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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cal Newport
Read between
March 2 - March 7, 2021
According to this premise, if you feel overwhelmed by tools like email or instant messenger, it’s because your personal habits are sloppy: you need to batch your inbox checks, and turn off your notifications, and write clearer subject lines!
The underlying value of the constant electronic communication that defines modern work, however, is never questioned,
What if email didn’t save knowledge work but instead accidentally traded minor conveniences for a major drag on real productivity
What if our problems with these tools don’t come from easily fixable bad habits and loose norms, but instead from the way they dramatically and unexpectedly changed the very nature of how we work?
While the ability to rapidly communicate using digital messages is useful, the frequent disruptions created by this behavior also make it hard to focus, which has a bigger impact on our ability to produce valuable output than we may have realized.
it has instead become totally intertwined in how this work actually gets done—preventing easy efforts to reduce distractions through better habits or short-lived management stunts like email-free Fridays.
Real improvement, it became clear, would require fundamental change to how we organize our professional efforts.
it has recently advanced into a much more serious problem, reaching a saturation point for many in which their actual productive output gets squeezed into the early morning, or evenings and weekends, while their workdays devolve into Sisyphean battles against their inboxes—a uniquely misery-inducing approach to getting things done.
we completely transformed the underlying workflow that determines how our daily efforts unfold.
by 2019 the average worker was sending and receiving 126 business emails per day, which works out to about one message every four minutes.
The Hyperactive Hive Mind A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.
It’s this workflow that causes us to spend over a third of our working hours in our inbox, checking for new messages every six minutes.
Beyond the very small scale (say, two or three people), this style of unstructured collaboration simply doesn’t mesh well with the way the human brain has evolved to operate.
pioneering research in psychology and neuroscience reveals that these context switches, even if brief, induce a heavy cost in terms of mental energy—reducing cognitive performance and creating a sense of exhaustion and reduced efficacy.
There is massive potential productivity currently latent in the knowledge sector. To unlock it will require much more systematic thinking about how best to organize the fundamental objective of getting a collection of human brains hooked together in networks to produce the most possible value in the most sustainable way.
that information work is very fragmented,”
Interaction now occurs in small chunks, fragmenting the other efforts that make up the typical knowledge worker’s day.
“These data . . . seem to lend support to the notion that knowledge workers experience very fragmented workdays.”
The primary purpose of RescueTime is to provide individual users with detailed feedback on their behavior so they can find ways to be more productive.
It reveals that half these users were checking communication applications like email and Slack every six minutes or less.
The average user studied had only fifteen such uninterrupted buckets, adding up to no more than an hour and fifteen minutes total of undistracted productive work per day. To be clear, this is not an hour and fifteen minutes in a row, but instead the total amount of undistracted productive work conducted throughout the entire day.
As foundational results in neuroscience reveal, part of what distinguishes us from our primate ancestors is the ability of our prefrontal cortex to operate as a kind of traffic cop for our attention, amplifying signals from brain networks associated with our current object of focus while suppressing signals from everywhere else.
only humans can decide to focus on something not actually happening around them at the moment, like planning a mammoth hunt or composing a strategy memo.
this network switching is not an instantaneous process; it requires both time and cognitive resources. When you try to do it rapidly, things get messy.
The fact that switching our attention slows down our mental processing has been observed since at least the early twentieth century,
“Every time you switch your attention from one task to another, you’re basically asking your brain to switch all of these cognitive resources,”
“A man who worked himself to tatters on minor details had no ability to handle the more vital issues of war,”
Marshall focused his energy as a manager on making key decisions that would impact the outcome of the war. This was a task for which he was uniquely suited. He then trusted his team to execute these decisions without involving him in the details.
Marshall was more effective at his job because of his ability to focus on important issues—giving each full attention before moving on to the next.
management is about more than responsiveness.
“When managers are the ones trying to recover from email interruptions, they fail to meet their goals, they neglect manager-responsibilities and their subordinates don’t have the leadership behavior they need to thrive.”
The premise on which this effectiveness is built is that communicating about tasks often gets in the way of executing them—the more you can off-load this communication from the cognitive space of your staff, the more effective they become at actually getting things done.
As we learned from the example of IT ticketing systems, if we can somehow create space between communication and execution, people in these roles would find the tasks before them more easily dispatched.
not only does it make us less productive; it also makes us miserable—a reality that has massive consequences for both individual well-being and organizational stability.
“The longer one spends on email in [a given] hour the higher is one’s stress for that hour.”
these anxious emails are more likely to contain words that express anger.
Other researchers have found similar connections between email and unhappiness.
The researchers found that repeated exposure to “high information and communication technology demands” (translation: a need to be constantly connected) was associated with “suboptimal” health outcomes.
When employees are miserable they perform worse. They’re also more likely, as the French labor minister warned, to burn out, leading to increased healthcare costs and expensive employee turnover.
This chapter is more about its impact on the human soul. My goal in the pages ahead is to understand why this workflow makes us so unhappy.
Their goal was to measure each individual’s “relational wealth,” a technical term for what we might call popularity within the tribe.
these differences correlated strongly with factors such as body mass index and female fertility, which, in a hunter-gatherer tribe, play a major role in determining whether you succeed in passing your genes to the next generation.
“psychological and physiological reinforcement mechanisms encouraging the formation and maintenance of social relationships.”
The more robust15 their connection into the network, the higher their reproductive success.
The new study found that this popularity was captured by the record of one-on-one conversations: those who managed these direct interactions properly thrived, while those who didn’t struggled to pass on their genes.
One-on-one conversations are crucial to the Mbendjele BaYaka.
The problem, of course, is that deeply embedded human drives are not known for responding to rationality.
these unanswered messages become the psychological equivalent of ignoring a tribe member who might later prove key to surviving the next drought.
the underlying evolutionary pressures which ingrain the idea that ignoring a potential connection is really bad!
this linguistic channel of information captured only a small part of what would be important for understanding the interaction underway in that conference room.
