Cal Newport's Blog, page 5

Heschel on the Joys of Slowness

In 1951, Abraham Joshua Heschel published a monograph titled simply, The Sabbath. It consisted of ten short chapters, comprising of less than a hundred total pages, illustrated with original wood engravings by Ilya Schor.

Early in the book, Heschel establishes the unique importance the Bible places on rest:

“It is, indeed, a unique occasion at which the distinguished word qadosh [a transliteration of the Hebrew term for ‘holy’] is used for the first time: in the Book of Genesis at the end of the story of creation. How extremely significant is the fact that it is applied to time: ‘And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.‘ There is no reference in the record of creation to any object in space that would be endowed the quality of holiness.”

As Heschel elaborates, this idea was new. In pagan religions, places were holy; a sacred mountain, say, or a deified river. But the Abrahamic faiths found something Godly in a ritual of rest amid the flow of time.

Even here, however, it’s easy to lose the core meaning of this scriptural wisdom. Aristotle identified rest as important for recharging in preparation for more work. As Heschel make clear, this is not at all the purpose of the Sabbath:

“The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.”

To Heschel, as for the many billions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who have practiced variations of this ancient insight, weekly rest is not about taking a break from the world around us, but instead about experiencing the joys of the world to come. It aims to makes the current moment more holy, not to render future moments more efficient.

These are heady ideas, but when viewed from a secularized remove they provide some useful insight into our ongoing discussion about slower notions of productivity. Work is important and good. (Did God not labor for six days of creation before resting on the seventh?) But it’s not everything. When slowing down the pace of our efforts we must, if only occasionally, sidestep instrumentality. Doing less should sometimes be about enjoying the beauty of right now.

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Speaking of slower notions of productivity, I wanted to thank everyone who responded to last week’s request to pre-order my new book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout. On the day of that announcement alone, we sold 800 hardcovers, and dropped the book’s Amazon rank all the way down to #54!

If you haven’t yet pre-ordered the book, please consider doing so. As mentioned last week, I’m offering a collection of bonuses as my way of saying thanks (learn more about pre-ordering and the bonuses here.)

I also wanted to announce an exciting new development: You can now pre-order signed copies of the book from People’s Book, the independent bookstore right down the street from my house. Even if you’ve already purchased Slow Productivity, please consider also ordering a signed copy as a gesture of support to local booksellers. Even better, if you live near Takoma Park, MD, come check out the store in person!

The post Heschel on the Joys of Slowness appeared first on Cal Newport.

My new book: Slow Productivity

It’s hard to believe that we’re less than two months away from the publication of my new book, ​Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout​, which comes out on March 5th. As promised by the subtitle, this book describes a groundbreaking new philosophy for pursuing meaningful accomplishment while avoiding overload, based around three principles that will sound familiars to long-time readers of this newsletter: (1) Do Fewer Things; (2) Work at a Natural Pace; (3) Obsess Over Quality.

It’s here that I want to straight-up ask you a favor: If you were thinking of buying the book anyway, would you consider ​pre-ordering now​ in advance?

(Pre-order numbers turn out to be really helpful for authors. The major retailers, for example, look at them to determine how seriously to treat a new title. They’re also critical for bestseller list placement.)

To help thank you for helping me, I’ve put together the following collection of bonuses for those who buy Slow Productivity in advance:

Chapter-by-Chapter Audio Commentary [released on publication date]: On March 5th, I’ll be releasing an exclusive chapter-by-chapter audio commentary for Slow Productivity, allowing those who pre-ordered the book to enjoy a behind the scenes look into my thought processes and the insights that shaped my writing of the book, as well as ideas and advice that didn’t make the final edit.

A Slow Productivity Primer [available instantly]: Dive deeper into the slow productivity movement with an annotated collection of my best writing on the topic from the past four years.

A Slow Productivity Crash Course [available instantly]: In this targeted video course I explain the main ideas behind slow productivity, detailing the three main principles of the philosophy, and providing for each a piece of concrete advice you can implement immediately. This crash course will allow you to begin to enjoy the benefits of this approach to work right away while waiting for the book to arrive.

In case you’re still on the fence, here’s what some other people I admire have been saying about the book:

“With profound insights backed by research, analysis, and examples from the lives of scientists and artists, Cal Newport explores a better way to work—one that promises more calm, clarity, and creativity.”

— Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project

“This brilliant and timely book is for all of us who’ve grown disillusioned with conventional productivity advice, yet still yearn to get meaningful things done. With his trademark blend of philosophical depth and realistic techniques, Newport outlines an approach that’s more human and vastly more effective in the long run.”

— Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks

“Slow Productivity is an opportunity to understand why we so often feel frustrated with the demands of the world we live in—and what we can accomplish if we choose to turn inward, once again.”

— Meera Lee Patel, author of Start Where You Are

“If you are stretched thin and having trouble getting everything done, you need to speed up, right? Wrong. In Slow Productivity, Cal Newport does what he does best, delivering counterintuitive secrets that just might save your career and sanity.”

— Arthur C. Brooks, author of Build the Life You Want

To secure your pre-order bonuses, simply ​pre-order Slow Productivity​, then follow the steps listed at:

​https://calnewport.com/slow​

Thank you for all of your support over the years. I’m excited for Slow Productivity to come out and am truly hoping it sparks a new conversation about the way we work.

The post My new book: Slow Productivity appeared first on Cal Newport.

On Slow Writing

Someone recently forwarded me an essay from a blogger named Henrik Karlsson. It opens with an admission: “When I started writing online, the advice I got was to publish frequently and not overthink any single piece.”

Karlsson was not alone in receiving this suggestion. As social media erupted into cultural dominance over the past decade, it carried in its wake a force that thoroughly disrupted written media: virality. An article or post that hit the Twitter or Facebook zeitgeist just right could summon hundreds of times more readers than average. Because it was difficult to predict which pieces might ascend to this cyber-blessed state, the optimal strategy became, as Karlsson was told, to publish as much as possible, maximizing the odds that you stumble onto something sticky.

What makes Karlsson’s essay interesting, however, is that he decided to test this hypothesis on his own work. “I’ve now written 37 blog posts and I no long think this is true,” he writes. “Each time I’ve given in to my impulse to ‘optimize’ a piece it has performed massively better.”

Using new subscribers as a metric of success, Karlsson calculated more specifically that spending twice as long on an article yields, on average, more than four times the number of new subscribers.

A useful way to approximate these dynamics is to imagine plotting skill level versus the number of people producing work at that level. Roughly speaking, the more time you spend on a creative endeavor, the higher the skill level you achieve, and the higher skill level you achieve, the fewer people there are also producing at that level. Spending more time, in other words, makes your work more valuable.

They key is understanding how fast this curve falls. In my experience, in many creative endeavors, it falls fast (to be nerdy about it, at least quadratically). If you double your skill, for example, the number of people producing at your level probably falls by much more than a factor of two. This helps explain Karlsson’s results. As he spent more time optimizing his essays, the pool of competition diminished rapidly, greatly increasing the value to his potential readers. The best strategy for growing his newsletter therefore became to write the best things he was capable of crafting.

This slow publishing approach, of course, does decrease your chances of virality. But for a writer, virality is not so important anyway. The temporary attention it brings soon dissipates, while the subscribers left behind have only a tenuous connection to your efforts. Meanwhile, a more languid but regular pace of really good work is a consistent formula for steadily building an intensely loyal readership.

The good news is that recent changes to the operation and cultural positioning of social media have greatly diminished its promise of virality. More creators are awakening to something like Karlsson’s realization. Speeding up in pursuit of fleeting moments of hyper-visibility is not necessarily the path to impact. It’s in slowing down that the real magic happens.

The post On Slow Writing appeared first on Cal Newport.

On Metrics and Resolve

One of the least understood components of my time-block planner is the “daily metrics” box that tops every pair of planning pages. Given that we’ve recently arrived at the beginning of a new year, an event that inevitably suffuses our culture with talk of reinvention and self-improvement, it seems an opportune time to look a little closer at this under-appreciated idea.

The mechanics of metric tracking are easy to explain. At the end of each day, you record a collection of symbols that describe your engagement with various key behaviors. These metrics can be binary. For example, you might have a specific symbol to indicate if you meditated, or called a friend, or went to the gym. If you engaged in the activity, you record the symbol. If you did not, you record the symbol with a line through it.

Metrics can also be quantitative, capturing not just whether you engaged in the activity, but to what degree. Instead of simply recording a symbol that indicates that you went for a walk, for example, you might augment the symbol with the total number of steps you took throughout the day. Instead of capturing the fact you did some deep work, you might also tally the total number of hours spent in this state.

The resulting information might seem an inscrutable cipher to an outsider, but once you get used to your personal metrics, they will provide, at a glance, an elaborated snapshot of your day.

Consider, for example, the sample “daily metrics” box from above. In this case, its terse scribbles might capture the following about the date in question:

You did not exercise (crossed out ex).You took 9000 steps (s:9000).You ate clean (ac).You spent three hours working deeply (dw:3).You read two book chapters (r:2).

The key question, of course, is why you should bother with this tracking discipline in the first place. Goal setting and time management are all prospective, in that they look boldly toward your desired future. Metrics, by contrast, are retrospective, merely leaving a record of what has already occurred.

This latter activity, however, turns out to be closely connected to the former. The dynamics at play here begin with motivation. In many ways our motivation centers are cruder than we like to imagine. You can tell yourself a complicated story about the importance of fitness in your vision of the life well-lived, but in the end, the desire to avoid letting down your future self by having to record that shameful crossed out ex metric might prove significantly more likely to inspire you to pick up the weights.

Once you’re making consistent and disciplined progress on small things that reflect your larger values, your identity evolves. You begin to see yourself as someone with discipline; someone willing and able to do hard things in the moment to obtain meaningful rewards in the future. It’s on this foundation that you will find yourself better able to stick with grander forward-looking goals.

Tracking daily metrics, in other words, is like a training regime for your will. Like many, you might be embracing the new year with a long list of ambitious resolutions. This is great. But perhaps before you dive into your big plans you should spend a month or two first tracking the small.

The post On Metrics and Resolve appeared first on Cal Newport.

Standing Up to Technology

In the fall of 2016, I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that pushed back against the conventional wisdom that social media was important for your career. “In a capitalist economy, the market rewards things that are rare and valuable,” I wrote. “Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable.” Aided in large part by an attention-catching headline — “Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It” — my piece touched a nerve, soon hitting the top of the paper’s Most Emailed chart.

This sudden prominence generated a fierce backlash. I was invited on a radio program only to be ambushed by two surprise guests invited to refute my ideas. A well-known communication professor began emailing me invitations to debate. One online publication described my call to use less social media as a call to disenfranchise marginalized peoples. (I’m still trying to figure that one out.) Perhaps most notably, two weeks later, the Times took the unusual step of publishing a response op-ed — “Don’t Quit Social Media. Put it to Work for Your Career Instead” — that went through the main points of my piece one by one, explain why each was wrong.

In my most recent essay for The New Yorker, published earlier today, I revisit this incident from seven years ago. As I write, my distinct impression of this period was that of being targeted by a cultural immune reaction: “The idea of stepping away altogether from powerful new tools like social media just wasn’t acceptable; readers needed to be assured that such advice could be safely ignored.”

In 2016, American culture was gripped by what the late social critic Neil Postman called a “technopoly”; a social order in which we fully capitulate to the technological:

“[In a technopoly] innovation and increased efficiency become the unchallenged mechanisms of progress, while any doubts about the imperative to accommodate the shiny and new are marginalized. ‘Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World,’ Postman writes. ‘It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.’ Technopoly, he concludes, ‘is totalitarian technocracy.'”

This was the setting in which my call to cut back on social media was so thoroughly and immediately rejected. It represented a glitch in the technopolic matrix that needed immediate repair.

The goal of my new essay, however, was not mere negative nostalgia. It goes on to highlight a more recent positive trend that has been largely overlooked: the age of technopoly seems to be ending. Increasingly we see resistance to the blind acceptance of all technological progress as inevitable, whether this be in the form of the Writers Guild of America banning certain uses of artificial intelligence in the creation of television shows, or the Surgeon General suggesting that maybe we should just stop letting kids use social media.

I recommend that you read the full essay for specific details, but my general conclusion is that a new, more critical engagement with tools that I call techno-selectionism is becoming more viable. As 2023 rapidly gives way to 2024, maybe we’ll see this new philosophy really began to spread. I’ll be doing my part to help it along.

The post Standing Up to Technology appeared first on Cal Newport.

Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet

Earlier this week, Neil Gaiman was interviewed on Icelandic television. Around the twenty-five minute mark of the program, the topic turned to the author’s thoughts about the internet. “I love blogging. I blog less now in the era of microblogging,” Gaiman explained, referring to his famously long-running online journal hosted at neilgaiman.com. “I miss the days of just sort of feeling like you could create a community by talking in a sane and cheerful way to the world.”

As he continues, it becomes clear that Gaiman’s affection for this more personal and independent version of online communication is more than nostalgia. As he goes on to predict:

“But it’s interesting because people are leaving (social media). You know, Twitter is over, yeah Twitter is done, Twitter’s… you stick a fork in, it’s definitely overdone. The new Twitters, like Threads and Blue sky… nothing is going to do what that thing once did. Facebook works but it doesn’t really work. So I think probably the era of blogging may return and maybe people will come and find you and find me again.”

In these quips, Gaiman is reinforcing a vision of the internet that I have been predicting and promoting in my recent writing for The New Yorker (e.g., this and this and this). Between 2012 to 2022, we came to believe that the natural structure for online interaction was for billions of people to all use the same small number of privately-owned social platforms. We’re increasingly realizing now that it was this centralization idea itself that was unnatural. The underlying architecture of the internet already provides a universal platform on which anyone can talk to anyone else about any topic. We didn’t additionally need all of these conversations to be consolidated into the same interfaces and curated by the same algorithms.

The future of the internet that most excites me is also, in many ways, a snapshot of its past. It’s a place where the Neil Gaiman’s of the world don’t need to feed their thoughts into an engagement engine, but can instead put out a virtual shingle on their own small patch of cyberspace and attract and build a more intimate community of like-minded travelers. This doesn’t necessitate a blog — podcasts, newsletters, and video series have emerged as equally engaging mediums for independent media production. The key is a communication landscape that is much more diverse and distributed and interesting than what we see when everyone is using the same two or three social apps.

This vision is not without its issues. The number one concern I hear about a post-social media online world is the difficulty of attracting large audiences. For content creators, by far the biggest draw to a service like Twitter or Instagram is that their algorithms could, if you played things just right, grant you viral audience growth.

Take myself as an example. Over the past fifteen years I’ve slowly built this newsletter to around 80,000 loyal subscribers who really seem to connect with what I have to say. If I had instead directed my energy during this period toward a social platform (which I somewhat infamously refused to do), I probably could have gathered ten times more followers.

I’m not sure, however, that I care. What exactly is a social media follower anyway? A couple years ago, for example, publishing houses began signing major social media influencers to book deals under the assumption that their huge follower counts would yield automatic sales. Things didn’t work out as planned. I think I’m happy with my 80,000 subscribers, many of whom I know by name, and who have been reading and commenting on my work for many years. It feels like a family while the social media influencers I know often experience their audiences more like an unruly mob that they’re struggling to pacify.

An online world in which it’s hard to be a superstar, but easier to find a real sense of community, sounds like a good tradeoff to me. I’m hoping Neil Gaiman is right that the Age of Twitter really is coming to an end, and that a return the quieter, deeper pleasures of a more homegrown social internet will soon return. I remember fondly read Gaiman’s blog during the early 2000s. There were no likes or virality, but I did feel connected to an author I liked. Can’t that be good enough?

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In Other News: On the ​latest episode​ of my podcast, Deep Questions, I take a critical look at the idea of “laziness,” exploring more effective ways of thinking about struggles to get important things done. (​watch​ | ​listen​)

The post Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet appeared first on Cal Newport.

Should This Meeting Have Been an Email?

In the context of knowledge work there are two primary ways to communicate. The first is synchronous, which requires all parties to be interacting at the same time. This mode includes face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and video conferences.

The second way is asynchronous, which allows senders to deliver their messages, and receivers to read them, when each is ready. This mode includes memos, voicemails, and, most notably in recent years, email.

Which communication style is better? This simple question requires a complicated answer.

The great advantage of asynchrony is its low logistical overhead. If I want to send you information or ask a question I can dash off an email as soon as I think of it, avoiding the endless phone tag or office corridor searches that might have been necessary in a previous era. As I wrote in my 2019 New Yorker article about the history of email, in the early days of office work the idea of practical and fast asynchronous messaging was commonly understood to be a potential “productivity silver bullet.”

The downside of asynchronous communication, paradoxically, is that it can become too easy to use in the moment. As I documented in my most recent book, A World Without Email, the introduction of low-friction digital messaging led workers to move many of their interactions into haphazard threads consisting of unscheduled messages bouncing endlessly back and forth between email inboxes.

This state of affairs required an increasingly large fraction of their workday to be dedicated to monitoring this messaging. (The modern office worker now checks email or chat once every 6 minutes on average). The cognitive overhead generated by all of this context switching is exhausting and makes people miserable.

Turning our attention now to synchrony, the great advantage of this communication style is its transmission efficiency. Real-time conversations are information dense, making it possible to convey large amounts of nuanced details or reach complicated decisions in relatively short amounts of time. A five minute conversation can often accomplish the same as a dozens of back-and-forth messages.

This information efficiency, however, is offset by logistical bloat. While it might be technically possible for us to solve a problem or clearly explain an issue in five minutes of talking, in the modern workplace this interaction will likely be scheduled as a Zoom meeting or conference room gathering that will be allocated, due to the constraints of digital calendars, a minimum of thirty minutes. Few professional experiences are more frustrating than to see your day eaten up by endless appointments rich in mindless small talk and stalling. “This meeting could have been an email!”, has become the exasperated mantra of knowledge workers lamenting their impossibly overloaded calendars.

Highlighting the interlocking pros and cons of these two different communication modes is about more than just improving our understanding of modern work. This specificity can also help identify new strategies that we might have otherwise overlooked.

Looking closer at synchronous interaction, for example, once we’re aware of its advantages and disadvantages, the relevant question now becomes whether it’s possible to leverage the information density of real-time interaction while avoiding the bloat induced by thirty-minute meetings. Stated this way, some obvious solutions emerge.

You might, for example, implement office hours. Announce a set period of time each day during which you’ll be available for synchronous conversation: your door is open, phone on, Zoom room activated. When someone tries to initiate a multi-message back-and-forth conversation over email, point them toward your next office hours. They can stop by for exactly the amount of time needed for you to reach a solution. Because the same office hours can be used to handle many different such interactions, the overhead-per-interaction averages out to something minimal.Similarly, if you work on a team, fix several short standing team meetings per week. Maintain a shared document that your team uses between these meetings to record any issues that need to be discussed. When you get to the next standing meeting process through these items one after another. This can save literally hundreds of distracting messages per week at the cost of only a small number of fixed calendar appointments.

Both of these example strategies allow you to harness the power of synchrony while avoiding its worst excesses. The goal is not to transform every meeting into an email, but to reduce the useful-to-fluff ratio of the meetings that do make it onto your calendar.

More important than these two specific solutions — which are just a couple among many similar ideas (see, for example, Amazon’s PowerPoint ban) — is the more general approach taken in this discussion. The impact of technologies on the way we work, live, and relate to each other are often complicated. We have to understand these nuances before we can hope to make meaningful strides toward gaining more control over our tools.

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In Other News…

Quick Note: If you pre-ordered my upcoming book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout (Portfolio, March 2024), hold onto your digital receipt. You’ll be able to soon trade it in for some interesting bonuses!

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The Quiet Workflow Revolution

Starting a few years ago, ads for a web-based software start-up called Monday.com began to show up everywhere online. A subsequent S.E.C. filing revealed that the company spent close to a hundred and thirty million dollars on advertising in 2020 alone, which worked out to over eighty percent of their annual revenue. By the end of this blitz they had generated more than seven hundred million views of their YouTube-based spots — an audience larger than the preceding four Super Bowls combined.

As I report in my most recent article for The New Yorker, Monday.com had good reason to make this aggressive investment:

“Monday.com claims to help knowledge workers collaborate better: ‘Boost your team’s alignment, efficiency, and productivity by customizing any workflow to fit your needs.’ This objective might sound dry in our current moment of flashy social apps and eerie artificial intelligence, but helping organizations manage their workflows has proved to be surprisingly lucrative. Trello, one of the early success stories from this category, was launched in 2011 as a side project by an independent software developer. In 2017, it was purchased by Atlassian for four hundred and twenty-five million in cash and stock. Another workflow-management service, named Wrike, subsequently sold for $2.25 billion. For its part, Monday.com went on to leverage the user growth generated by its advertising push to support a successful I.P.O. that valued the company at over seven billion dollars.”

This sudden shift in the business productivity market away from tools that help you better execute your work (like word processors and email clients), and toward tools that help you better organize your work, is important.

As I’ve long argued, one of the major problems in knowledge work is the haphazard way in which we organize our efforts, allowing the chaotic decisions of individuals to somehow aggregate into an ad hoc equilibrium. We give everyone an email inbox and a Zoom account, outline “clear” objectives, and then just tell them to “rock n’ roll.” The result is frenetic overload, exhausted brains, and, ultimately, burn out.

We can’t fix what we dislike about these jobs until we first get more specific about how they actually operate. And this will require clearly specified workflows. As I conclude in my New Yorker piece, if flashy new software services like Monday.com help push toward this realization, then we should welcome their ascendency.

“It’s in rethinking how we organize our work, not just in how fast we can accomplish it, where the real improvements are to be found,” I write. “Perhaps we’re finally ready to learn this reality.”

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In other news:

On the most recent episode of my podcast, Deep Questions, I shift my attention from the short-term to the long-term, investigating what habits you can put in place now to ensure you’re satisfied 5 to 10 years in the future. I also answer listener questions and discuss a new mathematical theory that explains how social media traps us in its misery-inducing web. ( Watch | Listen )

The post The Quiet Workflow Revolution appeared first on Cal Newport.

On Disruption and Distraction

Disruption and disorder have always stalked the human condition. This reality sometimes plays out on the grand scale, as in the brutality of terror and war, and sometimes more intimately, as in the sudden arrival of ill health or a personal betrayal.

Though such upheavals are timeless, our options for response have continued to evolve. The last decade or so has added a new, culture-warping tool to this collection of coping mechanisms: smartphones. Or, to be more specific, the algorithmically-optimized content delivered through these devices.

The techno-psycho dynamics at play here are straightforward. The algorithms that drive content curation platforms such as TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram are designed to increase engagement. This is an inherently interactive process: the services decide what to show you by combining what they already learned about you in the past with observations on what seems to be drawing more of your attention in the moment. In a period of disruption, this will, more likely than not, lead you deep into digital grooves that promise to offer some relief from your emotional pain.

This relief can be delivered by drowning out your pain with even stronger emotions. These platforms are adept, for example, at stoking a satisfying fire of anger and outrage; a repeated electronic poking of a psychological bruise. For those who were unlucky enough to wander onto Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the horrific terrorist attack on southern Israel last week witnessed this effect in its full unnerving power.

These platforms are also able to move hard in the other direction and serve up the grim surrender of apocalyptic narratives. This was made apparent during the coronavirus pandemic when many were lured by their phones into a sense of survivalist despair that left physic scars that persisted in constraining their lives well after the virus’s inevitable transition toward endemicity.

This relief delivered by our phones is not always about amplifying feelings. It can also be delivered in the form of numbness: drips of endless, meaningless, shiny, shallow distraction that take the edge off your distress. TikTok specializes in this style of deliverance: swipe, swipe, swipe, until you temporarily dislocate from the moment.

As we right now find ourselves mired in an extended period of unusually heavy disorder, it seems an appropriate time to step back and ask how well smartphones have been serving us in this manner. Has the escape they offered led us to a lasting calm or a sustainable response to our travails? Few believe they have.

In search of a better alternative, I reached out to my friend Brad Stulberg, who earlier this fall published a bestselling book, Master of Change, about how to navigate unavoidable upheaval. (You can also watch my recent podcast interview with Brad here.)

He told me that a more sustainable response to change can be found in your core values:

“When you feel the ground shifting underneath you, when you don’t know your next move, you can ask yourself, How might I move in the direction of my core values? … The portability of core values means that you can practice them in nearly all circumstances. Thus, they become a source of stability throughout change, forging the rugged boundaries in which your fluid sense of self can flow and evolve. Nothing can take your values away from you. They provide a rudder to steer you into the unknown.”

This is, or course, not a new idea. In response to the horrors of the Blitz, besieged Londoners famously found meaning in joining volunteer ambulance corps. Dr. King responded to his unjust imprisonment in Birmingham, followed by the public rejection of his cause by the Alabama clergy, through the careful construction of a manifesto, written surreptitiously behind bars, that justified his movement with inspired, mind-changing logic.

But even if not new, it has never seemed more important to remember this truth. Value-driven responses are not as immediately appealing as finding a hyper-charged digital escape, but these latter escapes inevitably reveal themselves to be transient and the emotions they’re obscuring eventually return. If you can resist the allure of the easy digital palliative and instead take on the heavier burden of meaningful action, a more lasting inner peace can be achieved.

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In other news…

In Episode 270 of my podcast, Deep Questions, I dive deeper into this topic of how “super distractions” like social media are so durable because of the associations we create between these behaviors and emotional pain. Building on this reality, I then offer concrete advice for finding freedom.

The post On Disruption and Distraction appeared first on Cal Newport.

On Tire Pressure and Productivity

The other day the low tire pressure indicator came on in my car. I didn’t see an obvious flat, so the likely explanation was some combination of colder temperatures and natural pressure loss over time, meaning that there was no immediate danger. Nonetheless, the bright orange warning light on my dashboard injected a steady dose of subliminal anxiety when driving.

So, as I was leaving my house this afternoon, somewhat late to catch a matinee showing of The Creator (which I had convinced myself was necessary “research” for someone who writes professionally about artificial intelligence), I decided to take five minutes to pull out the pump and add some air. Soon after I pulled out of my driveway the pressure warning clicked off.

I’m telling this story because of what happened next: I felt a short-lived but intense feeling of satisfaction.

Because I have a book on the subject coming out in March, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about both the promises and perils of “productivity.” It’s easy to dismiss interest in this topic as pure artifice, propped up by an exploitive “hustle culture” orchestrated by the logics of “late-stage capitalism.” Such sentiments, of course, are not entirely unwarranted as there are subtle but urgent truths buried within these general analytical broadsides.

But my experience with my tire pressure complicates the discussion. Our brains find deep satisfaction in seeing a problem, devising a plan, then witnessing its successful completion. We’re wired, in other words, to enjoy getting things done. To flee this impulse is to alienate ourselves from our basic nature.

Where does this leave us? It’s becoming increasingly clear that the right question regarding productivity is not whether it’s good or bad, as it’s both a reflection of our humanity and a target for exploitation. The better query is how we can more fully reclaim it — to build a life that enjoys the pleasures of accomplishments while avoiding the sting of overload and burnout.

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In other news…

Are you interested in a one-on-one conversation with me about any topic of your choice? You can bid on this opportunity between now and October 3rd at 9pm ET at the Authors for Voices of Color Auction. This is my third year in a row participating in this charity event as I feel strongly about the cause. Click here to see all the items up for bid and then scroll down to find my offering. Looking forward to getting to know some of you better soon!

In podcast news, in Episode 267 of Deep Questions I take a deep dive into why we’re exhausted at work, pointing to a perhaps unexpected culprit and using this explanation to identify some effective solutions. Check it out.

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