Cal Newport Blog

A World Without Email

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 22:09:41 GMT

I’m pleased to officially announce my new book: A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. It comes out March 2nd in the US (and March 4th in the UK).

I started working on this book in 2016, almost immediately after Deep Work was released. At some point, I put the manuscript on pause to write Digital Minimalism, then returned my attention to grappling with its central ideas.

In many ways, this book is my magnum opus on the topic of technology and the workplace. If you’ve been following my articles for the New Yorker over the past year or so, or listening to my podcast, you’ve encountered a sampling of the rigorous new thinking at the core of this effort.

I’ve divided A World Without Email into two parts.

The first part, which is titled “The Case Against Email,” provides the definitive treatment on how the world of work transformed after the introduction of digital communication tools, and what unintended consequences these changes created.
The second part, which is titled “Principles for A World Without Email,” introduces a framework I call attention capital theory that can be deployed to radically rethink how we work, pushing us toward a vision in which ceaseless, ad hoc messaging is replaced with much more sustainable and structured approaches to producing valuable output with our brains.

The advice in this book is designed to be relevant for several different audiences, including employees, entrepreneurs, and executives. This breadth is captured in the endorsements, which include:

Dropbox cofounder Drew Houston, who says “A World Without Email crystallizes what so many of us feel intuitively but haven’t been able to explain: the way we’re working isn’t working.”
Kevin Kelly, who says “Cal Newport is on a quest to uncover better ways for knowledge workers to collaborate.”
Harvard Business School Professor Leslie Perlow, who says “This book is a call to action”
Greg McKeown, who calls the book ” bold, visionary, almost prophetic.”

I will, of course, be talking about the book more as we approach the publication date. If you preorder the book, hold on to your email receipt, as I’ll be announcing soon a way for you to redeem it to receive a pre-order bonus.

But until then, I’m just excited to finally be talking publicly about something I’ve been working on for so long on my own…

#####

Speaking of my books: if you live in the UK, the kindle version of Digital Minimalism is currently on sale for only 0.99p…if you haven’t read my latest yet, this is the absolute best time to do so!

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

Projects vs. Tasks: A Critical Distinction in Productive Scheduling

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 22:22:54 GMT

In a recent episode of my podcast, an Australian doctor named Nathan asked an interesting question regarding some difficulties he had maintaining and organizing his task list:

“David Allen asked ‘Is it actionable?’; separating tasks from ideas. But I also find that there are different types of tasks. The easiest to deal with are what I’m taking to calling ‘concrete’ tasks, such as taking out the rubbish, or submitting a final report. These are defined, necessary tasks that are cognitively easy to deal with. However, I’m also aware of ‘aspirational’ tasks, such as ‘summarize War and Peace,’ which are open-ended, and don’t really matter if you accomplish them by a specific time…they tend to just pile up.”

This is an important question because it touches on the rare productivity topic that’s both crucial to my personal process, and something that I haven’t already written much about. I thought, therefore, it would useful to briefly review the answer I gave Nathan.

In the influential world of Getting Things Done (GTD), all work eventually reduces to specific and unambiguous “next actions,” an idea David Allen adapted from the business consultant Dean Acheson (unrelated to Truman’s Secretary of State). In GTD, you might have a list of broader “projects,” such as Nathan’s example of summarizing Tolstoy, but these are just reminders that should spur you to add relevant next actions to your task list during your next review; perhaps, in this case, “buy notebook for book summary,” or “read the next 10 pages.”

As I told Nathan, I do not strictly subscribe to this philosophy of task essentialism. For me, some projects are never translated into tasks. Instead, I place them on my quarterly plan. I’ll then see the project when setting up my weekly plan. At this point, I work out what progress, if any, I want to make on it during the upcoming week. Finally, I see these notes each day as I setup my time block schedule, leading me to allocate the specific minutes the project needs during the upcoming hours.

For the sake of example, let’s tackle how I might schedule Nathan’s War and Peace case study:

Description of the project in my Quarterly Plan: “One of my goals this winter is to finish reading War and Peace, while taking good notes on each chapter.”
Sample Weekly Plan note about this project: “Put aside 30 minutes for lunch each day this week, and work on War and Peace while eating. The one exception is Thursday, as I have a lunch scheduled with Diana.”
Sample time block schedule: Every day of the week, with the exception of Thursday, includes a 30-minute time block labeled “lunch + W&P.” When I get to that block, I know exactly what I need to be working on.

For projects that require an ambiguous but significant amount of deep work, this planning flow from quarterly to weekly to daily is how I ensure that the sheer volume of cognitive effort required to accomplish something hard actually occurs. If I instead simply added the equivalent of “read the next 10 pages” to an overflowing task list, I doubt I’d ever make much progress on the things that matter.

To be clear, most of the obligations on my plate exist as concrete items in my task lists (which, as my podcast listeners know, I maintain using Trello). But most of the projects that move the needle in my career — working on a research paper, writing a major article — never get discretized into bite-size actions on a list. I instead treat them with the level of intention that their formidable difficulty deserves.

This distinction between tasks and projects is subtle, but it’s also critical to how I think about my work, so I thought it was worth discussing as we enter a new year and begin pondering how to make the most out of this annual return to a proverbial clean slate.

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

Theodore Roosevelt’s Focused Advice

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 13:49:24 GMT

One of my colleagues at Georgetown recently pointed me toward a 1902 letter that Theodore Roosevelt sent to his son Kermit, who at the time was at boarding school.

Here’s the passage that caught my attention:

“I am delighted at all the accounts I receive of how you are doing at Groton. You seem to be enjoying yourself and are getting on well. I need not tell you to do your best to cultivate ability for concentrating your thought on whatever work you are given to do—you will need it in Latin especially.”

As readers of Deep Work know, I’ve previously highlighted Teddy’s fabled powers of focus as playing a critical role in his rise, so it’s not surprising that he’s emphasizing this same skill to his son. What strikes me, however, is that this recommendation isn’t standard for all students.

The connection between concentration and effective thinking is well-understood by this point, and yet few curriculums, at any level of education, aim to help students cultivate this ability. I can think of few meta-skills more important in an increasingly symbolic and complex culture than the ability to lock in on an abstract challenge and see it through to a useful conclusion. But we rarely talk about what it actually feels like to think hard, and how to get better at it.

Teddy prefaced his letter to Kermit by saying “I need not tell you.” The implication being that his advice on concentration was well-worn. I’m not sure that it remains so obvious in our current moment.

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

Andrew Gelman’s 4 pm Rule (a Knowledge Work Reverie)

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 23:11:19 GMT

Andrew Gelman is a professor at Columbia University with a joint appointment in the department of statistics and political science. To say he’s productive is an understatement. He’s written six book, has been cited over 120,000 times, and wields an h-index over 100 (if you’re not sure about this last statistic, ask a professor friend to explain why it’s impressive).

The reason I’m mentioning Gelman is a blog post he published earlier this week. As pointed out by the eagle-eyed reader who sent me the article, in the second paragraph, Gelman casually admits: “I never check my email before 4.”

Rationally, this is exactly what you want from a professor at a major university like Columbia: someone who is perhaps not that responsive to emails, but generates six books and 120,000 citations.

And yet, I can tell you from my own experience, and those of the many professors who send questions to my podcast or emailed me in response to my infamous 2019 article on this topic for the Chronicle of Higher Education, this noteworthy habit of Gelman’s is much more the exception than the rule in academia.

An interesting thought to ponder in the days ahead, during which the Christmas break gives us all a temporary inbox reprieve, is what the world of work would be like if Gelman’s email habit was much less exceptional. What if we were all given the cognitive space needed to pursue our field’s equivalent of 120,000 citations?

I’ll have a lot more to say about this idea in the new year, but for now we can set this up as a pleasant thought experiment; a knowledge work equivalent of dancing sugar plum dreams.

The post Blog first appeared on Cal Newport.

Unpacking Our Dialectical Relationship with Slack

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 22:01:23 GMT

Earlier this week, I published an essay in the New Yorker about Salesforce’s proposed $28 billion acquisition of Slack. You might assume that my feelings toward this slick-interfaced interruption machine are purely negative, but as I admit: “I do not dislike Slack as much as people assume given that I wrote a book titled Deep Work.”

What interests me more than easy criticism here is the knowledge sector’s dialectical relationship with this tool. People hate it, but they also kind of love it. Slack fragments your attention into minuscule shards, but it also solves issues that make email nearly untenable as a means of organizing work.

As I elaborate in the essay, it’s in this dual reaction that we find the truly important insight. Slack optimized the hyper-communicative, ad hoc, message-driven workflow that email helped make ubiquitous. We love it because it improves this approach to work, but we hate it because this approach doesn’t scale, and therefore ultimately makes us miserable — an observation succinctly captured in the piece’s title: “Slack is the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work.”

Anyway, as always, I recommend you read the original article for a fuller take on my thinking.

The post Unpacking Our Dialectical Relationship with Slack first appeared on Cal Newport.

From Instagram to Insistent Goats: Another Life After Social Media Case Study

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 18:53:10 GMT

Not long ago, I received a note from a reader named Shandel who wanted to share her experience with social media. She began by noting that she used to “love” these services:

I loved meeting new people and adding them to my friends list. It was a thrill!…I joined a running group and felt super cool to be posting with them and to be tagged in their photos. I was proud of my life and wanted to show it off.”

Then, like many, she began to feel “some unrest.” She worried that she was looking at photos of her kids more than she looked at them in real life, and found herself adjusting her family like models to produce better posts. She started to feel creeped out that “friends” were commenting on these photos even though they’d never actually met.

A breaking point came when the family car got stuck in the snow. Shandel’s instinct was to jump out and begin filming her husband’s efforts to free the tires, as it seemed like a scene that could yield a good haul of likes. “Can you help me!?”, he finally called out in exasperation.

That was the final push: Shandel quit social media. When she wrote me, it had been six months since she made the decision.

“It’s okay. I’m okay. I don’t need to know everything that’s going on. My kids have stopped asking me to put down my phone. I am busier now than I’ve ever been, and I feel more peace in my heart about how I spend my time. I’m currently working full-time from home, raising my kids, raising my goat kids, and gardening.”

Shandel hasn’t abandoned using technology to stay connected, but now does so on her own terms. She still takes pictures of her kids, for example, but instead of posting them to Instagram, she texts them directly to her “actual friends and family.”

The thought of Shandel and her children out in their fields (she sent me a picture of their land: it’s bucolic), feeding the goats, tending the garden, looking toward the horizon and not a screen: made me happy. It’s a nice reminder that although social media can offer diversion from a lot that’s tough in life, it disrupts what’s good as well, and that’s rarely a fair trade.

The post From Instagram to Insistent Goats: Another Life After Social Media Case Study first appeared on Cal Newport.

Rethinking the Internet, Again

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 20:54:46 GMT

In October, I wrote a blog post suggesting a framework for the social internet in which users own their own data, including social links, original content, and descriptions of their interests. In my proposal, social networks would compete to offer you the best experience using this common pool of information.

If you don’t like how Instagram is observing your behavior to sell ads, for example, you can now turn to an alternative site that has access to the same pictures and social connections, and can therefore show you the same material, but now with more privacy.

Similarly, if you don’t like Twitter’s content policies, you can turn to any number of alternative applications that have access to the same mini-posts, but can apply their own house rules about what they’ll display or recommend.

A lot of interesting things can happen, in other words, once individual companies can no longer horde your information.

As many readers helpfully pointed out in response to my October post, I was not the first person to have this idea. I was particularly pleased to discover an open source project that attempts to implement something more or less exactly in line with this vision, and that’s headed by someone who knows a thing or two about the world wide web because, well, he invented it.

The project is named Solid and it was started by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who I used to occasionally see in the elevator at MIT, as his World Wide Web Consortium was headquartered on the floor below my office in the Stata Center.

The core idea of Solid is that people house their digital data in decentralized servers called Pods. You can run your own Pod server, or use a third-party server hosted by a company you trust. The key is that no one organization controls everything. Instead, as with the classic web, all servers can be accessed using a common protocol.

When a web site or application wants to use some of your data, it must now ask you for permission. Using cryptographic tools, you can then grant the requester access to exactly the information you want it to have, and it can use your permission to go gather this data from the relevant Pods. The reverse can also happen: with the right permission, a service can write new things to one of your Pods, such as adding a new social link, or a note from a healthcare provider.

No one company owns your information, and no company can use your information without you knowing. (Indeed, though not specifically referenced by the Solid project, this scheme might even enable Jaron Lanier’s provocative idea of micro-payments in exchange for monetizing your information.)

My short summary here doesn’t do justice to the complex technology underpinning Solid. You can find out more at the official project web site, or in this recent profile from Tech Crunch, which includes helpful case studies.

The larger point I want to emphasize is that we don’t have to settle for the current configuration of our online existence. There’s nothing inevitable about a setup in which a few mega-companies own all of our data and therefore dictate our digital culture. We can do more than boycotts and legislative threats.

Thirty years ago, one man, working as a technology fellow at CERN, had an idea that completely changed the trajectory of the internet. Why couldn’t he — or someone like him — do it again?

#####

My friends at Mouse Books (as featured in Digital Minimalism) are at it again. They just launched a kickstarter for a special edition 3-book holiday collection dedicated to the topic of hell. Seems about right for 2020. If you’re looking for a high quality analog alternative to numbing yourself with your phone, check out this new series.

The post Rethinking the Internet, Again first appeared on Cal Newport.

On Technology and Focus: ASMR, VR, and the First Steps Toward Immersive Single Tasking

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 23:22:27 GMT

Around 2010, a curious new term arose in obscure but energetic internet chatrooms: autonomous sensory meridian response. ASMR, as it was soon abbreviated, described a peculiar but common form of paresthesia experienced as a tingling that starts in the scalp and then moves down the back. It’s often triggered by specific sounds, like soft whispering or a paintbrush scraping canvas. Not surprisingly, those sensitive to ASMR often found Bob Ross reruns to be a reliable source of the effect.

What makes ASMR relevant our interests here is that it happened to emerge as a topic of discussion just as YouTube emerged as a cultural force. Soon a cottage industry arose of AMSR videos featuring meticulously recorded trigger sounds. One such video opens on a straw stirring seltzer water. A little later it zooms in on a knife scraping dried blush on a make-up tray. It’s been viewed over four and a half million times.

The reason I know about ASMR is that as these “tingle videos” grew in popularity, they gave way to a sub-genre called ASMR rooms. The goal in these videos was no longer to trigger the classical tingling response, but instead to invoke a sense of meditative calm and focus.

One such video, for example, is a mostly static shot of a Charles Dickens’s victorian-style writing room, with animated flames crackling in the fireplace and a storm raging outside the windows. The scene runs for close to two hours. The only thing that changes is the intensity of the rain:

A popular variety of ASMR room scenes recreates locations from the Harry Potter universe. A couple days ago, a reader pointed me toward one of her favorite examples of this category, a recreation of the magical workshop of Newt Scamander from the Fantastic Beasts movies:

This video features both rain and glowing oil lamps. Extra touches include a glass vessel containing gelatinous, glowing, magical ephemera, and a writing quill that ever so slowly rotates in its inkwell.

The reader told me that she plays the video full screen on her computer while positioning a word processor document in front of it. She listens to the stereo sound in high quality noise cancelling headphones. Though she works out of a “small and noisy urban flat,” the video and sounds help her fall into a state of concentration when she needs to write.

I mention this all because I’m increasingly convinced that something interesting is happening here.

I’ve written before about immersive single tasking, my term for applying technology to induce states of productive and rewarding concentration. It seems like the thriving ASMR room community may currently hold something close to a lead in investigating this possibility.

To me, the next logical step is to figure out how to make this work in a virtual reality context, where the effect of the immersion would be significantly amplified.

The connection between ASMR and virtual reality is at least a half-decade old. And more recently, people have begun porting the ASMR room experience into this new medium as well:

The big problem with the latter trend, however, is that you cannot easily work if you have a large plastic rig covering your eyes. To immerse yourself in a 3d virtual reality recreation of Hogsmeade village on a snowy evening might indeed put you into a state of creative contemplation, but it’s a waste if you can’t also craft any useful artifacts during your moments of techno-induced concentration.

Which brings me to a recent idea: why not integrate automated speech recognition? Perhaps we’re just one small step into the adjacent possible away from actually deriving a strong immersive single tasking benefit here. What if, in other words, we augmented a VR ASMR room with basic speech recognition functionality?

Here’s what I roughly imagine: While you sit in Newt Scamander’s magical workshop, listening to the rain, and examining the haphazard cabinets of curiosities that surround you, a simple click of your VR controller puts you in transcription mode, and your speech automatically appears fleetingly in the scene as lines on the piece of parchment arranged on the desk. When you’re done, your notes are stored safely in a text file.

This would not be an efficient way to polish a chapter of your complex novel, but it could be just what you need to figure out the outline that gets you past a tricky plot point, or, in another context, unstick a new business strategy for your company, or capture an insight that unlocks a recalcitrant proof.

I don’t know whether or not VR AMSR rooms combined with voice recognition technology would actually provide a useful amplification of our latent deep work capabilities, but in a moment in which we’re temporarily stuck in our homes due to a pandemic, eager to produce things that matter, while also constrained by the prosaic limitations of our “small and noisy” surroundings, the time has never been better to start experimenting with the role technology can play in unlocking our cognitive potential.

The post On Technology and Focus: ASMR, VR, and the First Steps Toward Immersive Single Tasking first appeared on Cal Newport.

When Did Productivity Become Personal?

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 23:09:35 GMT

My latest article for The New Yorker, published on Tuesday, is titled “The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.” It’s not, however, really about David Allen’s productivity system, which longtime readers (and listeners) know I really admire. It’s instead about a deeper question that I hadn’t heard discussed much before: Why do we leave office workers to figure out on their own how to get things done?

With the notable exception of agile software development teams, companies in this sector largely leave decisions about how work is assigned, reviewed, and organized up to individuals. We promulgate clear objectives and construct motivating corporate cultures, but when it comes to actually executing these tasks, we just hook everyone up to an email address or Slack channel and tell them to rock and roll. This has led to a culture of overload and fragmented attention that makes everyone involved miserable.

I don’t want to spoil too much of the piece, but here are two big picture conclusions:

First, our current commitment to autonomy in knowledge work is more arbitrary than we realize. It largely comes from a single, influential management theorist who shaped the evolution of this emerging sector in the mid-twentieth century.
Second, if companies got more involved with the workflows organizing how things actually got done, they could likely increase both their profitability and their employees’ satisfaction.

If you combine this article with my preceding two efforts for The New Yorker, which focused on the topics of remote work and email, respectively, you’ll encounter, in increasing high fidelity, hints of my rapidly-maturing critique of knowledge work, and my optimism for its future.

The post When Did Productivity Become Personal? first appeared on Cal Newport.

The Time Blocking Revolution Begins…

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 15:54:08 GMT

I’m excited to announce that my new Time-Block Planner is now available everywhere books are sold online.

I first described my time blocking practice on this blog back in 2013. The idea began to gain traction after I popularized it in my 2016 book, Deep Work. In the years since, it’s been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and Lifehacker.

I often claim time blocking is the secret to my productivity. In my experience, time blockers accomplish roughly twice as much work per week as compared to those who use more reactive methods, and enjoy a much clearer separation between work and non-work time, significantly reducing professional stress and anxiety.

Now for the first time, this system has been captured in a daily planner that makes it easy for anyone to implement these ideas in their own professional life. (To learn more about the system and exactly how the planner works, check out the dedicated site I launched at TimeBlockPlanner.com.)

There are two reasons why I decided to publish my own planner:

The first was convenience. I was tired of hand-formatting blank notebooks. I was also frustrated by paper quality issues and the lack of page marker ribbons that help quickly identify the current page. This planner solves those problems, reducing the friction required to implement daily planning.
The second, and more important, was motivational. It’s one thing to read about a productivity system, but it’s another thing to actually invest in and own an artifact that’s dedicated to implementing that system. I want more people to time block. Buying this planner signals to yourself that you’re a time blocker. It’s also an attractive aesthetic object, with nice paper and detailing. It’s a pleasure to use, especially with a micro-ball liquid ink pen (like this one). These factors might sound small, but they make a big difference when it comes to the challenge of consistently overcoming your mental resistance to stay organized. I think of the planner like a gym membership or Peleton subscription for your time and attention.

To find our more about the planner check out the dedicated site. You can buy the planner at the standard places: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powells, Hudson Booksellers, Books-a-Million, etc.

The post The Time Blocking Revolution Begins... first appeared on Cal Newport.

Staying Productive on Distracted Days

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 17:09:51 GMT

I don’t normally spend much time reading information online, so I definitely noticed this morning the unusual degree to which I was distracted by breaking election news. This points to an interesting question that I’ve seen discussed in some articles in recent days: what’s the best way to keep getting things done on truly distracting days?

My answer: don’t.

“Productivity” is a slippery term. It’s often used to refer exclusively to the rate at which you produce value for your business or employer. I tend to apply it more broadly to describe the intentional allocation of your time and attention toward things that matter to you and away from diversions that don’t.

A lot of days, this probably involves a solid push on professional activities, as craft is an important part of cultivating a deep life. But not every day. If there are consequential national events transpiring, or you’re dealing with a crisis in your personal life, or you’re not feeling well, a productive day doesn’t necessarily require steady progress through a task list.

The tools I talk about here and on my podcast, like time-block planning, are really powerful, and offer the ability to help you to execute intentional, high impact schedules. This doesn’t, however, eliminate the philosophical question of what exactly a “high impact” schedule means on any given day.

The post Staying Productive on Distracted Days first appeared on Cal Newport.

The Stone Carver in an Age of Computer Screens

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 22:04:27 GMT

A reader recently pointed me toward a short video titled “A Continuous Shape.” It profiles Anna Rubincam, a stone carver from South London who works alone out of a utilitarian studio; sliding doors open to tree-lined patio.

The video follows Rubincam’s efforts over three weeks to produce a stone carving of a young woman’s head. It starts with her taking measurements from a live model. These are then translated into a clay figure, and subsequently engraved, one precise chisel hit after another, into a solid chunk of stone.

The reader who sent me the video titled his message: “Epitome of deep work.” I think he’s on to something.

When you watch Rubincam in action, it’s hard not to feel an intimation of wistfulness. Something about her efforts, in which she stands alone in a minimalist chamber, and hour after hour, with hard-won skill, manifests cognitive abstractions into concrete reality, seems about right.

I think the reason portrayals of physical craft are instinctually compelling is that they present a conception of “work” that closely aligns with our species’ wiring. Part of what separated us from our primate ancestors is our ability to understand the world symbolically; allowing us to make an abstract plan that we then translate into something real. We’re rewarded for this final step with a sense of satisfaction, and punished for its absence with a sense of anxious hollowness.

When contemplating these realities, I can’t help but wonder about the psychic toll of replacing the simplicity of such craft with email, and Zoom, and half-hearted PowerPoint. As I elaborate in Digital Minimalism, a brain forged in the Paleolithic doesn’t fully understand the digital, and is easily overwhelmed by a notion of work defined by constant, unstructured, unceasing electronic pings and dings.

Late in the video, Rubincam looks to camera and explains:

“Once you’ve created something it takes up a physical space in the world and it has a permanence that will hopefully outlast you.”

Here’s to hoping that as the world of work evolves beyond its tactile foundation, we can find a way to extract similar levels of calm human contentment from our daily efforts.

The post The Stone Carver in an Age of Computer Screens first appeared on Cal Newport.

A Modest Proposal: Deweaponizing Network Effects

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 22:03:09 GMT

I recently read an important new article titled “Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction.” It was written by Vikram Bhargava and Manuel Velasquez, two professors from Santa Clara University, and published earlier this fall in the journal Business Ethics Quarterly.

The article applies a rigorous ethical analysis to purposefully addictive social media platforms. In one section, for example, the authors deploy Martha Nussbaum’s influential capabilities approach to demonstrate that these platforms impair many of the elements required for a dignified human life. Their conclusion is that from a strictly philosophical perspective, service like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram present a “serious moral problem.”

This article is an important academic adjunct to the topics explored in the recent Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, and I highly recommend reading it.

I was also, however, intrigued by the concluding section, which explored implications and solutions (and cited Digital Minimalism, which I appreciated). This got me thinking about more radical responses to these present moral problems. I thought it might be fun to share one such, admittedly half-baked, notion here, with advance apologies to the originators of the many similar ideas I’m almost certainly inadvertently overlapping.

What if we got more serious about ceding users ownership over all of their social internet data: both what they’ve posted, but also their links; followers, friends, etc.?

Major legislative responses, such as the European Union’s GDPR, have tried to enforce data ownership, but what I have in mind is both simpler and more extreme.

In my hypothetical scheme, everyone has a cross-platform universal identifier. Every stable social connection on a given service can be imagined as a labelled edge in a social graph that contains a node for every universal identifier.

The key in this scheme is that these edges are owned by the user and must be easily portable to any service.

If, for example, you join a new social internet platform, you should be able, with a click of a button, to import all of your existing social connections from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter .

Furthermore — and here’s where the proposal gets more fanciful — all such services must provide APIs that make it easy for one to connect to another. The new social internet service you joined, for example, should be able to easily pull in all new Tweets you would have seen in your Twitter timeline, or all photos your Instagram friends have recently posted. (For more on some fledgling attempts at such standards, see my New Yorker piece on the “indie social media” movement.)

As argued in the Business Ethics Quarterly article cited above, one of the major moral issues with existing social media platforms is their ability to trap you in their walled garden, at which point they can, without restraint, wield attention engineering to exploit every last morsel of monetizable attention or data from your distracted husk of a digital body. You can’t leave the walled garden, because everything you care about is locked inside.

But in a scheme like the one proposed here, the locks are opened. If you don’t like Twitter’s addictive interface, or the outrage-inducing Tweets its algorithms push into your timeline, you can jump over to another service that doesn’t try to addict you; perhaps one that charges a modest subscription fee and instead curates a timeline of “deep thoughts” on selected topics, or shows you only the best or most originally twisted comedic memes of the day.

If we want to follow this train of thought to its radical but rational terminus, one might even imagine a publicly-funded technology consortium that stores all social links and all data posted or received on this social graph. In this scenario, every service works with the same public database, forcing them to compete only on the experience and value they bring to their users.

When you’re not trapped in the garden, in other words, you’re not compelled to put up with abuse.

To be fair, I can already think of a dozen issues with this particular, admittedly sketchy proposal. But there’s a broader point lurking underneath that I feel stronger about. Too many of the “solutions” proposed for the moral calamities induced by existing social media platforms focus on directly forcing those platforms to behave better.

But if we owned our social internet destiny, we wouldn’t need Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or (God forbid) Tik Tok, to behave better. We could just turn to an easily accessible, better alternative.

The post A Modest Proposal: Deweaponizing Network Effects first appeared on Cal Newport.

My New Planner + The Time Block Academy

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 19:00:06 GMT

Longtime readers and recent podcast listeners know that I’m a massive advocate of a productivity technique called time-block planning, which is at the core of my strategy for getting important things done in an increasingly distracted world.

After years of hand-formatting generic notebooks to satisfy my time-block planning needs, I decided to design my own planner optimized for exactly this activity.

Here’s the result…

The Time-Block Planner will be available everywhere books are sold online on November 10th and can be pre-ordered today.

I’ll share more details on the planner and the method it encodes as we get closer to the publication date. In the meantime, however, I wanted to discuss a special event I’m organizing for those hardcore time blockers who pre-order the planner before November 10th.

The event is called Time Block Academy.

It’s a live Zoom webinar that will be held November 13th at 3pm eastern. During the event, I’ll answer both live and pre-submitted questions about time blocking, productivity more generally, or whatever else is on your mind — sort of like a live episode of Deep Questions attended by a select crowd.

To gain admission, pre-order the Time-Block Planner at your preferred retailer, and email your proof of purchase to timeblockplanner@prh.com. My publisher will email you back with details about the webinar, as well as a link to a video tutorial I created that gives you a sneak peak of the planner and how it works.

(US Residents, 18+. Ends November 09, 2020. See terms at this link.)

The post My New Planner + The Time Block Academy first appeared on Cal Newport.

Churchill’s D-Day Task List

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 01:16:51 GMT

Last week, I received an email from a reader who had just returned from a trip to the Churchill War Rooms, a London museum housed in the bunkers, built underneath the Treasury Building, where Winston Churchill safely commanded the British war efforts as the Blitz bombarded the city above.

The reader had photographed an artifact he thought I might find interesting: a to-do list labeled “D Day,” written by one of the secretaries serving Churchill.

Here’s a detail shot:

Superficially, I was intrigued because I’ve been consuming a lot of WWII history recently. (At the moment, I’m concurrently reading The Splendid and the Vile along with David Roll’s excellent new George Marshall biography.)

But it also resonated at a deeper level.

On my podcast, I’ve been talking a lot about the notion of “facing the productivity dragon.” The idea is that when you’re confronted with a seemingly untenable set of obligations — as so many are right now during these pandemic times as jobs disappear, or force us to somehow juggle mounting work responsibilities with closed-school childcare — it’s still best to enumerate the full scope of the challenge.

Don’t retreat into frustration and despair. Write down everything that’s demanded of you, even if you can’t possibly satisfy all of the obligations. Then make the best plan you can given the difficult circumstances. The comfort comes from the plan, not the achievable outcomes.

Face the dragon, in other words, even if it’s terrifying. You’ll end up calmer and with more resolve than those who flee.

This is what came to mind when I looked at the above artifact images from the Churchill War Rooms. Even when forced to deal with something as hopelessly complex, and fraught, and impossible, and insanely high stakes as the reconquest of Europe, the first step was to write down, in humble script, the full scope of the tasks required for such an overwhelming endeavor.

You cannot slay the dragon until you can see it.

The post Churchill's D-Day Task List first appeared on Cal Newport.

On the Neurochemistry of Deep Work

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:58:28 GMT

Andrew Huberman is a neurobiologist at Stanford Medical School. His lab specializes in neuroplasticity, the process by which the human brain changes its neuronal connections.

A reader recently brought to my attention a fascinating discussion about learning. It’s from a podcast episode Huberman recorded with Joe Rogan back in July.

Around the two minute mark of the clip, Rogan provides Huberman with a hypothetical scenario: “You’re 35, and want to learn a new skill, what is the best way to set these patterns?”

As someone who is in my thirties and makes a living learning hard things, I was, as you might imagine, interested to hear what Dr. Huberman had to say on this issue. Which is all to preface that I was gratified to hear the following reply:

“If you want to learn and change your brain as an adult, there has to be a high level of focus and engagement. There’s no way around this…you have to lean in and focus extremely hard.”

As longtime readers know, I made this same argument in Deep Work, where I noted that “the ability to learn hard things quickly” was one of the two main advantages of training your ability to concentrate.

But Huberman blows past my simplistic explanations and dissects the complex neurochemistry behind learning. I won’t try to replicate all the details of his impromptu lecture, but I’ll elaborate one particularly interesting point.

Huberman notes that to attain significant brain rewiring requires that you induce a sense of “urgency” that leads to the release of norepinephrine. This hormone, however, will make you feel “agitated,” like you need to get up and go do something. It’s here that you must apply intense focus to fight that urge, ultimately leading to the release of acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter that in combination with the norepinephrine can induce brain growth.

I’m probably bastardizing some of these biological details, but regardless, they point to a narrow example of a broader point. The ability to focus is more than just an anachronistic novelty. It’s at the core of how us humans adapt and thrive in a complex world.

#####

Speaking of Deep Work, as I write this, it’s currently one of Amazon’s Daily Deals, meaning that the Kindle version is available for only $3.99. If you haven’t yet taken a deep dive into deep work, now is a great time to do so!

The post On the Neurochemistry of Deep Work first appeared on Cal Newport.

Do Smartphones Make Us Dumber?

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 20:53:34 GMT

A reader recently pointed me toward an intriguing article published in 2017 in the Journal for the Association of Consumer Research. It was titled, “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.”

The authors of the paper report the results of a straightforward experiment. Subjects are invited into a laboratory to participate in some assessment exercises. Before commencing, however, they’re asked to put their phones away. Some subjects are asked to place their phone on the desk next to the computer on which they’re working; some are told to put their phone in their bag; some are told to put their phone in the other room. (The experimenters had clever ways of manipulating these conditions without arousing suspicion.)

Each subject was then subjected to a battery of standard cognitive capacity tests. The result? Subjects measured notably lower on working memory capacity and fluid intelligence when the phone was next to them on the desk versus out of sight. This was true even though in all the cases the subjects didn’t actually use their phones.

The mere presence of the device, in other words, sapped cognitive resources. The effect was particularly pronounced in those who self-reported to be heavy phone users.

I think we’re only scratching the surface on the damage caused by our current technology habits. As I argued in Digital Minimalism, these tools are both powerful and indifferent to your best interests. Until you decide to adopt a minimalist ethos, and deploy technology intentionally to serve specific values you care about, the damage it inflicts will continue to accumulate.

The post Do Smartphones Make Us Dumber? first appeared on Cal Newport.

Eric Posner Thinks It’s a "Serious Mistake” for Law Professors to Use Twitter

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 15:28:26 GMT

Eric Posner is arguably one of the most influential and prolific law professors in the country at the moment. Which is why I paid attention when around the 39 minute mark of a recent interview, Posner was asked his thoughts on law professors using Twitter.

“I’ve thought about this a lot because it now seems like every law professor wants to have this public presence,” Posner replied. “And I increasingly think this is a serious mistake.”

As he elaborates, becoming a “good” academic who is “serious” about research is a hard job:

“It requires a huge amount of work, especially at the beginning, to absorb the literature, to absorb the norms…I think a lot of junior people who are on Twitter…should be educating themselves.”

As he then clarifies, most of what transpires on Twitter is people “ranting” and reading other peoples’ “rants.” Participating in that culture, he says, doesn’t contribute in a meaningful way to the public debate.

The interviewer then presents Posner with another standard argument for why academics should engage with social media: it’s a way to “establish prominence in a field or establish name recognition.”

Posner doesn’t buy it:

“They’re wrong. You see. It’s a classic mistake. They don’t realize that everyone else is thinking that as well…you think you’re going to get name recognition, and you’ll get known, because you’re sending out these really clever and incisive tweets that are going to get the attention of the world. But you’ve forgotten that a thousand other people are doing exactly the same thing.”

As Posner elaborates with acid precision, his experience with Twitter taught him that what it’s really good at is “tricking” you into thinking that “the whole world is waiting for you to pronounce on some important issue.” This sense of importance is intoxicating. But as he argues, with the exception of a very small number of outliers, the audience for most users doesn’t extend far beyond bots and some friends.

Even I don’t fully escape Posner’s derision, as he also briefly mentions blog posting as a similar waste of time. (The irony!) But I think it’s his take on Twitter that rings particularly true. I wrote some about this “illusion of influence” concept in Deep Work. These services don’t hook you because they’re interesting; they hook you because they make you feel like you’re interesting.

Which is all well and good, until you look up five years later at your tenure review and lament about all the high impact papers you could have written instead.

The post Eric Posner Thinks It's a "Serious Mistake" for Law Professors to Use Twitter first appeared on Cal Newport.

Michael Connelly Starts Writing Before the Sun Comes Up

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 23:38:04 GMT

One of the notable realities of my life, given the topics I write about, is the regularity with which people send me various articles about the work habits of the novelist Michael Connelly. Here’s a representative sample from an interview published in The Daily Beast:

“I get up to write while it’s still dark, 5 or 5:30. I start by editing and rewriting everything I did the day before, and that gives some momentum for the day. I get to new territory when the sun is coming up. I take a break to take my daughter to school…then I get back to it. If it’s early in a book, I’ll only write til lunch, because it can be hard for me to get that momentum going. If it’s late in a book and really flowing, I’ll just keep writing and writing until I’m either too tired or have been called to dinner.”

He later elaborates that he uses blackout shades to transform his writing office into a space beyond time. “You don’t know if it’s light or dark,” he explains. “I just try to put everything else out of focus and look only at the screen of my laptop.”

This routine is common among popular genre fiction writers (see, for example, John Grisham or Lee Child). To fulfill the economic necessity of publishing one book per year — which, as I can tell you from experience, is really hard — they strip down their work habits to support maximum cognitive output.

For the rest of us, drowning in our inboxes and Zoom invites, this should be more than a source of aspirational escape. It represents a reminder that getting the most out of the messy jumble of neurons known as the human brain requires sacrifices. To instead orient work around pleasing everyone who might need you in the moment is to ultimately please no one with the quality of what you produce.

The post Michael Connelly Starts Writing Before the Sun Comes Up first appeared on Cal Newport.

Life of Focus: Now Open

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 19:07:06 GMT

The first session Life of Focus, the online course I created with Scott Young, is now open. The registration period will last until Friday, September 4th (midnight Pacific Time).

Click here to join.

As I elaborated last week, this course is designed to help you transform both your professional and personal lives so that you focus more on things that really matter, and spend less of your day mired in distractions that don’t. It will then help you train your brain to make the most of the time you put aside for these important pursuits.

Drawing on ideas first explored in our bestselling books, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and Ultralearning, the course is divided into three months, each built around a concrete project that pushes you forward in your transformation into a life of focus. You’ll be guided in these efforts by video lessons, worksheets, and community support from your fellow students.

We’re proud of this course. We’ve been working on it for well over a year and have integrated into its construction the hard-won experience gained from serving over 5,000 students in our last online offering, Top Performer.

You can find out more details about the course and register here.

We’ll be closing registration on Friday. I hope to see you in the course!

(And if this is not of interest, worry not: this is the last blog post you’ll see about this session of the course. I will be sending some more information to my email list this week, but I’ve added a link to these emails that allows list subscribers to easily opt-out of receiving these course-related emails.)

The post Life of Focus: Now Open first appeared on Cal Newport.