Cal Newport @ProfCalNewport Twitter profile

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Cal Newport

3 years

To me, the deep life is about focusing with energetic intention on things that really matter — in work, at home, and in your soul — and not wasting too much attention on things that don’t.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

1 year

Your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

Do fewer things. Work at a varied pace. Focus on quality.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

1 year

The happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

1 year

Move your focus away from finding the right work, toward working right, and eventually build a love for what you do.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

Put relationships first. Give non-trivial time and attention to other people. That's the net that is going to allow you to get through anything.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

I see self-discipline as an identity you develop. If you can convince yourself that you are a disciplined person, then you will be able to apply it in your life.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

1 year

Here's a reminder for the rest of us, nervous about slipping into digital oblivion. What ultimately matters is the fundamental value of what we produce. Everything else is distraction.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Steinbeck was productive, writing 33 books and winning a Nobel Prize for his efforts. But he wasn't busy. After writing in the morning, he'd spend afternoons fishing or chatting with other writers. Maybe we understand "busy" in the wrong way.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

Two core abilities for thriving in the New Economy: 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

At the slightest hint of boredom, we can now glance at any number of apps or mobile websites that have been optimized to provide us an immediate and satisfying dose of input from other minds. It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life. That's worrisome.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

How much genius are we losing to the compulsive need to scroll just a little bit more?

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

A 40 hour time-blocked work week, I estimate, produces the same amount of output as a 60+ hour work week pursued without structure.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

Work schedules brimming with emails, Slack messages, and calendar invites cannot support the form of thought that moves the needle in your field. But how many of us are serious enough to protect the time to do nothing but think?

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

Figure out the life you want; what's important to you. Figure out what technology will support that. Get the benefits, avoid the costs. Be comfortable with missing out everything else.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

Your work matters. It’s okay to fight for it in your schedule.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

When choosing a career path: fix the lifestyle you want, then work backwards from there. Because in the end, what matters is your lifestyle. The specifics of your work are important only in how they impact your daily experience.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

If you’ve trained your mind that at the slightest hint of boredom it will receive a dopamine-flavored treat in the form of a rapid cycle of swiping and scrolling through social media, then good luck convincing yourself to sit down and tackle something meaningful but difficult.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

One of my most successful work strategies is fixed-schedule productivity. 1. Choose a schedule of work hours that provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation. 2. Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule. Sounds simple, but following #2 is not easy.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come. — C.S. Lewis At some point, we need to "get down to our work" even if the favorable conditions never come.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Do less. Do better. Know why.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

A deep life is a good life.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

You can accomplish a lot more than you think in normal 40-hour weeks if you're willing to really work when you're working. Then you get to be done when you're done.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

1 year

The right question is not whether new, rapidly spreading technology is useful (it often is), but instead, how we should use it. For example, email is clearly better than fax machines, but does this mean we should check our inbox every six minutes?

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Steve Martin's advice, "Always be so good they can’t ignore you. If you do that, lots of other good things will come", hit me hard. I was a 2nd year PhD student then, trying to "hack" my way up. But that piece of advice led me to focus on doing really good work first.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Remove apps that make money from your attention. Billions of dollars have been invested to figure out how to get you to compulsively look at your phone. So remove the apps. You can still access them on your computer, but not your phone, which follows you everywhere.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

I work in "seasons." Which means I go hard this semester, then take an easy semester. Or I go hard for a week, then go easy. This gives me enough time to rest, recover, and prevent burnout. Try it out in different time scales. Ex: go hard in the morning, stop by 5PM.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

Busyness and exhaustion are often unrelated to the task of producing meaningful results.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

"Follow your passion" is kind of bad advice. Passion for what you do does not exist with full intensity before you get started. Instead, you cultivate passion. It happens when you gain autonomy, get better skills, and create a bigger impact with what you do.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

When it comes to cognitive work, setting makes a difference. Setting up your laptop in your kitchen might technically give you everything you need to do your job. But will your mind end up in the same state produced by working in a marble-lobbied skyscraper in the city center?

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

You’re only granted so much energy to expend in a lifetime. You’re almost certainly best off focusing it as intensely as you can on the targets that seem to really move the needle.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

1 year

The "open office" is up there with Slack as representing the peak of early 21st century distraction culture — a period which the knowledge sector disregarded the reality of how human brains actually go through the difficult task of creating value through cogitation.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

My #1 advice to new workers: Don't drop the ball. Be someone others can trust and you will gain autonomy. Otherwise, you will always be micromanaged and never gain the freedom to set office hours, etc.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

24 days

Creating things that are too good to be ignored, regardless of the setting, is an activity that almost without exception requires undivided attention.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

1 year

ChatGPT is amazing, but in the final accounting it’s clear that what’s been unleashed is more automaton than golem.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

John McPhee is productive. He’s published 29 books, including one which won a Pulitzer Prize. He’s been penning distinctive articles for The New Yorker since 1965. And yet, he rarely writes more than 500 words a day. This is what slow productivity looks like.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Cognitive work is a fragile endeavor; environment matters. When we pass the laundry basket outside our home office (a.k.a. our bedroom), our brain shifts toward a household-chores context, even when we would like to maintain focus on our work.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Track lead instead of lag indicators. Lag indicator: Getting your next academic paper accepted into a better journal. It's something you can't fully control. Lead indicator: Achieving 15 hours of deep work on your paper per week. It's something you can control.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

If you’re intrigued by depth, give real depth a try, by which I mean giving yourself at least two or three hours with zero distractions. Let the hard task sink in and marinate. Push through the initial barrier of boredom and get to a point where your brain can think deeply.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

Different people have different ambition types. Type 1 craves activity and indulges in the appealing opportunities that success creates. Type 2 seeks simplicity and autonomy — seeing success as a source of leverage to reduce stressful obligations.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Deep Work - Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

20 days

When work was done at work, and there was no chance of continuing your labors at home, your job didn’t seem nearly as 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.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Motivation requires you to fulfill three basic psychological needs: 1. Autonomy - the feeling that you have control over your day. 2. Competence - the feeling that you are good at what you do. 3. Relatedness - the feeling of connection to other people.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

1. Community (family, friends, etc.), 2. Craft (work and quality leisure), 3. Constitution (health), and 4. Contemplation (matters of the soul).

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Take a 30-day digital declutter and step away from the technologies in your personal life that are optional. Get back to spending time on what you actually care about and value. When the 30 days are over, you'll know which technologies are worth adding back. And which aren't.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

2 years

How much creative, energetic, impact-inducing cognitive potential is suppressed by our ubiquitous slabs of glowing glass?

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

To everyone who wonders if the grass might be greener on the other side of the occupational fence, I offer this advice: Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

For me, a day off is a day where I have full autonomy over what I do. The blank calendar day, to me, is one of the more glorious sights.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

We’re using our phones all the time because it’s more palatable to be active and busy all the time than to sometimes face what’s going on in our lives or the world.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Nathan Chen, the figure-skating Olympic gold-medalist, did not bring his phone to the Olympics. He wanted to escape scrolling "for hours through social media.” Perhaps, a life subservient to that small glowing screen is not a life where you’re living up to your potential.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Here's one way to define the "deep life". An authentic and interesting life lived by someone who's not going to look back at the end of their life and ask "what did I do?"

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Work backwards from the life you want to live. Then figure out how you want to get there.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Exposure to the online torrent of incomplete, redundant, and often contradictory information that follow major news events is counterproductive and leaves us less informed.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

A life focused intensely on the things that really matter — even if it’s riddled with ups and downs — trumps a comfortable life that unfolds with haphazard numbness or excessive narcissism.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

If I had subscribed to the “follow your passion” orthodoxy at MIT, I probably would have left during those first years because I didn't love my work every day. But I knew that my sense of fulfillment would grow over time as I became better at my job. And it did.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Cognitive context switching is costly and time-consuming. For example: Texting a friend to organize a meetup, emailing your boss about your new proposal, and then reading the latest news about COVID. By the time you're done, you feel fatigued.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

What if remote work didn't mean working from home? Maya Angelou would rent hotel rooms to write, asking the staff to remove all artwork and enter each day only to empty the wastebaskets. She’d arrive at 6:30AM, with a Bible, a yellow pad, and a bottle of sherry.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Compulsively checking CNN, NYTimes, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, ESPN has become a lucrative tic for media platforms.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

The tricky part in cultivating a deep life, of course, is figuring out what things matter. This will differ between different people. I strive to divide my focused attention among four categories:

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Those who embrace the deep life often push some of these efforts to a place that seems radical to outsiders, but it’s exactly in this extremeness that they find the deep satisfaction.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

If you want to get better at writing fast, you have to be writing for an editor who can accept, edit, or reject your work. I experienced that when I wrote for Dartmouth's humor magazine. One of my headlines: “Team from Amish University Places Last at Robotics Competition.”

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Do less - I decided early on to focus on writing, among a couple of other bets. Do better - Then I started to train. Writing student books, analyzing New Yorker articles, and writing for smaller magazines. It took a decade, but now I'm writing for the New Yorker.

Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Do less. Do better. Know why.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

16 days

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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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

So there it is: a short summary of the underlying philosophy that gives rise to so much that I end up writing about, from the zen valedictorian, to career capital, to deep work, to the importance of digital minimalism.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

The need to keep up with the hyperactive hive mind makes the average knowledge worker check their communication channels once every six minutes. Because it's how they talk to clients, HR, vendors, coworkers; everyone. There's no time left to do anything else.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Here's how I reduce context switching in my email: 1) I have three distinct Google Workspaces with their own usernames and passwords. Personal, university, and website. 2) I check inboxes only when appropriate. After a podcast recording, I check my writing inbox specifically.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

The moonshot of the 21st century will be figuring out how to overcome the hyperactive hive mind workflow. It will revolutionize knowledge work and end the suppression of latent productivity.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

18 days

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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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Take a break from Twitter. Sure you might log on for noble reasons like checking baseball trade rumors, but once you see, out of the corner of your eye, a trending tweet about white supremacists using Omicron to accelerate climate change, boom. You're angry / anxious / upset.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

It is very hard to produce a film at Tarantino's level. But it does not require insane periods of frenzied effort. Tarantino's routine is write, float in a pool and think, and write again. That's it. But over time, this aggregates to an Oscar-worthy outcome.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

In the most general sense, productivity is about navigating from a large constellation of possible things you could be doing to the actual execution of a much smaller number of things each day.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

As a postdoc student, I trained myself for the busy schedule of a professor by adding artificial time constraints. I exercised for two hours in the middle of the day, did productive meditation, etc. While still maintaining the 9-5 work hours. Now it's paid off.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

The ability to work without distraction on difficult tasks (deep work) is becoming more rare. But at the same time, it's a skill that's becoming more valuable. Therefore if you cultivate this skill, you will thrive.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

When picking a career, don't get overly focused on the content of the work. Care about the lifestyle. Does it matter if you get autonomy as a social media manager or as a brand VP?

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

If you want more, do less. In a paper published in Nature journal, when we are faced with challenging scenarios, we're biased toward solutions that add components instead of the other solutions that subtract them.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Keep this in mind for your New Year's Resolutions.

Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

"Follow your passion" is kind of bad advice. Passion for what you do does not exist with full intensity before you get started. Instead, you cultivate passion. It happens when you gain autonomy, get better skills, and create a bigger impact with what you do.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Today we almost certainly have all the technological tools needed to push knowledge work into its next productive phase shift. But we remain mired to unstructured interactions with email threads and Zoom meetings. We need to ask if there's a better way.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Social media has pivoted away from the original selling point of "people you know are on here" to the news feed model of "look at this engaging content". This pivot reduces the benefit of social media. There's plenty of engaging content elsewhere, podcasts, newsletters, etc.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

We care a lot about doing well with the work on our plate (as we should), but not nearly enough about asking how big that plate should be in the first place. Do you really need to squeeze in those extra evening email replies? Is it worth it?

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

People often ask, how can I get away with only checking email twice a day? You do it with trust. People need to trust that you can deliver high quality work consistently. More trust means more autonomy.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Don't you think it's weird with the way we communicate information about a pandemic? Look at Twitter: Posting screenshots, an arbitrary 280 characters limit, long threads, advanced search, retweets, pins. We have the technology to clearly convey long-form information!

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

In an ideal world, sending an email just for the hell of it should be taboo.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Who you are, what you think, feel, do and love is the sum of what you focus on.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

The human brain is adept at filtering out superfluous incoming information, but if this superfluous information is relevant to us it becomes difficult to ignore. It's why you can hear the sound of your own name popping up in conversation across the room at a noisy party.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Your boss has no reason to let you choose your own projects or spend one week out of every four writing a novel at your beach house. These rewards are valuable. To earn them, you must accumulate your own career capital by mastering a skill that’s rare and valuable.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

WFNH. Working From Near Home. Why? Most of our homes are not designed as workplaces. And our work environment matters. It can destabilize the subtle neuronal dance required to think clearly. WFNH fixes this by having a professional space near, but distinct from our homes.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

As emails spread through organizations, the virus of the hyperactive hive mind followed. It's where people collaborate on the fly with back and forth messaging. Asynchronous, unscheduled messaging.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

If you enjoyed working from home, it's partly because you enjoyed the benefits of Deep Work. Less time for meetings and nonessential business travel.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

If you don’t give serious thought to how you want to structure your days, it’s all too easy to fall back into distraction and shallow busyness.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Introducing Facebook had a negative effect on student mental health. More specifically, "Our index of poor mental health, which aggregates all the relevant mental health variables in the NCHA survey, increased by 0.085 standard deviation units" after the Facebook roll-out.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Timescale matters. Galileo probably had his famed insight about the period of a pendulum in 1584 but he didn’t finish working out the details experimentally until 1602. In between, he studied literature, poetry, attended theater, and played the lute. He was slow productive.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

The ability to work without distraction on difficult tasks (deep work) is becoming more rare. But at the same time, it's a skill that's becoming more valuable. Therefore if you cultivate this skill, you will thrive.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

A paper titled "Social Media and Mental Health" tracked the introduction of Facebook at college campuses in the 2000s and connected it with surveys of student mental health. Here were their findings:

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

Consider setting office hours for your job. This is a fixed set of hours where others can reach you.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

There is no bonus for making a schedule and sticking with it. If you need to change it during the day, that's fine. The true goal is to prioritize your time.

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Cal Newport

@ProfCalNewport

3 years

If you want to make a living, do something rare and valuable. Don't leave your job to become a yoga instructor and expect to make a lot of money.

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