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Creativity

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

Cal Newport discusses the importance of regular sessions of “deep work” (distraction-free concentration), arguing that this way of working produces neurological, psychological and philosophical benefits and is needed for the jobs of the future.

🖼️ Contexts

This book is consistently recommended in productivity circles but I wasn’t compelled to read it until I heard Newport discuss his career in an interview last year. I found his style of writing—combining dense research and storytelling—compelling and breezy. One of the aspects I like most about this book are the many “breadcrumbs” of interesting research and literature he cites throughout that are a joy to follow up on (see “brain tickles” below).

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • “Deep work” is defined as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive abilities to their limit” producing value and skill acquisition that is hard to replicate in other ways. “Shallow work” is non-cognitively demanding in nature, consisting of tasks that can be done while distracted (emails, etc.)
  • Uninterrupted, carefully curated distraction-free “deep work” can be done up to four hours per day (but rarely more). While learning or applying new skills, only 1-2 hours of “deep work” can usually be accomplished per day.
  • Routines, ritual and location play a big role in enacting “deep work.” Banning internet use during sessions, or instituting a metric (like words per day), or even changing locations—having a special place where deep work is done—can provide useful constraints. “Start up” and “wind down” rituals (like, a cup of coffee and a walk) are also beneficial for signaling the shift for your mind and body.
  • It is important to aim for a small number of “wildly important goals.”

💯 Strong Lines

  • Why deep work matters: “The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
  • On the challenge of deep work in our tech-driven society: “Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological.”
  • On the pitfalls of modern work culture**:** “On our worst days, it can seem that all knowledge work boils down to the same exhausting roil of e-mails and PowerPoint, with only the charts used in the slides differentiating one career from another.
  • On the importance of ending a workday: “At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • The Intellectual Life by Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges, who wrote “Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.”
  • “Attention residue” as defined by Sophie Leroy in “Why is it so hard to do my work?”
  • Dreyfus and Kelly’s All Things Shining which cites the Enlightenment as a turning point in how we see ourselves in relation to work and the world: “The Enlightenment’s metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life…it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.”
  • The practice of giving of your time and attention, without expectation of reward or anything in return, as explored in Adam Grant’s Give and Take.
  • Kaplan’s Attention restoration theory (ART) —the importance of being in nature as a natural remedy for chronic concentration loss.

🍎 Ideas and Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

There are no explicit sections for teaching and learning (though Newport himself is a professor and has authored another book aimed directly at a student audience), but a lot of the cited studies have implications for how we teach:

  • For example, we should think about just how much students can learn of an unfamiliar concept or discipline: “…for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit.”
  • On the importance of building “boredom stamina”: “Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction…it’s hard to shake the addition even when you want to concentrate.”
  • Incorporation of “productive meditation” into learning—spaces where students are occupied physically but not mentally (walking, jogging, building, etc.) so that periods of focused concentration are more productive.
  • Not from the book but from his blog: “The Advice I gave my Students” (a low-key approach to digital minimalism during exams).

You are Not a Gadget

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1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

Published in 2010, Lanier argues that the emergence of web 2.0 (the current state of the internet, where users are content-generators as well as consumers), cloud computing, and crowdsourcing are all leading to a global stifling of creativity and individuality that will fundamentally alter what it means to be a human in the world.

🖼️ Contexts

I picked this one up at our neighborhood Half Priced Books out on a walk with my younger son. I purchased it along with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (she was on my mind as she had just recently passed away). I have long admired Lanier’s work and used his arguments to prompt student thinking around technology, virtual reality and “hive mind.” This book is prescient, especially with the rise of AI that has been peppered throughout so many news headlines since the release of ChatGPT. While his writing is often recursive, I enjoy the way his mind meanders and appreciate how he is able to talk about technological philosophies with simplicity and always with a hopeful eye on the future.

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • “Open culture” online is more about freedom for machines than people. Yes, we are able to combine fragments of materials from across a vast cyber network but these “content pieces” are stripped of author attribution, of the connection to their original creators—and, thus, their existence as expressions of humanity.
  • “The most important thing to ask about any technology is how it changes people.” As we design ourselves in the image of digital models, will we may leave empathy and humanity behind.
  • “There is more than one possible technological future and the debate should be how to best identify and act on whatever freedoms of choice we still have, not about who’s the Luddite.”
  • Advertising could be the only product that will maintain its value after the technological revolution. Even as other forms of expression are fragmentized and remashed, ads become more contextual, more individualized, more targeted, and unique. A new social contract has emerged: artists, musicians, and writers give their labor as unpaid fragments into the “hive mind” in exchange for self-promotion. “Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

💯 Strong Lines

  • On how the internet affects us interpersonally: “Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction…A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.”
  • On the challenges of changing technological design: “The brittle character of maturing computer programs can cause digital designs to get frozen into place by a process known as lock-in. This happens when many software programs are designed to work with an existing one. The process of significantly changing software in a situation in which a lot of other software is dependent on it is the hardest thing to do. So it almost never happens.”
  • On crowdsourcing: “…often you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video….Authorship—the very idea of the individual point of view—is not a priority of the new [digital culture] ideology.”
  • On love and civilization: “The plausibility of our human world, the fact that buildings don’t all fall down and you can eat unpoisoned food that someone grew, is immediate, palpable evidence of an ocean of goodwill and good behavior from almost everyone, living or dead. We are bathed in what can be called love. And yet that love shows itself best through the constraints of civilization because those constraints compensate for the flaws of human nature.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • A single person designed the web as we know it today: Tim Berners-Lee. It allowed for freely designed “web pages” to be accessible to all, and with no particular hierarchy or preference among them, and for access to be maintained by the creator.
  • The “Circle of Empathy”: “An imaginary circle of empathy is drawn by each person. It circumscribes the person at some distance, and corresponds to those things in the world that deserve empathy….the tricky part is that some entities reside close to the edge of the circle…the liberal impulse is to expand the circle, while conservatives tend to want to restrain or even contract the circle.”
    • This seems to Ezra Klein’s prediction that “We may soon find ourselves taking metaphysical shelter in the subjective experience of consciousness: the qualities we share with animals.”
  • The connection of the printing press to the “invention” of childhood: The rise of literacy protracted the “childhood stage” (because it takes many years to master reading); prior to widespread literacy, children went to work much earlier. Literacy is what led to “the extended womb” of the classroom.

🍎 Ideas and Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

  • Lanier’s discussion of how information systems or “life turned into database” has had a “disastrous effect” on U.S. education (via the ubiquity of standardized testing and nationwide databases), just as Facebook has had a disastrous effect on friendships: “Both degredations are based on the same philosophical mistake, which is the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do.” (page
  • The examination of the “brain as computer” metaphor or “computationalism.” Lanier describes four viewpoints that seem to connect to the ways we are discussing AI today:
    1. The probability of increasingly volumious levels of computation will eventually lead to “superbrains” or global consciousness (often discussed as Singularity). In other words, quantity = quality.
    2. Specific design features (usually related to self-representation and circular references) can make computer reasoning similar to that of human beings. This may relate to the concepts of “burstiness” and “perplexity” in AI today.
    3. If human beings recognize artificial intelligence (”hive mind”) as a person…it is a person. A simplified “Turning test” as it were.
    4. Human begins are the result of millions of years of “very deep encounter[s] with physical reality” so much so that there are no “abstractable bits”—we don’t know, and may never know, what the specifics of personhood are from a computational point of view. This approach to thinking about computationalism is what Lanier prefers.

The Grind Culture Detox

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1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

Archer connects “grind culture”—a values system wherein an individual’s worth is determined by what they produce economically—to the legacies of racial slavery and hyper-capitalism in the United States; she argues for a rejection of this pervasive paradigm and provides a guide to intentional practices of self-care, affirmation, and healing.

🖼️ Contexts

I picked this one up on a visit to BookWoman here in Austin. I had originally gone in to pick up Maria Tatar’s new book The Heroine with 1,001 Faces but this one caught my eye, too. It relates to themes in Wintering but draws a direct throughline from our society’s rejection of rest to slavery—an institution that spurred exponential economic growth by leveraging free labor without regard to its brutal and unimaginable human costs: “The foundations of American capitalism was built on a viciously high-stakes environment of productivity or death.” She goes on to connect this as well to our current anti-labor practices and the anti-social welfare rhetoric that precludes progress toward paid maternity care, universal healthcare, and living wages. I was also drawn to her personal story as it mirrored my own in several key ways. Though I’ve managed to take back a measure of my time from the 9-5 grind, I still find myself signing onto projects, filling my days back up with work, and often as mentally and physically depleted as I was before. I suppose this one called out to me so I could read this phrase, toward the book’s end, “…falling back into our old patterns can often provide a beautiful learning opportunity.” As I head into 2023, I found this to be a gentle nudge toward re-centering and listening to mind, body, and spirit.

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • If you have experienced any of the following, you’re experiencing the effects of grind culture: a fear of stillness, feeling guilty about resting, viewing exhaustion as productive, sacrificing the needs of your body to produce, overpacking your calendar, never feeling satisfied with what you have, competing with others over who grinds hardest, treating some people as though they are “more important” than others based on their profession.
  • Detoxing from grind culture is not a one-and-done process; the framework of “harm reduction” can be helpful in making steps toward incremental transformation when abstinence is not possible (after all, most of us will continue to need to work).
  • Healthy boundaries are essential to preserving mental, physical, emotional energy and are a key to self-sovereignty and work-life liberation.
  • “Thriving activities” should be customized — there is no one-size-fits all in terms of tending to one’s own well-being. While it is important to engage in movement, nutrition, creativity, mindfulness, learning, rest, and social connection—the methods are entirely up to what brings personal joy.

💯 Strong Lines

  • On grind culture and oppression: “…most of the sacred beings on this beautifully abundant planet are under the spell of materialism, manipulation, control, and coercion. This unfortunate dynamic helps construct things such as racism, gender-based oppression, and ableism. Grind culture provides the fuel to keep these toxic systems running.” (pg. 5)
  • On perfectionism: “Perfectionism is a form of self-harm rooted in the need to appear perfect or attain perfection as a threshold for self-worth in society….[it] dims our resilience, eats up time and energy, blocks our courage, and thwarts the mistakes we have to be able to make in order to learn and grow.” (pg. 10)
  • On motherhood: “Mothers are presented with a painful dichotomy. On the one hand, we’re expected to nurture our newborn from an endless well of attention, care and presence, and on the other, grind culture wants us to prove that our caretaking won’t be a liability.” (pg. 30)
  • On “self-care” (quoting Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha): “It’s not about self-care—it’s about collective care. Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, move slower, ones where there’s food at meetings, people work from home—and these aren’t things we apologize for. It is the way we do the work, which centers disabled-femme-of-color ways of being in the world, where many of us have often worked form our sickbeds, our kid beds, or our too-crazy-to-go-out-today beds. Where we actually care for each other and don’t leave each other behind. Which is what we started with, right?” (pg. 46)
  • On resting as defiance: “It disrupts grind culture’s spinning wheels. There is power in the slowdown. When you slow down, you rest; when you rest, you self-reflect; when you self-reflect, you begin to question, which in turn disrupts the culture of grinding.” (pg. 80)
  • On quiet-as-resistance (quoting Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet, with reference to Black social justice movements): “Quiet is often used interchangeably with silence or stillness…Quiet instead is a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life, wants, desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears, the inner life is not apolitical or without social value….It has its own sovereignty, it is hard to see, even harder to describe, but no less potent and inevitable.” (pg. 81)

🧠 Brain Tickles

🍎 Ideas and Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

There are so many activities that relate to social-emotional learning and holistic education. The term “self-care” is well-worn and I have seen the same strategies recommended in many corners—deep breathing, a nature walk, drinking enough water, etc (all good, by the way!) But Archer provides a wealth of other strategies in this book, encouraging readers to create their own “toolkits”. Some highlights that would be easy to incorporate/recommend for students:

  • Archer cites the work of Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, who outlines a framework for the “rest revolution”—highlighting seven forms of rest: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, sensory, creative. She offers a free “rest quiz” to locate the types of rest you most need to attend to.
  • I think there is a beautiful opportunity to connect some of the activities around “core values” to this book. Archer has a journal reflection that prompts people to think of their core values and then what the “highest expression of honoring these values” would look like in daily life. Then, to outline what one prefers to do to honor it (activities that bring joy connected to the value), what one is willing to allow but does not prefer (norms and tasks that are necessary but not enjoyable), and what one will not allow (i.e. activities, norms and environments that would negate the value entirely). An example of response to this prompt can be found on page 126.
  • The templates for ancestor acknowledgment and land acknowledgment (pp. 34-40) would be powerful connectors for communities of students to better appreciate each others’ experiences and perspectives, and the land they share in common.

No Zombie Projects: 3 Takeaways from Building a Second Brain’s Online Course

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I enrolled in Cohort 14 of Building a Second Brain in March of this year and thought I’d share some insights from that course to complement my notes from Tiago Forte’s recent book of the same title. Here are three that are still rattling around in my head all these months later that I didn’t find in the book:

1. No Zombie Projects

It’s easy to pile up a list of 10-15 ongoing projects in a master list and watch many of them atrophy from neglect as the months go by. My ideal self lives in my projects — the articles I haven’t written, books I haven’t read, presentations I have yet to give, courses I have yet to take, habits I want to adopt or break, creativity that wants to find expression in the tiny cracks of daylight between the “actual” (re: paying) work that consumes most workdays. Every project is “a hypothesis” that requires testing, in Tiago’s words, and so he advises that it is better for any endeavor to “fail fast” than to continue on in a project-list purgatory forever.

2. Your Attention is your Most Valuable Currency

The course begins with a module on “the perspective age” with the argument that one’s perspective – the way we experience the world, our education, desires, skills and interests—are uniquely ours and that it is the expression of this perspective that adds the most value to what we do creatively. There are a lot of implications that follow from this argument but one that I found compelling was the importance of paying attention to what I am paying attention to. In other words, making sure my information diet is rich with diverse perspectives and depth, and that I have some way of retrieving these – as well as the connected ideas they spark within me – when I need. In the Distill session, he remarked: “If you can just know what you know” you’ll be lightyears ahead in terms of navigating the endless space of the digital information universe.

3. Creative Decisions Really are Agonizing 

In Week 4, Tiago showed this simple graphic of the creative process: 

Forte, T. (2022, May 03). Week 4: Express [Powerpoint slides]. Building a Second Brain, Forte Labs.

“Divergent” stages of thinking – when we pin, like, and save all manner of digital ephemera – has to eventually come to a “convergent stage” of eliminating many of these ideas, even our most beloved (“decision” contains the Latin root –cide meaning “act of killing”). At some point, not all the ideas can progress forward, only the select few – the ones that most align to the purpose of the project. You will inevitably axe material you deeply love – that metaphor, example, chart, or image – but those can be worked into other projects, other spaces. This wasn’t revelatory information but has proved helpful in nudging me along from divergent states (which are always so fun!) to convergent states of thinking and creating that are more challenging. 

Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

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1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

The internet age requires us to outsource the capturing, organizing and distillation of information to a “second brain” (a “personal knowledge management system” or digital repository) so that we can be more productive in our creative efforts.

🖼️ Contexts

I fell down a productivity-guru rabbit hole about a year ago, stumbling upon numerous videos using this term “second brain” (like this one and this one) that led me to the Forte Labs website and Tiago’s blog (as well as the e-books that were created from them). I applied for a scholarship to attend his virtual workshop (Cohort 14) and can say the systems he presents have helped me feel less scattered and more able to connect interesting ideas from what I’m reading, watching and listening to. He covers a lot of ground here – this book really does function as the written equivalent of his course – including his lauded PARA system (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive). This overarching framework can function as a “life management” system and is adaptable any productivity app — Evernote, Notion, Obsidian, Roam. PARA helps us know where to put the information we consume. As to the what, how, when and why—there is another framework for how to develop and embed the information into creative projects: CODE (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express). Both are versatile and customizable methods that can help knowledge workers (and whole organizations) manage and make use of the information streams we swim in every day.

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • It is better to organize information by utility and action rather than theme or topic (i.e, How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?)
  • The goal of notetaking (and PKM more broadly) is creative expression —that is, to evaluate, share, teach, record, post, lobby, publish, speak, present, perform, produce, write, draw interpret, critique or translate.
  • To avoid saving/bookmarking too much: Ask yourself: Does it inspire me? Is it useful? Is it personal? Is it surprising?
  • Think about projects in terms of “intermediate packets” – the drafts, sketches, pilots, prototypes, concepts and demos—the smaller stepping stones that can be remixed, recycled and reused once a project is complete (key question: what are the knowledge assets you’re creating today that will be most valuable in the future?)

💯 Strong Lines

  • Surrounded by knowledge, starving for wisdom: So many of us share the feeling that we are surrounded by knowledge, yet starving for wisdom. That despite all the mind-expanding ideas we have access to, the quality of our attention is only getting worse. That we are paralyzed by the conflict between our responsibilities and our most heartfelt passions, so that we are never quite able to focus and also never quite able to rest.
  • Creative Constraints: “Innovation and impact don’t happen by accident or chance. Creativity depends on creative process.”
  • Don’t get too Complicated: “We don’t need complex, sophisticated systems to be able to produce complex, sophisticated works.”
  • The purpose of notes: “Your job as a notetaker is to preserve the notes you’re taking on the things you discover in such a way that they can survive the journey into the future.”
  • Save the in-between work: “—the notes, the drafts, the outlines, the feedback—tends to be underappreciated and undervalued….If we consider how precious little time we have to produce something extraordinary in our careers, it becomes imperative that we recycle that knowledge back into a system where it can become useful again.”
  • On the attention economy: “The ability to intentionally and strategically allocate our attention is a competitive advantage in a distracted world.”
  • It all goes back to childhood: “Underlying our struggles and challenges with productivity, creativity, and performance is our fundamental relationship to the information in our lives. That relationship was forged during your upbringing as you encountered new experiences, and was influenced by your personality, learning style, relationships, and your genes. You learned to react in a certain way when faced with new ideas. You adopted a default “blueprint” for how you treated incoming information—with anticipation, fear, self-doubt or some complex mix of feelings that is unique to you. That default attitude to information colors every aspect of your life.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • Archipelago of ideas: a metaphor that comes from Steven Johnson’s work, where he describes his writing process: “…I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter because it was a big sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which make sit seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.” It’s a practice similar to outlining.
  • Hemingway bridge: Ernest Hemingway famously ended his writing sessoins mid-sentence or mid-idea so that he knew what would come next in the story—this way the generative energy of one day could fuel the creativity of the next. A similar effect can be done with next steps, current status, thought captures, and intentions for follow up sessions.
  • Dial down the scope: common among project managers and software developers, this term refers to removing features and functionality for the launch of a product rather than delaying it all together.
  • Cathedral Effect: the spaces we inhabit change our ways of thinking.

🍎 Ideas & Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

The description of creative processes were illuminating and helped illustrate a variety of human creative endeavor and expression. In particular:

  • Twyla Tharp’s “boxes” (pp. 81-84, also detailed in her book The Creative Habit)
  • Octavia Butler’s commonplace books (pp. 145-149; you can also read about/see them here)
  • Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather notebooks (pp. 133-116, you can also watch him talk about them here)

The description of the “knowledge flywheel” (pg. 201) connects to sustainable assignments and open pedagogical approaches.