Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University and the best-selling author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and most recently, A World Without Email. I recently spoke with Cal about living the “deep life,” how our standard operating procedures are diminishing our ability to do meaningful work and what to do about it, and about what he’s learned from heroes such as Lincoln and Socrates about building a better world. I’ve edited the transcript for brevity and clarity. You can listen to the original conversation on the “Philosophy for Flourishing” podcast.
Jon Hersey: Cal, it was great hearing you speak at TOS-Con, and it’s wonderful seeing you again. Thanks for taking the time to talk today.
Cal Newport: Good to see you again, too, Jon. I’m looking forward to the conversation.
Hersey: First off, congratulations on your Netflix debut! I don’t often watch Netflix, but I made an exception when I heard that you’d appeared on The Mind Explained. You mentioned on your “Deep Questions” podcast that you were a little worried about your backdrop, that it was a bit messy because you transformed your office into a classroom for your kids during the pandemic.
As someone who has yet to have kids but is thinking about it, I’m curious how you made that decision. One of the common worries is that having kids makes it difficult or impossible to do big and important things. So, presuming that it was a conscious choice, what went into your decision?
Newport: When you have kids, there’s obviously a start-up period, which is highly disruptive for two to three months. But beyond that, it’s not a difficult feat—if not a standard feat—to set things up so that there is time when you’re at work and time when you’re not. The kids are in school, and I’m at an office, and then the day ends, and I come home. That’s not everyone’s situation, but it’s quite a common situation that if you’re working and have kids, you have two separate times. . . .
My approach has always been—even before I had kids: Figure out the hours you’re going to work and work backward from that limit. I’m a practitioner of what I call “fixed-schedule productivity.” These are the hours I work; everything has to fit in there. So, I have to carefully consider what I put on my plate and how productive I am to set my sights realistically. And that same mind-set, I think, applies quite well once you have kids. You just have to have a clear separation. There are hours when you’re at the office, or whatever that equivalent is where you are not the primary caregiver for the kids. And when you’re not at work, don’t work.
What doesn’t work with kids is having a more blended approach of always kind of working and always kind of not working, thinking you can just fluidly move from one to the other. You end up working at all hours, and that’s quite incompatible with having kids at home. But if you have a clear bifurcation, there’s no problem.
Hersey: Speaking of work, let’s move on to the topic of your latest book, A World Without Email. There, you talk about what is, perhaps, the biggest impediment to flourishing in the world of work, which you call the “hyperactive hive mind.” What is that, and how did it come about?
Newport: This is a thread I’ve been pulling for a while. I’ve been trying to understand how we got to this place, particularly with office work, where we spend so much of our cognitive energy checking inboxes and chat windows. Email was introduced for pragmatic reasons. Asynchronous communication is needed for the modern office, and we were implementing it with fax machines, voice mail, memos; email was better. But once it was introduced, regardless of the original purpose, it enabled a new mode of collaboration where we said: “Look, we can just figure things out on the fly with back-and-forth, unscheduled, ad hoc digital messages.” This was a new mode of digital collaboration that did not exist before. It’s what I call the hyperactive hive mind.
The problem with it is that it does not scale. If you and I are trying to figure out one thing, and that’s the only thing we’re working on, fine. We can send messages back and forth. But when you have two dozen different ongoing asynchronous, unscheduled conversations that are unfolding with back-and-forth emails—most of which have to be tended to with some alacrity, because if you wait all day before you reply, it will cause a problem—the necessary consequence is that you have to check these email inboxes or chat channels all the time. The gears of your business depend on it. When we look at people who are overloaded with communication, it’s not typically an issue with them having bad habits. It’s not that they’re addicted to email. It is a necessary consequence of implicitly deciding that the primary means by which coordination and collaboration happen is with on-the-fly, back-and-forth messages. So, I gave that phenomenon a name. I went deep into the neuroscience about why this phenomenon is a really poor way to organize human brains to actually produce value. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how to get past it.
Hersey: How do we get past it?
Newport: The big picture answer here is: The hyperactive hive mind is the problem, and the solution is replacing it. Now that sounds simple. But it’s not what we have been doing. For the most part, we’ve been addressing the symptoms without addressing the underlying cause. We say things such as “batch your email,” “write better subject lines,” “have better norms,” and “don’t expect a response to an email after a certain time.” But that’s like being in the boat that’s filling with water and saying, “Hey, let’s get bigger buckets to bail it out when the real question is, why is all this water coming into the boat? Oh, we have to plug this hole.” And so, most of my advice, varied as it might be in specifics, comes back to the same general idea of looking at the things you do on a repeated basis at work and asking, “How do I coordinate and communicate about this work without relying primarily on unscheduled messages sent back and forth on a whim?” It requires process engineering, through and through, until you have a replacement method to get a certain type of work done that does not require just rocking and rolling in your inbox.