Body and daily life
Cal Newport
Concentration is scarce
Cal Newport (2016 · Georgetown University) — Concentration is scarce.
What actually happened?
Newport is a working academic with a full publication record, several books and no social media account of any kind, and he closes the laptop most evenings by half past five. He does not present that as discipline; he presents it as design. The book opens with people who went further. Donald Knuth gave up email in 1990 and asks correspondents to write to a postal address so that an assistant can batch it, on the grounds that email is a wonderful thing for people whose job is to be on top of things, and his job is to be at the bottom of things.
Attention residue: the cost is not the five minutes
After a switch, part of your attention is still hooked on the last task and needs time to move across. The real cost of one quick look at a message is the poor half hour that follows, and you cannot feel that part, because on returning to the work you feel focused.
Answer a message midway through a proposal and the next twenty minutes usually need rewriting the following day.
Fragments do not add up to a block
Four fifteens are not an hour, because each one pays the switching cost again and deep thinking needs a climb. It explains why a person whose diary is cut up by meetings produces nothing requiring continuity even when the total hours are there.
The forty minutes between two meetings is hard to think in. Most people can only spend it on small chores.
Book the block; do not manage the will
Self-control is consumable and a diary is not. Fix the deep hours the way a meeting is fixed, announce them, and enter them when the time comes. A gap never appears by itself, because shallow work expands like a gas to fill whatever space is available.
Marking two hours each morning as unbookable beats asking yourself every morning when you will write.
Cap the shallow work rather than abolishing it
Mail, coordination and meetings are necessary and they build no new capability. He does not propose removing them. He proposes a ceiling and a fixed slot, so the total is unchanged and what remains can join up into blocks.
Handle mail at ten in the morning and four in the afternoon rather than whenever it lands.
How do I use it today?
Look back at yesterday and find whether there was a single stretch over ninety minutes with no interruption in it. If there was not, put one into tomorrow's diary the way you would put in a meeting, tell the people who would otherwise interrupt it, and push the mail into two fixed slots so the rest of the day can join up.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
Deep work is becoming rare exactly as it becomes valuable.
A gap never appears by itself. You have to schedule it.
Four fifteen-minute pieces do not make an hour.