How I Learned to Concentrate | Hacker News Reader

How I Learned to Concentrate

newyorker.com

77 pointsilya_m50 comments

There is really nothing to talk about in this piece so I'm just going to echo the sentiment here about Cal Newport. Read Deep Work, it's a great book, one of my favorite actually. But, once you've done that, you've read everything he has to offer because every book, blog post, and video is an idea from Deep Work recycled and stretched 16 different ways.

Thanks for the TLDR

While most people here seem to be dismissive, it's not like his books are targeted at the already successful, accomplished, or polished. They are meant to show people a way to become more successful in a world that has too many distractions. Not every job supports deep work and the other approaches, but many people, especially students, will benefit. I know I could have used it 30+ years ago!

I've only read Deep Work, but I found it very motivating and have tried to incorporate some of the lessons into my life. Now, (literally) buying into the whole ecosystem of Cal Newport is probably overkill, but occasionally listening to his podcast, which essentially answers the same questions over and over and over again, can be motivating and uplifting for those of us who are lacking in the perfection department.

For anyone who is familiar with his work, are his assertions scientifically backed or is it more pop psychology?

Not pop psychology. I read his book Deep Work; it was well researched (and good). Also, he's a comp sci professor @ Georgetown and has an excellent podcast.

I've read all his books and many of his articles. I would say they are science-informed. He works with expert scientists in the relevant fields and weaves in his own experiences.

But honestly, most of his ideas IMO are...straightforward and un-controversial? He's doing a good job re-emphasizing them and making the case for why:

- Focusing on 1 task for a long time is hard, but as with most things in human life you can practice & get better

- Deep work = hard, focused work to produce outsized, unique, creative value

- Most knowledge work nowadays is too frenetic and it's hard to do deep work unless you fight for it

- Switching tasks / contexts quickly has a switching cost. Sure, there's some neuro / psychology research around this ... but also haven't we like all felt that?

Cal does a good job drawing from his own experience and from other leading deep work thinkers and he's distilled those learnings in a way the rest of us can embrace & adopt progressively.

But he's not trying to pretend that this is scientifically the best way to crush it in your career or something

To me, it is "straight forward" in the same way that Dropbox was straight forward once it was successful (before their success, it wasn't so obvious). Once you read his material, you might think "oh yeah, of course," but there's far more value in his work than that. It sometimes seemed silly when I was reading his book Deep Work, because it's like "yeah man just put your head down and focus," but of course there is so much more to it than that. There is much more that could be said, but I need to get back to work :D I highly recommend his work.

The point about context switching being costly is definitely something that the general public doesn't get.

If you ask most people whether they can multitask, they will proudly say yes.

Bosses don't care about deep work either. I have been in jobs where they interrupted me every half an hour. I remember switching between 4 or more tasks trying to get anything done. It would all just get muddled in my head making it hard to keep track of what I was doing.

I'm a big deep work fan and have read most of Cal's books, and I would almost say neither

It's more like a set of ideas and practices, with a bunch of real-life examples, and tools/frameworks you could use in your own life.

A lot of what he's written makes sense to me, so having more formal frameworks and examples around that is helpful. It wasn't a game changing breakthrough

It is pop psychology. Cherry-picked studies, anecdotes, etc.

I like his advice but his books don’t work to exclude other possible explanations or prove casual links/action mechanisms.

I would almost look at them as light philosophical works although the logical rigor for that field is also missing—again, saying this as an appreciator of his advice.

I disagree with you... . . . . . . . . ...on nothing :)

To me, whether books like Cal Newport's cite scientific studies is beside the point. The goal of reading a book like "Deep Work" isn't to gain objective knowledge of results in psychology, but to get some nuggets of wisdom that help you manage your own life. Call it "self help", "wisdom literature", or whatever; it's ultimately one person's perspective on what sort of attitudes help us cope with life and how the world squeezes us. Take that for what it's worth.

What good is a nugget of wisdom if it's false, and how do you know if it's true or false without a factual basis?

Don't say intuition; our intuition sucks. Don't say the need doesn't require some scientific standard of proof; if it's false, it's a waste of time or worse, gets a negative return on the time.

The issue is that most validated scientific results aren't directly applicable as life advice. It's better to be aware that applying them always involves some subjective interpretation, and that's not always better than some heuristic gained from experience.

A related question: is his advice helpful for startup founders? From my brief understanding of his work, it seems like it could be relevant to later-stage founders, who are not wearing quite as many hats on a daily basis, but would be less relevant for early-stage founders. But I'd be interested to know if anyone here has applied his advice in an early-stage context and found it helpful.

Do yourself a favor and don't buy any books by Cal Newport. They're glorified blog posts with a bunch of overblown common sense rebranded with marketable terminology. Read Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi if you want something similar that has more substance.

> Read Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

This is the book every productivity self-help book published in the last 20+ years reference. Including the one I self-published many moons ago.

Mihaly is the only person who has done actual research and experiments on the subject. He basically worked on this his entire career from the mid 1960's onwards. Everything else is derivative.

While you're there, do yourself another favor and read up on Fogg's Behavior Model. That's the other academic research that all the famous productivity books base their suggestions upon.

The derivative pre-chewed content is fine, but get the underlying steak. It's worth it. The returns will compound your whole life/career.

Oof, that's a harsh take, what's your support?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/books/review/slow-product...

> In his acknowledgments, he thanks his wife for “putting up with all the sacrifices involved in having a partner with a troubling addiction to writing books,”

You'd think there'd be fewer sacrifices involved, given that he's mostly just writing one book, multiple times. /s

My support is first-hand experience and major disappointment buying and reading his most popular book - Deep Work. It was a borderline insulting read in its lukewarm repackaging of common sense wisdom and other people's original research.

I found deep work like a totally okay book. But yea for sure no groundbreaking stuff or research there.

Mental math "tricks" and "thinking hacks" [1] are a couple shortcuts I'm trying to cram in order to be more productive with my aging wetware.

The first chapter is several memorization techniques, all related to hanging vivid associations to numbers, keywords, and physical spaces.

[1] Hale-Evans, Ron. 2006. "Mind Performance Hacks."

As first expounded by Matteo Ricci, a 16th/17th-century Jesuit missionary to China.

https://web.mit.edu/uricchio/Public/Documents/media-in-trans...

Thank-you. I need to work up to that. The first two hacks map numbers to rhyming words and numbers to shapes.

A couple modifications to the "memory palace" include (1) expanding each room to 10 numbered slots: each wall, wall meeting wall, and floor plus ceiling; (2) an entire hotel of rooms from the Dominic method.

There's also behavioral hacks, math tricks, and a bunch of others that I had never been exposed to.

> Scientists who work in labs, and have to run experiments or crunch numbers, can famously work long hours.

Since the author is a CS theory person, I guess "experiments" includes CS systems people, who tend to have very time-intensive building of systems for experiments.

In that same Stata Center as the author, my young CS systems principal investigator (PI) was working at least as hard as any grad student or postdoc. One time, probably in the wee hours of a morning, when a few of us were still working in the lab, I bumped into her, and joked something like, she won't have to work so hard once she gets tenure. Without missing a beat, her deadpan response: "I already have tenure."

Work ethic and endurance aren't the only requirements for success like hers, but they really help in systems-building work.

This guy's work - imho - is like many business books. Simple idea, stated over and over. Most of the ideas can be summarized in a paragraph or so.

It's Cal (not Carl) and he has essentially been writing the same book for the past decade. If you have read Deep Work you have read his next five books (including this one).

I gained nothing from reading this piece other than there are smart people at MIT (which i've already known) and that this guy has a new book coming out.

My first instinct was "I bet this guy is promoting a new book". Scroll down and lo and behold. I should mention though that I have no opinion on the author and his books since I haven't read them.

I think a more interesting dichotomy than "productivity" vs "business" is "efficiency" vs "efficacy". Our work culture (and business pop culture) has come to worship at the shrine of efficiency & productivity, but spends relatively little time dwelling on efficacy. What is the impact that only you can drive? The Effective Executive shaped my thinking about this quite a bit, and I'm a better professional for it.

Productivity often depends on the ability to concentrate. But also on motivation, time management skills, workload, environment, and overall well-being

Quick read but not worth it.

Cal or Calvin, not Carl :)

I wonder how he regards his success as a productivity guru vs professor. All credit to him for achieving a level of success, notoriety that most will never get close to in their life. At the same time, I suspect productivity guru is not quite what he wanted to become. Or maybe it is. I don't know.

It's that time of the year again.

Newport (a relentless marketer, a bit like Tim Ferris) has been on a contract to churn out these filler "books" based on the same bloody theme for years. I've been harping on it since 2019[1].

As I noted here[2], "for a guy advocating 'minimalism', he churns out [far] too much needless crap. The irony seems definitely lost on him."

More comments on this tiring topic here[3]. Stop wasting your money buying his crap. What's the alternative? Again, as I've noted in the past[3]:

"The alternative to the empty books [...] is to read the original classics, and the actual scholars who did the work (Csikszentmihalyi, Kahneman, Richard Thaler, Timothy Wilson and many others)."

Edit: You can also get far more value by reading one of Plato's dialogues from 2000 years ago, instead. (Start with the excellent "Five Dialogues" selected by Hackett Classics.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20082125

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36024139

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29035998

Newport (a relentless marketer, a bit like Tim Ferris) has been on a contract to churn out these filler "books" based on the same bloody theme for years. I've been saying this since 2019[1].

Like Ryan Holiday, Robert Greene, or Seth Godin. These people make a lucrative career re-spinning and re-hashing the same vague advice. They occupy a middle ground between science, journalism, and self-help.

Very well said, all are smooth, snake-oil salesmen. (You might know, Greene is a mentor of Holiday.)

Curt not Cart*

Edit: Oh have a sense of humorl

I wonder if he had to pay the newyorker for this 'article'.

Cal, not Carl.

The person's name is Cal

> I was astonished at how the most impressive of my colleagues could listen to a description of a complicated proof, stare into space for a few minutes, and then quip, “O.K., got it,” before telling you how to improve it. It was important that they didn’t master your ideas too quickly: the dreaded insult was for someone to respond promptly and deem your argument “trivial.” I once attended a lecture by a visiting cryptographer. After he finished, a monster mind in the audience—an outspoken future Turing winner—raised his hand and asked, “Yes, but isn’t this all, if we think about it, really just trivial?”

> I was sent all around Europe to present papers at various conferences. The meetings themselves weren’t the point. It was the conversations that mattered—one good idea, sparked on a rooftop in Bologna or beside Lake Geneva in Lausanne, was worth days of tiring travel.

God save me from ever having to work with people this pretentious

Seems meme-worthy. “Just one good idea, sparked over a dish of caviar eaten off a naked Slavic woman, or hugging a golden toilet at the sheik’s 4th house in Dubai, was worth days of tiring travel.”

:) But seriously, there's a lot worse qualities a person could have, than to appreciate spending time with others, to understand the world better, and generate new ideas.

Articulating it isn't necessarily boasting (though it might be).

Cal, not Carl.

This is just a promotional post for a book, there is no actual content in this link

Maybe that's true if you've read the book? I learned several things of interest.

It sounds like many people read the book the first time, when it was called Deep Work, or the second time, when it was called something else.

This must be Cal's twin brother, Carl. /s

Deep Work is a solid book and very quick to read. Most of his other books cross over into self-help, which can be tiring.

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