How the Digital Workplace Broke Our Brains

Calvin Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University and the author of, among other books, Deep Work and A World Without Email. At the heart of so much of Newport’s work is this incredibly rich mystery: Why hasn’t the internet produced more geniuses? One possibility is that the productivity tools ironically inhibit our productivity. The average white-collar worker in marketing, advertising, finance, and media now spends up to 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication. In a recent survey, Microsoft found that video meetings had taken up so much of the day that a significant share of its workforce was logging online between 9 and 10 p.m. to finish their actual non-email, non-meeting work. In response to this relentless need to loop back and back and back, Newport came up with what he called the Deep Work Hypothesis: He said to learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. But the ability to perform this kind of deep, focused work is becoming rare at exactly the same time it is becoming most valuable in our economy. In this conversation, we talk about deep work and shallow work, how our productivity tools make us less productive, and how to actually get things done.

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In the following excerpt, Calvin Newport walks Derek through his own tools for productivity and explains the breakdown of the digital workplace.

Derek Thompson: Before we get to your diagnosis of the state of the digital workplace, I want to know a little bit about how a productivity expert structures their workday. So you are a professor, which I imagine includes teaching responsibilities and research and administrative duties. You are, as you said, a New Yorker writer. You’re a book writer. You’re a husband, you’re a father. I know it might seem like I’m kind of putting the cart before the horse here by asking you to disclose the medicine before we discuss the disease of our harried minds. But what is notable about your workday, the way you work, that most listeners who do, let’s call it laptop work, like you, might find your strategy distinctive?

Calvin Newport: I’ll preface the description of what I do with just the explanation. So what is the connection with what I just said, which is I write about technology, its impact on our world and productivity? It’s because one of the biggest impacts of technology in our world in the last, let’s say decade and a half, has actually been the way that new technologies in the workplace and new technologies in our personal life distract us, exhaust us, and keep us away from being able to do work that we love. I’m a computer scientist. Why do I talk about productivity? Because when you study technology and its impact, you can’t get away from the way technology seems to pull on our attention, the way technology seems to try to destabilize our ability to do good work. So that’s what led me to the productivity world.

So then, what do I do? Well, I’m a big believer in what I call multi-scale planning, which at its core is all about having some intention and control about where your time goes. So what it’s rejecting is the reactive approach, which right now has become the default but has become more of a default in the last 15 years than it ever was before because distracting technologies push us into a mode of reactivity. What’s in my inbox? What’s on my Slack? What’s on my phone? What can I do in the moment? What message can I send? What thing can I respond to? I reject that. And the way I try to reject that is through multi-scale planning.

So you start at, let’s say, the scale of a semester, or the scale of a quarter, if you’re not in an academic context, and say, “OK, I want a plan. What am I doing this summer?” Or “I want to plan. What are the big things I’m working on for this fall?” You then use that strategic plan, quarterly plan, semester plan, whatever you want to call it. You look at that at the next scale, which is weekly. So at the beginning of every week, you say, “OK, let me look at that big-picture plan, use that to help inform a plan I’m going to make for the week ahead.” And now you’re actually looking at your concrete calendar. What is scheduled? “Tuesday is busy. Oh, I’m teaching, I’ve got these meetings. Thursday’s pretty open before noon, so that might be a good day to catch up on whatever it happens to be.” If you’re looking at your concrete calendar, you create a plan for the week. So I’ll actually usually type this out, plain text file, nothing fancy.

Then you use your weekly plan when you get to the scale of the day, and you make a plan for each day where you now consult that weekly plan. And when you’re planning at the scale of the day, I like to do what I call time blocking. I actually look at the available hours during my workday, and I block them off. “OK, this hour I’m working on this. This specific half hour I’m doing that. All right, for this two-hour stretch here, I’m going to work on this project.” So it’s actually giving every minute of your day a job as opposed to going into your day and saying, “What should I work on next? Who needs me? I’m a little bit exhausted, so let me load up the inbox real quick,” or something like this.

So at all scales, we’re talking from semester down to weekly down to daily, each scale informs the next. And the whole idea behind all of this is, I am trying to give my time a mission. I’m trying to look at my time and say, “What’s the best thing to do with this? What’s the best way to make use of this?” It’s active instead of reactive. And that’s really the backbone of how I approach and try to balance all this different work.

Thompson: That’s so interesting, this concept of fractionally scheduling your time. And when you were mentioning the idea that the laptop and the phone screen can trigger this sense of reactivity, that really struck a chord with me. There have been so many times where I’ll sit down and I think I know what I want to accomplish at my desk on that morning, but then email is shouting and Twitter is shouting and LinkedIn is shouting and Slack is shouting. And then of course, I should probably check the news, and maybe I should listen to that podcast. And oh, that article or that tweet launched a tab, which launched a tab, which launched a tab. That reactivity of the internet, to use some of your language, essentially schedules our time for us.

And you’re saying, if you preschedule your time before you reach the computer, you can ward off, you can foreclose the possibility of being scheduled by these screaming devices. I think the best way to begin to talk about your diagnosis of why the digital workplace has broken is to draw up a term from your book A World Without Email. And that term is the hyperactive hive-mind workflow. Tell us what that term is referring to. What is the hyperactive hive-mind workflow?

Newport: Yeah, this is what’s critical about what we were just talking about. In 1992, if you said, “I’m just going to show up at my office, and I will let the day unfold as it unfolds,” you would actually probably be OK. I mean, there were some distractions, you might spend some more time at the coffee carafe than you might want to. But ultimately, you’d think, “I don’t have much to do here sitting on my desk. All right, let me pull something out, let me work on it.” It’s really more of a contemporary issue that now we have all these different sources pulling at our attention, that if you just approach your day saying, “What do I want to work on next?” you can actually lose your whole day. And the hyperactive hive mind is why.

So that’s my name. I’m putting a name on something that was before not named. But it is implicitly the way we have decided, in laptop work, to use your term, to collaborate and coordinate our efforts. And the hyperactive hive mind says, we have these low-friction digital communication tools. So at first it was email, then we get Slack and Teams, but it’s all the same idea, low-friction digital communication tools. Let’s just work things out on the fly. So if I need something from someone, I’ll just shoot them a message. We’ll go back and forth: “Hey, what time is this meeting?” “Do you know about this?” “Hey, what’s going on with this client that just called?” We’ll figure things out with back-and-forth unscheduling ad hoc message. And that’s called the hyperactive hive mind, that’s the name I gave to it.

Now, it’s a very natural mode of collaboration if you’re in a small group of people. It’s how a small group of people in the same physical location would coordinate themselves. I would just talk to you, you would talk to me, we’d go back and forth ad hoc. Digital communication like email or Slack made it possible to scale that up to lots of people, to whole organizations, the people who are spread out over many different locations.

And my argument is that this implicit decision we made to switch to the hyperactive hive mind is at the core of many woes in modern knowledge work. Having to maintain all of these ongoing back-and-forth conversations requires that we have to keep monitoring these communication channels. I do not have the ability to say, “Let me wait until 3 o’clock to check my inbox for the first time” if there are 12 conversations going on. And some of these conversations might have to have four or five back-and-forths to reach a decision, and that decision has to be reached today. And so I have to keep monitoring my inbox to see when your next message comes in. Because I’ve got to volley that back over the proverbial net pretty quickly because we have to get this back-and-forth four or five times to reach a decision by close of business.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Calvin Newport
Producer: Devon Manze

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