Each month I strive to read five books, from a variety of genres and levels of seriousness. By popular request, I’ve listed below the titles I completed in December 2021 (for more detailed thoughts on these books see Episode 163 of my podcast):

How Star Wars Conquered the Universe
Chris Taylor

After completing Joseph McBride’s epic biography of Steven Spielberg in November, I decided I needed to know more about his longtime friend, George Lucas. Though this book frequently digresses into discussions of the cultural impact of the Star Wars franchise, it also contains one of the most thoroughly-researched biographies of Lucas currently available. Bottom line: George Lucas, like Spielberg, had three things going for him: (1) he was very talented (did you know he was Francis Ford Coppola’s first choice to direct Apocalypse Now?); (2) his timing was perfect; and (3) he was relentlessly driven and ambitious.

In Praise of Slowness
Carl Honore

This book, published in 2004, provides a journalistic account of the various offshoots of the “slow food” movement that originally began in Rome in the 1980s. I read it as part of the research for my recent New Yorker article on “slow productivity”, and was struck by the extent to which the issues that seem pressing today about busyness and overload were already a problem fifteen years earlier. Nothing is new.

The World-Ending Fire
Wendell Berry

After years of people recommending him to me, I finally took the plunge into the literary world of Wendell Berry. Now I can’t help but wonder what took me so long. This 2018 collection of Berry’s best essays is a fantastic introduction into his genre-defining polemic style, which mixes razor-sharp commentary with a poetry grounded in lived experience, to argue on behalf of land, the environment, and a slower, richer approach to life. If you’ve never heard of Berry, let me offer you the following three enticements to find out more: (1) he still farms his land in rural Kentucky with mules and horses; (2) he doesn’t own a computer; (3) the audio version of this essay collection is narrated by Nick Offerman.

When the Lion Feeds
Wilbur Smith

As my friends and family know, I’m a serious fan of genre fiction, with a particular interest in adventure yarns and techno-thrillers. Wilbur Smith helped define the former category in the twentieth century, so when he died this past November at the age of 88, having sold over 140 million books worldwide, I decided, as a tribute to his influence, to go back and read his very first novel. It tells the tale of Sean Courtney, the son of a cattle rancher in 19th century colonial South Africa, who finds himself cast out on his own after the death of his father. This is the first book in an ongoing series that Smith wrote following multiple generations of the Courtney family. It’s definitely a book of its time (it was first published in the 1960s), but it introduces plot and style conventions that echoed throughout many adventure titles that followed.

Hero On a Mission
Donald Miller

As we headed up the Catskills to celebrate Christmas with my family, I grabbed a galley copy of this book that Miller’s publisher had sent me (its official release date is actually today). Because I’m currently contemplating writing a book on my emerging concept of the deep life, I’m particularly interested at the moment in any book that attempts to structure the complex urge to cultivate a more meaningful existence. I found myself unexpectedly (and perhaps dangerously) inspired by Miller’s discussion of the 15-acre plot of land he and his wife bought outside Nashville, where they’re carefully cultivating the forest, planting extensive gardens, and organizing retreats.

A reader named Alexander recently pointed me toward an essay he wrote about his experiment avoiding social media for all of 2021. What caught my attention is the fact that Alexander runs an online business as a freelance copywriter. I frequently hear from people who are exhausted by the frenetic, anxiety-inducing churn of social media, but are concerned that without their participation on these services their professional lives will disintegrate. With this in mind, I thought it might be useful to share some highlights from Alexander’s detailed breakdown about what exactly happened to his livelihood when he stepped away from his social accounts for twelve months.

I’ll start with the punchline: Even though Alexander used to make regular use of LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to promote and grow his business, his year without these services did not bankrupt him. Indeed, as he reports, both his business and his email newsletter subscribers grew by 50% during this period. How did clients find him? Google searches, referrals, and repeat work.

Alexander also notes an increase in his productivity. “Social media became my mental crutch when faced with a hard task,” he writes, describing the period before his experiment. “When I couldn’t think of how to write the next sentence or headline, my default action was to open another tab and scroll social media.” When the option for these easy mental escapes was eliminated, he found himself producing better work:

“It’s safe to say that [my output during my year without social media] is far more writing than I’ve done in past years, despite the fact that I had more client work than ever. Also, I would venture to guess that my quality went up a bit. One of the downsides of social media is ease of publishing. There are no gatekeepers stopping me from publishing lazy work.”

Then there were the non-professional benefits generated by Alexander’s experiment:

“Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram caused me more anxiety and stress than I even realized. The constant opinionated noise and comparison on these platforms is hard to overstate.”

He was able to redirect this energy, previously dissipated through endless scrolling, into more meaningful leisure pursuits:

“I discovered (and rediscovered) some outdoor hobbies this year. It’s hard to know whether this is correlation or causation, but I joined a couple adventure races, played many tennis matches, and easily walked and ran at least 500 – 700 miles last year, averaging a little more than 10 miles per week.”

It would be dishonest to imply that social media has no professional benefits. Alexander admits, for example, that his success without these services was supported by the fact that he was already established. “This would have been a different experiment had I given up social media during my first year,” he writes.

But in the end, Alexander decides that he had no interest in returning to his past habit of constant social media engagement. In true digital minimalist style, he decided, after his experiment completed, to carefully reintroduce LinkedIn, which he’ll use as a publishing platform for his original articles, while remaining logged off from the other services that used to command his attention.

“The big takeaway of this year is that I love life without social media,” Alexander concludes. I can’t help but suspect that many others might feel the same, given a chance to experience what such a life is really like.

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Related note: if you decided to participate in my No Twitter Challenge, announced late last month, please send me updates to author@calnewport.com with “No Twitter Challenge” in the subject line. I want to hear how it goes for you!

Back in December of 2019, inspired by the recent release of my book, Digital Minimalism, I announced what I called the Analog January Challenge. The goal of the challenge was to complete a series of five commitments designed to help you develop quality, non-digital alternatives to screen-based distractions.

Two years later, I’m bringing back the Analog January Challenge. In response to the urgent anxieties of our current moment, however, I’m simplifying its demands to the following:

Do not access Twitter for the month of January. In its place, learn a new non-professional skill or pursue a hobby project for no other reason than inherent enjoyment. When you feel the need to check Twitter, work on this initiative instead.

And that’s it.

I’m motivated in designing this new challenge by the reality that Twitter has had an unusually toxic run in recent years. It’s become difficult to make it through more than a handful of tweets before you encounter something that either makes you angry, or depressed, or, more often than not, incredibly anxious.

In fairness, this service wasn’t intentionally designed to grasp our brain stem and squeeze it into an inflamed pulp of enraged emotions, but it turned out to be exceptionally good at accomplishing exactly this insidious goal. You might log onto Twitter for an important and noble reason, like checking Washington Nationals baseball trade rumors, but then, out of the corner of your eye, you see a trending tweet about white supremacists using Omicron to accelerate climate change, and boom: your innocent contentment is shattered.

So why not take a break? For thirty-one blissfully peaceful days. A period to re-learn that there are other, more meaningful, more analog ways to quiet our chattering brain. We can learn how to knit, or buy a lathe, or 3D print mini spaceships for a strategy game we’re inventing with our kids. But for just one month, why not take a breather from the panic and outrage?

In comparison to other digital tools, Twitter offers little that you can’t either replicate or easily live without for a month. When it comes to distraction, you can find much more engaging fare on streaming video services or podcasts. When it comes to news, unless you’re a TV producer or newspaper editor, you don’t need to be nearly that up to date. When it comes to connection, send text messages, FaceTime, and, to the extent possible, do things with real people in real places. When it comes to building an audience, they’ll still be there in February, so in the meantime, why not create something special they’ll really appreciate when you return?

This 2022 version of the Analog January Challenge is, for sure, more stripped-down than its antecedent from two years earlier. But this is, if anything, a moment for simplicity. So I hope you’ll join me. And if you don’t, keep an eye on Washington Nationals tweets and send me a note if there’s anything I should know.

Last week, for the first time in a long time, I made a substantial change to the configuration of my email inboxes.

This might seem somewhat out of character. As readers of A World Without Email know, I’m largely indifferent about using hacks and technical fixes to improve your email experience. The real problem, I argue in that book, is the implicit decision to coordinate so much of your collaborative efforts with unscheduled back-and-forth messaging. This hyperactive hive mind workflow doesn’t scale: once you have dozens of these conversations unfolding concurrently, you have no choice but to check your inbox constantly, as otherwise you might slow down the ongoing collaboration.

According to this analysis, the solution to email overload is not handling messages more efficiently, but instead preventing them from arriving in your inbox in the first place. You must, in other words, replace the hyperactive hive mind workflow with alternatives that do not generate so much unscheduled communication.

Motivated by these ideas, most of my efforts in recent years to tame my email have focused on implementing better processes — methods for collaboration that don’t just depend on dashing off quick messages. And yet, I still found myself recently needing to make a change to the technical details of my communication setup.

The instigating factor was cognitive exhaustion. On a typical workday, I might put aside a single 30 – 60 minute block in my time-block plan to process my inbox. I use the term “inbox” loosely here, because over the years I’ve built up many different email addresses: my original Gmail address, which I setup back when the service was in beta testing and you needed an invitation to join, a couple academic addresses, and three writing-related addresses connected to my calnewport.com domain. I was forwarding all of these messages to my original Gmail inbox and using filters to move them into dedicated labels, creating mini-inboxes I could quickly cycle through.

The total number of relevant messages arriving through these six addresses on a typical day is not excessive. (Remember, I spend a lot of time combatting the hyperactive hive mind approach to collaboration). But I was still finding the process of responding to them to be oddly draining; a time block I dreaded.

In the end, it was research I had conducted for A World Without Email that helped reveal the issue. In that book, I give a thorough survey of the research literature on cognitive context switching. It turns out that it’s expensive and relatively time-consuming to switch your attention from one target to another, as the process requires a complicated dance of neural network activation and inhibition. In the book, I used this research to underscore the costs of returning to your inbox every few minutes: each such check instigates another expensive switch. It also explains, however, why I was feeling such fatigue during the singular task of responding to messages.

The problem was not the number of emails I encountered, but the fact that were coming from multiple distinct contexts: my personal life, my academic life, and my writing life. Faced with twenty messages to answer, no single missive in the pile would require more than a few minutes of thinking to dispatch. The issue is the context switching between messages: a question from a family member, then a meeting request from a student, then a note about an issue with a podcast advertiser — switch, switch, switch.  The first reply is easy, by the tenth I’m blocked.

So I decided to separate these contexts. I now have three distinct Google Workspaces, each with their own username and password: one for my personal address, one for my Georgetown addresses, and one for my calnewport.com addresses. (Technically, I also have a fourth Google Workspace, for my New Yorker address, but I don’t use it much.)

I no longer schedule “checking my inbox” as a general activity. I instead check these individual inboxes at times when it seems appropriate. I can already notice the difference. When every note in a given inbox falls within the same cognitive context, much less friction aggregates as I move from message to message. Furthermore, I can now schedule inbox checks adjacent to appropriate work blocks: checking my writing inbox, for example, at the end of a podcast recording session, when my mind is already thinking about relevant issues.

If we believe our minds to be black box computational devices, none of this makes sense. Why waste time maintaining three different inboxes if you end up processing the exact same number of messages each day as before? Once we realize, however, that our brain is not a computer, and that it functions in an idiosyncratic, messy manner, these types of humanistic productivity contrivances sometimes turn out to be exactly what we need.

Since last spring, I’ve been pursuing the goal of reading five books a month. To meet this mark, I start with a foundation of daily reading, but then, when I get momentum going on a given book, I schedule extra reading sessions in my time block schedule, allowing me to accelerate toward completion. I also include at least one audio title each month, and try to mix together a diversity of genres to keep things interesting.

Recently, on my podcast, I adopted the habit of of briefly reviewing the books I read each month. I thought it might be fun to replicate these reviews here in written form (an homage, I suppose, to my friend Ryan Holiday’s epic and longstanding Reading List newsletter).

Without additional preamble, here are the five books I completed* in November 2021:

Relic
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

One of the best thrillers of the 1990s. I re-read this book in honor of Halloween this year (but didn’t finish until November) and was pleased to find that it held up. The basic plot is straightforward: an apparent monster is loose in the American Museum of Natural History. The execution, however, is superb. The book mixes multiple genres, including techno-thriller, mystery, and horror, and leans into the fact that Preston spent eight years working at the Museum before hatching the scheme to write this thriller with Child.

Steven Spielberg: A Biography
Joseph McBride

After reading a film studies textbook in October (long story), I’ve been on a bit of a popular cinema kick. It was this interest that led me to Joseph McBridge’s exhaustively researched 1997 biography of the wunderkind director.  McBride deploys a loosely Freudian approach to his subject, meaning that you should prepare for a long analytical treatment of Spielberg’s childhood. The narrative picks up steam, however, when a family friend at Universal, impressed by Firelight, an amateur 8mm feature Spielberg filmed using his friends and neighbors as cast, wrangles up an internship for the teenager on the studio lot. Spielberg haunts sets and the commissary, obsessively soaking in the trade. He then puts everything he learned into a feature short called Amblin, which is so polished that Universal pulls the trigger to hire the precocious 21-year-old to a television directing contract. Spoiler alert: things subsequently go quite well. My key takeaway from the book: Spielberg, for reasons that McBride can never quite nail down, was capital-D driven. His story provides a master class in the potential of mixing relentless ambition, talent, and perfect timing.

K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches
Tyler Kepner

I actually bought this book back in July from one of my favorite booksellers, Labyrinth Books, on Nassau Street, in Princeton, New Jersey. I didn’t get around to really reading it, however, until this fall. The book provides a brief oral history of ten important baseball pitches. Kepner, a baseball columnist for the Times, mixes a lot of original interviews with aging baseball greats with archival research. As you might expect from a Times reporter, the writing craft is superb. As someone who came to baseball relatively late (my twenties), however, I occasionally found myself drowning in repeated references to players I didn’t recognize. The book leans more towards nostalgia than a Moneyball-style contrarian sharpness.

Future Ethics
Cennydd Bowles

For obvious reason, I’ve recently taken up a professional interest in digital ethics. Bowles’ 2018 book provides a useful survey of the various problems tackled by this nascent field, and the frameworks that have emerged to tackle them. I particularly enjoyed Bowles sharp summary of Peter-Paul Verbeek’s Mediation Theory, which I first came across in Verbeek’s classic, Moralizing Technology, and which I think provides arguably the best take we currently have on our complicated relationship with modern tools. (Indeed, I would argue that Digital Minimalism is itself a practical instantiation of this theory’s main proposals.)

Numbers: The Language of Science
Tobias Dantzig

Original written in the 1930s, and boasting a book jacket blurb from Albert Einstein (“Beyond doubt the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics which has ever fallen into my hands”), Number provides a cultural history of our increasingly complicated understand of what we mean by the notion of a number. Dantzig starts with the emergence of a “counting sense” in humans that goes beyond what other animals can manage, and ends with Cantor’s uncountable infinities. Though the book perhaps gets a little too math-ey by the end (and this is coming from someone who is literally teaching discrete mathematics to university students at the moment), Dantzig provides a compelling overview of what we mean when we talk about “numbers,” and why this is a question that we must repeatedly keep re-visiting.

* Not every book is read within the exact days of a given month, so my rule is to count each book in the month in which I complete it.

In early 1973, George Lucas was living modestly with his wife, the film editor Marcia Lou Griffin, in a one-bedroom apartment in Mill Valley, a small town in Marin County, just north of San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge. Lucas’s situation drastically changed that summer when Universal released his second feature film, American Graffiti.

The movie was a major hit, earning over $60 million in its first year alone, before eventually going on to rake in $250 million in the decades that followed. Given that Graffiti was made on a shoestring budget of only $775,000, it still ranks as one of the most profitable movies of all time. Lucas, of course, enjoyed immense personal benefit from this success. His fledgling production company, LucasFilm, received $4 million from the movie in 1973, an amount worth over $16 million in today’s dollars.

I recently read about this particular beat in Lucas’s long narrative in Chris Taylor’s exhaustively-researched 2014 book, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe. As Taylor details, Lucas resisted the urge to follow the path of his friend Francis Ford Coppola, who had made a fortune the previous year with the runaway success of The Godfather, and then promptly spent the money on a “massive” Pacific Heights mansion and a private jet lease. He and Griffin instead bought a rambling Victorian house on Medway road in the Marin County village of San Anselmo.

What caught my attention most, however, is what Lucas did next.

According to Taylor, Lucas worked from old photographs of the house to reconstruct a two-story tower, including a fireplace and wrap-around windows offering a scenic view of nearby Mount Tam. It was in this tower, in the two years that followed, that Lucas sequestered himself most afternoons to sit at a three-sided desk he built out of old doors and grind out a new script for a movie concept that had long fascinated him, but was proving immensely difficult to reduce into a digestible story. His working title for the project: “The Star Wars.”

To my dismay, I couldn’t locate any extant images of Lucas’s writing tower. (The best I could find was the photo reproduced above, which shows Lucas in the house at Thanksgiving in 1977.)  But as with last week’s essay about Eoin Colfer devising the mega-bestselling Artemis Fowl series in a well-constructed backyard shed, I think this case study underscores the more general point that, for professional creatives, spending money to upgrade the aesthetics of your workspace is not just an exercise in expression, but is perhaps instead one of the best business investments you’ll ever make.

A few years ago, my family faced a housing dilemma. We lived at the time in our first house, a small cape cod near the top of an elongated cul-de-sac, situated on a bluff above Sligo Creek, a half mile outside downtown Silver Spring. We had two kids who comfortably shared an upstairs bedroom. But then my wife and I decided they needed a new brother, and we soon realized that we might not actually have anywhere to put him.

So we started thinking through options to gain more space. At one point, I landed on what I deemed to be an ingenious plan. We would give up my home office and instead build, in the corner of our small backyard, a custom writing shed. Inspired by the cabin Michael Pollan built in the woods outside his home in Kent, Connecticut, I began to daydream about making that short walk from our back door to a wood-paneled oasis; heated in the winter by a marine pellet stove, and cooled by tilt-open windows in the pleasant DC spring.

For various reasons, including the potential illegality of cramming an outbuilding of this size into our cramped yard, we ended up instead buying a new house ten minutes down the road. But the daydream of my impractical writing shed lingered.

Which is all a long way of establishing the importance of what happened earlier today. I was watching an old episode of a promotional show called Disney Insider with our youngest son (now three), when we were suddenly confronted with a great example of a writer who actually acted on my impulse. The segment in question focused on Eoin Colfer, the Irish author of the massively successful Artemis Fowl book series.

At the time of the segment’s filming, Colfer lived in a modest row house near the town center of Wexford, Ireland. After the birth of their first child, he converted a shed in the back of their narrow garden into an office, and, by the looks of it, he did it right.  The building is clad in red stained wood, with visible slatting and a modern slanted roof. Inside there’s room only for a desk that faces wall-to-wall windows looking back at the house. Behind him is a simple shelf holding the books crafted in the space.

It’s actually hard to find images of the shed online. The picture at the top of the post, extracted from Colfer’s Twitter account, is one of the better examples I could find,

Here’s another incomplete image that showcases the shelf behind the desk:

And one that reveals some of the front windows:

The television segment we watched did a much better job of showcasing the shed’s pleasing, depth-supporting aesthetics, both inside and outside. But the above images provide a good general sense of the space.

Perhaps non-surprisingly, Colfer no longer writes in this modest shed. A little internet sleuthing reveals that he eventually moved to a stately manner house, situated on 14 acres in the countryside outside Wexford proper. The property included a collection of free-standing stables and garages, one of which was converted into an elegant new office clad in light American oak. Even more recently, Colfer sold this property to move to Dublin.

When you sell 25 million books, you have options.

It was nice to see, however, that the spark that initiated this wildly lucrative and impactful writing career was a small but intentional shed built at the back of a narrow garden. Perhaps my daydream wasn’t so far-fetched after all.

When I give interviews about the potential harms of social media, I often tell a story from early in my career as a professor. In this tale, I was walking across the campus of a well-known university, on my way to give a talk to a student group about stress and academic success. I was escorted by a professor involved with the school’s student mental health clinic.

As we chatted, she casually mentioned an interesting development they’d noticed at the clinic. A few years earlier, seemingly all at once, the number of students they served significantly increased. Even more curious, the students all seemed to be suffering from the same cluster of previously-rare anxiety-related issues.

I asked her what she thought explained this change.

She responded without hesitation: “smartphones.”

As she then elaborated, the first classes to arrive on campus already immersed in the phone-enabled world of social media and ubiquitous connectivity were suddenly and more notably anxious than those who had come before.

I’ve been involved in many public discussions and debates on the promises and perils of network technologies in the years that have elapsed since that fateful conversation. I even ended up writing a bestselling book on the topic. Throughout this whole period, however, that story I first heard as a young professor stuck with me.

Which is why I was fascinated when, earlier today, a colleague of mine at Georgetown pointed me toward a new paper, co-authored by a trio of researchers from Stanford, MIT, and the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance, that argues that the experience described to me so many years earlier might have actually been quite common.

This paper, titled “Social Media and Mental Health,” leverages an ingenious natural experiment. When Facebook first began to spread among college campuses in the first decade of the 2000s, its introduction was staggered, often moving to only a few new schools at a time. (I still remember when Facebook arrived at Dartmouth during my senior year in 2004. It was a big event.)

The authors of this paper connect a dataset containing the dates when Facebook was introduced to 775 different colleges with answers from seventeen consecutive waves of the National College Health Assessment (NCHA), a comprehensive and longstanding survey of student mental health.

Using a statistical technique called difference in differences, the researchers quantified changes in the mental health status of students right before and right after they were given access to Facebook. Putting aside for now some technical discussion about how to properly obtain robustness from such analyses, the authors summarize their results as follows:

I recently received an interesting email from a Lutheran pastor named Amy. She had read some of my recent essays on slow productivity (e.g., 1 2 3), and heard me talk about this embryonic concept on my podcast, so she decided to send me her own story about slowing down.

“A few years ago, I realized I was on the verge of burnout with my job,” she began. To compensate for this alarming state of affairs, Amy took the following steps…

She quit social media.

She took off her phone any site or app that was “refreshable by design.”

She implemented my fixed-schedule productivity strategy by setting her work hours in advance, then later figuring out how to make her efforts fit within these constraints.

She began to take an actual Sabbath, inspired, in part, by Tiffany Shlain’s book, 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week.

She forwarded all work calls to voicemail and put in place a rule saying she must wait 24 hours before replying to any message that either made her upset or elated.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, she began scheduling less work for herself. Following an adage she first heard in seminary, she scheduled only two-thirds of her available work hours, leaving time free to handle pastoral emergencies, and enabling, more generally, margin surrounding her daily activities.

Amy feared this embrace of slow productivity would generate uproar from her parishioners and spawn relentless crises and problems. The reality turned out to be less dramatic:

“When I experimented by ceasing to do some things, and doing other things by putting in less effort, I heard nothing back. Nobody got really upset (at least not to my face). And when people have gotten upset about things, I’m better able to deal with it because I’m more rested, I have a life, it’s not as stressful as it used to be for me when my work mode was more reactive.”

Reflecting on her experiments with doing less, but doing what remains better, Amy reached a telling conclusion: “Time management is a core spiritual practice.”