Comment by OldGuyInTheClub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by OldGuyInTheClub | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

OldGuyInTheClub

Some good tips for us mortals. I have admired Donald Knuth for many things[footnote] but especially for his stance on email which I use here as a stand-in for distractions. I wish I had 10% of his discipline!

"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.

On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every six months. " https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

[footnote] I'm from the physical sciences, not CS, but the man transcends departments!

He started doing this after he was an emeritus professor, at which point he basically has no regular job duties. No need to go to meetings, no need to respond to anyone. The emeritus professors in my wife's department (also at Stanford) do not go in for meetings, do not teach classes, and do not have undergraduate or graduate advisees. Emeritus at Stanford basically means retired (though they can recall you to teach if they want to for a limited period of time).

So yeah, if you're in that position, you can decide not to do email. But for the rest of us...

edit: thanks for the correction below — he was nearly an emeritus professor when he stopped using email.

His site says he stopped email on January 1, 1990. This would have been before his formal retirement in 1992 or 1993 which was also unusual in that he was only in his early 50s at the time.

I agree that his is not a general case. Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi and all that.

Someday I would like to know how people like him develop and maintain that level of drive and focus. I've been able to do it for a few weeks at a time, maximum before bonking hard.

Well, most of us can't afford a secretary like him.

I think he came up at a time when departments had staff to work with faculty. Of course when one reaches his level of fame, funding comes without asking.

One downside of our computerized society is that people now have to do things because the tools supposedly exist for everything to be self serve. It marginalize the skills and talents of those who provided those valuable services in the past.

Secretaries still exist.

outside of CEOs personal assistants, I have trouble encountering any within last 5 years - and the secretarial staff was visibly getting downsized at university before that, handling mostly the mail room

Are you sure? Yu don't need a full time secretary, just a few hours a month of an Internet concierge.

Knuth's approach takes an extreme and of course someone like him can afford a secretary but for those of us that can't, Cal Newport's book Deep Work offers some pretty good suggestions on how to handle the plague of emails while being prolific in the work output that he generates. Key among the is the batching technique which others have mentioned but I'd highly recommend reading Deep Work to get a good balanced view on the subject

Reply on news.ycombinator.com