well-defined problem) will instead be spent trying to clarify hazy ideas to a point where such depth is possible.

In my particular line of work, the following activities seem to help:

Agree to give a talk on the topic.
Go visit (or invite to visit) a collaborator to bounce around the idea.
Setup a (bounded) series of meetings of phone calls to see if the idea can be kneaded into something pliable.
Read, read, read related work and capture the notes in an annotated bib (a tip that has arguably doubled my research productivity)
And finally, once ready, spend a half day or so trying to write up a problem document that captures a clear description of the problem, a collection of simple results, and a list of some next results that seems promising and tractable (this is like a business plan for a research problem, and usually something I like to develop before committing to long term time investment).

The specifics of these activities will differ depending on your job. But the big idea here is that by dedicating some deep work time to seeking project clarity (when projects are hazy), you’ll end up with more quality results in the long run.

The Nuanced Road to Passion: A Career Case Study

The Insult of Simplicity

There are many reasons why I don’t like the advice to “follow your passion.”

One reason I haven’t mentioned much recently is that I find its premise insultingly simplistic.

It would be nice if we were all born with a clear preexisting passion.

It would also be nice if simply matching your job to a topic you liked was all it took to generate a meaningful career.

But reality is more nuanced (as we should expect, given the rareness and desirability of the goal being pursued here).

In an effort to be more positive than negative, however, I thought it might be useful to provide a brief case study that sketches a more realistic image of how people end up with work that matters.

This case study comes from a reader whom I’ll call Peter…

Peter’s Tale

After graduating college, Peter, like many recent graduates, had no clear preexisting passion to guide him. So, like many recent graduates, he did something expected: he applied to law school.

At law school, Peter began to build useful skills. Among other things, he learned to write precisely, think analytically, and more specifically, to unwind legal statutes.

During his summers he interned at various organization. One of these internships was with a large NGO. He learned that the work of this organization (it’s a non-profit you’ve heard of before) resonated with him. Of equal importance, he learned that one of the divisions in this organization had need of lawyers.

So Peter worked hard during the internship and the remainder of law school (he claimed that his now battered copy of Straight-A helped him through this period).

This performance earned him a job offer from the NGO. He’s excited for the position which he is just about to begin.

It’s too early to tell whether this particular career direction will continue to blossom into a true passion for Peter, but there’s a good chance it will (I’ve heard this same opening act many times before).

What strikes me about this narrative is that it complicates the simple tropes advanced by the Passionistas.

Peter, for example, described his journey as follows:

“It really was a matter of following the path where I could build on my existing skills and had the potential to move towards some kind of mastery.”

He then added:

“When others ask for advice, they seem to want to hear the narrative about how I followed my passion, but that would be an enormous oversimplification.”

When it comes to the important task of build a meaningful career, I think we need to hear more from the Peters of the world, and less oversimplified cheer-leading.

###

Administrative Note: I did a talk for Jenny Blake’s Speak Like a Pro virtual conference. If you’re interested in public speaking you might find the conference interesting. I believe it begins today (Monday). Check it out…

(Photo by The Other Dan)