Tag: cal newport
Do Smartphones Make Us Dumber? by Cal Newport
Do Smartphones Make Us Dumber? A reader recently pointed me toward an intriguing article published in 2017 in the Journal for the Association of Consumer Research. It was titled, “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” The authors of the paper report the results of a straightforward experiment. Subjects ...
Focus Week: Rediscover Depth by Cal Newport
Focus Week: Rediscover Depth When I was a young graduate student at MIT, I was impressed by Alan Lightman, a one-time physicist, who turned toward essay and novel writing and ended up accepting a humanities professorship and starting the school’s science journalism program. What initially caught my attention about Lightman was the following line, which ...
On Running an Office Like a Factory by Cal Newport
On Running an Office Like a Factory I was recently browsing the archives of the MIT Sloan Management Review (as one does), when I came across a fascinating article from the Fall 2018 issue titled “Breaking Logjams in Knowledge Work.” The piece starts with a blunt observation: “If you work in an organization, you know ...
Let Go to Grow: On a Blogger’s Decision to Trade Social Media for a Quieter Life by Cal Newport
Let Go to Grow: On a Blogger's Decision to Trade Social Media for a Quieter Life A reader recently pointed me toward an interesting essay. It was written by a blogger and podcaster named Mika. “I’ve thought about how to start this post FOR MONTHS,” she begins, before building to her reveal: “When I hear ...
Another Tale of Finding Depth in a Locked Down Life by Cal Newport
In my last post, I profiled a novelist who took advantage of the lockdown to slow down; giving herself more than enough time and space to inhabit her manuscript revisions. This shift allowed her to tap a “mysterious” source of creativity and finish her work ahead of schedule. In response, a reader sent me some ...
On Doing Less to Produce More: A Novelist Embraces a Minimalist Lockdown by Cal Newport
I recently received an email from a writer in New York City who sold her debut novel right before the coronavirus lockdown. She had until mid-April to finish her first round of revisions. In an effort to make the process more “fun and fluid and intuitive,” and feature less of the stressful long hours she ...
Building a WWII Bunker in an Office Building by Cal Newport
Building a WWII Bunker in an Office Building April 29, 2020 A reader recently sent me another entertaining example of the deep life in action. He runs a design firm with an office in a warehouse-style building that included a cool feature: a “patio,” cantilevered high above the main floor, where he could relax or ...
Beyond the Inbox: Rules for Reducing Email by Cal Newport
Beyond the Inbox: Rules for Reducing Email April 15, 2020 In my last post, I warned that a sudden shift to remote work could inadvertently push knowledge workers into a state of inbox capture, in which essentially all of their time outside of Zoom calls ends up dedicated to sending and receiving email (or Slack ...
The Underappreciated Impact of the Attention Redistribution Revolution by Cal Newport
The Underappreciated Impact of the Attention Redistribution Revolution March 29, 2020 I launched this site during the period sometimes referred to as the “golden age of blogging”: the years from 2003 to 2009 when independent, inexpensive to run, sometimes highly-influential blogs threatened to upend the world of traditional media. By 2010, however, that cultural energy ...
Top Economists Study What Happens When You Stop Using Facebook by Cal Newport
Top Economists Study What Happens When You Stop Using Facebook March 1, 2020 In the most recent issue of the prestigious American Economic Review, a group of well-known economists published a paper titled “The Welfare Effects of Social Media.” It presents the results of one of the largest randomized trials ever conducted to directly measure ...
On Thomas Edison, Technophobia, and Social Media Criticism
Source: On Thomas Edison, Technophobia, and Social Media Criticism February 10, 2020 I recently finished Edmund Morris’s epic new Thomas Edison biography. It took me a while to get used to his reverse chronology structure (he works backwards from Edison’s later years to his earlier years), but once I did, I found it riveting. One ...
Reflections on the Disconnected Life by Cal Newport
Reflections on the Disconnected Life November 25, 2019 Not long ago, an Australian media professor named Robert Hassan boarded the CGM CMA Rossini, a container ship, at a dock in Melbourne. He had arranged to stay on the ship for its five week passage to Singapore. He brought a handful of books, but no phone, ...
Senator Hawley on Social Media: “addiction is actually the point.” by Cal Newport
Senator Hawley on Social Media: “addiction is actually the point.” June 29, 2019 Photo by Natureofthought. Early last month, Josh Hawley, the newly-elected senator from Missouri, gave a speech about big tech at the Hoover Institute. He made a couple points that caught my attention, such as when he said this: “Social media only works ...
Naval Ravikant, Email, and the Future of Work by Cal Newport
Naval Ravikant, Email, and the Future of Work June 19, 2019 In a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Naval Ravikant referenced economist Ronald Coase’s 1937 paper, “The Nature of the Firm,” which later helped Coase win a Nobel prize. The mathematical details of this paper are dense, but on Rogan’s show, Ravikant summarizes its ...
On the Pleasures and Sorrows of Life Without Screens by Cal Newport
On the Pleasures and Sorrows of Life Without Screens June 1, 2019 Photo by Marketa. I recently received a message from a friend of mine, a young man named Mike. He told me that Digital Minimalism had changed his life. Naturally, I asked him to elaborate what he meant. In response, he listed the following ...
Novelist Mark Haddon Quit Twitter. Not Because It’s Terrible, But Because It Prevents Him From Being Great by Cal Newport
Source: Novelist Mark Haddon Quit Twitter. Not Because It’s Terrible, But Because It Prevents Him From Being Great May 18, 2019 Photo by Luis Marina. Last week, the British novelist Mark Haddon wrote an essay for the Financial Times about his recent decision to take a break from Twitter. What I liked about this piece ...
Cal Newport On the Utility Fallacy
But as I’ve learned in my years thinking and writing about such issues, when it comes to consumer-facing technologies, the more important story is almost always how they end up mutating our socio-cultural dynamics.
On Monks and Email by Cal Newport
On Monks and Email April 29, 2019 Medieval monks thought a lot about thinking. As University of Georgia history professor Jamie Kreiner elaborates in a recent Aeon article: “Their job, more than anything else, was to focus on divine communication. For these monks, the meditating mind wasn’t supposed to be at ease. It was supposed ...
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Quits Facebook. The Media Bungled the Story. by Cal Newport
AOC Quit Facebook. The Media Bungled the Story. April 18, 2019 Photo by bruce mars from Pexels Over the weekend, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced on a podcast that she was quitting Facebook as part of her efforts to cut back on her social media use more generally. This was big news because the 29-year-old AOC is ...
Is Social Media Undermining Religion? by Cal Newport
Source: Digital Minimalism and God (Or, is Social Media Undermining Religion?) April 9, 2019 Photo by Oliver Sjöström from Pexels Those who know Martin Luther King Jr.’s story well, know that January 27, 1956, was a pivotal date for the young minister. Only one month earlier, still a newcomer in town, King, to his surprise, ...
Dearborn Blog 