Cal Newport's Blog, page 5

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.

The post On Tire Pressure and Productivity appeared first on Cal Newport.

On Tools and the Aesthetics of Work

In the summer of 2022, an engineer named Keegan McNamara, who was at the time working for a fundraising technology startup, found his way to the Arms and Armor exhibit at the Met. He was struck by the unapologetic mixture of extreme beauty and focused function captured in the antique firearms on display. As reported in a recent profile of McNamara published in The Verge, this encounter with the past sparked a realization about the present:

“That combination of craftsmanship and utility, objects that are both thoroughly practical and needlessly outrageously beautiful, doesn’t really exist anymore. ‘And it especially doesn’t exist for computers.'”

Aesthetically, contemporary digitals devices have become industrial and impersonal: grey and black rectangles carved into generically-modern clean lines . Functionally, they offer the hapless user a cluttered explosion of potential activity, windows piling on top of windows, command bars thick with applications. Standing in the Arms and Armor exhibit McNamara began to wonder if there was a way to rethink the PC; to save it from a predictable maximalism.

The result was The Mythic I, a custom computer that McNamara handcrafted over the year or so that followed that momentous afternoon at the Met. The machine is housed in a swooping hardwood frame carved using manual tools. An eight-inch screen is mounted above a 1980’s IBM-style keyboard with big clacking keys that McNamara carefully lubricated to achieve exactly the right sound on each strike: “if you have dry rubbing of plastic, it doesn’t sound thock-y. It just sounds cheap.” Below the keyboard is an Italian leather hand rest. To turn it on you insert and turn a key and then flip a toggle switch.

Equally notable is what happens once the machine is activated. McNamara designed the Mythic for three specific purposes: writing a novel, writing occasional computer code, and writing his daily journal. Accordingly, it runs a highly-modular version of Linux called NixOS that he’s customized to only offer emacs, a text-based editor popular among hacker types, that’s launched from a basic green command line. You can’t go online, or create a PowerPoint presentation, or edit a video. It’s a writing a machine, and like the antique arms that inspired it, the Mythic implements this functionality with a focused, beautiful utilitarianism.

In his critical classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued that the form taken by the technologies we use impacts the fundamental nature of our cognition. When we switched media consumption from long newspaper articles to television soundbites, for example, our understanding of news lost its heft and became more superficial and emotionally-charged.

When pondering Keegan McNamara and the Mythic, I can’t help but apply Postman’s framework to the machines that organize our professional activities. The modern computer, with its generic styling and overloaded activity, creates a cognitive environment defined by urgent, bland, Sisyphean widget cranking — work as endless Slack and email and Zoom and “jumping on” calls, in which there is always too much to do, but no real sense of much of importance actually being accomplished.

In Keegan’s construction we find an alternative understanding of work, built now on beauty, craftsmanship, and focus. Replacing everyone’s MacBook with custom-carved hardwood, of course, is not enough on its own to transform how we think about out jobs, as these issues have deeper roots. But the Mythic is a useful reminder that the rhythms of our professional lives are not pre-ordained. We craft the world in which we work, even if we don’t realize it.

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In other news: My longtime friend Brad Stulberg has a great new book out this week. It’s called, Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything is Changing — Including You. In my cover blurb, I noted that this “immensely wise and timely book provides a roadmap for a tumultuous world.” I really mean it! The idea of preparing yourself to thrive, and not crumble, when faced with inevitable change is self-evidently important, and Brad does a great job of delivering the goods on this timely theme.

Pro-tip: if you do buy the book this week, go to Brad’s website to claim a bunch of cool pre-order bonuses that he’s offering through the first full week of publication.

The post On Tools and the Aesthetics of Work appeared first on Cal Newport.

We Don’t Need a New Twitter

In July, Meta announced Threads, a new social media service that was obviously designed to steal market share from Twitter (which I still refuse to call X). You can’t blame Meta for trying. In the year or so that’s passed since Elon Musk vastly overpaid for the iconic short-text posting service, Twitter has been struggling, its cultural capital degrading rapidly alongside its infrastructure.

Meta’s plan with Threads is to capture the excitement of Twitter without all the controversy. Adam Mosseri, the executive in charge of Threads, recently said they were looking to provide “a less angry place for conversations.” His boss, Chris Cox, was more direct: “We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run.”

Can Meta succeed with this plan to create a nicer Twitter? In my most recent article for The New Yorker, published earlier this month, I looked closer at this question and concluded the answer was probably “no.” At the core of Twitter’s ability to amplify the discussions that are most engaging to the internet hive mind at any one moment is its reliance on its users to help implement this curation.

As I explain in my piece:

The individual decision to retweet or quote a message, when scaled up to millions of active users, turns out to produce an eerily effective distributed selection process. A quip or observation that hits the Internet just right can quickly spark an information cascade, where retweets spawn more retweets—the original message branching exponentially outward until it reaches, seemingly all at once, an extensive readership.

This cybernetic approach to selecting trends embeds a Faustian bargain: it will generate engagement, but this engagement will be inevitably biased toward negativity and rancor, as in the game of initiating information cascades, the more charged missives are more likely to succeed. Given the reality of these techno-dynamics, my conclusion is that Threads will not succeed with its mission. It can make its platform less angry by relying more on algorithms than humans to figure out what to share, but the result will be a more sanitized and boring experience, like a text-based Instagram feed, full of anodyne comments and bland influencer drivel.

In the second half of my piece, I turn my attention to the bigger question: should we care? In other words, is it important that the internet host a successful global conversation platform on which hundreds of millions of people gather to discuss anything and everything on a common massive feed? I’ll point you toward my full article for my detailed examination of this issue, but if you’re a longtime reader of my newsletter, you can likely already guess where I’ll end up.

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In other news: The recent launch of the new spiral-bound version of my Time Block Planner was a big success. The positive feedback I’ve been receiving has been gratifying. If you’re still interested in learning more, I want to point you toward this recent podcast episode in which I provide a detailed overview of time blocking and the new planner, and then provide some advanced tips for getting the most out of a blocking discipline.

The post We Don’t Need a New Twitter appeared first on Cal Newport.

Edsger Dijkstra’s One-Day Workweek

Within my particular subfield of theoretical computer science there’s perhaps no individual more celebrated than Edsger Dijkstra. His career spanned half-a-century, beginning with a young Dijkstra formulating and solving the now classic shortest paths problem while working as a computer programmer at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, and ending with him as a renowned full professor holding a prestigious chair in the computer science department of the University of Texas at Austin.

During this period, Dijkstra introduced some of the biggest ideas in distributed and concurrent computing, from semaphores and deadlock, to nondeterminacy and fairness. In 2003, the year after his death, the annual award given by the top conference in my field was renamed The Dijkstra Prize in his honor.

This is all to say that I was intrigued when an alert reader recently pointed my attention to a fascinating observation about Dijkstra’s career. In 1973, fresh off winning a Turing Award, the highest prize in all of computer science, Dijkstra accepted a research fellow position that the Burroughs Corporation created specifically for him. As his colleagues later recalled:

“[Dijkstra’s] duties consisted of visiting some of the company’s research centers a few times a year and carrying on his own research, which he did in the smallest Burroughs research facility, namely, his study on the second floor of his house in Nuenen.”

Dijkstra maintained an academic appointment during this period, but ramped down his involvement with his university so that he only visited campus one day per week, on Tuesdays, during which he would gather likeminded colleagues to read papers and discuss ideas. He even pulled back on the time-consuming task of preparing papers for peer-reviewed publication, capturing more of his ideas directly in hand-written, sequentially-numbered reports that he called “EWDs”, referencing his initials.

At this point, Dijkstra had become the opposite of busy. He spent almost all of his time thinking and recording his ideas. He only came to campus on Tuesdays. And yet, as Dijkstra’s colleagues noted:

“The Burroughs years saw him at his most prolific in output of research articles. He wrote nearly 500 documents in the EWD series.”

In this specific case study we see hints of a general observation about slow productivity. Busyness is not the engine of production. It can, in many cases, instead be the obstacle to accomplishing your best work.

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As you may have noticed, this newsletter took a little break over the summer, during which time I’ve been serving as a Montgomery Fellow up here at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. As the summer quarter winds down, and me and my family are preparing to move back from the idyllic Montgomery House here on campus to our home in Takoma Park, I’ve now restarted the newsletter, which should return to something like its normal rhythm of 2+ essays per month.

A couple quick administrative notes to share:

The second edition of my Time Block Planner is launching on August 15th. I’ll probably post more about it closer to that date, but I’ll mention now that the new edition has spiral binding (!), a beautiful new grade of paper, and an extra month’s worth of planning pages. If you’re already thinking about ordering one, you might consider pre-ordering it, as my editor warned me that once we sell out the first printing it might take a minute until we receive the next one (due to supply chain nonsense).We recently revealed the cover for my upcoming book on Slow Productivity, which is scheduled to come out in March. I made a conscious choice with this design to separate myself from the standard vernacular of business and advice guides and instead emphasize this book’s aspirational focus on crafting a more humane and sustainable life. I’ll of course be talking a lot more about all of this as we get closer to the release date next year.

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When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

In a recent article written for Slate, journalist Dan Kois recounts the shock his younger coworkers expressed when they discovered that he had, earlier in his career, earned a master’s degree while working a full-time job. “It was easy,” he explained:

“I worked at a literary agency during the day, I got off work at 5 p.m., and I studied at night. The key was that this was just after the turn of the millennium. ‘But what would you do when you had work emails?’ these coworkers asked. ‘I didn’t get work emails,’ I said. ‘I barely had the internet in my apartment.'”

In his article, Kois goes on to interview other members of Generation X about their lives in the early 2000s, before the arrival of smartphones or even widely available internet. They shared tales of coming home and just watching whatever show happened to be on TV (maybe “Seventh Heaven,” or “Law and Order”). They also talked about going to the movies on a random weekday evening because they had nothing else to do, or just heading to a bar where they hoped to run into friends, and often would.

The threads that kept catching my attention, however, were about work communication. “The very idea that, once work hours were over, no one could get hold of you—via email, text, Slack, whatever—is completely alien to contemporary young people,” Kois explained. But this reality made a huge difference when it came to the perception of busyness and exhaustion. When work was done at work, and there was no chance of continuing your labors at home, your job didn’t seem nearly as all-consuming or onerous .

There’s a lot about early 2000s culture I’m not eager to excavate, but this idea of the constrained workday certainly seems worthy of nostalgia.

The post When Work Didn’t Follow You Home appeared first on Cal Newport.

On the Slow Productivity of John Wick

I found myself recently, as one does, watching the mini-documentary featurettes included on the DVD for the popular 2014 Keanu Reeves movie, John Wick — an enjoyably self-aware neon noir revenge-o-matic, filmed cinematically on anamorphic lenses.

At the core of John Wick‘s success are the action sequences. The movie’s director, Chad Stahelski, is a former stuntman who played Reeve’s double in The Matrix trilogy and subsequently made a name for himself as a second unit director specializing in filming fights. When Reeves asked Stahelski to helm Wick, he had exactly this experience in mind. Stahelski rose to the challenge, making the ambitious choice to feature a visually-arresting blend of judo, jiu-jitsu, and tactical 3-gun shooting. In contrast to the hand-held, chaotic, quick-cutting style that defines the Bourne and Taken franchises, Stahelski decided to capture his sequences in long takes that emphasized the balletic precision of the fighting.

The problem with this plan, of course, is that it required Keanu Reeves to become sufficiently good at judo, jiu-jitsu, and tactical 3-gun shooting so as not to look clumsy for Stahelski’s stable camera. Reeves was game. According to the featurette I watched, to prepare for production, he trained eight hours a day, four months in a row. The effort paid off. The action set pieces in the movie were show-stopping, and after initially struggling to find a distributor, the film, made on a modest budget, went on to earn $86 million, kicking off a franchise that has since brought in hundreds of millions more.

What struck me as I watched this behind-the-scenes feature is how differently creatives who work in the arts think about productivity as compared to creatives who work in office jobs. For Keanu Reeves, it was obvious that the most productive path was to focus all of his attention on a single goal: becoming really good at Stahelski’s innovative brand of gun fu. Doing this, and basically only this, month after month, materialized hundreds of millions of dollar of profit out of the entertainment ether.

In office jobs, by contrast, productivity remains rooted in notions of busyness and multi-faceted activity. The most productive knowledge workers are those who stay on top of their inboxes and somehow juggle the dozens of obligations, from the small tasks to major projects, hurled in their direction every week. Movie-making is of course different than, say, being a marketing executive, or professor, or project manager, but creating things that are too good to be ignored, regardless of the setting, is an activity that almost without exception requires undivided attention. Are we so sure that the definition of “productive” that defines knowledge work really is the most profitable use of our talents?

John Wick may be shallow entertainment, but the story of its success highlights some deep lessons about what the rest of us might be missing in our pursuit of a job well done.

The post On the Slow Productivity of John Wick appeared first on Cal Newport.

The End of Screens?

Image by Sightful

Believe it or not, one of the most important technology announcements of the past few months had nothing to do with artificial intelligence. While critics and boosters continue to stir and fret over the latest capabilities of ChatGPT, a largely unknown 60-person start-up, based out of Tel Aviv, quietly began demoing a product that might foretell an equally impactful economic disruption.

The company is named Sightful and their new offering is Spacetop: “the world’s first augmented reality laptop.” Spacetop consists of a standard computer keyboard tethered to pair of goggles, styled like an unusually chunky pair of sport sunglasses. When you put on the goggles, the Spacetop technology inserts multiple large virtual computer screens into your visual field, floating above the keyboard as if you were using a computer connected to large external monitors.

As oppose to virtual reality technology, which places you into an entirely artificial setting, Spacetop is an example of augmented reality (AR), which places virtual elements into the real world. The goggles are transparent: when you put them on at your table in Starbucks you still see the coffee shop all around you. The difference is now there are also virtual computer screens floating above your macchiato.

To be clear, I don’t believe that this specific product, which is just now entering a limited, 1000-person beta testing phase, will imminently upend the technology industry. The goggles are still too big and unwieldy (more Google Glass than Ray Ban), and the field of vision for their virtual projections remains too limited to fully support the illusion of screens that exist in real space.

But I increasingly believe that Sightful may have stumbled into the right strategy for finally pushing AR into the mainstream. Unlike Magic Leap, the over-hyped Google-backed start-up that burned through $4 billion trying to develop a general-purpose AR device that could do all things for all people, Sightful has remained much more focused with their initial product.

Spacetop solves a narrow problem that’s perfectly suited for AR: limited screen space for mobile computing. Their initial audience will likely be power users who desperately crave monitor real estate. (As I learned researching a 2021 New Yorker article about working in virtual reality, computer programmers, in particular, will happily embrace even the most wonky of cutting-edge technologies if it allow them to use more windows simultaneously.)

This narrowness simplifies many of the technical issues that afflicted the general-purpose AR technologies developed by companies like Magic Leap. Projecting virtual screens is much easier than trying to render arbitrary 3D objects in a real space, as you don’t have to worry about matching the ambient lighting. Furthermore, the keyboard base provides a familiar user interface and vastly simplifies the process of tracking head movements.

In other words, this is a problem that AR has a chance to convincingly solve. And once this door is open, and AR emerges as a legitimate profitable consumer technology, significant disruption might soon follow.

Imagine the following scenario:

In the third generation of their technology, Sightful achieves a small enough form-factor and large enough field of vision for their AR goggles to appeal to the much broader market segment of business users looking for more screen space when working away from the orfice.Seeing the potential, Apple invests several hundred million dollars to develop the iGlass: a pair of fashion-forward AR goggles, connected wirelessly to an elegant, foldable base on which you can touch or type, marketed as a replacement for the iPad and MacBook that can fit in your pocket while still providing you a screen bigger than their biggest studio monitors.Spooked, Samsung scrambles to release a high-end AR television experience that allows you to enjoy a virtual 200-inch television in any room.Apple smells blood and adds television functionality as a software update to iGlass. Soon Samsung’s market drastically shrinks. This sets off the first of multiple cataclysmic consolidations in the consumer electronics sector. Within a decade, we find ourselves in a world largely devoid of screens. Computation unfolds in the cloud and is presented to us as digital projections on thin plastic optical wave-guides positioned inches from our eyes.

I don’t, at this point, mean this prognostication to be either optimistic or dystopian. I want only to emphasize that in a moment in which we’re all so enthralled with the question of whether or not autoregressive token predictors might take our jobs, there are some other major technological fault lines that are beginning to rumble and might very well be close to radically shifting.

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In other news:

Speaking of a potential AR revolution, I talked about Apple’s upcoming splashy entrance into this space during the final segment of Episode 249 of my podcast, Deep Questions .My friend Adam Alter, who I quoted extensively in Digital Minimalism, has a fantastic new book out titled Anatomy of a Breakthrough . Here’s my blurb from the back cover: “A deeply researched and compelling guide to breaking through the inevitable obstacles on the path to meaningful accomplishment.” Check it out!

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