Cal Newport's Blog, page 9

Taking a Break from Social Media Makes you Happier and Less Anxious

In my writing on technology and culture I try to be judicious about citing scientific studies. The issues involved in our ongoing wrangling with digital innovations are subtle and often deeply human. Attempts to exactly quantify what we’re gaining and losing through our screens can at times feel disconcertedly sterile.

All that being said, however, when I come across a particularly well-executed study that presents clear and convincing results, I do like to pass it along, as every extra substantial girder helps in our current scramble to build a structure of understanding.

Which brings me to a smart new paper, written by a team of researchers from the University of Bath, and published last week in the journal of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. It’s titled “Taking a One-Week Break from Social Media Improves Well-Being, Depression, and Anxiety,” and it caught my attention, in part, because of its parsimonious design.

As I reported last fall in The New Yorker, a problem with existing research on social media and mental health is that it often depends on analyzing large existing data sets. Finding strong social psychological signals in these vast collections of measurements is tricky, as outcomes can be quite sensitive to exactly what questions are asked.

This new paper avoids these issues by deploying a gold-standard for studying human impacts: the randomized control trial. The researchers gathered 154 volunteers with a mean age of 29.6 years old. They randomly divided them into an intervention group, which was asked to stop using social media for one week (with a focus, in particular, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok), and a control group which was given no instructions.

At the end of this week, the researchers found “significant between-group differences” in well-being, depression, and anxiety, with the intervention group faring much better on all three metrics. These results held even after control for baseline scores, as well as age and gender.

The researchers further found that they could obtain smaller, but still significant improvements in depression and anxiety by having users simply reduce the time they spend on Twitter and TikTok. The biggest effects, however, came from full abstention.

Caveat emptor, I don’t know these researchers, nor have I run this work by the experts I trust in the field, so I can’t vouch without equivocation for the strength of its findings. But given the simple study design and the clear effects it revealed, the message here seems to be clear: social media hurts mental health. Which motivates an obvious follow-up question: Why do we insist on still shrugging our shoulders and continuing to treat the use of these tools like some sort of unavoidable civic and professional necessity?

The post Taking a Break from Social Media Makes you Happier and Less Anxious first appeared on Cal Newport.

My “Oldest” Productivity Strategy

I recently posted a video about one of my oldest and most successful work strategies: fixed-schedule productivity. The idea is simple to describe:

Choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule.

These simple limits, however, can lead to complex productivity innovations. In my own life, the demands of fixed-schedule productivity helped me develop what became my time blocking and shutdown ritual strategies.

In my video, which is actually a clip taken from episode 193 of my podcast, I call this my “oldest” productivity strategy. I don’t think that’s literally true, but it is old. I went back and did some digging and discovered that I first wrote about this idea here on my blog back in 2008, meaning I had probably been deploying it for at least a couple years before then. In 2009, I wrote a more epic post on the topic for my friend Ramit Sethi’s blog which was subsequently featured on Boing Boing. Which is all to say, fixed-schedule productivity has been bouncing around for a while.

Anyway, watch the video if you want a more detailed discussion of the strategy, why it works, and how I’ve used it in my own life.

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Aziz Ansari’s Digital Minimalism

Not long ago, I watched Aziz Ansari’s new Netflix special, Nightclub Comedian. I was pleasantly surprised when, early in the show, Ansari demonstrates his commitment to escaping tech-driven distraction by showing off his Nokia 2720 flip phone (see above). Soon after the special was released, Ansari elaborated on his personal brand of digital minimalism in a radio interview:

“Many years ago, I kind of started turning off the internet, and I deleted all social media and all this stuff, and I’ve slowly just kept going further and further. I stopped using email, maybe, four years ago. I know all this stuff is like, oh yeah, I’m in a position where I can do that and have certain privileges to be able to pull it off, an assistant or whatever, but all that stuff I do helps me get more done.”

This commitment to craft over servicing digital communities is not uncommon among top comedians. Dave Attell, who is widely considered by his peers to be one of the best living joke writers, has a lifeless Twitter account dedicated primarily to announcing show dates. Dave Chappelle doesn’t even bother using Twitter at all. “Why would I write all my thoughts on a bathroom wall,” he quipped last year when asked about his lack of presence on the popular platform.

Professional comedy provides a useful test case for the importance of digital engagement. It’s a field in which both name recognition and craftsmanship matter: you need an audience, but you also need to consistently deliver. Many top practitioners, such as Ansari, Attell, and Chappelle, experimented with this trade-off and ultimately decided that focusing on being so good you can’t be ignored, not the frenetic managing of digital legions, was the surest route to sustainable success.

I recently had to spend a fair amount of time on Twitter to research my latest New Yorker essay. Encountering that onslaught of manic dispatches, tinged with equal parts desperation and pyrrhic triumph, I could only hope that these insights forged in the world of high-level entertainment will soon spread.

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The Real Problem with Twitter

Last week, Twitter accepted Elon Musk’s acquisition bid. The media response was intense. For a few days, it was seemingly the biggest story in the world: every news outlet rushed out multiple takes; commentators fretted and gloated; CNN, for a while, even posted live updates on the deal on their homepage.

As I argue in my latest essay for The New Yorker, titled “Our Misguided Obsession with Twitter,” these varied responses were unified by a shared belief that this platform serves as a “digital town square,” and therefore we should really care about who controls it and the nuances of the rules they set.

But is this view correct?

Drawing on Jon Haidt’s epic Atlantic article on the devolution of social media (which I  recently discussed in more detail on my podcast), I note that Twitter is far from a gathering place for representative democratic debate. Its most active users are much more likely to be on the political extremes. They’re also whiter and richer than the average American, not to mention that they have the time to spend all day tweeting, which is quite a rarified luxury.

Here’s Ethan Porter, a media studies professor at George Washington University, elaborating this latter point in a recent Washington Post article:

“The thing about Twitter is, it’s actually quite a demanding platform. In other words, to really participate on Twitter, you need to be a really active Twitter user, and the number of people who have jobs that allow them to be active Twitter users is pretty small.”

The real outrage, I conclude, is not the details of how Elon Musk might change Twitter, but the fact that so many people in positions of power — politicians, business leaders, journalists — still pay so much attention to these 240-character missives.

“Twitter’s increasingly heated wrangling is not just far from a considered democratic debate,” I write, “but has truly become a spectacle driven by a narrow and unrepresentative group of elites.”

This may be optimistic thinking, but I’m hoping that the average person’s response to the media frenzy that surrounded Musk’s acquisition will spark pushback — not against the service’s new owner, but instead against all the people in positions to affect out daily lives who keep giving it such rapt attention.

Anyway, for more detail on my take, see the full article…

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Smartphones vs. Science: On Distraction and the Suppression of Genius

Last month, Adam Weiss, a fourth-year chemistry PhD student at the University of Chicago, published a column in the journal Nature. In the piece, Weiss talked about how he had recently hit “a rut” in his polymer chemistry research. “Although I had been productive early in my graduate career,” he wrote, “my long hours and hard work were no longer translating into success in the laboratory.”

It didn’t take much self-reflection for Weiss to identify the problem: his phone. He recognized that he increasingly colonized his “quiet time” with digital distractions. As a result, his work felt “chaotic and disorganized.” Throwing more hours at the problem didn’t help: “I was working more than ever, but getting less done.”

So Weiss tried something drastic. He ditched his smartphone during work hours, relying instead on an old fashioned feature phone without an internet connection. He decided email and Slack messages would have to wait until he returned from the lab. For music, he used an iPod.

Weiss suffered from some withdrawal symptoms (“[I was] staring at my iPod throughout the day and hoping for a rush of dopamine that no longer came”), but these eventually passed. With time, his comfort with deep thinking returned. As he explained:

“I started reading papers during long experiments, and began a habit of writing in my down time. These practices have already yielded success: I am currently preparing a review article for submission with my adviser, and I’ve written this column and other personal reflective works.”

Liberated from the incessant drip of context-shifting diversion, Weiss’s anxiety diminished while his productivity and creativity improved, generating “an abundance of new scientific ideas.”

I was struck by two observations about this story…

The first is optimistic. Witnessing Weiss’s dramatic transformation provides hope for the countless others who find themselves stumbling through a maze of disorganized, emotional thoughts, set against a background hum of unspecified anxiety. Something as simple as disconnection can yield profound results.

The second is pessimistic. The rareness of Weiss’s dramatic transformation underscores the vastness of the creative, energetic, innovative, impact-inducing cognitive potential in the world that’s currently being suppressed by these ubiquitous slabs of glowing glass. This is the question that haunts me: How much genius are we losing to the compulsive need to scroll just a little bit more?

The post Smartphones vs. Science: On Distraction and the Suppression of Genius first appeared on Cal Newport.

John McPhee’s Slow Productivity

Earlier this week, the writer John McPhee turned 91. One of the nice things about McPhee’s birthday, in addition to it providing an occasion to celebrate his incomparable output, is that it usually leads to one of my favorite writerly quotes spreading around the internet.

By any reasonable standard, McPhee is productive. He’s published 29 books, one of which won a Pulitzer Prize, and two of which were nominated for National Book Awards. He’s also been penning distinctive articles for The New Yorker since 1965. And yet, he rarely writes more than 500 words a day.

When asked about this paradox, McPhee famously quipped:

“People say to me, ‘Oh, you’re so prolific’…God, it doesn’t feel like it—nothing like it.  But, you know, you put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart.”

This is a perfect summary of slow productivity. Being frantically busy in the present moment has very little to do with whether or not in the future you’ll look back at your career with pride about what you’ve accomplished.

(If you’re looking for another way to honor McPhee this week, I recommend reading his very first article for The New Yorker, a profile of Princeton basketball star, and future senator, Bill Bradley.)

The post John McPhee’s Slow Productivity first appeared on Cal Newport.

The Books I Read in February 2022

Each month I strive to read five books, from a variety of genres and levels of seriousness. By popular request, I try to list the books I read here in my newsletter. Below are the books I read in February 2022.

[Note: I recently realized that I forgot to write a post about my books for January 2022. Whoops! Fortunately, you can watch me discuss my January reads in this clip taken from my podcast.]

The Loop 
Jacob Ward

Science journalist Jacob Ward warns about a future in which AI technology forms a tight cybernetic feedback loop with the biases ingrained into the human brain, pushing our day-to-day existence in frightening directions. It’s sort of like a version of The Terminator in which Danny Kahneman plays a starring role. As longtime readers and listeners of mine know, a big theme in my techno-criticism is the under-appreciated degree to which technologies exert powerful, unintended consequences on our personhood and culture, so Ward’s warning hits a sweet spot with me.

Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck

I stumbled across this 1937 classic on the shelf of my personal library and realized, with a start, that I had never really read any Steinbeck. I figured this narrow but deep tale of Lennie and George’s search for work would be a good place to start. Steinbeck deploys a standard third person omniscient narrative style that avoids all the flash of the modernists, and then postmodernists, that soon after took over the literary scene. But in his hands, it’s enough. I still think about the ending.

Cathedral of the Wild
Boyd Varty

The memoir of Boyd Varty, who is my age, but unlike me, grew up in the wilds of South Africa on the pioneering Londolozi Game Reserve. I picked up this book after hearing Varty’s recent appearance on Tim Ferriss’s podcast and I wasn’t disappointed. Here’s just a partial list of some of the things Varty experienced in his childhood: being attacked by a crocodile; having a deadly poisonous black mamba slither over him; learning the art of lion tracking; having Nelson Mandela retreat to his house to rest and recover after being released from prison. I hope HBO has already purchased the rights to the Londolozi story: it’s the definition of epic.

Voices in the Ocean
Susan Casey

I’m a big fan of Susan Casey, who has perfected a style of nature journalism that’s built around a narrative of personal adventures. (I recommend you start with The Devil’s Teeth.) Casey’s latest is about dolphins, and in particular, their troubled relationship with humans. True to the Casey formula, she soon finds herself in pseudo-danger, journeying to the infamous, organized crime-protected Japanese dolphin-hunting grounds featured in the Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove, and making her way to some seedy bars in the Solomon Islands to investigate a failed Dolphin export scheme. Perhaps the most interesting part of this book is what happened to Casey after she published it: moved by the experience, she quit her high-stress job as an immensely successful magazine executive to live in Maui and pursue a slower life more connected to the ocean. I would love to read a book about that!

Living with a SEAL
Jesse Itzler

I found this book in a Little Free Library walking around my hometown of Takoma Park, Maryland. It’s the story of what happened when musician and entrepreneur Jesse Itzler (husband to Spanx founder, Sara Blakely) hires David Goggins, an ex-Navy SEAL known for his heroically grueling fitness exploits, to live with him and train him for a month. My muscles are sore just thinking about all the crazy workouts Goggins makes Itzler undertake. The book was light and fun, but it makes a lot more sense if, like me, you first read Goggin’s mega-bestselling memoir, Can’t Hurt Me.

The post The Books I Read in February 2022 first appeared on Cal Newport.

Brandon Sanderson’s Advice for Doing Hard Things

A reader recently sent me a video of a keynote speech, delivered in 2020 by the popular fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson. The title of the presentation was “The Common Lies Writers Tell You,” but its real message was more general.

Sanderson starts (perhaps channeling a young Cal Newport) by pushing back on our common instinct to tell kids “you can do anything you want to” or “follow your dreams.” He argues that these aphorisms inflict a disservice on impressionable minds as they obfuscate the complexity, and frustration, and nuance involved in actually pursuing remarkable goals.

He retorts that the following claim is much more realistic:

“I can do hard things. Doing hard things has intrinsic value, and they will make me a better person, even if I end up failing.”

Sanderson then proceeds to details three tips, drawn from his experience as a successful novelist, to help structure any attempt to tackle hard things. I found his advice both interesting and refreshingly blunt, so I thought it might be useful to summarize his three tips here, annotated with some of my own thoughts…

Tip #1: Make Better Goals

After winning a story writing contest in high school, Sanderson decided to pursue the goal of becoming a professional novelist. He ended up writing thirteen novels in a row before he sold one. Looking back, he describes this as a bad goal as it was something he could not directly impact through his actions. A better focus would have been on completing a certain number of novels, each one better than the last, regardless of whether or not they sold or made him famous.

“Make goals that you have control over,” he explains.

Readers of Deep Work might recognize a similar theme in my discussion of the 4DX methodology, and its emphasis, in particular, on tracking lead instead of lag indicators. Your goal, for example, shouldn’t be to get your next academic paper accepted into a better journal, as it doesn’t specify a concrete action you can schedule and execute. A better approach might be to focus on banking 15 hours of deep work on your paper per week: this you can control, and it’s likely to influence your overall objective.

Tip #2: Learn How You Work

Sanderson notes that he dislikes the common narrative that claims “real writers have an overwhelming compulsion to write,” and that if you find yourself procrastinating, then you’re not a writer. He thinks this is nonsense.

“I love writing,” he says, “but [even] I have a hard time sitting down and writing.”

Sanderson argues you should instead experiment to figure out what combination of motivation, and circumstances, and accountability work best for your particular personality. He responds well to tracking a daily word count in a spreadsheet. Others, he notes, thrive under the social pressures of a writing group, while others lean on deadlines to induce work. The key is recognizing that the urge to avoid hard things is human, and should be expected. It’s part of the process.

A big idea from Digital Minimalism, which complements this tip well, is that significantly reducing the role of screens in your life will significantly reduce the friction you experience toward doing hard things. If you’ve trained your mind that at the slightest hint of boredom it will receive a shiny, dopamine-flavored treat in the form of a rapid cycle of swiping and scrolling through Twitter and TikTok, then good luck convincing yourself to sit down and tackle something meaningful but difficult.

Tip #3: Break It Down

Sanderson’s final piece of advice is to break large goals down into manageable pieces. He notes, for example, that the novel he’s currently writing is longer than the entire Hunger Games series combined. This is “a really big book,” he exclaims, before saying he can only tackle an endeavor of this size “word by word.”

He goes on to reveal that he wishes that he had been given a more detailed roadmap when he first set out to be a writer. The experienced novelists that he asked for advice would just tell him to “write.” Better advice, he noted, would have been to setup a practice regime, centered on writing a certain number of complete manuscripts, each of expanding size and ambition, all aimed at developing his chops to the point that he’d be ready to produce something sellable.

A related idea I talk about a lot on my podcast is the importance of creating accurate roadmaps toward these types of goals. Talk to people who have succeed before and have them walk you step-by-step through their story, allowing you to learn what really matters and what doesn’t. One of the biggest mistakes you can make when setting out to do something impressive is creating a story around what activities you want to be important, instead of what actually makes a difference.

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Nathan Chen Didn’t Bring His Phone to the Olympics

Last week, the American figure skater Nathan Chen, a favorite to win gold in the 2022 Olympics, lived up to expectations. In a four-minute free skate performance that included five quadruple jumps, and a joyous dance break, he earned the medal that had eluded him four years earlier in Pyeongchang.

Many of you sent me articles about Chen. You were less interested in what he did than in what he didn’t do: bring his phone to the competition. As the Wall Street Journal (among others) reported, Chen arrived at the 2022 Olympics without his phone so as to escape the cognitive drain induced by “the urge to scroll for hours through social media.” He brought his guitar instead, choosing to replace dopamine hacking with high quality leisure.

Most of us, of course, are not Olympic athletes struggling to live up to impossible expectations. There is, however, still a lesson to be learned from Chen’s disconnection. A life spent subservient to that small glowing screen is not a life where you’re living up to your potential.

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Life of Focus is Now Open

A quick administrative note…

Life of Focus, the three-month training program I co-instruct with Scott Young, is now open for a new session. We will be holding registration until Friday, February 11th, 2022. Check it out here:

https://www.life-of-focus-course.com

This course aims to help you achieve greater levels of depth in your work and life. It’s split into three, one-month challenges. Each challenge contains a guided effort to help you establish and test new routines and skills, supported by specific lessons to help you deal with the inevitable issues you’ll face. The challenges include:

Establishing deep work hours. We all know we could get a lot more done with less stress if we had more time for deep work, but actually achieving this regularly can be tricky. The first month focuses on finding and making the subtle changes you need to get in more deep work — without burning yourself out.Conducting a digital declutter. Technology can be great, but it can also make us miserable. When we’re given access to endless distraction, it’s hard to engage in meaningful hobbies or enjoy deeper interactions with our friends and family. This month helps you cultivate a more deliberate attitude to the digital tools in your personal life.Taking on a deep project. In the final month, we’ll reinvest the time we’ve created at work and at home in a project that engages you in something meaningful — not just passively consumption.

Life of Focus, which we debuted last year, is arguably the most popular course we run. It’s also the course in whcih students have reported some of the strongest results we’ve ever encountered. This is because Life of Focus is action oriented. You don’t  just consume information, it requires you to make lasting changes. 

Anyway: registration is open now until Friday. If you want to find out more, click below.

https://www.life-of-focus-course.com

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