Cal Newport's Blog, page 8

Your Work Matters. Build Your Schedule Accordingly.

About halfway through Laura Vanderkam’s sharp new productivity guide, Tranquility by Tuesday, we’re introduced to Elizabeth, an education professor who, worried about her ticking tenure clock, came to Laura for time management advice.

Elizabeth was struggling to find time for her research. Her husband and two children had followed her to northern Long Island to be close to the university were Elizabeth taught. As a result, however, her husband now faced an hour-long commute into the city each day, leaving Elizabeth with the primary responsibility for taking care of the kids before and after school. This created tight constraints on her available work hours, and the time that did remain was all too easily devoured by the demands of the classroom and teaching assistant supervision.

Laura asked Elizabeth to come up with a set of fixed time slots she could dedicate to research, to help ensure progress would be made even during busy weeks (longtime readers might recognize this as a variation of the autopilot schedule strategy). Elizabeth came back with the following options:

6:00 – 7:30am on Monday and Fridays, before her husband left for work.5:45 – 6:45pm on Wednesday night, when she had childcare coverage before a night class.

Laura knew these meager options weren’t going to produce a lot of new research. “You don’t need to be a professor to deduce how easily those three small spots could disappear,” she writes. With this reality in mind, Laura pushed Elizabeth to be more aggressive in carving out time for deep work. The result was the following more substantial schedule:

On Thursdays, Elizabeth arranged for their normal sitter to pick the kids up from school and stay with them until 5:00. Because Elizabeth doesn’t teach on Thursday afternoons, this frees up a five-hour slot she can consistently dedicate to research.Turning her attention to the weekend, Elizabeth arranged for her husband to take the kids from 12:00 to 4:00 every Saturday, freeing up another four-hour research block.

I know from my own academic experience that a pair of four to five hour chunks each week can really support some serious academic output. On the flip side, Elizabeth’s original proposal of three apologetic, short bursts, scheduled early in the morning and at the end of the day, wouldn’t have likely been that effective.

This example is important because it underscores a psychological reality of productivity that can be lost among all the posturing around systems and tools. It’s easy to feel like it’s impolite to prioritize work that’s important to you above other peoples’ demands. This is what led Elizabeth, at first, to limit her research to only the few scraps of time during her week that no one else had already claimed.

Sustainable production of valuable work, however, requires a dash of selfishness. Elizabeth’s revised schedule was exactly right. No reasonable person would find her investment in a once-a-week babysitter, or request for weekend dad time, to be excessive. These acts of self-prioritization were, objectively speaking, small. But they made a large difference in Elizabeth’s ability to produce the tenure-caliber work she knew she had in her. Your work matters. It’s okay to fight for it in your schedule.

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Laura’s new book will be released in October. She’s offering some nice bonuses, however, if you pre-order it now. (Learn more here.)

The post Your Work Matters. Build Your Schedule Accordingly. first appeared on Cal Newport.

Whitman in the Knapsack: Mary Oliver and the Power of Walking in Nature

Among those who find pleasure in cataloging the habits and rituals of prodigious creatives, the poet Mary Oliver is a familiar companion. Her commitment to long walks outdoors, scribbling notes in a cloth-bound notebook, is both archetypical and approachable.

This vision of Oliver finding inspiration in her close observations of nature, made as she wanders past ponds and through forest-bound glades, matches our intuitions about the artistic process. As Oliver writes in her poem, The Summer Day:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

We can also, if we’re being honest, imagine ourselves extracting a diluted version of this inspiration, if only we too could find the time to take our moleskin into the woods. It’s here, in other words, that we find a key piece to Oliver’s enduring appeal.

This is all preamble to my delight in being pointed recently, by a reader, toward a 2015 interview with Oliver, where she discussed the origins of her habit of retreating into nature to wrangle her muse. As Oliver explained:

“I don’t like buildings . So the one record I broke in my school was truancy. I went to the woods a lot, with books; Whitman in the knapsack. But I also liked motion. So I just began with these little notebooks and scribbled things as they came to me and worked them into poems later.”

Today, as in most times past, there’s a lot going on in the world, much of it distressing. We could respond by staring with increased intensity into glowing screens, hoping that the resulting numbness outcompetes the anxiety. Or, like Oliver, we could put Whitman in our knapsack, and head outside, slowly, into nature, with our minds as our only companion.

The post Whitman in the Knapsack: Mary Oliver and the Power of Walking in Nature first appeared on Cal Newport.

The Most Important Piece of Career Advice You Probably Never Heard

This essay was inspired by Top Performer, the online course about engineering a more meaningful and satisfying career that I designed with Scott Young. The new and improved version of this course will be open for new registrations next week. Find out more here.

In the spring of 2008, I published one of the more consequential essays in the history of this newsletter. It was titled: “The Most Important Piece of Career Advice You Probably Never Heard.” At the time, I was a doctoral student at MIT, still more than a year away from defending my dissertation. I was also, as I explain in the opening of the essay, about to attend my second college graduation in less than three weeks. As a result, my mind was mired in thoughts about career advice.

As I considered what I might write on this topic an insight struck me with a jolt of electric clarity. In the end, what matters is your lifestyle. The specifics of your work are important only in how they impact your daily experience. As I summarized, when choosing a career path:

“Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there.”

This idea, which I dubbed lifestyle-centric career planning, subverted popular advice from that period which tended to emphasize the importance of passion and dream jobs. In this widely-accepted schema, the full responsibility for your ongoing satisfaction was offloaded to the minutia of your professional endeavors.

This didn’t strike me as correct. There are so many other aspects of your life that matter in your contentment, including, as I enumerated in my original essay, the following:

How much control do I have over my schedule?What’s the intensity level of my job?What’s the importance of what I do?What’s the prestige level?Where do I live?What’s my social life like?What’s my work life balance?What’s my family like?How do other people think of me?What am I known for?

Confident answers to these types of questions might identify many different jobs that, if properly pursued, move you toward the life you desire. They can also help you direct the job you already have in directions that will provide you the most benefit.

The conceptual seed planted by this essay soon began to grow in my work. My very next essay, published three days later, was titled, “The Problem with Passion.” This was one of the first examples of me taking direct aim at the all-too-popular recommendation to “follow your passion.” But it was not the last.

Four years later, I published my first hardcover idea book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which explicitly rejected passion-centric career advice and promoted an alternative approach more aligned with the philosophy of lifestyle-centric career planning I had first sketched out back in the spring of 2008. It went on to sell 300,000 copies, and counting.

Two years after that, in 2014, Scott Young and I launched the first version of our online course Top Performer, which operationalized many of the ideas from that book. Eight years and more than 5,000 student later, we’re opening the latest evolution of this course to new registrations starting Monday, August 29th. It was this upcoming launch — one of many of over the years — that got me reminiscing about my long history with thinking critically about career satisfaction, and led me, eventually, back this pragmatic gem of an essay from all the way back in 2008. It’s sometimes the smallest ideas, articulated at just the right moment, that end up most changing the trajectory of your life.

The post The Most Important Piece of Career Advice You Probably Never Heard first appeared on Cal Newport.

New Study Confirms the Value of Solitude

 

In my book Digital Minimalism, I emphasized the danger of a newly-emerged condition that I called “solitude deprivation.” As I wrote, the introduction of the smartphone caused our relationship with distraction to mutate into something new:

“At the slightest hint of boredom, you can now surreptitiously glance at any number of apps or mobile-adapted websites that have been optimized to provide you an immediate and satisfying dose of input from other minds. It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life.”

I went on to argue that this condition was worrisome. Us humans evolved to experience significant amounts of time alone with our own thoughts. Remove this solitude from our lives and we’re not only bound to get twitchy and anxious, but we miss out on much of the subtle but deep value generated by a wandering mind.

A new paper, published by researchers at the University of Tübingen, and appearing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, provides some support for these claims. “Psychologists who studied a group of more than 250 people encouraged to engage in directionless contemplation or free-floating thinking,” summarizes The Guardian, “said that the activity was far more satisfying than the participants had anticipated.”

Furthermore, the paper reports benefits to losing yourself in thought, finding that this state can “aid problem solving, increase creativity, enhance the imagination and contribute to a sense of self-worth.”

Kou Murayama, the lead author of the study, noted that the subjects underestimated the value of contemplation, and in many cases worried that this activity would be a negative experience. They often preferred the easy distraction provided by technology such as smartphones. “This could explain why people prefer to keep busy rather than to enjoy a moment of reflection or letting their imagination run away with itself in their everyday lives,” he concluded.

These results do a good job of summarizing our current troubled relationship with our own minds. We fear solitude, but it’s exactly this time alone with our own thoughts that we need to make sense of our experiences and grow as humans. TikTok is fun, but grappling with the core questions of our existence is fundamental.

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This week on Deep Questions: In episode 208 of my podcast, posted earlier today, I tackle my problem with task lists, the liminal space between deep and shallow work, and the anxiety of not making enough progress on your goals. You can watch the full episode on YouTube or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

The post New Study Confirms the Value of Solitude first appeared on Cal Newport.

TikTok’s Poison Pill

Just a few months ago, it seemed that the biggest social media news of the year would be Elon Musk’s flirtations with buying Twitter (see, for example, my article from May). Recently, however, a new story has sucked up an increasing amount of oxygen from this space: TikTok’s challenge to the legacy social platforms.

Last February, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, released a quarterly report that revealed user growth had stalled. Analysts were quick to attribute this slow down, in part, to fierce competition from TikTok, which had recently blasted past the billion user mark. The valuation of Meta plummeted by over $200 billion in a single day.

Forced by investor pressure to respond, Meta began a sudden shift in its products’ features that moved them closer to the purified algorithmic distraction offered by its upstart rival. This spring, a leaked memo revealed Facebook’s plan to focus more on short videos and make recommendations “unconnected” to accounts that a user has already friended or followed. More recently, Instagram began experimenting with a TikTok-style full screen display, and has emphasized algorithmically-curated videos at the expense of photos shared by accounts the user follows.

From a short-term business perspective, these might seem like necessary changes. But as I argued in my most recent article for The New Yorker, published last week, the decision by companies like Facebook and Instagram to become more like TikTok could mark the beginning of their end.

The problem comes from their underlying business models. The social media giants of the last decade have cemented a pseudo-monopolistic position in the internet marketplace because they serve content based on massive social graphs, constructed in a distributed fashion by their users, one friend or follow request at a time. It’s too late now for a new service to build up a network of sufficient influence and complexity to compete with these legacy topologies.

TikTok, by contrast, doesn’t depend on this type of painstakingly accumulated social data. It instead deploys a simple but brutally effective machine learning loop onto the pool of all available videos on its platform. By observing the viewing behavior of individual users, this loop can quickly determine exactly which videos will most engage them; no friends, retweets, shares, or favorites required. The value of the TikTok experience is instead created by a unique dyadic mind meld between each user and the algorithm.

If platforms like Facebook and Instagram abandon their social graphs to pursue this cybernetic TikTok model, they’ll lose their competitive advantage. Subject, all at once, to the fierce competitive pressures of the mobile attention economy, it’s unclear whether they can survive without this protection.

As I argue in my article:

“This all points to a possible future in which social-media giants like Facebook may soon be past their long stretch of dominance. They’ll continue to chase new engagement models, leaving behind the protection of their social graphs, and in doing so eventually succumb to the new competitive pressures this introduces. TikTok, of course, is subject to these same pressures, so in this future it, too, will eventually fade. The app’s energetic embrace of shallowness makes it more likely, in the long term, to become the answer to a trivia question than a sustained cultural force. In the wake churned by these sinkings will arise new entertainments and new models for distraction, but also innovative new apps and methods for expression and interaction.”

In this prediction, I find optimism. If TikTok acts as the poison pill that finally cripples the digital dictators that for so long subjugated the web 2.0 revolution, we just might be left with more breathing room for smaller, more authentic, more human online engagements. “In the end, TikTok’s biggest legacy might be less about its current moment of world-conquering success, which will pass,” I conclude. “And more about how, by forcing social-media giants like Facebook to chase its model, it will end up liberating the social Internet.”

This future is far from guaranteed. But let’s hope it’s true…

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LBJ’s Poolside Phone and the Connectivity Revolution

A reader named Peter recently sent me a perceptive note. He had just returned from a visit to Austin, where he had visited the LBJ Ranch, now operated as national historical site, located about 50 miles west of the city in the Texas Hill Country.

As Peter recalled, during the tour, the guide emphasized that as president, Lyndon Johnson was so obsessed with connectivity that he had a telephone installed beside his pool. “Everyone in the tour group laughed,” wrote Peter. But as he then correctly pointed out, this collective mirth may have been hasty.

In an age of smartphones, everyone has access to a phone by the pool. Also in the bathroom. And in the car. And in every store, and on every street, and basically every waking moment of their lives. The average teenager with a iPhone today is vastly more connected than the leader of the free world sixty years ago.

I thought this was a good reminder of the head-spinning speed with which the connectivity revolution entangled us in its whirlwind advance. We haven’t even begun to seriously consider the impact of these changes, or how us comparably slow-adapting humans must now adjust. Be wary of those who embrace our current moment as an optimal and natural evolution of our species’ relationship with technology. We still have a lot of work ahead of us to figure out what exactly we want. After sufficient reflection, it might even turn out that taking a call by the pool, LBJ style, isn’t as essential as we might have once imagined.

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The 3-Hour Fields Medal: A Slow Productivity Case Study

Earlier today, June Huh, a 39-year-old Princeton professor, was awarded the 2022 Fields Medal, one of the highest possible honors in mathematics, for his breakthrough work on geometric combinatorics.

As described in a recent profile of Huh, published in Quanta Magazine (and sent to me by several alert readers), Huh’s path to academic mathematics was meandering. He didn’t get serious about the subject until his final year at Seoul National University, when he enrolled in a class taught by Heisuke Hironaka, a charismatic Japanese mathematician who had himself won a Fields back in 1970.

Given his recent conversion to the mathematical arts, Huh was only accepted at one of the dozen graduate schools to which he applied. It didn’t take long, however, for him to stand out. As a beginning student, Huh managed to solve Read’s conjecture, a long-standing open problem concerning the coefficients of polynomial bounds on the chromatic number of graphs. The University of Michigan, which had previously rejected Huh’s graduate school application, soon recruited him as a transfer student. Along with his collaborators, Huh generalized the approach he innovated to tackle Read’s conjecture to prove similar properties for a much broader class of objects called matroids. The new result stunned the mathematics community. “It’s pretty remarkable that it works,” said Matthew Baker, a respected expert on the topic.

The reason so many readers sent me the Quanta profile of Huh, however, was not because of its descriptions of his mathematical genius, but instead because of the details it shares about how Huh structures his deep efforts:

“On any given day, Huh does about three hours of focused work. He might think about a math problem, or prepare to lecture a classroom of students, or schedule doctor’s appointments for his two sons. ‘Then I’m exhausted,’ he said. ‘Doing something that’s valuable, meaningful, creative’ — or a task that he doesn’t particularly want to do, like scheduling those appointments — ‘takes away a lot of your energy.'”

One of the core principles of my emerging philosophy of slow productivity is that busyness and exhaustion are often unrelated to the task of producing meaningful results. When zoomed in close, three hours of work per day seems painfully, almost artificially slow — an impossibly small amount of  time to get things done. Zoom out to the larger scale of years, however, and suddenly June Huh emerges as one of the most, for lack of a better term, productive mathematical minds of his generation.

The post The 3-Hour Fields Medal: A Slow Productivity Case Study first appeared on Cal Newport.

On Wendell Berry’s Move from NYU to a Riverside Cabin

In my previous essay, I wrote about how novelist Jack Carr rented a rustic cabin to help focus his attention on completing his latest James Reece thriller. This talk of writing retreats got me thinking again about what’s arguably my favorite example from this particular genre of aspirational day dreaming: Wendell Berry’s “camp” on the Kentucky River.

In February, Dorothy Wickenden, whose father Dan Wickenden was Berry’s original editor at Harcourt Brace, featured Berry’s camp in a lengthy New Yorker profile of the now 87-year old writer, farmer, and activist. Berry brought Wickenden to a twelve-by-sixteen foot one-room structure, raised on concrete pilings high on the sloped bank of the river, only on the condition that she not reveal its exact location.

In the summer of 1963, Berry, all of twenty-nine, and just a few years into a professorship at New York University, built the current cabin on the same site where his great-great-great grandfather, Ben Perry, one of the first settlers in the valley, had long ago erected a log house. Berry remembered the location from his childhood. As Wickenden explains, Berry returned that summer to build an escape where he could “write, read, and contemplate the legacies of his forebears, and what inheritance he might leave behind.”

What struck me as I returned to this story were the unremarked implications of its timing. Berry supposedly built the cabin in the summer of 1963, but didn’t announce his resignation from NYU and move to Kentucky until 1964. Though I can’t confirm these details, I like to imagine Berry returning to New York from his summer retreat, with the attraction of the deep contemplation available on the quiet shores of the Kentucky River gnawing at his attention, stirring something within — until, finally, he cracked, and decided it was time to move home.

Regardless of the details of Berry’s motivation, it’s hard, in hindsight to question the decision, as he ended up writing fifty-two books in that humble room, and becoming one of the twentieth century’s most influential voices on sustainability and rural living.

Sometimes we retreat to the proverbial cabin to support deep work already under way. Other times, we build the cabin first, and then let its charms convince us to get started.

The post On Wendell Berry’s Move from NYU to a Riverside Cabin first appeared on Cal Newport.

Jack Carr’s Writing Cabin

Last spring, I wrote an essay for The New Yorker about a notable habit common to professional authors: their tendency to write in strange places. Even when they have beautifully-appointed home offices, a lot of authors will retreat to eccentric locations near their homes to ply their trade.

In my piece, for example, I talked about Maya Angelou writing on legal pads while propped up on her elbow on the bed in anonymous hotel rooms. Peter Benchley left his bucolic carriage house on a half-acre of land to work in the backroom of a furnace supply and repair shop, while John Steinbeck, perhaps pushing this concept to an extreme, would lug a portable desk onto an old fishing boat which he would drive out into the middle of Sag Harbor.

My argument was that authors like Angelou, Benchley, and Steinbeck weren’t seeking pleasing aesthetics or peace (furnace repair is loud). They were instead trying to escape cognitive capture. “The home is filled with the familiar,” I wrote, “and the familiar snares our attention, destabilizing the subtle neuronal dance required to think clearly.”

Anyway, this is all just preface to me reporting that I recently stumbled across another nice example of this work from near home phenomenon.  It came in an episode of Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic podcast featuring the bestselling novelist Jack Carr talking about his latest James Reece thriller, In the Blood. For our purposes, it’s important to know that Carr has a beautiful home in Park City, Utah, which, based on photos he’s shared on social media, includes idyllic spaces to write; e.g.:

And yet, at roughly the 16:30 mark of the podcast interview, Carr reveals that in order to help focus while working on In the Blood, he ended up renting a rustic cabin across town, where he would chop wood to feed the stove, and write at a simple table.

Home is where the heart is, but it’s not necessarily where the mind reaches its full potential.

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Inbox Pause? How About an Inbox Reset?

Several readers have recently pointed me toward a productivity tool called Inbox Pause, which allows you to prevent messages from arriving in your email inbox for a set amount of time. You could, of course, simply decide not to check your inbox for this period, but as every knowledge worker who has ever used email has learned, it can be very, very difficult to resist a quick check when you know there are messages piling up, desperate for your response.

I like this tool. Among other benefits, it can provide a nice support system for time block planning. When you start a block that doesn’t require email, you can setup a pause to make sure you’re not tempted to abandon whatever demanding activity you’ve planned to instead fall back into the comfort of stupefying inbox sifting.

Pausing on its own, however, cannot fully solve the problem of communication overload. As I argue in my book, A World Without Email, the foundation of our overload is a widely-adopted collaboration style that I call the hyperactive hive mind. This is an approach in which work is coordinated with a series of ad hoc, on demand, unscheduled, back-and-forth messages — be them emails, instant messages, or texts (the actual technology doesn’t really matter).

Each ongoing back-and-forth conversation of this type can generate dozens of messages in a short period of time. Given dozens of these conversations unfolding concurrently, you can easily confront a hundred or more messages a day, many of which require a relatively quick response, as they’re part of an extended back-and-forth that presumably cannot be dragged out too long.

In this context, there is only so many pauses you can take, as every time you step away, you’re potentially delaying many different back-and-forth discussions, perhaps critically, and ensuring an even more intimidating, tottering pile of urgency awaiting you when the pause completes.

What’s the ultimate solution? An inbox reset. As I detail in my book, you need to start enumerating every type of conversation that’s unfolding over email (or IM, or text), and ask for each, is there a process, or tool, or set of new rules, that would allow us to get this work done in the future without trading multiple unscheduled messages?

To be clear: these resets are a pain. They require you to work with others to come up with more structured ways of collaborating. It would be easier if we could instead deploy hacks or tips all on our own. But in the context of knowledge work, despite what we’ve been told, productivity isn’t personal, it’s instead systematic, and must be addressed collectively.

In the meantime, however, we must do what we can to survive the onslaught of the hyperactive hive mind. Taking a pause on a regular basis is a good start.

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