Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

This strategy picks specifically on social media because among the different network tools that can claim your time and attention, these services, if used without limit, can be particularly devastating to your quest to work deeper. They offer personalized information arriving on an unpredictable intermittent schedule—making them massively addictive and therefore capable of severely damaging your attempts to schedule and succeed with any act of concentration. Given these dangers, you might expect that more knowledge workers would avoid these tools altogether—especially those like computer programmers or writers whose livelihood explicitly depends on the outcome of deep work. But part of what makes social media insidious is that the companies that profit from your attention have succeeded with a masterful marketing coup: convincing our culture that if you don’t use their products you might miss out. This fear that you might miss out has obvious parallels to Nicodemus’s fear that the voluminous stuff in his closets might one day prove useful, which is why I’m suggesting a corrective strategy that parallels his packing party. By spending a month without these services, you can replace your fear that you might miss out—on events, on conversations, on shared cultural experience—with a dose of reality. For most people this reality will confirm something that seems obvious only once you’ve done the hard work of freeing yourself from the marketing messages surrounding these tools: ...

Defusing Social Media FOMO