Cal Newport's Blog, page 53

Woody Allen and the Art of Value Productivity

A Tale of Two Productivities

As a graduate student I was known for being organized. I was reminded of this a couple weeks ago when I attended a computer science conference along with many of my old lab mates.

What I also remember is that I always felt indifferent about this reputation. To be organized is a nice thing. But it didn’t take me long at MIT before I realized it’s also unrelated to what matters most: the consistent production of high value results.

We don’t often talk about this division but I think it’s crucial. There’s a lot written about task productivity (the ability to organize and execute non-skilled obligations), but much less written about value productivity (the ability to consistently produce highly-skilled, highly-valued output).

As I’ve settled more into life as a professor, I’ve been increasingly fascinated with value productivity. It’s not that task productivity lacks importance — it has saved me much stress — but I think the value variety is what will rule in an increasingly competitive knowledge economy.

It is with this fascination in mind that I spent some time recently re-watching Robert Weide’s deep diving documentary on the life and habits of Woody Allen. When it comes to value productivity, Allen is an unquestionably good place to start. He’s written and directed 44 movies in 44 years, earning 23 Academy Award nominations along the way.

By watching the documentary with an ear for work habits, I picked up the following three ideas that help explain Allen’s astonishingly high level of value productivity…

Idea #1: Don’t Break the Chain

One of Allen’s best known habits is that he writes every day for a fixed amount of time. As he explained: “If you work only three to five hours a day you become very productive. It’s the steadiness of it that counts. Getting to the typewriter every day is what makes productivity.”

The flip side of this commitment is that he feels no guilt relaxing once he hits his daily quota.

Seinfeld calls this the “don’t break the chain” strategy — and it has a large following. In the past, I’ve been skeptical of such rigidity. Allen, however, might be converting me to this point of view; at least, for certain types of work, namely non-urgent, high value projects.

Here’s why: It’s easy to convince yourself that these projects have a high priority in your life while at the same time you commit a shockingly small amount of time toward their completion. This is a recipe for self-delusion or self-despisal (when you realize how little is getting done).

Allen’s approach solves both problems.

Idea #2: Be Bold in Conception, But Pragmatic in Execution

Allen is often bold in conceiving a project. Once he starts executing, however, his focus turns to doing whatever it takes to ship a finished product on budget and on time.

“You always set out trying to make Citizen Kane,” he famously quipped. “By the time you get to the editing room, you try just not to be humiliated.”

(This reminds me a lot of the publishing process. My books are always ground breaking. Then I have to write them.)

Allen’s balance is critical because it’s easy to fall too far to one side or the other. If you just ship for the sake of shipping, for example, you’re likely to end up producing an ever-growing mountain of mediocrity. You must, in other words, push yourself to do something better. At the same time, if you become too entangled in your own hype, you’re likely to fall into perfectionism — letting years worth of opportunities pass as you ponder your masterpiece.

Idea #3: Focus on High Return Activities, Not Twitter

Early in his career, Allen identified what activities generated the highest returns, and then focused relentlessly on these behaviors to the exclusion of most other distractions.

He writes scripts, for example, freehand in a home office on yellow notepads. Once the idea begins to gel he types a polished version on an Olympia SM-3 manual typewriter — the same machine he bought as a teenager when he first began writing gag lines for newspaper columnists.

By stripping down his work hours to the core elements, and removing from his life the often insidious question of “what should I do next?”, he’s able to extract a huge amount of value from the limited hours he spends each day writing.

But what about social media you ask? Certainly an entertainment personality needs a following online! Allen (and his 23 Academy Award nominations) disagrees. Forget Twitter, he’s never owned a computer.

Lessons from Rosie O’Donnell’s Ten Year Big Break

O’Donnell’s Ten Year Big Break

Last month, Rosie O’Donnell appeared on Here’s The Thing, Alec Baldwin’s NPR interview show.

The episode, if heard casually, gives the impression that her break was rapid and inevitable. As a high school senior, we learn, she wrote comedy skits for a school variety show. A local comedy club owner liked the skits and invited O’Donnell to perform a set. She killed.

At this point, it was clear that she would become a comedian. Her break came later when Lorne Michaels and Brandon Tartikoff (former NBC chief) happened to hear her perform at a club where they had come to audition Dana Carvey.

Tartikoff came up to O’Donnell after the show and said simply: “Hi. I want you to call this number at NBC tomorrow. We have a job for you.”

Television, then movies, then her talk show — it all fell into place after that key moment.

This is a classic big break. But if you listen closer to the episode it becomes clear that it was not out of the blue. While telling this story, O’Donnell, as an aside, clarified the timeline of that fateful night by noting: “[Remember that at this point] I had had a decade under my belt of doing standup, right?”

O’Donnell’s big break, in other words, was ten years in the making…

Competing Big Break Theories

If you study people with remarkable careers they often tell stories similar to O’Donnell: they begin with a long period of anonymous striving followed by a break then rapid ascent (see also, Martin and Schwarzenegger).

There are two interpretations of this trend…

The first interpretation says that lucky breaks, by definition, are low probability events. Therefore, you have to open yourself up to opportunity again and again and again before you can expect one of these low probability events to finally occur. It took O’Donnell a decade to break out, according to this theory, because the probability that Lorne Michaels and Brandon Tartikoff show up at your show is really low.
The second interpretation draws from career capital theory. It tells us that lucky breaks are essentially impossible until after you have developed a rare and valuable skill. At this point, breaks actually become quite probable, so long as you are doing the right things to demonstrate your skill. This theory tells us that it took O’Donnell a decade to break out because this is how long it takes to develop comedy chops. The fact that Michaels and Tartikoff wandered into her show is inconsequential. Once she was excellent, some event like that was bound to happen sooner or later.

The problem with the first interpretations is that it leads people to bounce from thing to thing, always hoping that something unexpectedly hits big, never taking the time to produce real value.

The second interpretation tells us to instead focus on whether or not we have crossed the break threshold — the point at which you are so good you can’t be ignored and a big break has become possible. It’s really hard to cross this threshold in most fields, and if you’re not explicitly pursuing this goal you’ll likely end up in a purgatory of professional but unremarkable skill, playing half-empty clubs, hoping that the right executive happens to walk through the door.

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An Administrative Aside: From what I understand, Google Reader no longer exists. This probably explains why my RSS subscriber count recently dropped by 20,000! If you’re an RSS subscriber, I’ve heard good things about Feedly. (My same RSS feed will work, you just need a new reader.) Also, I’m in the middle of a site redesign that will finish up in August/September. As part of this redesign, I’m launching an e-mail list that will allow you to receive my posts, plus some extra content, right in your inbox. Stay tuned for more details…

Why Did Most of Dartmouth’s Valedictorians Become Investment Bankers and Consultants? The Need for a Deeper Vocabulary of Career Aspiration

The Brain Drain

My alma mater, Dartmouth College, graduated five (!) valedictorians this year.

Dartmouth, of course, is not alone in sending a disproportionate number of its best and brightest to these narrow sectors. In recent years, to name an oft-cited example, Princeton sent 36% of its students to finance jobs while Harvard sent 17%.

There are many reasons proposed for this brain drain (whether or not this is really a “drain” is a different debate, though I tend to agree it is), including: prestige, money, the need to pass a new competitive admissions process to signal value, and psychologically-astute recruiting tactics.

I’m particularly interested, however, in an explanation offered by David Brooks in a recent column:

“Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options.”

According to Brooks, elite students assume their choices are limited to: (a) making lots of money in finance and consulting, or (b) saving the world by working for a boots-on-the-ground non-profit. [Stanford students, Brooks notes, get an extra option less popular on the East Coast: (c) starting a tech company.]

This rings true.

A Stunted Career Vocabulary

Something I noticed time and again when out talking about SO GOOD is that the current generation of college students has a stunted vocabulary when it comes to discussing career aspirations.

I’m not exactly sure why, though I hypothesize it’s some combination of the character-crushing competitive college admissions process (which most students don’t understand) and the dulling effect of the “follow your passion” culture. When college graduation looms, these students realize that they lack the mental models needed to develop a sophisticated vision of the role work can play in a life well-lived. So they fall back on simplistic heuristics.

What we need is more career conversations, started much earlier, handled with significantly more subtlety and intelligence than most 19 year-olds, or the career advice industry that caters to them, seem willing to pursue.

A Deeper Career Vocabulary

In an effort to begin a transition toward a richer vocabulary of career aspirations, I’ve listed below three issues relevant to career choice that any ambitious college student, confused about life after graduation, should spend more time trying to understand…

The Value of Craftsmanship. There’s a deep sense of satisfaction in the process of mastering a craft that produces things that the world values. There’s an even deeper satisfaction in subsequently applying this craft and receiving recognition for your competence. For millennia, human culture has understood and revered this value. Many different career paths can provide this return — if you know what you’re looking for.
The Importance of Lifestyle. What traits define, to you, a good life? Autonomy? Time affluence? Mobility and adventure? Connection? Influence? Impact? Students tend to place too much importance on the specifics of a job, as if there was a specific knowledge work pursuit hardwired in their genes. It is instead the general traits of their lifestyle that tend to bring people satisfaction — not specific jobs. How deeply do you understand what general traits resonate with you? This understanding brings great clarity to your path through the working world.
A Personal Ethic. Identifying your core values is important. But equally important is translating these values into an actionable ethic. As Brooks mentions in the column I cited earlier, too many students seem stuck with a watered down, college admission-style model of ethics, where doing volunteer work is sufficient to label your life as moral. Ethics run deeper. If, for example, you’re talented enough to graduate at the top of an Ivy League class, you need to ask: What is my responsibility to the world? What legacy do I want to leave behind? This doesn’t mean you must aspire to become the next Paul Farmer. On the other hand, it might mean that helping a hedge fund make a small number of wealthy people slightly more wealthy does not make the cut. (See Clayton Christensen’s recent book for interesting thoughts on this topic.)

 To summarize, what you do for a living is important. When you face this decision for the first (though certainly not last) time, you need to approach it with more than a slogan and a handful of cliches. This is a topic that deserves a deeper and more nuanced conversation.

The Courage Crutch: A Remarkable Life Requires You to Overcome Mediocrity, Not Fear

The Cult of Courage

The rhetoric surrounding career advice is saturated with calls for “courage.” Here are a few representative quotes I grabbed at random from the web:

“[S]ensational and successful entrepreneurs…had the courage to pursue what makes their heart sing.”
“As we move out of our comfort zones towards either accomplishing new things or approaching new levels of greatness, it’s normal to lack courage…”
“A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage.”
“In our day-to-day lives, the virtue of courage doesn’t receive much attention…Instead of setting your own goals, making plans to achieve them, and going after them with gusto, you play it safe. Keep working at the stable job, even though it doesn’t fulfill you.”

The storyline told by such quotes is simple: You know what career decisions would leave you happy and fulfilled, but “society” and “your family” are fearful, dull, stupid, and devoid of useful wisdom, and will therefore try to scare you out of following this good path. You must, therefore, build the courage to overcome their fear-mongering so you can live happily ever after.

The influence of this narrative, and the broader courage culture (as I named it in SO GOOD) that supports it, provides me a ceaseless source of annoyance. Given that it’s graduation season, and the topic of career happiness is therefore relevant, I thought I’d offer a few thoughts about why this trope irks me so much, and why you should treat it with caution.

Three Problems with the Courage Culture

Here are my main issues with the ideas promoted by the courage culture…

First, it’s narcissistic. The courage culture sets up a narrative where you are the noble warrior resisting overwhelming efforts to coerce you into conformity. It supports an almost conspiratorial worldview where unnamed forces are massed against your efforts to do something great.

The reality, of course, is that you’re not Frodo, and there’s no occupational Sauron to evade. No one cares what you do for a living. They care only about what tangible value you offer the world.

Second, remarkable accomplishments are hard, not scary. Almost without exception, building a remarkable career requires that you become remarkably good at something valuable. This requires time and is hard. But it’s not particularly scary. By the time most people are skilled enough to do something remarkable, the decision can seem more obvious than fear-inducing.

Consider, for example, the founding of Apple Computer. Steve Jobs took the plunge into starting the company because Paul Terrell placed a six-digit order for Wozniak’s remarkable Apple 1. When someone offers you hundreds of thousands of dollars for a product you designed in your spare time, you don’t need courage to start a company, you need, instead, the will to bust your ass (which is exactly what Jobs did).

Stephen King provides another good example. He wrote in his spare time since he was a boy. He didn’t quite his job to write full time, however, until after he sold the paperback rights to Carrie for $400,000. To quit a job that was paying him one-twentieth of that amount was an act of reasonable accounting, not courage.

Third, it’s insulting to people who know more than you about life. The idea that society, and, more specifically, your parents and community, are steering you toward unhappiness because of their stupidity and irrational fear of uncertainty, discounts the fact that their advice is drawn from many years of experience. They’ve lived longer than you. They’ve been through different careers. They’ve watched friends try different things. (If you’re an echo-boomer, they’ve probably watched friends try wild, outlandish things.) They have, in other words, many hard won data points to pull from when they offer their thoughts.

It’s possible, in other words, that your parents are discouraging you from quitting your job to start a blog business because it’s a bad idea — not because they’re myopic and meek.

Bottom Line

The courage culture paints a tempting picture of how people end up with remarkable lives. It tells a story where you’re the main character, fighting evil forces, and ultimately triumphing after a brief but intense battle.

The reality is decidedly less exciting. Remarkable careers require that you become remarkably good. This takes time. But not necessarily a string of defiant rejections of some mysterious status quo.

(The brevity of the courage culture’s recommendations are a big part of their appeal. It takes a few weeks of courage to quit your stable job to pursue something bold. Building a real skill, by contrast, takes a long time and is much less fun. We shouldn’t be surprised that people prefer the abridged version of this particular story.)

For most people who aspire to a passionate working life, in other words, the key is not overcoming fear, but instead overcoming mediocrity.

(Photo by Kevin Krebs)

An Animated Argument Against Passion

 

A reader recently sent me the following note:

I was a believer in “finding your passion” until I read your book.  It has freed me from the frustration and impatience bred from the continuous quest to “find the perfect job.”

Enlightened, I made an animation to share the idea with my friends.

This animated short is embedded above. I thought those of you who read SO GOOD would enjoy it.

Hacking Deep Work with Project Step Labels

Hacking Depth

The equation is simple: the more deep work you do the more new value you create. And creating value, of course, is the key to a remarkable life.

Acting on this equation, however, can be surprisingly difficult.

Here’s a simple hack (that came out of my recent anti-planning stretch) that has helped me rack up more deep work toward my computer science research: I append my list of active projects with a code indicating the next step I’m trying to reach (see the left column in the image above).

Having this extra column greatly simplifies my transition into a deep work mode, as my goal for these sessions is now simple: try to advance to the next steps on these projects.

This hack also works, in part, because specificity is crucial for deep work (your mind needs a crystal clear target before it will marshal the resources needed to go deep). It also works because the simple positive feedback (updating my board every time I move to the next step of a project) taps into our brain’s habit circuitry (c.f., Duhigg).

When it comes to deep work, there’s no magic bullet that will make it effortless. This work is hard. But hacks of this type can help keep these efforts from sliding toward impossible.

The Deliberate Rise of Stephen King

On Reading On Writing

Every few years I re-read On Writing, Stephen King’s professional memoir. It helps me reorient to the reality of becoming better at creative endeavors.

Here’s King, talking about his initial efforts to publish his short stories in magazines:

“When I got my rejection slip…I pounded a nail into the wall above the Webcor [phonograph]…and poked [the rejection slip] onto to the nail…By the time I was fourteen (and shaving twice a week whether I needed to or not) the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing. By the time I was sixteen I’d begun to get rejection slips with handwritten notes a little more encouraging.”

It would be another ten years before King sold his first novel, Carrie.

The obvious lesson of this story is that King wrote a lot before he became good. The visual of rejection slips filling a spike is vivid.

But there are two other important elements lurking, uncovered only with a deeper reading of On Writing.

First, King didn’t just write, he tried to get people to pay for his writing, by submitting it to magazines. The nice thing about money (as I elaborate in SO GOOD) is that people don’t like to give it up. Therefore, when you ask people to give you money in exchange for your product, you’re going to get brutally honest feedback.

Second, King was careful to always aim above, but just barely above, his current skill level. His first published story was in a fanzine — the 1960′s version of a blog. He moved from fanzines to second-tier mens magazines like Cavalier and Dude. After he cracked that market he moved on to top-tier mens magazines and top-tier fantasy and science fiction publications. Only once he could consistently hit those targets did he succeed in selling his first novel to Doubleday.

Let’s step back and summarize these key points of King’s training: lots of practice, driven by honest feedback and challenges just beyond his current skill level.

Sound familiar?

King’s rise to writing fame is a perfect case study of deliberate practice in action.

(Photo by snck)

Controlling Your Schedule with Deadline Buffers

A Hard Week

Last week was hard. Four large deadlines landed within a four day period. The result was a week (and weekend) where I was forced to violate my fixed-schedule productivity boundaries.

I get upset when I violate these boundaries, so, as I do, I conducted a post-mortem on my schedule to find out what happened.

The high-level explanation was clear: bad luck. I originally had two big deadlines on my calendar, each separated by a week. But then two unfortunate things happened in rapid succession:

One of my two big deadlines was shifted to coincide with the second big deadline. Because I was working with collaborators, I couldn’t just ignore the shift. The new deadline would become the real deadline.
The other issue was due to shadow commitments – work obligations you accept before you know the specific dates the work will be due. I had made two such commitments months earlier. Not long ago, however, their due dates were announced, and they both fell square within this brutal week.

The easy conclusion from this post-mortem is that sometimes you have a hard week. Make sure you recharge afterward and then move on.

This is a valid conclusion And I took it to heart. But it’s not complete…

The Deadline Banner

As I dug deeper through the forensic detritus of this brutal week I noticed that I could have made it less brutal. As deadlines popped up or shifted on my schedule, I dutifully updated them on my calendar. But in doing so, I didn’t appreciate the monumental work pile-up these shifts were creating. If I had noticed this, I could have invoked some emergency measures earlier to lessen the load.

In response to this revelation I am now toying with a simple tweak to how I use my calendar: the deadline buffer.

The idea is simple…

Any serious deadline should not exist on your calendar just as a note on a single day. It should instead by an event that spans the entire week preceding the actual deadline. (In Google Calendar, I do this by making it an “all day” event that lasts the full duration; e.g., as in the screenshot at the top of this post.)

The motivation behind this hack is to eliminate the possibility for pile-ups to happen without your knowledge. If you buffer each deadline with a week-long event, any overlap will become immediately apparent.

As a bonus, this approach also helps you keep these key pre-deadline weeks clear of excessive meetings. It’s easy, for example, to agree to a non-urgent interview months in the future. But when you see that this date has a deadline buffer in place, you become more likely to say, “actually, let’s schedule this for the week after…that week is going to be a little tight.”

This is the type of prescient scheduling you’ll appreciate when the deadline looms and you see before you a delightfully light schedule.

In the spirit of anti-planning, I don’t know how well this will work, but it’s worth some experimentation.

Do More By Planning Less: The Power of the Anti-Plan

Seeking Full Capacity

Since becoming a professor, my productivity (as measured by original publications in quality venues) has improved.

I’m happy about this fact.

But I’m also convinced that I’m still leaving capacity on the table. As my expertise in my area grows, I’m reaching a point where I have more ideas per year than I have time to publish (which can be frustrating). If I could increase my deep to shallow work ratio just a little more, I could, I think, close that gap.

Accomplishing this goal, however, has proved difficult.

According to my Monthly Plan archives, since September 2012 I’ve launched at least six different plans aimed at increasing my research output, with the goal of closing this final gap.

None made a major impact.

With this in mind, I’m taking advantage of the beginning of summer to try, as I like to do every now and again, the most radical of productivity plans — no plan at all.

Anti-Planning

I’m a believer in something I call anti-planning.

A normal plan requires you to figure out in advance when and how you’re going to accomplish important projects.

An anti-plan has you to throw out all such rules and just dive in, adapting, the best you can, to your circumstances. It requests only that you keep a record of your experience, capturing, for later review, your thoughts, triumphs, and frustrations.

(For this purpose, I like to keep a gournal — my word for an electronic journal based on automatically filtering Gmail messages, sent to a special address, into a journal label. See the screenshot above for my setup.)

The Anti-Plan Theory

The theory behind anti-planning is that it exposes you to a much wider swath of the productivity plan landscape. Your journal will keep you updated on how well you’re doing, which provides the selective pressure needed to drive you toward some novel approaches to getting more depth out of your working habits.

People sometimes worry that anti-planning will tank their productivity. The reality is usually the opposite: the flexibility and constant self-reflection tends to increase the rate at which you produce valuable output.

For these same reasons, however, anti-planning can be draining (all that reflection and decision making reduces willpower). So I usually only last a month or two before falling back onto a more structured set of rules.

The key, however, is that the system I end up after anti-planning is often more effective than where I was before.

Bottom Line

I’ve only recently begun my most recent bout of anti-planning, so I don’t yet have new grand conclusions. But even the initial reflections now trickling in are proving quite interesting (I’m starting to realize, for example, that deep work is deeply cyclical, and not something that can happen every day of every week).

In the meantime, if you’re frustrated with the effectiveness of your productivity plans, spend some time without one, and see what bubbles to the surface.

Louis C. K. on Career Capital

The Power of Diligence

The comedian Louis C. K. lives a remarkable life. How did he make that happen? Here’s an interesting quote from a recent New York Times interview:

There’s people that say: “It’s not fair. You have all that stuff.” I wasn’t born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by “new at it,” I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that’s in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

Notice his use of the phrase “horrible process” in describing his rise. This is exactly what is wrong with telling people: “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life” — you’re providing them a flawed description of reality.

Careers you love require a lot of work. Sometimes even “horrible” work.

You can’t escape the necessity of career capital…

(Hat tip: 99u)