Cal Newport's Blog, page 50

Don’t Fight Distraction. Make It Irrelevant.

The War on Attention

My friend Dale (whose Ancient Wisdom Project blog you really should read) recently pointed me toward an interesting David Brooks column. In it, Brooks addresses the difficulty of maintaining focus in a distracted age:

And, like everyone else, I’ve nodded along with the prohibition sermons imploring me to limit my information diet. Stop multitasking! Turn off the devices at least once a week! And, like everyone else, these sermons have had no effect.

What’s interesting about this column is Brooks’ solution, which articulates a point that I firmly believe:

The lesson…then, is that if you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say “no” to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say “yes” to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.

This rings true with my research on deep work. Those who are best at this skill are without exception obsessed with something that demands sustained attention, be it chess playing, writing, or theoretical physics. These deep workers rarely seem worried about distraction because it’s simply not an issue for them.

A New Focus on Focus

Distraction, from this perspective, is not the cause of problems in your work life, it’s a side effect. The real issue comes down to a question more important than whether or not you use Facebook too much: Are you striving to do something useful and do it so well that you cannot be ignored?

David Brooks would wager (and I would tend to agree) that once you can get to a positive answer to this question, you’ll find your worries about distraction rendered irrelevant.

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I took the picture above in the woods near Georgetown where I like to go to churn on particularly knotty problems. As an interesting case study in the patience required for deep thinking, I originally posted the image back in January, where I talked about starting to work through an interesting but hard problem. Five months of persistent thought later, I finally finished the result. The deep life, it seems, is not a good fit for those who like immediate gratification!

Deep Habits: My Office in the Woods

Fashionably Deep

A reader sent me the above image. She implied that it represents a logical conclusion to my ever intensifying quest for depth.

I’m not there yet, but she’s not far off…

Case in point: I recently found a new hidden work location here on the Georgetown campus that I think trumps any previous spot I’ve found in terms of its ability to eliminate distraction and foster depth:

I hate to give away all my secrets, but the location of this particular spot involves the Glover park trail that abuts the western edge of the medical school.

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As an unrelated logistical note, my good friend Ramit Sethi is holding a webinar to explain what the hell goes on in that fabled Dream Job course he offers. If you’re interested, I believe it’s tonight (Wednesday, 5/28). You can learn more here.

Should We Work Like Novelists?

The Habits of a Writer

As I continue to clear out my queue after my end-of-semester blogging hiatus, there’s another article to mention that recently caught my attention. The fantasy author George R. R. Martin, it turns out, writes his books using Word Star, an ancient word processor that runs on DOS (see the screenshot above).

“It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn’t do anything else,” he explained.

Martin is not the only fiction writer with idiosyncratic rituals surrounding his work. Neil Gaiman, for example, famously does much of writing long hand, and Stephen King is very particular about his desk.

This interests me because fiction writers are the epitome of deep workers (to make any progress, fiction writing requires your full concentration), and many of them, like Martin, Gaiman, and King, seem to rely on unusual but well-honed habits to get them into this mindset.

A natural question arises from this observation: Should those of us who work deeply in other fields follow their example?

This has been on my mind recently. In my pursuit to improve my ability to work deeply, I’ve paid a lot of attention to issues like scheduling (e.g., blocks versus lists) and tracking (e.g., milestones versus hour tallies). Like many knowledge workers, however, I’m  haphazard about the physical details that surround this work. I don’t have a special location or special tools I always use. I don’t have a head clearing ritual or hike to a hidden glen to tackle my knottiest problems.

But the more I hear about the habits of professional deep workers like novelists, the more I wonder if I should.

One of my goals this summer is to experiment more with the intensity piece of deep work (as I introduced in a recent blog post), and working with depth-inducing  habits and rituals of the type described above should be part of this experimenting. With this in mind, if you’ve found any such behavior useful in your own (deep) work, let me know about it in the comments.

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Unrelated note: My friend Laura Shin, who writes from Forbes.com, and has been nice enough to feature me in some of her articles, just published an ebook, The Millennial Game Plan, which collects the best of her writing. She touches on a lot of issues we like to discuss here.

Why Didn’t Dan Kois Quit Facebook?

The Facebook Cleanse

Earlier today, one of the most read articles on Slate was titled “The Facebook Cleanse.” It was authored by Dan Kois, a veteran writer who reviews books for Slate and contributes regularly to the New York Times Magazine.

The article opens with the following:

“For years, I’d been frustrated that Facebook felt completely useless to me. The signal-to-noise ratio was way too low…my feed was overwhelmed by randos: publicists I’d met at parties years before, comedians with whom I’d shared stages in 2004, siblings of high school classmates, readers I’d friended or accepted friend requests from in hopes of Building My Brand.”

At this point in the article, I hoped (fruitlessly) that Kois would then reach the following eminently reasonable conclusion:

“Then I realized that I was a grown man and a serious writer and the fact that I was devoting any thought to this weird, juvenile ad network cooked up by a twenty-year old was ridiculous, so I of course quit.”

Alas: I know better.

Kois instead detailed an elaborate and time consuming routine in which he carefully culled, over many days, his “friend” list down to something that felt less useless.

Sigh.

Here’s the thing: I don’t find social media worthless, but I’m floored by its universality.

It’s not surprising, in other words, that lots of people like Facebook, but it is surprising that there are so few people who don’t.

Neil Postman warned about this in his insightful (but somewhat overlooked) 1992 book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. The danger is not when a given technology tries to take over our culture, he warns, but instead when we stop debating the incursion and just assume it’s necessary.

(To be clear, I don’t know Kois, and suspect he probably has good reasons to use Facebook. I’m just using him an archetype to drive this discussion.)

Richard Feynman Didn’t Win a Nobel by Responding Promptly to E-mails

Feynman’s Faux Irresponsibility

Around 38 minutes into the above interview, the late physicist Richard Feynman describes an unorthodox strategy for defending deep work:

“To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time…it needs a lot of concentration…if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everyone I don’t anything. If anyone asks me to be on a committee for admissions, ‘no,’ I tell them: I’m irresponsible.”

Feynman got away with this behavior because in research-oriented academia there’s a clear metric for judging merit: important publications. Feynman had a Nobel, so he didn’t have to be accessible.

There’s a lot that’s scary about having success and failure in your professional life reduce down to a small number of unambiguous metrics (this is something that academics share, improbably enough, with professional athletes).

But as Feynman’s example reminds us, there’s also something freeing about the clarity. If your professional value was objectively measured and clear, then you could more confidently sidestep actives that actively degrade your ability to do what you do well (think: constant connectivity, endless meetings, Power Point decks).

Put another way: if other knowledge work fields judged merit with the academic model, you’d probably find it a lot harder to get people to show up at your next project status meeting…even if you promised extra-fancy animations in your deck.

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Hat Tip: Eric S.

Work Accomplished = Time Spent x Intensity

The Straight-A Method

In the early 2000′s, I was obsessed with study habits. The obsession began with my interest in performing well at Dartmouth, then eventually evolved into a (surprisingly popular) book.

Something I uncovered during this period is that high performing undergraduates, as a general rule, seem to internalize the following formula:

Work Accomplished = Time Spent x Intensity

This formula helps explain why some students can spend all night in the library and still struggle, while others never seem to crack a book but continually bust the curve. The time you spend “studying” is meaningless outside of the context of intensity. A small number of highly intense hours, for example, can potentially produce more results than a night of low-intensity highlighting.

(This is how I avoided all-nighters, for example, during my three year stretch of 4.0′s as an undergraduate.)

From Campus to Corporation

I’m mentioning this phenomenon because of the following observation:

The above formula applies to most cognitively demanding tasks.

In other words, intensity affects the productivity of a knowledge worker as much as it helps the GPA of a college student.

An idea that’s gripped my imagination recently is that we’ve significantly underestimated the magnitude of this reality in our professional lives (I absolutely include myself in this plural pronoun).

Optimizing your intensity, in other words, might be more than a minor enhancement to personal productivity; it might instead unlock absurd rates of production.

I’m still gathering my evidence for this conjecture, but what I’m finding so far intrigues me.

(Here’s a taste: I recently interviewed a writer who published 1.5 million words last year, all the while writing only around 3 hours a day, five days a week. His secret: he systematically increased his intensity levels during these sessions using fine-grained metrics, ascetic schedules/rules, and aggressive environment hacking. If you want to see him in action, check out his upcoming kickstarter project in which he plans to co-write a book publicly in 30 days.)

In the meantime, it’s an interesting thought experiment to consider your own level of workday intensity, and wonder what would be involved in taking 2 – 4 hours of your day, and engineering your life so as to optimize the intensity of your concentration during these periods. What changes would you have to make to how you manage your energy, environment, or processes? What results might it produce?

As I attempt to devise a more coherent understanding of intensity management, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts or experiences.

(Photo credit)

Deep Habits: Using Milestones to Get Unstuck

In Search of Productive Simplicity

Last week, I described a kink in my project productivity systems. I was oscillating, somewhat haphazardly, between two different strategies, tracking hours (e.g., when the work is open-ended), and pursuing milestones (when the work is known and I need to hustle).

This felt too complicated, so I asked for your thoughts and you responded with over thirty suggestions.

A lot of your advice seemed to fall into the category of “different work requires different tools, switch as needed.”

This is probably good counsel.

But it still nagged at my preference for simplicity in such matters (which, as a theoretical computer scientist, I of course measure in terms of Kolmogorov complexity).

Then I got an e-mail from an academic in a field that also requires proof-style work (e.g., problems for which the process to completion is unknown in advance). He explained how he approaches projects:

Milestones for me. In [my field] I hit roadblocks and dead ends which force me to start over or take off in a different direction.

After asking him some clarifying questions, I filled in the details. When working on a complex problem, he would set a key milestone and attack it. If he failed to reach the milestone, he would then ask “why?”, and react accordingly:

If his answer is “I didn’t spend much time on it,” then he knows the next step is to put aside more time in the near future to work deeply.
If his answer is, instead, “I did spend enough time on it, but I didn’t get anywhere,” then he’s forced to either: (a) identify a brand new approach and tackle the same milestone again with this new approach; or (b) move on to an unrelated milestone.

To summarize, this approach focuses on milestones of the form “accomplish X by Y” (not hour tracking), but when a milestone is missed, it generates an immediate postmortem to figure out what comes next.

Once I understood these details, the full simplicity and power of this approach resonated with me. This academic was reacting to an important truth that I was overlooking: the difficulty of hard-to-predict processes — like solving proofs — is not just making sure you put in the time, but also making sure you don’t waste time stuck in a cul-de-sac (to borrow a Seth Godin term).

Stated more concretely: it’s likely way more productive to spend five hours each on three different approaches to a problem then to spend fifteen hours stuck on one approach.

This milestone-centric strategy is inspired by this reality. There are two reasons why it appeals to me:

First, I love the simplicity of using a single tool to unify how I approach the various important projects in my life.

Second, it resonates with my experience: if I fail to prove something with a given approach after, say, 5 – 6 hours, I’m likely never going to succeed with this approach. I either need to try something new, read something new, talk to someone, or move on to a new problem, keeping this one in the back of my mind in case I later come across a relevant new tool (a common trick of Richard Feynman).

I need to try this approach more extensively before declaring it successful. And it likely does not apply to many fields outside my own. But I thought it might be interesting to offer some insight into the meta-thinking that supports a lot of what I do.

More importantly, it’s a good excuse to bring up Kolmogorov.

Deep Habits: Should You Track Hours or Milestones?

Meaningful Metrics

Some of you have been requesting to hear more about my own struggles to live deeply in a distracted world. In this spirit, I want discuss strategies for completing important but non-urgent projects. In my experience, there are two useful things to track with respect to this type of work:

Specific milestones: for example, the number of book chapters completed or mathematical results proved.
Hours spent working deeply toward milestones: for example, you can keep a tally of the hours spent writing or working without distraction on an important proof.

In my own work life, I find myself oscillating between these two types of metrics somewhat erratically, and I’m not sure why.

A Hybrid Approach

Part of my confusion is that both approaches have pros and cons.

The advantage of tracking milestones, for example, is that the urge to achieve a clear outcome can inspire you to hustle; i.e., drop everything for a couple days and just hammer on the project until it gets where you need it to be. Sometimes my projects fall into a state of stasis where hustle of this type is needed to get unstuck.

The advantage of tracking hours, on the other hand, is that many of the important but non-urgent projects I pursue cannot be forced. I can commit, for example, to finishing a proof in a week, but this doesn’t mean I will succeed. Some proofs never come together;  some take months (or years); others fall quickly. It’s hard to predict. Tracking hours in this context ensures, at the very least, that these projects are getting a good share of my time, even if I can’t predict what will finish and when.

When it comes to productivity, I’m a big believer in simplicity. My oscillation between the different styles of methods described above strikes me as non-simple.

At the current moment, for example, I’m tracking deep hours on my key research projects (see the image above), but I also have a milestone plan for this work that seems to be almost completely useless. I think I maintain the latter because of an ill-defined sense that I need to add more hustle into the mix here.

When it comes to writing, I’m currently working on a big project (more on this later). I tried, but then quickly abandoned, an hour tracking approach to this work. Right now I’m having much more success hustling to hit carefully chosen milestones; probably because this work is more predictable.

I’m left, in other words, with a relatively confused jumble of approaches to keeping myself on track with big projects. I’m happy with the rate at which I’m producing, but I can’t help but wonder if: (1) I could be producing even more with my (well-defined and contained) working hours; or (2) if the scheduling and tracking of this production could be greatly simplified, and, in turn, simplify my life.

This is something I’m thinking a lot about recently. I’d be interested to know if you are too, and if so, what you’ve discovered works (or does not).

Would You Buy a Yard Tool if You Had No Idea What to Use it For? So Why Would You Sign Up For Snapchat?

The Amazing Roto-Mill

I’ve been toying with a (potentially) interesting thought experiment recently. Imagine you walk into a hardware store and a helpful clerk comes up to you holding a weird looking tool.

“Here’s our latest and greatest lawn care tool,” he explains. “It’s called a roto-mill. It has a reinforced auger head that spins at 1600 RPM.”

“Why do I need a roto-mill?”, you ask.

“I don’t know,” he replies. “I want you to buy it, take it home, dedicate a few hours every weekend to trying it out in your yard, seeing if you can find a use for it. Who knows, you might even find it fun.”

“But I have other things to do on the weekends,” you protest, “things I know are useful and things I know are fun.”

“If you don’t dedicate your time and attention to working with this roto-mill,” the clerk warns, “you might miss out on some benefit that we’re not thinking of now. I don’t see how you could afford such a risk in today’s age of modern yard tools.”

A (Contrived) Analogy

This dialogue, of course, is contrived, but you’d likely agree that if you were that customer, you’d walk out of the store, perhaps worried that the clerk was mentally disturbed.

What intrigues me, however, is that this is essentially the same conversation many have with high tech companies when they release their latest, greatest social media tools. If we replace the word “roto-mill” with “snapchat,” for example, the above suddenly seems more familiar and somehow less absurd.

But why?

I’m the first to admit that this thought experiment is not perfect: there’s money involved in buying a yard tool, but not so directly involved in trying an online tool; entertainment is perhaps not being valued fairly; etc.

But still, an interesting Monday afternoon thought…

(Image by Lance Fisher)

The Student Passion Problem

The Double Degree

A reader recently pointed me to the following question, posted on Stack Exchange:

I am studying a combined bachelor of engineering (electrical) and bachelor of mathematics; I just started this year and will graduate in 2018. The reason why I am doing double degrees and not a single degree is because I love both electrical engineering and mathematics and I could not ignore any of them. So with this in mind, I am thinking of doing two PHDs when I graduate (one in electrical engineering and one in mathematics). Is this a good path or I should concentrate on only one of them?

The responses in the comment thread for this question are fantastic, but in this post I want to add an additional thought to the conversation.

The Student Passion Problem

Over the past few years, I’ve been writing a lot about the negative impact of the passion mindset on recent graduates. The above question reminded me that it is easy to forget this mindset’s negative impact on those who are younger, especially students.

(Indeed, I was first introduced to the problems surrounding passion when advising undergraduates struggling with their choice of major.)

The above student is a perfect example. He feels compelled to maintain a double major (and perhaps even an absurd double PhD) in two hard fields, which, as I’ve argued here and here and here, is a recipe for unnecessary stress and burnout.

Why does he feel compelled to make this sacrifice? He “loves” both fields.

From an objective perspective, what does it mean for a second semester freshman to “love” electrical engineer or mathematics? At best, it means he enjoyed a handful of courses on the topic and/or thinks it sounds interesting.

To feel real passion for an academic subject, by contrast, requires years of honing your craft. Until then, you’re pursuing an idealized simulacrum.

The obvious advice to this student, then, is to choose one of these topics that interest him and then invest the time necessary to learn the craft and develop a true connection to the material. In fact, as long time Study Hacks readers know, this strategy of doing a small number of things really well is my number one piece of advice for college students looking to enjoy life and have interesting options after graduation.

But the passion mindset that dominates our culture corrupts this thought process. Because we’re taught at an early age that we have preexisting inclinations that matter above all else, it’s easy to mistake any idle interest or yearning as an obligatory pursuit — regardless of the consequences.

In other words, when talking to students about passion, it might be better to present college as a place to learn to develop passions, not follow ones that you’ve convinced yourself somehow already exist.

(Photo by JSmith Photo)

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Student overload is on my mind as I’m heading up to Middlebury on the 10th to give my talk on escaping the cult of overwork. If you’re in the area, I encourage you to attend.