Several readers pointed me toward a recent NPR Marketplace segement about a fully-remote tech company called Zapier that tried an interesting experiment last summer: they cancelled all meetings for a week.

“When I heard from leadership that we were going to experiment with a week with no Zoom meetings, all I felt was excited anticipation,” explained Ellie Huizenga, a content strategiest at Zapier.

“Did that mean that you could just go into your Outlook or your Google Calendar or whatever you use and just zap all your meetings?,” asked Kai Ryssdal, the host of Marketplace, with thinly-veiled jealously.

“Kind of, Yeah,” replied Huizenga, before elaborating:

“Our leadership team sent a Slack message giving details about how the week was going to look for the entire company. Once that announcement came from leadership, Caitlin, my manager, reached out and let me know that she was canceling our one-on-one, canceling our team meeting for that week, and then she also encouraged me to look at the other meetings that were on my Google Calendar and confirm if we could do them [asynchronously] instead of on Zoom.”

Zapier was concerned about the rising volume of appointments filling their employees’ schedules. Huizenga, in her content strategy role, spent up to ten hours a week on Zoom. Managers at the company had it much worse, with many reporting that they spent more than half of their work week participating in video conferences. Zapier wanted to find out how critical these real-time, pre-scheduled collaboration sessions really were. It was in this context that what became known as Getting Stuff Done (GSD) week was conceived.

Here’s Huizenga, in a blog post about the experiment published on the Zapier website, summarizing some of the ways she compensated for a lack of meetings during GSD week:

“Instead of my weekly 1:1, I consolidated questions for my manager and sent them to her in a direct message on Slack.

Instead of a project check-in, all team members shared their updates in the relevant Asana tasks.

Instead of a one-off strategy call, stakeholders shared their thoughts (and comments) in a Coda doc.

Instead of a project kickoff call, our project manager sent a Slack message that shared the project charter, timeline, and next steps.”

According to a post-experiment survey conducted by Zapier’s “People Ops” team, these types of alternatives ended up working well. As they reported:

• 80% of respondents would want to do another GSD week in the future.

• 80% of respondents achieved their goal(s) for the week.

• 89% of respondents found communication to be about as effective during GSD week as during a typical week.

This last data point is the most important. One of the most consistent things I’ve learned studying the impact of digital communication technology on the workplace is that it’s easy for convenient habits — “I’ll shoot you a meeting invite” — to become ubiquitous. Just because certain behaviors are common, however, doesn’t mean that they are, to borrow a phrase from the Zapier experiment, the best way to get stuff done.

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A Humble Request: a reporter from the Financial Times is interested in hearing stories from people who have attempted the types of techniques I discuss in Deep Work and A World Without Email in their own teams or companies. If you have a case study to share about your experiences combatting the hyperactive hive mind, you can send her an email directly at  courtney.weaver@ft.com (If you do send her a message, however, please consider cc’ing me at author@calnewport.com as well: I love to hear these tales! I always learn a lot.)

Early in my latest article for The New Yorker I take a closer look at the recent protests waged by Apple employees in response to CEO Tim Cook’s announcement that they had to return to their desks in Cupertino. On the surface, the employees were concerned about losing what they like about remote work. In an open letter addressed to Cook, they cited worries about time lost to commuting as well the difficulty of achieving “deep thought” in a crowded office.

As I write in my article, however, protests of this type might actually be a proxy for a deeper unease:

“Knowledge workers were already exhausted by their jobs before the pandemic arrived: too much e-mail, too many meetings, too much to do—all being relentlessly delivered through ubiquitous glowing screens. We used to believe that these depredations were somehow fundamental to office work in the twenty-first century, but the pandemic called this assumption into question. If an activity as entrenched as coming to an office every day could be overturned essentially overnight, what other aspects of our professional lives could be reimagined?”

If burnt-out employees lose their bid for permanent telecommuting, “the last highly visible, virus-prompted workplace experiment,” the window to push for more serious transformation — the types of changes that can save knowledge work from its current drowning into a sea of distracted busyness — might slam shut.

But as I conclude: “The tragedy of this moment…is how this reform movement lacks good ideas about what else to demand.” We learned through experience that working from home is not enough on its own to cure most of what makes office jobs unnecessarily exhausting, and few believe that four-day work weeks or, dare I say it, quiet quitting are somehow sufficient either. We need bolder notions.

This then brings me to the central provocation of my article: What if a good way to chart the future of work is to look to its deep past?

I go on to investigate what the anthropology literature teaches us about what “work” meant for most of our species’ 300,000 year history. My conjecture is that in identifying places where our current activities most differ from how we toiled in our Paleolithic past, we might identify specific sources of discomfort with our current ways of working. How does, in other words, the modern necessity of juggling full email inboxes or managing crowded to-do lists conflict with a brain adapted over hundreds of thousands of years for hunting and gathering in small, close-knit tribes? And once we find these points of friction, what can we do to reduce them?

All of this, of course, is messy and imprecise, but it’s also really fun to think and write about. You’ll have to read the full article to learn all the details of what I uncover during my deep dive into the deep history of work, but the short version of my conclusions should sound familiar to fans of a slower productivity mindset: do fewer things, working at a varied pace, focusing on quality.

Such a deliberate approach might sound unachievable in our moment of hyper-connected busyness, but it might just be, for lack of a better word, much more natural than how we approach ours jobs today.

In August, a reporter from Rolling Stone sat down to interview the San Francisco-based rapper Larry June before he took the stage at Lollapalooza in Chicago.

June is known for his status as an independent artist. After an early deal with Warner Brothers fizzled, June went on to produce and release almost all of his subsequent work without support from a major label. He’s also known for his productivity. June has released 10 albums since 2018, with his most recent, last summer’s Spaceships on the Blade, reaching number 39 on the Billboard 200. In addition to these projects, June has released 5 collaborative albums, 4 EPs, 5 Mixtapes, and made appearances as a guest artist on singles from artists like Post Malone.

It’s this latter reputation, as an artist who ships original work at a fast pace, that makes what June admitted to the Rolling Stone reporter so surprising:

“Since we’re on Rolling Stone, I’ve go to let y’all know, that for everybody that wants to feature: I only rap three hours a day. You know what I’m saying? I only rap three hours a day. I get in the studio at 6 o’clock and I’m done around 9 o’clock in the morning…I don’t really like rapping too long. It gives me anxiety. I feel energy, I’m in the studio, I knock it done right there.”

As the music producer who originally sent me this clip emphasized, this slow but steady pace is unusual in the industry. “Rappers are notorious for claiming to live in the studio, brag about never sleeping, working 12-16 hrs a day,” he told me. But as June elaborates to the reporter, his technique works because of the miracle of compounding achievement:

“It might take me 3 hours to do one song, I might like just do the intro…and then the next day [record some more]….the thing though is consistency…If I do only 3 hours a day, every day, for 365 days, I just did outstanding numbers.”

Don’t underestimate the power of this productivity arithemtic. During 2020 alone, when June found himself isolated at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, recording each day, free from distraction, in his basement recording booth, he finished six different projects.

In this interview clip, we find a classic example of slow productivity. Spending 16 hours in the studio feels “productive” in an exhausting, performative sense. Retreating to your basement for only a few hours each morning seems somehow diminished by comparison. But as June’s success unambiguously illustrates, accomplishment is often best measured on the scale of years not days, and when you zoom out to this grander level, the advantages of a focused slowness become hard to ignore.

By his last year at Harvard Medical School, Michael Crichton, 26-years old at the time, knew he didn’t want to pursue a medical career, so he went to the dean with a proposition. He planned to write a nonfiction book about patient care, he explained, and wanted to know if he could use his final semester to hang around the hospital gathering research for his project. “Why should I spend the last half of my last year at medical school learning to read electrocardiograms when I never intended to practice?”, Crichton remembers asking.

The dean replied paternalistically with a warning that writing a book might be more difficult than Crichton expected. It was at this point that the young medical student revealed that he had already published four books while at Harvard (under a pen name), and had multiple other writing projects in progress, including his first medical thriller, A Case of Need, that would soon win him an Edgar Award for best mystery novel of the year, and his first fully-developed techno-thriller, The Andromeda Strain, which would become a breakout bestseller.

I came across this story in a New York Times profile of Crichton written in 1970, a year after he finished medical school.  What struck me about this profile was less its origin story heroics, and more its revelation of the sheer busyness of Crichton at this early point in his ascent. While nominally still a postdoc at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, when the profile was published, Crichton’s energy was clearly radiating in many different directions. He had just published Five Patients, the non-fiction book he had proposed to his med school dean (who had, as it turned out, ultimately agreed to Crichton’s plan),  was about to release an experimental novel about drug dealing that he had co-authored with his brother, and had, since that fateful meeting a year earlier, finished two other pseudonymous potboiler thrillers.

Perhaps most notably, he was also finishing the manuscript for The Terminal Man, his follow-up to The Andromeda Strain. As the Times reports, Crichton had become a “one-man operation” dedicated to this project: in addition to the book, he was simultaneously writing a screenplay adaptation and was determined to direct any resulting movie. To support this latter goal he began spending a couple days every week in Hollywood as part of what he called “a skills-building gambit.” The Times described the 27-year-old’s career as “hyperactive.” This might be an understatement.

It’s interesting to compare Crichton’s rise to that of John Grisham, one of the few novelists of the late 20th century to rival Crichton’s publishing success. Grisham’s ascent began with his second novel, The Firm, which attracted significant interest from publishers after Paramount, based on a bootleg copy of the manuscript, snapped up the film rights for $600,000. The book went on to eventually sell 7,000,000 copies.

It’s here, however, that Grisham’s path diverges from Crichton. As I’ve written about before, instead of embracing a haphazard collection of overlapping projects, Grisham instead built a simplified routine centered on the singular goal of producing one book per year. He typically starts writing on January 1st, working three hours a day, five days a week, in an outbuilding on his farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. He aims to finish the first draft of that year’s book by March and have the manuscript completely done by July.  Grisham will conduct a limited publicity tour surrounding the book’s fall release, but otherwise devotes all of his remaining time and energy to non-professional activities, like the youth baseball league he started in 1996. When his longtime assistant retired, Grisham didn’t bother hiring a replacement as there wouldn’t be enough for them to do. The only professional acquaintances who might call were his editor and agent, but they we familiar with his routine, and rarely bothered him.

In Crichton and Grisham we see two different models of ambition. The first model, exemplified by Crichton, is what I call Type 1. It craves activity and feasts at the buffet of appealing opportunities that success creates. The other model, exemplified by Grisham, is what I call Type 2. It craves simplicity and autonomy, and sees success as a source of leverage to reduce stressful obligations. Medical school wasn’t sufficiently stimulating for Crichton. Life as a lawyer was too hectic for Grisham. They therefore reacted to their success in much different ways when it respectively arrived.

As best I can tell, different people are wired for different ambition types. The key seems to be to recognize what type best matches you before success begins to exert significant force on your career. A Type 1 personality stuck in a outbuilding on a farm, quietly writing day after day, will quickly become bored. A Type 2 personality working on a screenplay at the same time as two books while filling weeks with Hollywood meetings will be crushed with anxious unease.

Ambition type mismatch, of course, is a lucky problem to have, as it means that you must be doing something right. But this doesn’t diminish its importance for those that it does impact. It didn’t take me long, for example, to realize I’m more Grisham than Crichton (in terms of personality, not, alas, cumulative book sales). This has likely saved me from untold volumes of unhappy anxiety. If you haven’t yet, now might be a good time to figure out what type you are.

A reader recently pointed me toward a long and thoughtful reflection on academic life written by Stephen Stearns, the Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. In a section titled “Learning Balance,” he talks about his work habits in the early 1970s, when his first son was born. “I was not around much to help, for during that time I was working seventy to eighty hours per week,” he writes.

This type of absentee fatherhood was common in this era, but fortunately for Stearns and his children, his wife wasn’t having it. As Stearns recalls, she sat him down, and gave him the following ultimatum:

“I want you to promise not to work nights or weekends: you need to be sharing the parenting, and your child needs a father.  If you don’t agree, I will divorce you.”

Stearns listened. “For the next twenty years I did not work nights or weekends, and I spent thousands of delightful hours with our sons while they were growing up,” he recalls.  “She was very wise, and I am grateful to her.”

What’s particularly interesting about this story is what didn’t end up happening. Even though Stearns was now working less than the norm among his peers, he continued to thrive professionally. Toiling within the constraints of a fixed schedule turned out to amplify his effectiveness. Here’s how he describes it:

“When I was at work, I worked.  And when I was with my family, I concentrated on them. The change in focus cleared and refreshed my mind so that when I went to work, I was efficient…Five to eight hours per day of clear thinking and concentrated work five days per week produces more impressive results than the coffee, chit-chat, and various displacement activities that often fill the time of many of those who think they are working seventy or eighty hours a week.”

Stearns describes his approach as embracing professio sano in vitam sanam: a healthy profession in a healthy life. Here on this newsletter, of course, we’ve long used a different name for this same strategy: fixed-schedule productivity. 

I’ve embraced this slow philosophy for most of my professional career. As with Stearns, I too have become a believer in how much can be accomplished in normal 40-hour weeks; if you’re willing to really work when you’re working, and then be done when you’re done. It’s nice, however, to see someone so much more eminent than me also find success with this fixed-schedule approach.

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During the pandemic, I setup a modest deep work hideaway in some office space I lease on the main street of the town where I live in the outskirts of Washington, DC. This is where I record my podcast, Deep Questions, meet with other writers and professors, and, in general, escape when I need a change of scenery to focus my efforts. By popular demand, I’ve posted a video that includes a tour of the space. If you’ve been curious what my “Deep Work HQ” actually looks like, check it out.

In my last dispatch, I reported on how the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson writes in a “supervillain lair” built twenty feet underground near his otherwise unremarkable home in suburban Utah. According to an article published last weekend in The Guardian, Sanderson is not, as it turns out, the first author to use extreme measures to generate fantastical inspiration.

In 1894, an Irish actor who was struggling to write a novel in his spare time traveled with his wife and young son to the remote Aberdeenshire coast of northeast Scotland. They stayed in The Kilmarnock Arms, an oak-paneled hotel in the center of Port Erroll, a small fishing village located near a desolate sandy beach. Most days, the actor would make the twenty-minute walk to Slains Castle (pictured above), a ruined 16^th century fort situated dramatically on a seaside cliff. He was seeking inspiration for a character he was attempting to bring to life in his manuscript—a count who was hiding a horrific secret. The actor’s name was Bram Stoker, and the fictional count, of course, was to be called Dracula.

In London, Stoker had been acting alongside Henry Irving, a stage star of the era who was famous for his early embrace of what would later be known as method acting. Stoker decided to apply Irving’s approach to his novel writing. As detailed by The Guardian:

“According to his wife, Florence, everyone – including the hotel staff, and the locals – was frightened of [Stoker]. He ‘seemed to get obsessed by the spirit of the thing,’ she later said. He ‘would sit for hours, like a great bat, perched on the rocks of the shore, or wander alone up and down the sand hills thinking it all out’.”

Stoker returned to Aberdeenshire at least a dozen times in the years that followed, sometimes staying at the the Kilmarnock Arms and sometimes taking a cottage. “For Stoker, Aberdeenshire stood in for Transylvania,” explains a local historian quoted in the article. And he translated that inspiration into a memorable gothic tale.

I tell this story not because I think a method approach, in which you inhabit your characters and their behaviors, is the best way to write fiction. (If this were true, a lot more authors would take a swing at romance novels.) But instead because it’s an extreme example of a more general point that I’ve been emphasizing recently: when it comes to cognitive work, setting makes a difference.

Putting professors into stark and spacious modern offices is functional. But is it as conducive to deep thought as the fire-warmed study of the Oxford Don? Setting up your laptop on your kitchen table might technically give you access to everything you need to do your job. But will your mind end up in the same state produced by commuting to the marble-lobbied skyscraper in the city center?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the next big innovations in knowledge work will be less about technology and tools, and more about better understanding the psychology that goes into wringing value out of thought matter.

The pandemic got knowledge worker types suddenly thinking more seriously about their telecommuting setups. Once it became clear that we might be toiling hour after hour, day after day, in our own homes, that Ikea desk in the corner by the washing machine no longer seemed quite so adequate.

I enjoyed, during the early months of this period, sharing here on my newsletter case studies about some of the more unusual or interesting home office setups that my readers sent me. You’d be surprised, for example, by how many people relocated to tents in their backyard. One professional musician went so far as to build a cabin for practicing inside his apartment. I even wrote an article about the topic for The New Yorker.

As I recently discovered, however, the bestselling fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson put us all to shame. His home office heroics began in 2008, when he and his wife bought a nondescript house in a nondescript Utah suburb. Sanderson noticed the adjacent lot was still undeveloped. As he explained in a recent Reddit comment:

“So I started to plan. And the next year, I bought that lot. When my wife asked what I wanted to do with it, I was quite decisive. I wanted an underground supervillain lair.“

It took Sanderson eleven years of planning, but as revealed in a series of stunning photographs that he shared on his newsletter, he finally built up both the resources and courage to start digging.

Here’s a photo of the hole he excavated. Keep in mind that this is in a normal-sized lot between two houses. Sanderson admitted that it took some wrangling to get the needed permissions from his town (“the city really has no idea what to do with someone like me”).

Here are the concrete walls being added to the lair. To keep the space epic, Sanderson insisted on twenty-foot ceilings.

After the lair was completed and covered back over, Sanderson built a garage and extended driveway on the lot so that it looked as if nothing unusual was going on in this space next to his house:

Though Sanderson posted these photo back when construction began several years ago, it wasn’t until last spring, when he allowed cameras from the CBS Morning Show to tape an interview in the lair, that we got our first look inside.

Here’s the secret stairway that leads down to the complex from inside his house. The stained glass windows depict covers of his popular books.

The nook where he’s sitting in this photo is where he plans to setup his writing desk. The more formidable tiled space in the background, surrounding the cylindrical saltwater fish tank, is meant for larger gatherings. He calls it his “Adventurer’s Club.”

Here’s the movie screening room he added that features three rows of reclining seats and a full-size screen.

“It’s…admittedly a little extravagant,” Sanderson writes. “[But] what else would you expect from a fantasy novelist?” No explanation is needed for me. As my readers know, when it comes to producing important work, I’m always happy to see someone go, well, deep.

About halfway through Laura Vanderkam’s sharp new productivity guide, Tranquility by Tuesday, we’re introduced to Elizabeth, an education professor who, worried about her ticking tenure clock, came to Laura for time management advice.

Elizabeth was struggling to find time for her research. Her husband and two children had followed her to northern Long Island to be close to the university were Elizabeth taught. As a result, however, her husband now faced an hour-long commute into the city each day, leaving Elizabeth with the primary responsibility for taking care of the kids before and after school. This created tight constraints on her available work hours, and the time that did remain was all too easily devoured by the demands of the classroom and teaching assistant supervision.

Laura asked Elizabeth to come up with a set of fixed time slots she could dedicate to research, to help ensure progress would be made even during busy weeks (longtime readers might recognize this as a variation of the autopilot schedule strategy). Elizabeth came back with the following options:

• 6:00 – 7:30am on Monday and Fridays, before her husband left for work.
• 5:45 – 6:45pm on Wednesday night, when she had childcare coverage before a night class.

Laura knew these meager options weren’t going to produce a lot of new research. “You don’t need to be a professor to deduce how easily those three small spots could disappear,” she writes. With this reality in mind, Laura pushed Elizabeth to be more aggressive in carving out time for deep work. The result was the following more substantial schedule:

• On Thursdays, Elizabeth arranged for their normal sitter to pick the kids up from school and stay with them until 5:00. Because Elizabeth doesn’t teach on Thursday afternoons, this frees up a five-hour slot she can consistently dedicate to research.
• Turning her attention to the weekend, Elizabeth arranged for her husband to take the kids from 12:00 to 4:00 every Saturday, freeing up another four-hour research block.

I know from my own academic experience that a pair of four to five hour chunks each week can really support some serious academic output. On the flip side, Elizabeth’s original proposal of three apologetic, short bursts, scheduled early in the morning and at the end of the day, wouldn’t have likely been that effective.

This example is important because it underscores a psychological reality of productivity that can be lost among all the posturing around systems and tools. It’s easy to feel like it’s impolite to prioritize work that’s important to you above other peoples’ demands. This is what led Elizabeth, at first, to limit her research to only the few scraps of time during her week that no one else had already claimed.

Sustainable production of valuable work, however, requires a dash of selfishness. Elizabeth’s revised schedule was exactly right. No reasonable person would find her investment in a once-a-week babysitter, or request for weekend dad time, to be excessive. These acts of self-prioritization were, objectively speaking, small. But they made a large difference in Elizabeth’s ability to produce the tenure-caliber work she knew she had in her. Your work matters. It’s okay to fight for it in your schedule.

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Laura’s new book will be released in October. She’s offering some nice bonuses, however, if you pre-order it now. (Learn more here.)

Among those who find pleasure in cataloging the habits and rituals of prodigious creatives, the poet Mary Oliver is a familiar companion. Her commitment to long walks outdoors, scribbling notes in a cloth-bound notebook, is both archetypical and approachable.

This vision of Oliver finding inspiration in her close observations of nature, made as she wanders past ponds and through forest-bound glades, matches our intuitions about the artistic process. As Oliver writes in her poem, The Summer Day:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

We can also, if we’re being honest, imagine ourselves extracting a diluted version of this inspiration, if only we too could find the time to take our moleskin into the woods. It’s here, in other words, that we find a key piece to Oliver’s enduring appeal.

This is all preamble to my delight in being pointed recently, by a reader, toward a 2015 interview with Oliver, where she discussed the origins of her habit of retreating into nature to wrangle her muse. As Oliver explained:

“I don’t like buildings . So the one record I broke in my school was truancy. I went to the woods a lot, with books; Whitman in the knapsack. But I also liked motion. So I just began with these little notebooks and scribbled things as they came to me and worked them into poems later.”

Today, as in most times past, there’s a lot going on in the world, much of it distressing. We could respond by staring with increased intensity into glowing screens, hoping that the resulting numbness outcompetes the anxiety. Or, like Oliver, we could put Whitman in our knapsack, and head outside, slowly, into nature, with our minds as our only companion.

This essay was inspired by Top Performer, the online course about engineering a more meaningful and satisfying career that I designed with Scott Young. The new and improved version of this course will be open for new registrations next week. Find out more here.

In the spring of 2008, I published one of the more consequential essays in the history of this newsletter. It was titled: “The Most Important Piece of Career Advice You Probably Never Heard.” At the time, I was a doctoral student at MIT, still more than a year away from defending my dissertation. I was also, as I explain in the opening of the essay, about to attend my second college graduation in less than three weeks. As a result, my mind was mired in thoughts about career advice.

As I considered what I might write on this topic an insight struck me with a jolt of electric clarity. In the end, what matters is your lifestyle. The specifics of your work are important only in how they impact your daily experience. As I summarized, when choosing a career path:

“Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there.”

This idea, which I dubbed lifestyle-centric career planning, subverted popular advice from that period which tended to emphasize the importance of passion and dream jobs. In this widely-accepted schema, the full responsibility for your ongoing satisfaction was offloaded to the minutia of your professional endeavors.

This didn’t strike me as correct. There are so many other aspects of your life that matter in your contentment, including, as I enumerated in my original essay, the following:

• How much control do I have over my schedule?
• What’s the intensity level of my job?
• What’s the importance of what I do?
• What’s the prestige level?
• Where do I live?
• What’s my social life like?
• What’s my work life balance?
• What’s my family like?
• How do other people think of me?
• What am I known for?

Confident answers to these types of questions might identify many different jobs that, if properly pursued, move you toward the life you desire. They can also help you direct the job you already have in directions that will provide you the most benefit.

The conceptual seed planted by this essay soon began to grow in my work. My very next essay, published three days later, was titled, “The Problem with Passion.” This was one of the first examples of me taking direct aim at the all-too-popular recommendation to “follow your passion.” But it was not the last.

Four years later, I published my first hardcover idea book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which explicitly rejected passion-centric career advice and promoted an alternative approach more aligned with the philosophy of lifestyle-centric career planning I had first sketched out back in the spring of 2008. It went on to sell 300,000 copies, and counting.

Two years after that, in 2014, Scott Young and I launched the first version of our online course Top Performer, which operationalized many of the ideas from that book. Eight years and more than 5,000 student later, we’re opening the latest evolution of this course to new registrations starting Monday, August 29th. It was this upcoming launch — one of many of over the years — that got me reminiscing about my long history with thinking critically about career satisfaction, and led me, eventually, back this pragmatic gem of an essay from all the way back in 2008. It’s sometimes the smallest ideas, articulated at just the right moment, that end up most changing the trajectory of your life.

In my book Digital Minimalism, I emphasized the danger of a newly-emerged condition that I called “solitude deprivation.” As I wrote, the introduction of the smartphone caused our relationship with distraction to mutate into something new:

“At the slightest hint of boredom, you can now surreptitiously glance at any number of apps or mobile-adapted websites that have been optimized to provide you an immediate and satisfying dose of input from other minds. It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life.”

I went on to argue that this condition was worrisome. Us humans evolved to experience significant amounts of time alone with our own thoughts. Remove this solitude from our lives and we’re not only bound to get twitchy and anxious, but we miss out on much of the subtle but deep value generated by a wandering mind.

A new paper, published by researchers at the University of Tübingen, and appearing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, provides some support for these claims. “Psychologists who studied a group of more than 250 people encouraged to engage in directionless contemplation or free-floating thinking,” summarizes The Guardian, “said that the activity was far more satisfying than the participants had anticipated.”

Furthermore, the paper reports benefits to losing yourself in thought, finding that this state can “aid problem solving, increase creativity, enhance the imagination and contribute to a sense of self-worth.”

Kou Murayama, the lead author of the study, noted that the subjects underestimated the value of contemplation, and in many cases worried that this activity would be a negative experience. They often preferred the easy distraction provided by technology such as smartphones. “This could explain why people prefer to keep busy rather than to enjoy a moment of reflection or letting their imagination run away with itself in their everyday lives,” he concluded.

These results do a good job of summarizing our current troubled relationship with our own minds. We fear solitude, but it’s exactly this time alone with our own thoughts that we need to make sense of our experiences and grow as humans. TikTok is fun, but grappling with the core questions of our existence is fundamental.

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This week on Deep Questions: In episode 208 of my podcast, posted earlier today, I tackle my problem with task lists, the liminal space between deep and shallow work, and the anxiety of not making enough progress on your goals. You can watch the full episode on YouTube or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

Just a few months ago, it seemed that the biggest social media news of the year would be Elon Musk’s flirtations with buying Twitter (see, for example, my article from May). Recently, however, a new story has sucked up an increasing amount of oxygen from this space: TikTok’s challenge to the legacy social platforms.

Last February, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, released a quarterly report that revealed user growth had stalled. Analysts were quick to attribute this slow down, in part, to fierce competition from TikTok, which had recently blasted past the billion user mark. The valuation of Meta plummeted by over $200 billion in a single day.

Forced by investor pressure to respond, Meta began a sudden shift in its products’ features that moved them closer to the purified algorithmic distraction offered by its upstart rival. This spring, a leaked memo revealed Facebook’s plan to focus more on short videos and make recommendations “unconnected” to accounts that a user has already friended or followed. More recently, Instagram began experimenting with a TikTok-style full screen display, and has emphasized algorithmically-curated videos at the expense of photos shared by accounts the user follows.

From a short-term business perspective, these might seem like necessary changes. But as I argued in my most recent article for The New Yorker, published last week, the decision by companies like Facebook and Instagram to become more like TikTok could mark the beginning of their end.

The problem comes from their underlying business models. The social media giants of the last decade have cemented a pseudo-monopolistic position in the internet marketplace because they serve content based on massive social graphs, constructed in a distributed fashion by their users, one friend or follow request at a time. It’s too late now for a new service to build up a network of sufficient influence and complexity to compete with these legacy topologies.

TikTok, by contrast, doesn’t depend on this type of painstakingly accumulated social data. It instead deploys a simple but brutally effective machine learning loop onto the pool of all available videos on its platform. By observing the viewing behavior of individual users, this loop can quickly determine exactly which videos will most engage them; no friends, retweets, shares, or favorites required. The value of the TikTok experience is instead created by a unique dyadic mind meld between each user and the algorithm.

If platforms like Facebook and Instagram abandon their social graphs to pursue this cybernetic TikTok model, they’ll lose their competitive advantage. Subject, all at once, to the fierce competitive pressures of the mobile attention economy, it’s unclear whether they can survive without this protection.

As I argue in my article:

“This all points to a possible future in which social-media giants like Facebook may soon be past their long stretch of dominance. They’ll continue to chase new engagement models, leaving behind the protection of their social graphs, and in doing so eventually succumb to the new competitive pressures this introduces. TikTok, of course, is subject to these same pressures, so in this future it, too, will eventually fade. The app’s energetic embrace of shallowness makes it more likely, in the long term, to become the answer to a trivia question than a sustained cultural force. In the wake churned by these sinkings will arise new entertainments and new models for distraction, but also innovative new apps and methods for expression and interaction.”

In this prediction, I find optimism. If TikTok acts as the poison pill that finally cripples the digital dictators that for so long subjugated the web 2.0 revolution, we just might be left with more breathing room for smaller, more authentic, more human online engagements. “In the end, TikTok’s biggest legacy might be less about its current moment of world-conquering success, which will pass,” I conclude. “And more about how, by forcing social-media giants like Facebook to chase its model, it will end up liberating the social Internet.”

This future is far from guaranteed. But let’s hope it’s true…

A reader named Peter recently sent me a perceptive note. He had just returned from a visit to Austin, where he had visited the LBJ Ranch, now operated as national historical site, located about 50 miles west of the city in the Texas Hill Country.

As Peter recalled, during the tour, the guide emphasized that as president, Lyndon Johnson was so obsessed with connectivity that he had a telephone installed beside his pool. “Everyone in the tour group laughed,” wrote Peter. But as he then correctly pointed out, this collective mirth may have been hasty.

In an age of smartphones, everyone has access to a phone by the pool. Also in the bathroom. And in the car. And in every store, and on every street, and basically every waking moment of their lives. The average teenager with a iPhone today is vastly more connected than the leader of the free world sixty years ago.

I thought this was a good reminder of the head-spinning speed with which the connectivity revolution entangled us in its whirlwind advance. We haven’t even begun to seriously consider the impact of these changes, or how us comparably slow-adapting humans must now adjust. Be wary of those who embrace our current moment as an optimal and natural evolution of our species’ relationship with technology. We still have a lot of work ahead of us to figure out what exactly we want. After sufficient reflection, it might even turn out that taking a call by the pool, LBJ style, isn’t as essential as we might have once imagined.

Earlier today, June Huh, a 39-year-old Princeton professor, was awarded the 2022 Fields Medal, one of the highest possible honors in mathematics, for his breakthrough work on geometric combinatorics.

As described in a recent profile of Huh, published in Quanta Magazine (and sent to me by several alert readers), Huh’s path to academic mathematics was meandering. He didn’t get serious about the subject until his final year at Seoul National University, when he enrolled in a class taught by Heisuke Hironaka, a charismatic Japanese mathematician who had himself won a Fields back in 1970.

Given his recent conversion to the mathematical arts, Huh was only accepted at one of the dozen graduate schools to which he applied. It didn’t take long, however, for him to stand out. As a beginning student, Huh managed to solve Read’s conjecture, a long-standing open problem concerning the coefficients of polynomial bounds on the chromatic number of graphs. The University of Michigan, which had previously rejected Huh’s graduate school application, soon recruited him as a transfer student. Along with his collaborators, Huh generalized the approach he innovated to tackle Read’s conjecture to prove similar properties for a much broader class of objects called matroids. The new result stunned the mathematics community. “It’s pretty remarkable that it works,” said Matthew Baker, a respected expert on the topic.

The reason so many readers sent me the Quanta profile of Huh, however, was not because of its descriptions of his mathematical genius, but instead because of the details it shares about how Huh structures his deep efforts:

“On any given day, Huh does about three hours of focused work. He might think about a math problem, or prepare to lecture a classroom of students, or schedule doctor’s appointments for his two sons. ‘Then I’m exhausted,’ he said. ‘Doing something that’s valuable, meaningful, creative’ — or a task that he doesn’t particularly want to do, like scheduling those appointments — ‘takes away a lot of your energy.'”

One of the core principles of my emerging philosophy of slow productivity is that busyness and exhaustion are often unrelated to the task of producing meaningful results. When zoomed in close, three hours of work per day seems painfully, almost artificially slow — an impossibly small amount of  time to get things done. Zoom out to the larger scale of years, however, and suddenly June Huh emerges as one of the most, for lack of a better term, productive mathematical minds of his generation.

In my previous essay, I wrote about how novelist Jack Carr rented a rustic cabin to help focus his attention on completing his new latest James Reece thriller. This talk of writing retreats got me thinking again about what’s arguably my favorite example from this particular genre of aspirational day dreaming: Wendell Berry’s “camp” on the Kentucky River.

In February, Dorothy Wickenden, whose father Dan Wickenden was Berry’s original editor at Harcourt Brace, featured Berry’s camp in a lengthy New Yorker profile of the now 87-year old writer, farmer, and activist. Berry brought Wickenden to a twelve-by-sixteen foot one-room structure, raised on concrete pilings high on the sloped bank of the river, only on the condition that she not reveal its exact location.

In the summer of 1963, Berry, all of twenty-nine, and just a few years into a professorship at New York University, built the current cabin on the same site where his great-great-great grandfather, Ben Perry, one of the first settlers in the valley, had long ago erected a log house. Berry remembered the location from his childhood. As Wickenden explains, Berry returned that summer to build an escape where he could “write, read, and contemplate the legacies of his forebears, and what inheritance he might leave behind.”

What struck me as I returned to this story were the unremarked implications of its timing. Berry supposedly built the cabin in the summer of 1963, but didn’t announce his resignation from NYU and move to Kentucky until 1964. Though I can’t confirm these details, I like to imagine Berry returning to New York from his summer retreat, with the attraction of the deep contemplation available on the quiet shores of the Kentucky River gnawing at his attention, stirring something within — until, finally, he cracked, and decided it was time to move home.

Regardless of the details of Berry’s motivation, it’s hard, in hindsight to question the move, as he ended up writing fifty-two books in that humble room, and becoming one of the twentieth century’s most influential voices on sustainability and rural living.

Sometimes we retreat to the proverbial cabin to support deep work already under way. Other times, we build the cabin first, and then let its charms convince us to get started.

Last spring, I wrote an essay for The New Yorker about a notable habit common to professional authors: their tendency to write in strange places. Even when they have beautifully-appointed home offices, a lot of authors will retreat to eccentric locations near their homes to ply their trade.

In my piece, for example, I talked about Maya Angelou writing on legal pads while propped up on her elbow on the bed in anonymous hotel rooms. Peter Benchley left his bucolic carriage house on a half-acre of land to work in the backroom of a furnace supply and repair shop, while John Steinbeck, perhaps pushing this concept to an extreme, would lug a portable desk onto an old fishing boat which he would drive out into the middle of Sag Harbor.

My argument was that authors like Angelou, Benchley, and Steinbeck weren’t seeking pleasing aesthetics or peace (furnace repair is loud). They were instead trying to escape cognitive capture. “The home is filled with the familiar,” I wrote, “and the familiar snares our attention, destabilizing the subtle neuronal dance required to think clearly.”

Anyway, this is all just preface to me reporting that I recently stumbled across another nice example of this work from near home phenomenon.  It came in an episode of Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic podcast featuring the bestselling novelist Jack Carr talking about his latest James Reece thriller, In the Blood. For our purposes, it’s important to know that Carr has a beautiful home in Park City, Utah, which, based on photos he’s shared on social media, includes idyllic spaces to write; e.g.:

And yet, at roughly the 16:30 mark of the podcast interview, Carr reveals that in order to help focus while working on In the Blood, he ended up renting a rustic cabin across town, where he would chop wood to feed the stove, and write at a simple table.

Home is where the heart is, but it’s not necessarily where the mind reaches its full potential.

Several readers have recently pointed me toward a productivity tool called Inbox Pause, which allows you to prevent messages from arriving in your email inbox for a set amount of time. You could, of course, simply decide not to check your inbox for this period, but as every knowledge worker who has ever used email has learned, it can be very, very difficult to resist a quick check when you know there are messages piling up, desperate for your response.

I like this tool. Among other benefits, it can provide a nice support system for time block planning. When you start a block that doesn’t require email, you can setup a pause to make sure you’re not tempted to abandon whatever demanding activity you’ve planned to instead fall back into the comfort of stupefying inbox sifting.

Pausing on its own, however, cannot fully solve the problem of communication overload. As I argue in my book, A World Without Email, the foundation of our overload is a widely-adopted collaboration style that I call the hyperactive hive mind. This is an approach in which work is coordinated with a series of ad hoc, on demand, unscheduled, back-and-forth messages — be them emails, instant messages, or texts (the actual technology doesn’t really matter).

Each ongoing back-and-forth conversation of this type can generate dozens of messages in a short period of time. Given dozens of these conversations unfolding concurrently, you can easily confront a hundred or more messages a day, many of which require a relatively quick response, as they’re part of an extended back-and-forth that presumably cannot be dragged out too long.

In this context, there is only so many pauses you can take, as every time you step away, you’re potentially delaying many different back-and-forth discussions, perhaps critically, and ensuring an even more intimidating, tottering pile of urgency awaiting you when the pause completes.

What’s the ultimate solution? An inbox reset. As I detail in my book, you need to start enumerating every type of conversation that’s unfolding over email (or IM, or text), and ask for each, is there a process, or tool, or set of new rules, that would allow us to get this work done in the future without trading multiple unscheduled messages?

To be clear: these resets are a pain. They require you to work with others to come up with more structured ways of collaborating. It would be easier if we could instead deploy hacks or tips all on our own. But in the context of knowledge work, despite what we’ve been told, productivity isn’t personal, it’s instead systematic, and must be addressed collectively.

In the meantime, however, we must do what we can to survive the onslaught of the hyperactive hive mind. Taking a pause on a regular basis is a good start.

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?

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

1. Choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.
2. 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.

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.