Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 120: LISTENER CALLS: Students' Diminishing Focus

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast. - Saving a software team from the hyperactive hive mind. [3:21] - Working from near home on a student budget [6:18] - Students' diminishing focus. [13:10] - Useful academic work. [24:15] - Deep work subverting deep leisure. [29:09]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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It's that code deep that's going to get you the 25% off your purchase. monk pack delicious, nutritious food you can count on. And now, let's get started with our show. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep questions, listener calls, mini episode. We've got a good episode here, including a question with a surprise shout out to my grandfather, which I appreciate. As always, go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to learn how you can submit your own voice questions for these listener calls. many episodes. All right, let's just get right into it.

Our first question has to do with the tension between wanting to answer questions and always needing to be connected. Hi, Cal, this is Brad from Utah. I work with a software development team, which is building a brand new product. And because this product is new, there's a lot of questions all the time about how things work or new patterns for doing things. Because we suffer from hyperactive hive mind, those questions. questions that a developer has are usually answered very quickly. But I want to implement deep work principles for this team, but I'm worried that if I do, those questions may go unanswered for an hour or two or longer while the rest of the team is disconnected, which feels like wasted time in

itself. So I'm wondering if you have any recommendations on how to balance these things. Thanks. So, Brad, excuse me if I'm getting this wrong. Because I'm not a software developer, but I've covered that world quite a bit and I'm adjacent to that world as a computer scientist. And my understanding is that what you're talking about is already a solved problem. There are well-defined project development methodologies. I mean, at the core of Agile, for example, is this idea of how do we add features to new software, and it's all about being more iterative and trying to figure everything out in advance. All of the different Agile methodologies are really clear about how you come together to figure out a story about what a user needs and how that translates to a feature,

going to work on that feature. They're working on it today in a sprint, this team, here's what they need, and here's when we next check in on it. I mean, it's like a really structured thing that has no requirement for just grab me as you have a question. So I think the issue is you are applying the hyperactive hive mind as your primary collaborative modality in your team. We're going to build this product, let's rock and roll. As problems come up, you have to grab people on the fly. In that setting, it is disruptive to move people away from their communication tool. So leave the hive mind and get more structured about how you identify features, how big they are, how you decide what they are, how you coordinate who's going to work on it, how you execute the work on it, how you check on what's done. And all of that, fortunately, in your situation, has been figured out before. I mean, Agile covers this. All the Agile Methodologies cover this. Read the book Sprint for more about the really rapid product design. I mean, look, these ideas are out there. I'm going to do them in injustice if I try to summarize them with too much detail, but they're out there. If you're listening to this and you're not in software development, look to what they're doing as

inspiration. There's nothing specific about software development that says this is one of the only types of knowledge work in which we can get really structured about how we figure out what needs to be done, how we assign it, who works on it, how they execute it, how we check on it. It's specific to writing code for that type of structure. So I really want there to be more creativity out there with people much more willing to think through, wait, what is the work we do? How do we actually want to do it? You start asking that question. You can end up in some pretty structured, interesting places. All right, let's shift gears here into a question about my concept of working from near home.

Hi, Kyle. My name is Kate. I am from Scotland and I am a full-time post-grad theology student. I love your grandfather, by the way, John Newport. So I just finished reading your essay on working from near home. And whilst I agree with everything that you said in that essay, what would you say to those students like me who couldn't afford to rent a place or go elsewhere to do deep work? I study in my office. I do tons of research and I can definitely say that it's so hard for me to get into the zone and do deep work even though I've been doing. my pre-deep work rituals since the pandemic is hard not to get distracted when I go to the bathroom, go to the kitchen, I see the laundry basket, the dishes. What would you advise? Well, first of all, I appreciate the shout out to my grandfather, John Paul Newport,

who got one of his doctorates out there at Edinburgh. He actually has a biography coming out in April, but like a river glorious written by Karen Bullock. I've read it, and I really enjoyed it. I might have Karen on when we get closer to the publication date to talk about some lessons from my grandfather's life. Anyways, I appreciate that reference.

Let me give a little bit of background for the readers who didn't come across my work from near home essay for the New Yorker I wrote a couple months ago. The idea was basically when you're working from home, if you are in your actual home, you are being exposed to salient distractions, which is going to make it difficult to work on your work.

I'm saying this is something we downplay when we think about remote work. First of all, there's a lot of triggers in your house, like you mentioned, laundry, unpaid bills, that when you see them, your mind begins to shift to that cognitive context relevant to that trigger, and therefore it is taking focusability away from whatever work you're about to just do. And then just the types of distractions you encounter, you know, your kids yelling, a roommate watching a fun show, the types of distractions you encounter in your house are just really distracting in a way that just a generic conversation in a coffee

shop might not be. So I recommend it if we're going to move more work out of the office. We should think about working from near home as something we might want to focus on more because you can actually do a lot more if you're not in the office but also not in your own home. All right, to your question, I think the irony is you're talking about being in Scotland, I'm assuming you're in Edinburgh, though I don't know for sure, saying I can't afford a place to go rent the place to go work or this or that. Where I'm thinking, if I had all the money in the world and all the time in the world, and I could go anywhere in the world to get my work done, I would go to Edinburgh and Scotland.

You're living in the place. You're living in the place that I would probably go. Maybe I'm romanticizing Scotland, but there's just something about the cloudy weather. the castles, the moors, the greenery, the quiet, it's always appealed to me. Now, again, maybe I've read too much Harry Potter, or if I'm trying to be more academic here, I should say, maybe I've read too much David Hume and I'm romanticizing the region, but it's a inspiring place. Which is all to say, you have really great opportunities all around you to create work from

near home deep work locations that could really get your brain going. Now, you mentioned your question, you can't afford to rent a house or something like that. You don't have to rent a house. You don't have to own a second property. And the thing I want to point you towards for inspiration. So I want to point you back to my blog at Calnewport.com. If you go back to the earlier archives, if you go back to 2008, 2009, 2010, I'm primarily writing for students.

Back then, I was mainly writing student advice. And one of the topics that came up a fair amount back then is, what we used to call adventure studying. And the idea was go find sort of awe-inspiring or interesting or unusual places to do your schoolwork and take a photo and send it to me. And I would write about them on the blog. Because even back then I had this notion in my mind, like you can't just sit in your dorm room. If you have to do hard work, have special places you go. Make the work effort itself into something that is attention-catching and energizing.

And people would do really cool things. There's a picture on there of a waterfall. So at some school they had a hike and it took a little while and they get to a waterfall and they'd work on their homework by the waterfall. Museums in town were popular. Go to this museum and in the cafe and you could overlook this river. That was very popular. There was one enterprising astronomy student who figured out how to essentially break onto the roof of the astronomy building and he would go out there at night when you could see the stars and work on the roof. I used to talk to people about, you know, on my blog, I had this post.

It was something like Heidegger and Heffawisen. I can't bring, if you have to read some convoluted philosophy, go to the pub and get a pint where there's a fireplace. And Edinburgh is full of these things and, you know, pretend like you're one of the, you know, an enlightenment philosopher or something. And there's just go someplace kind of interesting to get the work done. You know, go by Edinburgh Castle, go for a hike. and bring your books with you and read it on the hike out on a moor somewhere. You know, I mean, whatever. Interesting scenery, scenery unrelated to your normal work,

scenery with some connection to an academic or philosophical type history. All of this could be really good. And you can't throw a cat in Edinburgh without hitting a site that is scenic and unrelated to your particular work connected to some sort of philosopher who came up with some sort of philosophy. So let's break this frame that says work from near home is about buying or renting another place. to work and just let it be find interesting places to do your deepest work and the more interesting the better the more over the top the better the more outrageous the more you had to hike somewhere

to get there the more it seems like a really unusual place to be working on your math problem set because you're at a on a lake somewhere on a raft great the more unusual or interesting or inspiring the probably the better it's going to serve as helping you snap into work mode and out of the mode of the mundane and the distracting. And I'll lay this out of a challenge for anyone. If you're out there doing work in really unusual, unspiring places, take a picture, send it to interesting at calnewport.com. Maybe we can revive this concept of adventure studying,

or at the very least, it'll be an excuse for me to go drink some more Heffelaisans. All right, speaking of students, let's do a question now about even younger students. Hi, I am Levin. I am a teacher for younger children in between two and a half and 12 years. old. I see a loss of focus by more and more children and as a teacher this is a complex problem because a lot of support is given from professionals like psychologists, parents and others. But in the classroom I need more and more attention, attraction instead of deep contact and really interest in the subjects we propose in the classroom.

So perhaps you have more experience what we can do with younger children. Thank you. Well, I agree with you first that this is an issue. I mean, one of the things that seems clear for my work on these topics is that focus is a practiced skill. It's not something that just comes natural to us, that we just need to be reminding. did to do more often. It requires work. And we should be a little bit more clear about this.

Sometimes a focus doesn't. Our brains are very good at maintaining unbroken concentration on a salient stimuli. If there's a sound that is, you know, in the bushes, is that a beast, you know, friend or foe, we can concentrate on that sound incredibly intensely. Okay, what's going on? Let's hear if it happens again. And we think we hear a rattle of a rattle snake or we're trying to. to see if coming over the bend, is that a cloud or whatever? I mean, if it's something like a physical stimuli that's very important to us in the moment,

we can give it very intense focus. But focus on abstraction is something we've had to teach our brains to do much more recently in our evolutionary history, this idea that we can take an abstract thought, sort of a mathematical thought, a philosophical thought, or what have you, and hold it in our mind and think about it and manipulate it, that we can move numbers around for the calculus problem, that we can do a dialectic probing of a philosophical concept just in our head. That's very unnatural. We're basically hijacking other parts of our brain to do this type of symbolic processing

with sustained attention at a level that we never really evolved to do. So it's hard and we have to practice it. And school gives us that practice, right? When you have to sit there and work on the calculus problem, when you have to sit there and do the book report, you are implicitly training your mind to do this type of sustained focus. Then once you can do it, it allows you to contribute to the culture of ideas, to be involved with the culture of ideas. The issue is this training is implicit. We don't set out with that as a tier one goal with education.

It's just something that you kind of get. Our goal is to teach you how to do these things and to do this type of thinking, but as a side effect, as a side effect, you learn how to sustain focus on the abstract. Because it's not a tier one goal, we don't really expend a lot of attention or attention. effort to sustain it. So there's an argument to be made that this is what has started to happen, a negatively reinforcing feedback cycle. Other cultural forces had shifted in such a way that has added some degradation to people's ability to focus.

We have things like phones now and young people are getting these really attractive stimuli and they don't tolerate boredom anymore and they get less used to just keeping their attention on one thing at a time. And so you begin to get a bit of a degree. of attention. Now, what happens then when you go into a school context? And, hey, traditionally, when we learn this math or do these book reports, it kind of stretches your ability to focus, it makes you better at it. If the student is starting from a lower baseline ability to focus because of other cultural forces, the work becomes harder. It's harder for them. I have a harder time

focusing on this math problem than maybe someone 20 years ago did because I have less exposure to boredom and concentration and I get more distraction. If we were thinking about the ability to focus as a tier one skill, we would say, ah, there's something shifting out there in our culture, so we have to really double down and be careful about, like, we're going to have to put more attention to this to really overcome those forces to maintain the similar levels of ability to focus on our students. And maybe we'd have to put more energy into it. But because it's not a tier one focus of our education, what happens is, is we say, well,

this seems too hard. students are struggling with this more than they did before so let's rein it in to require less of that focus so it's more comfortable right and then their ability to focus gets even you know so now we've we've degraded the ability the growth of the ability to focus and then we have to kind of dumb down the focus required for the work that comes later and and and then they're less young people are then less less able to resist distraction and they get even more distracting their life outside of school and they're more, and now we have to bring down the work even more. And we get this negative reinforcing feedback cycle where by the time you get to university or outside of university, the kids' minds are all over the place. And they're in a workplace,

and it's just, I can't just sit here and write this. This is intolerable. I need to be on Slack. I need to send messages. I need to rock and roll. Can't I just become a social media brand manager? So I can't just sit and concentrate. And we're in a hard place

because it is an important skill. And this is the argument of deep work is the ability to focus without this traction. It's only becoming more important as our knowledge economy becomes more elite and more competitive. So these trend lines are going in two different directions. So what I've argued is, and I don't know how to do this specifically, but what I have argued is that we should think about the ability to focus on abstraction

as one of the skills we're directly building in school, and then we can directly train it. I don't know exactly what that training would look like. I mean, I've helped students do things like interval training, where you have timers and you try to concentrate intensely until a timer goes off, and you increase those intervals. I've talked to people about productive meditation where you try to work on ideas while walking.

The walking helps free up your concentration ability and you get used to holding things in your mind. I've talked about memory exercises, like building memory palaces as a way of helping to stabilize the eye of attention inside of your brain. I mean, there's things we can do. And I'm not an expert, but there's things we can do. And I think we should.

I think it should be one of the things you get out of school is I can turn a laser-like focus on something and keep it there and not have that be super uncomfortable. It is like a superpower in our current economy. It's a superpower that we could be giving to all of our students and instead we say, how about some kryptonite? So I'm sorry I don't have like a specific curriculum or solution here, but I agree with you on the problem. And I think the general solution is we got to start training this stuff. Let's take a moment to talk about ExpressVPN.

What actually happens when you're on your laptop and you connect to that wide. access point. You know, you're at the library and you connect to the access point. You start surfing the web. Your computer is sending packets. I'm sending packets over that wireless connection and the packet say, here's who I am, and this is the website. I'm sending information to.

Anyone can see that. Anyone with a basic packet sniffer can say like, ah, this is who, what websites you're visiting. You're visiting Calnewport.com. Are you crazy? I think we need to fire this person. You know who else sees all that information? your internet service provider.

Comcast Verizon, whoever you get your internet through, they see, because they're routing them for you, all these packets of where you're going, what websites you're visiting, and you know what? In the U.S.,

they can legally sell that information to add companies and tech giants. This is what this person is up to. They're visiting calnewport.com quite a bit. So, you know, let's not try to sell them books that are too smart. This person's clearly an idiot. A VPN solves this problem.

With a VPN, here's how it works. You say, oh, here's who I'm talking to to Verizon or Comcast. I'm talking to Verizon or Comcast. I'm talking to the ExpressVPN servers. And then you send to the ExpressVPN servers in an encrypted packet who you really want to talk to. They opened that encrypted packet and they talk to that server. They talk to Calnewport.com on your behalf and then encrypt the answer and send it back to you. So now everyone who's listening into your conversation, they say, ah, they're just talking

to their VPN. We have no idea who that VPN is then going to talk to on their behalf. Your service provider doesn't know the people who are sniffing your packets don't know. Your Calnewport.com affinity secret is safe. VPNs are critical. If you don't want people to know what you're up to, and ExpressVPN, I think, is the best in the business. They have the most servers. The servers are the connections are the fastest, and the software is the most seamless. When you're running ExpressVPN, you're just using your computer as normal. You don't even notice that this nice indirection is actually happening. Very easy to use. So if you want to secure your online activity today, go to expressvPN.com slash deep to get an extra three months free.

That's EXP-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash deep. ExpressVPN.com slash deep. I also want to talk about our good friends at Optimize. And I'm not using that phrase euphemistically. Optimize is founded by my actual longtime and good friend Brian Johnson. Optimize is a subscription network that basically focuses on the goal of helping you live a deeper life. Brian uses the terminology heroic life, but we're 100% in alignment on what we're thinking about here. So when you sign up for Optimize, you get a few things. One, you get access to the archives of Brian's philosopher notes.

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All right, let's move on here to a question about doing useful academic work. Hey, cow, my name's Alex, and I'm currently a PhD candidate working on my dissertation. As I consider a career in academia with hopes of a tenure-track position, I can't help but think of how I don't want to be busy just for the sake of busyness. I want to be useful, and I want my work to be helpful. So when it comes to academic writing and conducting research, what's your advice on avoiding busyness or just the pursuit of prestige and instead conducting research that's helpful and purposeful?

Well, Kelly, in most fields, in most fields, the work you're going to be doing in your first couple of years after graduate school. So if you get a tenure track job, and that work is going to be heavily dictated by what you were doing, during your doctoral program. So in other words, during your doctoral program, you're mastering some sort of very highly specialized skills. This is what your advisor was teaching you.

And then when you go out on your own, you're basically demonstrating to the world. I can continue applying this skill, doing work in this vein, on my own, without my advisor here. So whatever it was you were doing, you'll be doing more or less that at first when you get your professorship. Now, it can differ, of course, depending on your field. In my field, which is basically applied mathematics, we'd changed topics so much all the time.

I had a lot of latitude in a way that if I had instead mastered in biology, a very specific technique for putting electrodes in the bat brains, that's probably my first grant, my first NIH grant out of grad school is going to be about putting electrodes in bat brains. I just spent six years mastering

that skill. So it does kind of depend on the field. But typically, you're doing in your first years after grad school, what you're doing in grad school. If you're in a humanities field, for example, you're probably transforming your dissertation to a book. is going to be a big part of your work. And if you're in a science field, as I just mentioned,

you're probably going to be taking for a spin some sort of specialized technique or tools or theoretical frameworks that you learn from your advisor. As you get to tenure and beyond, this is when you can really begin to shift the new directions. This is one of a big believer in tenure, by the way, not just because I've had tenure for a while now and I enjoy having tenure,

but because it does actually work in the following way. You get breathing room to try some other things. and you don't have to worry about my record it's going to be scrutinized in another four years and if I haven't been producing I'm out when you're removed from that pressure. Now you can start saying I'm going to try something new.

I'm going to build up a new skill. I'm going to move to the adjacent possible to use a term I borrowed from Stuart Coffin and so good they can't ignore you but then apply to career innovation and try a different configuration of skills. I'm going to add a new skill to what I have and go a different way.

I'm going to write a grant with someone that I'm more interested in, that I'm more excited in, right? Then you're able to start making those type of shifts. And of course, the flip side of 10 years is that you continue someone who just stops working. To which I say, that's the gamble we have to pay. I mean, I'm a big believer in the 10-year system because, yeah, some people will take advantage at 10-year to stop working. Some will just keep doing what they're doing anyways, and it doesn't matter.

But maybe they'll feel less pressure and that's good. And some are going to really innovate. That innovation is going to be important. And I think that's the price we have to pay to get academic innovation. is we have to give some freedom for experimentation to professors. And so what I'm trying to say here is that you have a little bit of leeway right after grad school. You'll basically be doing what you're doing in grad school. But you can choose to what you apply it.

But then you should be thinking ahead to where do I want to go as to get to tenure and beyond, and maybe even start laying those foundations pre-tenure, not putting a ton of work into these new topics, but beginning to build up some background knowledge so that you can make this shift as you get towards tenure and beyond. Now, of course, if what you learned in grad school is already connected to something that you find to be very useful, that's great. You'll be doing useful stuff out of the gate. Or if what you're doing right outside of grad school can be aimed just a little bit to the side and make it much more useful, then that'd be great. And you can do it right outside of the gate. In my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, for example, I interviewed Pardis Abedi at Harvard, who had mastered at Harvard algorithmic, a sort of algorithmic genomic biological algorithm techniques.

these techniques for using algorithms to sift through genome data. And then she took that skill as she arrived at Harvard and moved a little bit to the side and applied it to, okay, what type of genomic data do I want to look at? I want to study ancient viruses to try to help reduce death and suffering in places where these ancient viruses are still endemic. So there, she wasn't coming up with a new skill as she went into the world of professorship, but she was applying her skill to the most useful place she could. So you have that leeway. You apply your skill to the most useful place you can,

but you still need to be actually producing work, and your leeway will be limited post-tenure, start making some bigger swings. All right, we got time for one more question. This one is about deep leisure in the time it takes away from deep work. Hi, Carl. I'm Farai from Zimbabwe,

and I wondered, how do you incorporate deep leisure after a day of deep work? Because deep leisure where you have some intense hobbies, like drawing painting, you actually need to build up the proficiency to do such things, and you probably need to tap into deep work reserves to do that. But you've done that deep work at work.

Then when you're coming home to do leisure, I don't think you have enough steam to do that deep work anymore, and it's probably really easy just to jump into doom-scrolling or watching YouTube videos through recommendations or something like that. So I'm wondering, how do you build up that ability to do deep leisure when you're coming from not really having such proficiency? Thanks. Well, there's two points here that come to mind.

First, let's just assume that we're looking at a day in which your work was very intense. You're concentrate really intensely on things. It was draining. And you're pretty mentally fatigued. So that kind of stipulates the context in which your question is asked. I think you're making too big of a jump. I mean, you basically have, there's two options here. Either you're doing like a very intensive leisure activity that involves arduous study or you're doom scrolling.

In that context, I think there's a lot of really interesting ground in between, you know, activities that are rewarding leisure activities that are not doom scrolling, but also are not you trying to learn particle physics in your spare time. reading a book that you enjoy, exercising, walking somewhere scenic, spending time with friends, trying to watch a classic film when you've read about it, now you want to actually see it, you know, working on some sort of manual craft where it's much more flow than practice-based. It's I know how to carve wood. I've already learned how to do it. And now I'm actually just working on a project in carving wood or something like this. I mean, there's any number of leisure activities where you can be present, maybe get. get some awe, see some intentions made manifest in the world perhaps, or get some blood flowing that really doesn't care that your brain is exhausted from work, right?

Because it's not demanding those same muscles. The second thing I would say is that, well, if you're always exhausted after work, then, like, maybe work less. I don't mean that to be glib. I mean, to the degree to which it's under your control, don't push your brain if you can avoid it to the limit every day. maybe some days you need to, but other days be seasonal, man. Pull back a little bit.

Taking today a little bit easier. Catching up with my colleagues. I'm optimizing some of my systems for some projects that are coming up. And I'm going to kind of check out of here a little early. And tonight I'm whatever, reading a hard book or taking a great course as you're going to a lecture. And I want to save some energy for it. I mean, we should have more of a give and take to the degree that it's possible in your job. And for a lot of knowledge work jobs, it is kind of possible because no one really monitors what's going on.

and it's all fake anyways. That's not really true, but you know what I'm saying. All right, so those would be my two things. There's leisure that is not demanding, which is also not doom scrolling. And it's often the case that you don't need to be mentally exhausted every day. Give yourself a break. Give yourself a break during work and spend some of that energy on some other things too.

Not everything has to be just about the professional skill you're developing. All right, so I hope you found that useful. Thank you to all who asked their questions. I'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.