Earlier this week, Neil Gaiman was interviewed on Icelandic television. Around the twenty-five minute mark of the program, the topic turned to the author’s thoughts about the internet. “I love blogging. I blog less now in the era of microblogging,” Gaiman explained, referring to his famously long-running online journal hosted at neilgaiman.com. “I miss the days of just sort of feeling like you could create a community by talking in a sane and cheerful way to the world.”

As he continues, it becomes clear that Gaiman’s affection for this more personal and independent version of online communication is more than nostalgia. As he goes on to predict:

“But it’s interesting because people are leaving (social media). You know, Twitter is over, yeah Twitter is done, Twitter’s… you stick a fork in, it’s definitely overdone. The new Twitters, like Threads and Blue sky… nothing is going to do what that thing once did. Facebook works but it doesn’t really work. So I think probably the era of blogging may return and maybe people will come and find you and find me again.”

In these quips, Gaiman is reinforcing a vision of the internet that I have been predicting and promoting in my recent writing for The New Yorker (e.g., this and this and this). Between 2012 to 2022, we came to believe that the natural structure for online interaction was for billions of people to all use the same small number of privately-owned social platforms. We’re increasingly realizing now that it was this centralization idea itself that was unnatural. The underlying architecture of the internet already provides a universal platform on which anyone can talk to anyone else about any topic. We didn’t additionally need all of these conversations to be consolidated into the same interfaces and curated by the same algorithms.

The future of the internet that most excites me is also, in many ways, a snapshot of its past. It’s a place where the Neil Gaiman’s of the world don’t need to feed their thoughts into an engagement engine, but can instead put out a virtual shingle on their own small patch of cyberspace and attract and build a more intimate community of like-minded travelers. This doesn’t necessitate a blog — podcasts, newsletters, and video series have emerged as equally engaging mediums for independent media production. The key is a communication landscape that is much more diverse and distributed and interesting than what we see when everyone is using the same two or three social apps.

This vision is not without its issues. The number one concern I hear about a post-social media online world is the difficulty of attracting large audiences. For content creators, by far the biggest draw to a service like Twitter or Instagram is that their algorithms could, if you played things just right, grant you viral audience growth.

Take myself as an example. Over the past fifteen years I’ve slowly built this newsletter to around 80,000 loyal subscribers who really seem to connect with what I have to say. If I had instead directed my energy during this period toward a social platform (which I somewhat infamously refused to do), I probably could have gathered ten times more followers.

I’m not sure, however, that I care. What exactly is a social media follower anyway? A couple years ago, for example, publishing houses began signing major social media influencers to book deals under the assumption that their huge follower counts would yield automatic sales. Things didn’t work out as planned. I think I’m happy with my 80,000 subscribers, many of whom I know by name, and who have been reading and commenting on my work for many years. It feels like a family while the social media influencers I know often experience their audiences more like an unruly mob that they’re struggling to pacify.

An online world in which it’s hard to be a superstar, but easier to find a real sense of community, sounds like a good tradeoff to me. I’m hoping Neil Gaiman is right that the Age of Twitter really is coming to an end, and that a return the quieter, deeper pleasures of a more homegrown social internet will soon return. I remember fondly read Gaiman’s blog during the early 2000s. There were no likes or virality, but I did feel connected to an author I liked. Can’t that be good enough?

The post Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet appeared first on Cal Newport.

In the context of knowledge work there are two primary ways to communicate. The first is synchronous, which requires all parties to be interacting at the same time. This mode includes face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and video conferences.

The second way is asynchronous, which allows senders to deliver their messages, and receivers to read them, when each is ready. This mode includes memos, voicemails, and, most notably in recent years, email.

Which communication style is better? This simple question requires a complicated answer.

The great advantage of asynchrony is its low logistical overhead. If I want to send you information or ask a question I can dash off an email as soon as I think of it, avoiding the endless phone tag or office corridor searches that might have been necessary in a previous era. As I wrote in my 2019 New Yorker article about the history of email, in the early days of office work the idea of practical and fast asynchronous messaging was commonly understood to be a potential “productivity silver bullet.”

The downside of asynchronous communication, paradoxically, is that it can become too easy to use in the moment. As I documented in my most recent book, A World Without Email, the introduction of low-friction digital messaging led workers to move many of their interactions into haphazard threads consisting of unscheduled messages bouncing endlessly back and forth between email inboxes.

This state of affairs required an increasingly large fraction of their workday to be dedicated to monitoring this messaging. (The modern office worker now checks email or chat once every 6 minutes on average). The cognitive overhead generated by all of this context switching is exhausting and makes people miserable.

Turning our attention now to synchrony, the great advantage of this communication style is its transmission efficiency. Real-time conversations are information dense, making it possible to convey large amounts of nuanced details or reach complicated decisions in relatively short amounts of time. A five minute conversation can often accomplish the same as a dozens of back-and-forth messages.

This information efficiency, however, is offset by logistical bloat. While it might be technically possible for us to solve a problem or clearly explain an issue in five minutes of talking, in the modern workplace this interaction will likely be scheduled as a Zoom meeting or conference room gathering that will be allocated, due to the constraints of digital calendars, a minimum of thirty minutes. Few professional experiences are more frustrating than to see your day eaten up by endless appointments rich in mindless small talk and stalling. “This meeting could have been an email!”, has become the exasperated mantra of knowledge workers lamenting their impossibly overloaded calendars.

Highlighting the interlocking pros and cons of these two different communication modes is about more than just improving our understanding of modern work. This specificity can also help identify new strategies that we might have otherwise overlooked.

Looking closer at synchronous interaction, for example, once we’re aware of its advantages and disadvantages, the relevant question now becomes whether it’s possible to leverage the information density of real-time interaction while avoiding the bloat induced by thirty-minute meetings. Stated this way, some obvious solutions emerge.

• You might, for example, implement office hours. Announce a set period of time each day during which you’ll be available for synchronous conversation: your door is open, phone on, Zoom room activated. When someone tries to initiate a multi-message back-and-forth conversation over email, point them toward your next office hours. They can stop by for exactly the amount of time needed for you to reach a solution. Because the same office hours can be used to handle many different such interactions, the overhead-per-interaction averages out to something minimal.
• Similarly, if you work on a team, fix several short standing team meetings per week. Maintain a shared document that your team uses between these meetings to record any issues that need to be discussed. When you get to the next standing meeting process through these items one after another. This can save literally hundreds of distracting messages per week at the cost of only a small number of fixed calendar appointments.

Both of these example strategies allow you to harness the power of synchrony while avoiding its worst excesses. The goal is not to transform every meeting into an email, but to reduce the useful-to-fluff ratio of the meetings that do make it onto your calendar.

More important than these two specific solutions — which are just a couple among many similar ideas (see, for example, Amazon’s PowerPoint ban) — is the more general approach taken in this discussion. The impact of technologies on the way we work, live, and relate to each other are often complicated. We have to understand these nuances before we can hope to make meaningful strides toward gaining more control over our tools.

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In Other News…

Quick Note: If you pre-ordered my upcoming book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout (Portfolio, March 2024), hold onto your digital receipt. You’ll be able to soon trade it in for some interesting bonuses!

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The post Should This Meeting Have Been an Email? appeared first on Cal Newport.

Starting a few years ago, ads for a web-based software start-up called Monday.com began to show up everywhere online. A subsequent S.E.C. filing revealed that the company spent close to a hundred and thirty million dollars on advertising in 2020 alone, which worked out to over eighty percent of their annual revenue. By the end of this blitz they had generated more than seven hundred million views of their YouTube-based spots — an audience larger than the preceding four Super Bowls combined.

As I report in my most recent article for The New Yorker, Monday.com had good reason to make this aggressive investment:

“Monday.com claims to help knowledge workers collaborate better: ‘Boost your team’s alignment, efficiency, and productivity by customizing any workflow to fit your needs.’ This objective might sound dry in our current moment of flashy social apps and eerie artificial intelligence, but helping organizations manage their workflows has proved to be surprisingly lucrative. Trello, one of the early success stories from this category, was launched in 2011 as a side project by an independent software developer. In 2017, it was purchased by Atlassian for four hundred and twenty-five million in cash and stock. Another workflow-management service, named Wrike, subsequently sold for $2.25 billion. For its part, Monday.com went on to leverage the user growth generated by its advertising push to support a successful I.P.O. that valued the company at over seven billion dollars.”

This sudden shift in the business productivity market away from tools that help you better execute your work (like word processors and email clients), and toward tools that help you better organize your work, is important.

As I’ve long argued, one of the major problems in knowledge work is the haphazard way in which we organize our efforts, allowing the chaotic decisions of individuals to somehow aggregate into an ad hoc equilibrium. We give everyone an email inbox and a Zoom account, outline “clear” objectives, and then just tell them to “rock n’ roll.” The result is frenetic overload, exhausted brains, and, ultimately, burn out.

We can’t fix what we dislike about these jobs until we first get more specific about how they actually operate. And this will require clearly specified workflows. As I conclude in my New Yorker piece, if flashy new software services like Monday.com help push toward this realization, then we should welcome their ascendency.

“It’s in rethinking how we organize our work, not just in how fast we can accomplish it, where the real improvements are to be found,” I write. “Perhaps we’re finally ready to learn this reality.”

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In other news:

• On the most recent episode of my podcast, Deep Questions, I shift my attention from the short-term to the long-term, investigating what habits you can put in place now to ensure you’re satisfied 5 to 10 years in the future. I also answer listener questions and discuss a new mathematical theory that explains how social media traps us in its misery-inducing web. (Watch | Listen)

The post The Quiet Workflow Revolution appeared first on Cal Newport.

Disruption and disorder have always stalked the human condition. This reality sometimes plays out on the grand scale, as in the brutality of terror and war, and sometimes more intimately, as in the sudden arrival of ill health or a personal betrayal.

Though such upheavals are timeless, our options for response have continued to evolve. The last decade or so has added a new, culture-warping tool to this collection of coping mechanisms: smartphones. Or, to be more specific, the algorithmically-optimized content delivered through these devices.

The techno-psycho dynamics at play here are straightforward. The algorithms that drive content curation platforms such as TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram are designed to increase engagement. This is an inherently interactive process: the services combine what they already learned about you in the past with observations on what seems to be drawing more of your attention in the moment. In a period of disruption, this will, more likely than not, lead you deep into digital grooves that seem to offer some relief from your emotional pain.

This relief can be delivered by drowning out your pain with even stronger emotions. These platforms are adept, for example, at stoking a satisfying fire of anger and outrage; a repeated electronic poking of a psychological bruise. For those who were unlucky enough to wander onto Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the horrific terrorist attack on southern Israeli last week witnessed this effect in its full unnerving power.

These platforms are also able to move hard in the other direction and serve up the grim surrender of apocalyptic narratives. This was made apparent during the coronavirus pandemic when many were lured by their phones into a sense of survivalist despair that left physic scars that persisted in constraining their lives well after the virus’s inevitable transition toward endemicity.

This relief delivered by our phones is not always about amplifying feelings. It can also be delivered in the form of numbness: drips of endless, meaningless, shiny, shallow distraction that take the edge off your distress. TikTok specializes in this style of deliverance: swipe, swipe, swipe, until you temporarily dislocate from the moment.

As we right now find ourselves mired in an extended period of unusually heavy disorder, it seems an appropriate time to step back and ask how well smartphones have been serving us in this manner. Has the escape they offered led us to a lasting calm or a sustainable response to our travails? Few believe they have.

In search of a better alternative, I reached out to my friend Brad Stulberg, who earlier this fall published a bestselling book, Master of Change, about how to navigate unavoidable upheaval. (You can also watch my recent podcast interview with Brad here.)

He told me that a more sustainable response to change can be found in your core values:

“When you feel the ground shifting underneath you, when you don’t know your next move, you can ask yourself, How might I move in the direction of my core values? … The portability of core values means that you can practice them in nearly all circumstances. Thus, they become a source of stability throughout change, forging the rugged boundaries in which your fluid sense of self can flow and evolve. Nothing can take your values away from you. They provide a rudder to steer you into the unknown.”

This is, or course, not a new idea. In response to the horrors of the Blitz, besieged Londoners famously found meaning in joining volunteer ambulance corps. Dr. King responded to his unjust imprisonment in Birmingham, followed by the public rejection of his cause by the Alabama clergy, through the careful construction of a manifesto, written surreptitiously behind bars, that justified his movement with inspired, mind-changing logic.

But even if not new, it has never seemed more important to remember this truth. Value-driven responses are not as immediately appealing as finding a hyper-charged digital escape, but these latter escapes inevitably reveal themselves to be transient and the emotions they’re obscuring eventually return. If you can resist the allure of the easy digital palliative and instead take on the heavier burden of meaningful action, a more lasting inner peace can be achieved.

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In other news…

• In Episode 270 of my podcast, Deep Questions, I dive deeper into this topic of how “super distractions” like social media are so durable because of the associations we create between these behaviors and emotional pain. Building on this reality, I then offer concrete advice for finding freedom.

The post On Disruption and Distraction appeared first on Cal Newport.

The other day the low tire pressure indicator came on in my car. I didn’t see an obvious flat, so the likely explanation was some combination of colder temperatures and natural pressure loss over time, meaning that there was no immediate danger. Nonetheless, the bright orange warning light on my dashboard injected a steady dose of subliminal anxiety when driving.

So, as I was leaving my house this afternoon, somewhat late to catch a matinee showing of The Creator (which I had convinced myself was necessary “research” for someone who writes professionally about artificial intelligence), I decided to take five minutes to pull out the pump and add some air. Soon after I pulled out of my driveway the pressure warning clicked off.

I’m telling this story because of what happened next: I felt a short-lived but intense feeling of satisfaction.

Because I have a book on the subject coming out in March, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about both the promises and perils of “productivity.” It’s easy to dismiss interest in this topic as pure artifice, propped up by an exploitive “hustle culture” orchestrated by the logics of “late-stage capitalism.” Such sentiments, of course, are not entirely unwarranted as there are subtle but urgent truths buried within these general analytical broadsides.

But my experience with my tire pressure complicates the discussion. Our brains find deep satisfaction in seeing a problem, devising a plan, then witnessing its successful completion. We’re wired, in other words, to enjoy getting things done. To flee this impulse is to alienate ourselves from our basic nature.

Where does this leave us? It’s becoming increasingly clear that the right question regarding productivity is not whether it’s good or bad, as it’s both a reflection of our humanity and a target for exploitation. The better query is how we can more fully reclaim it — to build a life that enjoys the pleasures of accomplishments while avoiding the sting of overload and burnout.

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In other news…

Are you interested in a one-on-one conversation with me about any topic of your choice? You can bid on this opportunity between now and October 3rd at 9pm ET at the Authors for Voices of Color Auction. This is my third year in a row participating in this charity event as I feel strongly about the cause. Click here to see all the items up for bid and then scroll down to find my offering. Looking forward to getting to know some of you better soon!

In podcast news, in Episode 267 of Deep Questions I take a deep dive into why we’re exhausted at work, pointing to a perhaps unexpected culprit and using this explanation to identify some effective solutions. Check it out.

The post On Tire Pressure and Productivity appeared first on Cal Newport.

In the summer of 2022, an engineer named Keegan McNamara, who was at the time working for a fundraising technology startup, found his way to the Arms and Armor exhibit at the Met. He was struck by the unapologetic mixture of extreme beauty and focused function captured in the antique firearms on display. As reported in a recent profile of McNamara published in The Verge, this encounter with the past sparked a realization about the present:

“That combination of craftsmanship and utility, objects that are both thoroughly practical and needlessly outrageously beautiful, doesn’t really exist anymore. ‘And it especially doesn’t exist for computers.'”

Aesthetically, contemporary digitals devices have become industrial and impersonal: grey and black rectangles carved into generically-modern clean lines . Functionally, they offer the hapless user a cluttered explosion of potential activity, windows piling on top of windows, command bars thick with applications. Standing in the Arms and Armor exhibit McNamara began to wonder if there was a way to rethink the PC; to save it from a predictable maximalism.

The result was The Mythic I, a custom computer that McNamara handcrafted over the year or so that followed that momentous afternoon at the Met. The machine is housed in a swooping hardwood frame carved using manual tools. An eight-inch screen is mounted above a 1980’s IBM-style keyboard with big clacking keys that McNamara carefully lubricated to achieve exactly the right sound on each strike: “if you have dry rubbing of plastic, it doesn’t sound thock-y. It just sounds cheap.” Below the keyboard is an Italian leather hand rest. To turn it on you insert and turn a key and then flip a toggle switch.

Equally notable is what happens once the machine is activated. McNamara designed the Mythic for three specific purposes: writing a novel, writing occasional computer code, and writing his daily journal. Accordingly, it runs a highly-modular version of Linux called NixOS that he’s customized to only offer emacs, a text-based editor popular among hacker types, that’s launched from a basic green command line. You can’t go online, or create a PowerPoint presentation, or edit a video. It’s a writing a machine, and like the antique arms that inspired it, the Mythic implements this functionality with a focused, beautiful utilitarianism.

In his critical classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued that the form taken by the technologies we use impacts the fundamental nature of our cognition. When we switched media consumption from long newspaper articles to television soundbites, for example, our understanding of news lost its heft and became more superficial and emotionally-charged.

When pondering Keegan McNamara and the Mythic, I can’t help but apply Postman’s framework to the machines that organize our professional activities. The modern computer, with its generic styling and overloaded activity, creates a cognitive environment defined by urgent, bland, Sisyphean widget cranking — work as endless Slack and email and Zoom and “jumping on” calls, in which there is always too much to do, but no real sense of much of importance actually being accomplished.

In Keegan’s construction we find an alternative understanding of work, built now on beauty, craftsmanship, and focus. Replacing everyone’s MacBook with custom-carved hardwood, of course, is not enough on its own to transform how we think about out jobs, as these issues have deeper roots. But the Mythic is a useful reminder that the rhythms of our professional lives are not pre-ordained. We craft the world in which we work, even if we don’t realize it.

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In other news: My longtime friend Brad Stulberg has a great new book out this week. It’s called, Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything is Changing — Including You. In my cover blurb, I noted that this “immensely wise and timely book provides a roadmap for a tumultuous world.” I really mean it! The idea of preparing yourself to thrive, and not crumble, when faced with inevitable change is self-evidently important, and Brad does a great job of delivering the goods on this timely theme.

Pro-tip: if you do buy the book this week, go to Brad’s website to claim a bunch of cool pre-order bonuses that he’s offering through the first full week of publication.

The post On Tools and the Aesthetics of Work appeared first on Cal Newport.

In July, Meta announced Threads, a new social media service that was obviously designed to steal market share from Twitter (which I still refuse to call X). You can’t blame Meta for trying. In the year or so that’s passed since Elon Musk vastly overpaid for the iconic short-text posting service, Twitter has been struggling, its cultural capital degrading rapidly alongside its infrastructure.

Meta’s plan with Threads is to capture the excitement of Twitter without all the controversy. Adam Mosseri, the executive in charge of Threads, recently said they were looking to provide “a less angry place for conversations.” His boss, Chris Cox, was more direct: “We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run.”

Can Meta succeed with this plan to create a nicer Twitter? In my most recent article for The New Yorker, published earlier this month, I looked closer at this question and concluded the answer was probably “no.” At the core of Twitter’s ability to amplify the discussions that are most engaging to the internet hive mind at any one moment is its reliance on its users to help implement this curation.

As I explain in my piece:

The individual decision to retweet or quote a message, when scaled up to millions of active users, turns out to produce an eerily effective distributed selection process. A quip or observation that hits the Internet just right can quickly spark an information cascade, where retweets spawn more retweets—the original message branching exponentially outward until it reaches, seemingly all at once, an extensive readership.

This cybernetic approach to selecting trends embeds a Faustian bargain: it will generate engagement, but this engagement will be inevitably biased toward negativity and rancor, as in the game of initiating information cascades, the more charged missives are more likely to succeed. Given the reality of these techno-dynamics, my conclusion is that Threads will not succeed with its mission. It can make its platform less angry by relying more on algorithms than humans to figure out what to share, but the result will be a more sanitized and boring experience, like a text-based Instagram feed, full of anodyne comments and bland influencer drivel.

In the second half of my piece, I turn my attention to the bigger question: should we care? In other words, is it important that the internet host a successful global conversation platform on which hundreds of millions of people gather to discuss anything and everything on a common massive feed? I’ll point you toward my full article for my detailed examination of this issue, but if you’re a longtime reader of my newsletter, you can likely already guess where I’ll end up.

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In other news: The recent launch of the new spiral-bound version of my Time Block Planner was a big success. The positive feedback I’ve been receiving has been gratifying. If you’re still interested in learning more, I want to point you toward this recent podcast episode in which I provide a detailed overview of time blocking and the new planner, and then provide some advanced tips for getting the most out of a blocking discipline.

The post We Don’t Need a New Twitter appeared first on Cal Newport.

Within my particular subfield of theoretical computer science there’s perhaps no individual more celebrated than Edsger Dijkstra. His career spanned half-a-century, beginning with a young Dijkstra formulating and solving the now classic shortest paths problem while working as a computer programmer at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, and ending with him as a renowned full professor holding a prestigious chair in the computer science department of the University of Texas at Austin.

During this period, Dijkstra introduced some of the biggest ideas in distributed and concurrent computing, from semaphores and deadlock, to nondeterminacy and fairness. In 2003, the year after his death, the annual award given by the top conference in my field was renamed The Dijkstra Prize in his honor.

This is all to say that I was intrigued when an alert reader recently pointed my attention to a fascinating observation about Dijkstra’s career. In 1973, fresh off winning a Turing Award, the highest prize in all of computer science, Dijkstra accepted a research fellow position that the Burroughs Corporation created specifically for him. As his colleagues later recalled:

“[Dijkstra’s] duties consisted of visiting some of the company’s research centers a few times a year and carrying on his own research, which he did in the smallest Burroughs research facility, namely, his study on the second floor of his house in Nuenen.”

Dijkstra maintained an academic appointment during this period, but ramped down his involvement with his university so that he only visited campus one day per week, on Tuesdays, during which he would gather likeminded colleagues to read papers and discuss ideas. He even pulled back on the time-consuming task of preparing papers for peer-reviewed publication, capturing more of his ideas directly in hand-written, sequentially-numbered reports that he called “EWDs”, referencing his initials.

At this point, Dijkstra had become the opposite of busy. He spent almost all of his time thinking and recording his ideas. He only came to campus on Tuesdays. And yet, as Dijkstra’s colleagues noted:

“The Burroughs years saw him at his most prolific in output of research articles. He wrote nearly 500 documents in the EWD series.”

In this specific case study we see hints of a general observation about slow productivity. Busyness is not the engine of production. It can, in many cases, instead be the obstacle to accomplishing your best work.

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As you may have noticed, this newsletter took a little break over the summer, during which time I’ve been serving as a Montgomery Fellow up here at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. As the summer quarter winds down, and me and my family are preparing to move back from the idyllic Montgomery House here on campus to our home in Takoma Park, I’ve now restarted the newsletter, which should return to something like its normal rhythm of 2+ essays per month.

A couple quick administrative notes to share:

• The second edition of my Time Block Planner is launching on August 15th. I’ll probably post more about it closer to that date, but I’ll mention now that the new edition has spiral binding (!), a beautiful new grade of paper, and an extra month’s worth of planning pages. If you’re already thinking about ordering one, you might consider pre-ordering it, as my editor warned me that once we sell out the first printing it might take a minute until we receive the next one (due to supply chain nonsense).
• We recently revealed the cover for my upcoming book on Slow Productivity, which is scheduled to come out in March. I made a conscious choice with this design to separate myself from the standard vernacular of business and advice guides and instead emphasize this book’s aspirational focus on crafting a more humane and sustainable life. I’ll of course be talking a lot more about all of this as we get closer to the release date next year.

The post Edsger Dijkstra’s One-Day Workweek appeared first on Cal Newport.

In a recent article written for Slate, journalist Dan Kois recounts the shock his younger coworkers expressed when they discovered that he had, earlier in his career, earned a master’s degree while working a full-time job. “It was easy,” he explained:

“I worked at a literary agency during the day, I got off work at 5 p.m., and I studied at night. The key was that this was just after the turn of the millennium. ‘But what would you do when you had work emails?’ these coworkers asked. ‘I didn’t get work emails,’ I said. ‘I barely had the internet in my apartment.'”

In his article, Kois goes on to interview other members of Generation X about their lives in the early 2000s, before the arrival of smartphones or even widely available internet. They shared tales of coming home and just watching whatever show happened to be on TV (maybe “Seventh Heaven,” or “Law and Order”). They also talked about going to the movies on a random weekday evening because they had nothing else to do, or just heading to a bar where they hoped to run into friends, and often would.

The threads that kept catching my attention, however, were about work communication. “The very idea that, once work hours were over, no one could get hold of you—via email, text, Slack, whatever—is completely alien to contemporary young people,” Kois explained. But this reality made a huge difference when it came to the perception of busyness and exhaustion. When work was done at work, and there was no chance of continuing your labors at home, your job didn’t seem nearly as all-consuming or onerous .

There’s a lot about early 2000s culture I’m not eager to excavate, but this idea of the constrained workday certainly seems worthy of nostalgia.

The post When Work Didn’t Follow You Home appeared first on Cal Newport.

I found myself recently, as one does, watching the mini-documentary featurettes included on the DVD for the popular 2014 Keanu Reeves movie, John Wick — an enjoyably self-aware neon noir revenge-o-matic, filmed cinematically on anamorphic lenses.

At the core of John Wick‘s success are the action sequences. The movie’s director, Chad Stahelski, is a former stuntman who played Reeve’s double in The Matrix trilogy and subsequently made a name for himself as a second unit director specializing in filming fights. When Reeves asked Stahelski to helm Wick, he had exactly this experience in mind. Stahelski rose to the challenge, making the ambitious choice to feature a visually-arresting blend of judo, jiu-jitsu, and tactical 3-gun shooting. In contrast to the hand-held, chaotic, quick-cutting style that defines the Bourne and Taken franchises, Stahelski decided to capture his sequences in long takes that emphasized the balletic precision of the fighting.

The problem with this plan, of course, is that it required Keanu Reeves to become sufficiently good at judo, jiu-jitsu, and tactical 3-gun shooting so as not to look clumsy for Stahelski’s stable camera. Reeves was game. According to the featurette I watched, to prepare for production, he trained eight hours a day, four months in a row. The effort paid off. The action set pieces in the movie were show-stopping, and after initially struggling to find a distributor, the film, made on a modest budget, went on to earn $86 million, kicking off a franchise that has since brought in hundreds of millions more.

What struck me as I watched this behind-the-scenes feature is how differently creatives who work in the arts think about productivity as compared to creatives who work in office jobs. For Keanu Reeves, it was obvious that the most productive path was to focus all of his attention on a single goal: becoming really good at Stahelski’s innovative brand of gun fu. Doing this, and basically only this, month after month, materialized hundreds of millions of dollar of profit out of the entertainment ether.

In office jobs, by contrast, productivity remains rooted in notions of busyness and multi-faceted activity. The most productive knowledge workers are those who stay on top of their inboxes and somehow juggle the dozens of obligations, from the small tasks to major projects, hurled in their direction every week. Movie-making is of course different than, say, being a marketing executive, or professor, or project manager, but creating things that are too good to be ignored, regardless of the setting, is an activity that almost without exception requires undivided attention. Are we so sure that the definition of “productive” that defines knowledge work really is the most profitable use of our talents?

John Wick may be shallow entertainment, but the story of its success highlights some deep lessons about what the rest of us might be missing in our pursuit of a job well done.

The post On the Slow Productivity of John Wick appeared first on Cal Newport.

Believe it or not, one of the most important technology announcements of the past few months had nothing to do with artificial intelligence. While critics and boosters continue to stir and fret over the latest capabilities of ChatGPT, a largely unknown 60-person start-up, based out of Tel Aviv, quietly began demoing a product that might foretell an equally impactful economic disruption.

The company is named Sightful and their new offering is Spacetop: “the world’s first augmented reality laptop.” Spacetop consists of a standard computer keyboard tethered to pair of goggles, styled like an unusually chunky pair of sport sunglasses. When you put on the goggles, the Spacetop technology inserts multiple large virtual computer screens into your visual field, floating above the keyboard as if you were using a computer connected to large external monitors.

As oppose to virtual reality technology, which places you into an entirely artificial setting, Spacetop is an example of augmented reality (AR), which places virtual elements into the real world. The goggles are transparent: when you put them on at your table in Starbucks you still see the coffee shop all around you. The difference is now there are also virtual computer screens floating above your macchiato.

To be clear, I don’t believe that this specific product, which is just now entering a limited, 1000-person beta testing phase, will imminently upend the technology industry. The goggles are still too big and unwieldy (more Google Glass than Ray Ban), and the field of vision for their virtual projections remains too limited to fully support the illusion of screens that exist in real space.

But I increasingly believe that Sightful may have stumbled into the right strategy for finally pushing AR into the mainstream. Unlike Magic Leap, the over-hyped Google-backed start-up that burned through $4 billion trying to develop a general-purpose AR device that could do all things for all people, Sightful has remained much more focused with their initial product.

Spacetop solves a narrow problem that’s perfectly suited for AR: limited screen space for mobile computing. Their initial audience will likely be power users who desperately crave monitor real estate. (As I learned researching a 2021 New Yorker article about working in virtual reality, computer programmers, in particular, will happily embrace even the most wonky of cutting-edge technologies if it allow them to use more windows simultaneously.)

This narrowness simplifies many of the technical issues that afflicted the general-purpose AR technologies developed by companies like Magic Leap. Projecting virtual screens is much easier than trying to render arbitrary 3D objects in a real space, as you don’t have to worry about matching the ambient lighting. Furthermore, the keyboard base provides a familiar user interface and vastly simplifies the process of tracking head movements.

In other words, this is a problem that AR has a chance to convincingly solve. And once this door is open, and AR emerges as a legitimate profitable consumer technology, significant disruption might soon follow.

Imagine the following scenario:

• In the third generation of their technology, Sightful achieves a small enough form-factor and large enough field of vision for their AR goggles to appeal to the much broader market segment of business users looking for more screen space when working away from the orfice.
• Seeing the potential, Apple invests several hundred million dollars to develop the iGlass: a pair of fashion-forward AR goggles, connected wirelessly to an elegant, foldable base on which you can touch or type, marketed as a replacement for the iPad and MacBook that can fit in your pocket while still providing you a screen bigger than their biggest studio monitors.
• Spooked, Samsung scrambles to release a high-end AR television experience that allows you to enjoy a virtual 200-inch television in any room.
• Apple smells blood and adds television functionality as a software update to iGlass. Soon Samsung’s market drastically shrinks. This sets off the first of multiple cataclysmic consolidations in the consumer electronics sector.
• Within a decade, we find ourselves in a world largely devoid of screens. Computation unfolds in the cloud and is presented to us as digital projections on thin plastic optical wave-guides positioned inches from our eyes.

I don’t, at this point, mean this prognostication to be either optimistic or dystopian. I want only to emphasize that in a moment in which we’re all so enthralled with the question of whether or not autoregressive token predictors might take our jobs, there are some other major technological fault lines that are beginning to rumble and might very well be close to radically shifting.

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In other news:

• Speaking of a potential AR revolution, I talked about Apple’s upcoming splashy entrance into this space during the final segment of Episode 249 of my podcast, Deep Questions.
• My friend Adam Alter, who I quoted extensively in Digital Minimalism, has a fantastic new book out titled Anatomy of a Breakthrough. Here’s my blurb from the back cover: “A deeply researched and compelling guide to breaking through the inevitable obstacles on the path to meaningful accomplishment.” Check it out!

The post The End of Screens? appeared first on Cal Newport.

Not long ago, my kids’ school asked me to give a talk to middle school students and their parents about smartphones. I’ve written extensively on the intersection of technology and society in both my books and New Yorker articles, but the specific issue of young people and phones is one I’ve only tackled on a small number of occasions (e.g., here and here). This invited lecture therefore provided me a great opportunity to bring myself up to speed on the research relevant to this topic.

I was fascinated by what I discovered.

In my talk, I ended up not only summarizing the current state-of-the-art thinking about kids and phones, but also diving into the history of this literature, including how it got started, evolved, adjusted to criticism, and, over the last handful of years, ultimately coalesced around a rough consensus.

Assuming that other people might find this story interesting, I recorded a version of this talk for Episode 246 of my podcast, Deep Questions. Earlier today, I also released it as a standalone video. If you’re concerned, or even just interested, in what researchers currently believe to be true about the dangers involved in giving a phone to a kid before they’re ready, I humbly suggest watching my presentation.

In the meantime, I thought it might be useful to summarize a few of the more interesting observations that I uncovered:

• Concern that young people were becoming more anxious, and that smartphones might be playing a role, began to bubble up among mental health professionals and educators starting around 2012. It was, as much as anything else, Jean Twenge’s 2017 cover story for The Atlantic, titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”, that subsequently shoved this concern into the broader cultural conversation.
• Between 2017 and 2020, a period I call The Data Wars, there were many back-and-forth fights in the research literature, in which harms would be identified, followed by critics pushing back and arguing that the harms were exaggerated, followed then by responses to these critiques. This was normal and healthy: exactly the empirical thrust and parry you want to see in the early stages of an emerging scientific hypothesis.
• Over the last few years, a rough consensus has emerged that there really are significant harms in giving young people unrestricted access to the internet through smartphones. This is particularly true for pre-pubescent girls. This consensus arose in part because the main critiques raised during The Data Wars were resoundingly answered, and because, more recently, multiple independent threads of inquiry (including natural experiments, randomized controlled trials, and self-report data) all pointed toward the same indications of harm.
• The research community concerned about these issues are converging on the idea that the safe age to give a kid unrestricted access to a smartphone is 16. (The Surgeon General recently suggested something similar.)
• You might guess that the middle school students who attended my talk balked at this conclusion, but reality is more complicated. They didn’t fully embrace my presentation, but they didn’t reject it either. Many professed to recognize the harms of unrestricted internet access at their age and are wary about it. (My oldest son, by contrast, who is 10, is decidedly not happy with me for spreading these vile lies at his school.)

This is clearly a fascinating and complicated topic that seems to be rapidly evolving. If you’re struggling with these developments, I hope you find my talk somewhat useful. I’m convinced that our culture will eventually adapt to these issues. Ten years from now, there won’t be much debate about what’s appropriate when it comes to kids and these technologies. Until then, however, we’re all sort of on our own, so the more we know, the better off we’ll be.

The post On Kids and Smartphones appeared first on Cal Newport.

Based on a tip from a reader, I recently tumbled down an esoteric rabbit hole aimed at the writing habits of the novelist Danielle Steel. Even if you don’t read Steel, you’ve almost certainly heard of her work. One of the best-selling authors of all time, Steel has written more than 190 books that have cumulatively sold over 800 million copies. She publishes multiple titles per year, often juggling up to five projects simultaneously. Unlike James Patterson, however, who also pushes out multiple books per year, Steel writes every word of every manuscript by herself.

How does she pull this off? She works all the time. According to a 2019 Glamour profile, Steel starts writing at 8:30 am and will continue all day and into the night. It’s not unusual for her to spend 20 to 22 hours at her desk. She eats one piece of toast for breakfast and nibbles on bittersweet chocolate bars for lunch. A sign in her office reads: “There are no miracles. There is only discipline.”

These details fascinate me. Steel is phenomenally successful, but her story reads like a Greek tragedy. She could, of course, decide to only write a single book per year, and still be a fabulously bestselling author, while also, you know, sleeping. Indeed, her cultural impact might even increase if she slowed down, as this extra breathing room might allow her to more carefully apply her abundant talent.

But there’s a primal action-reward feedback loop embedded into the experience of disciplined effort leading to success. Once you experience its pleasures it’s natural to crave more. For Steel, this dynamic seems to have spiraled out of control. Like King Midas, lost in his gilded loneliness, Steel cannot leave the typewriter. She earned everything she hoped for, but in the process she lost the ability to step away and enjoy it.

I think this dynamic, to one degree or another, impacts anyone who has been fortunate enough to experience some success in their field. Doing important work matters and sometimes this requires sacrifices. But there’s also a deep part of our humanity that responds to these successes — and the positive feedback they generate — by pushing us to seek this high at ever-increasing frequencies.

One of the keys to cultivating a deep life seems to be figuring out how to ride this razor’s edge; to avoid the easy cynicism of dismissing effort altogether, while also avoiding Steel’s 20-hour days. This is an incredibly hard challenge, yet it’s one that receives limited attention and generates almost no formal instruction. I don’t have a simple solution but I thought it was worth emphasizing. For a notable subset of talented individuals burnout is less about their exploitation by others than it is their uneasy dialogue with themselves.

The post Danielle Steel and the Tragic Appeal of Overwork appeared first on Cal Newport.

In recent months, I’ve received quite a few emails from readers expressing concerns about ChatGPT. I remained quiet on this topic, however, as I was writing a big New Yorker piece on this technology and didn’t want to scoop my own work. Earlier today, my article was finally published, so now I’m free to share my thoughts.

If you’ve been following the online discussion about these new tools you might have noticed that the rhetoric about their impact has been intensifying. What started as bemused wonder about ChatGPT’s clever answers to esoteric questions moved to fears about how it could be used to cheat on tests or eliminate jobs before finally landing on calls, in the pages of the New York Times, for world leaders to “respond to this moment at the level of challenge it presents,” buying us time to “learn to master AI before it masters us.”

The motivating premise of my New Yorker article is the belief that this cycle of increasing concern is being fueled, in part, by a lack of a deep understanding about how this latest generation of chatbots actually operate. As I write:

“Only by taking the time to investigate how this technology actually works—from its high-level concepts down to its basic digital wiring—can we understand what we’re dealing with. We send messages into the electronic void, and receive surprising replies. But what, exactly, is writing back?”

I then spend several thousand words trying to detail the key ideas that explain how the large language models that drive tools like ChatGPT really function. I’m not, of course, going to replicate all of that exposition here, but I do want to briefly summarize two relevant conclusions:

• ChatGPT is almost certainly not going to take your job. Once you understand how it works, it becomes clear that ChatGPT’s functionality is crudely reducible to the following: it can write grammatically-correct text about an arbitrary combination of known subjects in an arbitrary combination of known styles, where “known” means it encountered it sufficiently many times in its training data. This ability can produce impressive chat transcripts that spread virally on Twitter, but it’s not useful enough to disrupt most existing jobs. The bulk of the writing that knowledge workers actually perform tends to involve bespoke information about their specific organization and field. ChatGPT can write a funny poem about a peanut butter sandwich, but it doesn’t know how to write an effective email to the Dean’s office at my university with a subtle question about our hiring policies.
• ChatGPT is absolutely not self-aware, conscious, or alive in any reasonable definition of these terms. The large language model that drives ChatGPT is static. Once it’s trained, it does not change; it’s a collection of simply-structured (though massive in size) feed-forward neural networks that do nothing but take in text as input and spit out new words as output. It has no malleable state, no updating sense of self, no incentives, no memory. It’s possible that we might one day day create a self-aware AI (keep an eye on this guy), but if such an intelligence does arise, it will not be in the form of a large language model.

I’m sure that I will have more thoughts to share on AI going forward. In the meantime, I recommend that you check out my article, if you’re able. For now, however, I’ll leave you with some concluding thoughts from my essay.

“It’s hard to predict exactly how these large language models will end up integrated into our lives going forward, but we can be assured that they’re incapable of hatching diabolical plans, and are unlikely to undermine our economy,” I wrote. “ChatGPT is amazing, but in the final accounting it’s clear that what’s been unleashed is more automaton than golem.”

The post My Thoughts on ChatGPT appeared first on Cal Newport.

An article appearing last month in the Los Angeles Times book section opens with a nondescript picture of a young man in a Hawaiian shirt standing in front of a brick wall. The caption is arresting: “Taylor Koekkoek is one of the best short-story writers of his (young) generation. So why haven’t you heard of him?”

On March 21st, Koekkoek (pronounced, cook-cook) published his debut short story collection, Thrillville, USA. Those who have read it seem to love it. The Paris Review called it a “raw and remarkable debut story collection.” The author of the LA Times piece braved a blizzard in a rental car just for the chance to interview Koekkoek at his Oregon house. And yet, the book has so far escaped wide notice: At the time of this writing, its Amazon rank is around 175,000.

The LA Times provides some insight into this state of affairs:

“A Google search reveals very little about the writer: a few published stories, no social media trail, author bios at a handful of universities that feature the same photo of an amiable-looking young white man in a Hawaiian shirt. If one were to make up an identity for a fictitious writer, the results would resemble something like the sum total of Koekkoek’s online experience.” [emphasis mine]

It’s possible that Koekkoek will go on to make the standard moves for someone his age: engaging in social media, creating waves online, brashly carving out an audience. (Indeed, since his book came out, he seems to have started an Instagram account that currently features three posts.) But there’s a part of me that hopes he resists this well-worn path; that he continues to let his soulful words speak for themselves, and that, ultimately, the sheer quality of what he’s doing wins him grand recognition.

This would be a nice counterpoint to our current moment of instinctive self-promotion. A reminder for the rest of us, nervous about slipping into digital oblivion, that what ultimately matters is the fundamental value of what we produce. Everything else is distraction.

In other news…

• My apologies for my recent radio silence on this newsletter. In a coincidence of scheduling, of the type that happens now and again, I had an academic, magazine, and book-related deadline all fall into the same three-week period, so something had to give. I should be back to a more normal pace of posting now.
• I suppose I should mention that, a few weeks ago, I was profiled by the Financial Times Weekend Magazine. Believe it or not, I was the cover story (!?). You can read it here.

The post On Taylor Koekkoek’s Defiant Disconnection appeared first on Cal Newport.

Back in 2016, I reported on a rumor that was circulating about employee dissatisfaction at Meta (then, Facebook). Developers, it seemed, were unhappy with the company’s trendy, but also unbearably noisy and distracting, 8-acre open office floor plan.

“Developers need to concentrate,” explained an amused Joel Spolsky at a conference that year, before going on to add that Facebook was paying a 40 – 50% premium for talent because people didn’t want to work under those conditions. A commentator on my essay pointed to a podcast episode where Facebook insiders claim that the open office was never more than 30% occupied. “Apparently, the majority of people that work there make sure that they are away from their desk when they need to get work done,” he explained.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal last month, it looks like Meta is finally ready to do something about this self-inflicted problem. After hiring a fancy design firm and working through multiple ideas and prototypes they landed on an innovative solution: cubicles.

(To be fair, the company takes pains to argue that their solution is not cubicles, because, well, the walls are curved, and they are made out of fancier, sound-absorbing materials. Sure. Okay…)

I, for one, am pleased by this news. The open office boom is right up there with the spread of Slack as representing the peak of early 21st century distraction culture — a period in which the knowledge sector completely disregarded any realities about how human brains actually go about the difficult task of creating value through cogitation. The fact that Meta is closing the book on its ill-fated open office experiment is perhaps a glimmer of hope that we’re moving toward a deeper future

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In other news…

On Monday, Scott Young and I are re-opening our popular online course, Life of Focus, which combines ideas from Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and Scott’s excellent book, Ultralearning. For those who are interested, registration will be open Monday until Friday at the course site.

A quick word of warning: I am going to send three short emails about the course throughout the week, so be ready for that. (Each such message will also includes a link at the bottom you can click to opt-out of any future communication about the course. )

The post Meta Rediscovers the Cubicle appeared first on Cal Newport.

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court heard arguments on a case that has the potential to fundamentally reshape the internet as we know it. As you might expect, this caught my attention.

The focus of the case is a single sentence, found in Section 230(c)(1) of 1996’s Communications Decency Act:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

This so-called Section 230 has since been interpreted through multiple court rulings as providing broad immunity from liability for internet platforms that publish content from third-party users. If I defame you in a Tweet, in other words, you cannot sue Twitter.

The case in question was brought against Google by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a college student who was killed in a terrorist attack in 2015. The Gonzalez family claims that the terrorists responsible for their son’s death had been radicalized by videos recommend on YouTube, and therefore Google, which owns YouTube, should be held liable.

At the core of their argument is that Section 230’s protections should not extend to information recommended by algorithms. There’s a difference, the lawyer for the Gonzalez family argued, between passively hosting third-party content, such as on a bulletin board, and actively pushing it toward users, such as what happens on social media services.

The consensus from legal journalists (e.g., this comprehensive take from Adam Liptak) seems to be that the Supreme Court justices sounded unlikely to pursue an aggressive ruling.

“You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet,” admitted Elena Kagan.

“[A strong ruling against Section 230] would really crash the digital economy with all sorts of effects on workers and consumers, retirement plans and what have you,” worried Brett Kavanaugh.

The Justices instead signaled that such clarifications really should be an issue for the legislative branch to address, not the courts. This is all quite reasonable. But reading the coverage of these arguments, I couldn’t help but indulge in some day dreaming.

Imagine if the Supreme Court threw caution to the wind and radically rolled back Section 230 protections; to the point where it became legally unviable to operate any sort of major platform that harvests attention using algorithmic-curation of user-generated content. In this thought experiment, Facebook disappears, along with Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, and even YouTube.

This certainly would devastate the tech sector for a while. It would also hurt the portfolios of those invested in these companies. But what would the impact be on the average internet user? It might not actually be so bad.

You would still have access to all of the traditional news sites and streaming services that are based around old fashioned notions like editors and actually paying people for the content they produce for you. You would also still have access to the recently energized independent media sector, which would continue to thrive through individually-owned podcasts and email newsletters.

What about personal expression? This would shift back to individually-hosted sites that, for a handful of dollars a month, could easily support user posts including text, images and video. Presumably a new generation of RSS-style feed readers would emerge that allow you to browse these sites using attractive phone apps. In the absence of social-network virality, you would discover interesting people and feeds the way we did back in 2005, through a combination of links, serendipity, and word-of-mouth.

What would be missing in this shift from an algorithmic to human internet are many of the darker aspects of contemporary online life, such as slack-jawed addictiveness, or the dynamics that push people toward the worst versions of themselves and away from the humanity of their fellow man.

All of this, of course, is bathed in utopian wistful thinking. A trillion dollar industry won’t just disappear because of a reduced liability shield. Such a shift would also generate untold number of unexpected side effects, such as an exponential increase in nuance lawsuits, or the emergence of newer, even more insidious forms of attention extraction.

But I enjoyed this day dream while it unfolded. It reminded me that the internet we stumbled into over the past 25 years isn’t destiny. There are other options for how this grand network of networks might operate. We shouldn’t be so quick to accept the status quo.

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In other news…

• In the most recent episode of my podcast, Deep Questions, I explore strategies for leveraging remote work arrangements to significantly reduce the time your job requires.
• A talented filmmaker I know named Sara Robin is looking for participants for a documentary she’s filming about digital minimalism. In her words: “We are currently seeking participants who want to try out digital minimalism. If you are looking to reduce your digital media consumption and are interested to be involved in the film, we would love to hear from you!”  If you’re interested and want to find out more, email Sara directly: saraxrobin@gmail.com

A reader recently pointed me toward an intriguing letter, reproduced a few weeks ago in the always-impressive Areopagus newsletter, that was originally sent from Pliny the Younger to his friend Minicius Fundanus around 100 AD. Among other topics, the letter touches on the difficulty of completing meaningful work in a distracted world.

As Pliny writes:

“I always realize [that city life is distracting] when I am at Laurentum, reading and writing and finding time to take the exercise which keeps my mind fit for work. There is nothing there for me to say or hear which I would afterwards regret, no one disturbs me with malicious gossip, and I have no one to blame — except myself — when writing doesn’t come easily. Hopes and fears do not worry me, and my time is not wasted in idle talk; I share my thoughts with no one but my books. It is a good life and a genuine one, a seclusion which is happy and honorable, more rewarding than any “business” can ever be. The sea and shore are my private Helicon, an endless source of inspiration.”

“Away from the main body of the Villa, but connected to it by means of a covered arcade, is Pliny’s Retreat – a place where he can write in peace away from all distractions…I’ve shown the Retreat as a circular room with arms making the shape of a Greek cross. Pliny could then position himself wherever he liked to catch the light and the view from sunrise to sunset as he wrote.  He valued writing above everything else to him it was the most important part of the Villa.”

We shouldn’t, of course, be too literal in extracting practical advice from the life of Pliny the Younger. As a member of a lower aristocratic order in Classical Antiquity, Pliny’s life, in its details, is far different than, say, the standard middle-class twenty-first century knowledge worker. In other words, me telling you to build an outbuilding modeled after the Greek cross away from the main structures of your seaside villa might not evince appreciation.

But I did find it fascinating that even as far back as two thousand years ago, those who made a living with their mind (Pliny was a magistrate and lawyer) struggled with distraction, and found solace in the pursuit of something deeper.

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In other news…

In the most recent episode of my podcast, Deep Questions, I tackle the tension between ambition and burnout, describing a model for pursuing the former while avoiding the latter.

YouTube superstar (and former doctor) Ali Abdaal also released an interview with me in which we discussed the challenges of leaving a well-worn path to pursue something new.

Earlier this week, the New York Times Magazine published a conversation between me and the journalist David Marchese.  We touched on a lot of the ideas about digital technology and the workplace that I elaborate in my 2021 book, A World Without Email.

At one point during the interview, however, I came up with a new metaphor on the fly, which now, looking back, I recognize as potentially adding a useful new wrinkle to my thinking on these topics. Here’s the exchange:

Marchese: But hasn’t the cultural-technological ship sailed when it comes to this stuff? Or, to mix metaphors, part of me is wondering if what you’re suggesting is a little like saying that getting from place to place by horse is a lot more cognitively rewarding and humane than driving everywhere — which may be true, but no one’s going back to horses. What company is going to tell its employees to cut back on email and Slack?

Me: The right metaphor here is not “Let’s stick with horses, even though automobiles are around,” because automobiles were clearly a more energy and monetarily efficient way of moving things from A to B, just like email is clearly a more efficient way for me to deliver a memo to you than a fax machine. The metaphor is that it took a while before we figured out traffic rules and understood that it can’t just be cars going wild through the street. Eventually we figured out we need stoplights and lanes and traffic enforcement.

Almost by definition, if a technology rapidly spreads it’s because it’s doing something notably better than what came before it — be it delivering business information or drool-bucket distraction. Given this reality, nostalgia is often counter-productive: returning to an older generation of tools, in most cases, would be returning to less effective tools.

What trips us up, however, is when we leap from this solid observation to the shaky conclusion that new technologies should therefore be left alone to infiltrate our culture without checks or guidance. Email is clearly better than intra-office mail and fax machines, but does this mean work should require us to check an inbox once every six minutes? An iPhone is clearly a superior device to a Nokia Razr, but does this mean 12-year-olds should be using them? Cars are clearly more efficient than horses, but should I be allowed to drive 60 mph down a quiet residential street?

The right question is not, is this useful? But instead, how do we want to use it?

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In other news…

In the most recent episode of my podcast, Deep Questions, I discuss recent research that shows lumberjacks are significantly more happy than lawyers, and then attempt to extract lessons from this data about how best to craft a meaningful professional life.

In my recent appearance on Sam Harris’s podcast, Making Sense, I gave Sam my argument why I though he should leave Twitter. A few days later: he did! I can’t actually take credit for Sam’s decision (he had been pondering it for a while), but it was a fun conversation nonetheless.

When the Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro was a boy growing up in Guadalajara, his mother bought him a Victorian-style writing desk. “I kept my comic books in the drawers, my books and horror action figures on the shelves, and my writing and drawing stuff on the desk,” Del Toro recalled in a 2016 profile. “I guess that was the first, smallest version of my collection.”

As the director began to find success as an adult with his beautifully imagined, macabre fantasies, like Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth and Nightmare Alley, he was able to indulge his collecting instinct more seriously, amassing “a vast physical collection of strange and wonderful memorabilia.” Eventually, Del Toro’s objects became too much to manage.

As he explained in an NPR interview:

“We were living in a three-bedroom house and I magically had occupied four spaces. So it came to a point where the collection was much bigger than the family life. I was hanging up a picture, a really creepy painting by Richard Corben. My wife says, ‘That’s too close to the kitchen, the kids are gonna be freaked out.'”

So Del Toro took the natural next step: he bought a second house in the same neighborhood. His plan was to use the new residence to organize and store his growing collection and provide a quiet place for him to work. As an homage to Charles Dickens, he called it Bleak House.

By 2016, Bleak House contained over 10,000 items, including artwork, sculptures, artifacts and movies. It also featured thirteen different reference libraries. Housed in a room dedicated to a haunted mansion theme, for example, are Del Toro’s books on mythology, folklore, and fairy tales. The screening room boasts over 7,000 DVDs. One space includes a simulated rain storm that pours outside a fake window. This latter location is one of Del Toro’s favorite places to write.

What interests me about this story is less its eccentricity than its pragmatism.  As Del Toro explained in a video tour of the house, he was inspired by the original research library built at Disney Studios, and in particular, its philosophy that “when you create a group of extraordinary artists, you should definitely feed their imagination with all sorts of images.”

Del Toro designed Bleak House to fuel the creativity on which his career depends. “It’s here to try to provoke a sort of a shock to the system,” he said, “and aid in circulation of the lifeblood of imagination, which is curiosity.”

Truly deep work — the type that redefines genres — is truly hard. In such efforts, our brain needs all the help it can get.

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In other news: in the most recent episode of my podcast, Deep Questions, I tackled thirteen questions in a row, including one on developing discipline and another on planning projects with unpredictable time demands. Are you listening to Deep Questions yet? If not, you should be!