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#1067 - Cal Newport - The Collapse of Modern Attention

Modern Wisdom

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  • Early Warning About Social Media And Email Overuse
    • Cal Newport noticed social media and constant email/SaaS collaboration made no sense even a decade ago and warned against ubiquity.
    • He argued ubiquity pressures everyone onto attention-mining platforms and predicted worsening attention problems, which have now become common sense. Transcript: Cal Newport Mean, I think part of what I noticed was the present was crazy to me and no one else recognized it. So it was less even predicting the future. I feel like there was a time, God, it’s like 10 years ago now, where I was looking around and, yeah, saying two things. One, social media doesn’t make sense. Why are we all pretending like this is at the center of democracy and civic life and all business? We all have to be on here all the time. And two, email doesn’t make sense. Not what was going to happen in the future. I’m just looking at the way we’re working today with email and Slack and Teams was coming. This completely does not make sense. You’re switching your context once every two or three minutes. This is a terrible way to actually use your brain. So I never thought of myself as predicting the future as much as just telling people what was going on then didn’t make sense. And everyone thought I was crazy. And 10 years later, it just kind of jumped from I was crazy to its common sense. So it’s not even that interesting that I’m saying it anymore. (Time 0:00:20)
  • Microsoft Data Shows Attention Fragmentation
    • Microsoft 365 telemetry shows interruptions average once every two minutes and deep work often shifts to weekend mornings.
    • Newport uses this trendline to demonstrate hyperactive context switching has grown worse, not better. Transcript: Cal Newport The one I’ve been following, the study that I think is useful as a trend line is Microsoft actually does this annual report where they gather data from Microsoft 365. So it’s like Office and Word and PowerPoint and Excel. Nowadays, you use this sort of, the web-based version of these is very common. So they can gather data from just tens of thousands of knowledge workers actually using all these different tools. And the latest report they put out in 2025 now has the interruptions on average once every two minutes. So it’s just gotten out of control. So switching to a communication tool once every two minutes. They also found the latest report, and this is depressing to me as well, there’s one time in the week where they see a notable rise in the use of the non-communication. So actually using the core productivity tools like Word or PowerPoint, and it’s Saturday and Sunday morning. So we’ve just put the work off until the weekend when there’s no expectations of responses and spend the actual weekdays talking about work, I just don’t get. (Time 0:04:05)
  • Slack Is The Right Tool For The Wrong Way To Work
    • Slack solved a tooling mismatch by enabling the hyperactive hive mind but reinforced a destructive collaboration style.
    • It became loved because it fits constant ad-hoc coordination, yet that very fit creates context-switch misery. Transcript: Cal Newport We’ll figure things out like we’re all just kind of connected all the time. That’s a terrible way to work for all the reasons I talked about. It’s distracting. It’s context switching. You can’t do anything deep. It’s hard to produce value. But if that’s the way you’re going to work, email clients are not a very good tool for that. You have threads and it’s clunky and it’s hard to search through your email and find what you did before. So Slack came along and said, look, if this is the way you’re going to work, hyperactive hive mind, constant back and forth ad hoc coordination, we’ll build you a better tool for that. So that’s why people both love and hate Slack. It’s a really good tool for that style of collaboration. It works really well, but that style of collaboration makes us miserable. So it’s this weird love-hate relationship we have. Like, this works great. (Time 0:07:10)
  • Abstract Tasks Require Long Context Switch Time
    • Switching between abstract cognitive tasks takes 10–20 minutes to fully reorient, so two-minute interruptions prevent deep states.
    • That prolonged reloading explains the diffuse fatigue people call cognitive fatigue. Transcript: Cal Newport And we know it takes 10 to 20 minutes to fully change our attention context from one abstract target to another. It takes a long time. That’s why if you sit down to write something, everyone has this experience, the first five or 10 minutes, you’re like, man, this is terrible. Like I’m making no progress or whatever. And then after a while, you’re like, oh, this is starting to flow. Like it’s going better. That’s because it took that much time for your brain to load up all of the relevant information and to inhibit all the unrelated circuits and get your brain really ready to do that activity. So if you now interrupt that brain once every two minutes, it never can lock in on anything. And what you feel then is this sort of diffuse cognitive friction that we begin to experience as fatigue, cognitive fatigue. And it’s a really frustrating experience. It’s why if you go to an email inbox, you’re like, I have time. I’m going to empty this inbox. I’m going to go message by message. Here’s the best way to do it, right? On paper, I’m going to go message by message and I’m going to answer these messages. Why does that get so hard? Why do you find yourself like jumping around and looking for easier messages? Because each message is a different context than the other and that’s torture for the brain. It’s really, really hard to go from, all right, this is a complicated question one of my employees is asking me. And now this is a completely different issue, completely unrelated to that, where I have to think of like a good title for something. And now here’s a completely different issue. And you’re trying to switch one after another. Our brains aren’t wired for that. (Time 0:08:33)
  • Change Communication Protocols Not Just Your Checking Habits
    • You can’t unilaterally fix inbox-driven collaboration by merely limiting your checks; change collaboration protocols instead.
    • Newport stresses altering how the inbox is used, not just personal checking habits. Transcript: Cal Newport If you’ve changed nothing else about your workload or your communication protocols, if you just say, I’m not going to be on Slack from this hour to this hour, I only check my email twice A day or whatever that standard advice was from 15 years ago, it doesn’t work well because if you’re involved in a large number of projects that are timely and the way progress is going To be made is with ad hoc back and forth messaging, you have to be in there checking. That’s the brutal part of the hyperactive hive mind is that it has defenses to its elimination built into its very nature. Because if this is how we’re going to figure this out, like we have to have five or six back and forth messages to figure out what we’re going to do about this client coming tomorrow. We have to get this done today. That means you have to see my next message right away so that we have time for me to answer you and you to answer me and for that ping pong match to happen. That means you have to be checking your inbox or Slack constantly. Otherwise, you’re not going to see my next message in time for this whole game to unfold. So the very nature of that style of collaboration demands constant inbox checking, which is what I think people often get wrong about this. When I think about things like Slack or email, they think too often about either information oh, I’ve got so many messages in my inbox that I don’t need. I have all these newsletters and spam. That’s not a problem. That’s a minor problem. That’s an easily solvable problem. It’s like clutter. You know, that’s not a big problem. The issue is actually my collaboration style requires me to be in there because if I miss messages in a timely fashion, everything falls apart. (Time 0:11:00)
  • Train Focus And Aggressively Limit Your Workload
    • Train your ability to focus deliberately and limit workload to avoid overload.
    • Newport recommends practicing focused work and saying no to projects so value doesn’t decline as tasks multiply. Transcript: Cal Newport So in deep work, like one of the big ideas was you can train your personal ability to focus. Focusing is really important. Putting aside for now all the things trying to prevent you from focusing, you have to practice it. And if you practice it, you’ll get better at it. And if you get better at it, you’ll be a superstar because like that’s what matters in the knowledge economy. Everything good comes out of focus. Then I wrote a book after that called A World Without Email. And in that book, I was arguing the way we, the thing I was telling you about, hyperactive, high mind, communication is a problem. This is a real problem. The fact that we are using this method for coordination is causing all these trouble, is really causing problems. And I went through all the data and all the research and made the case this is super nonproductive. I went back to the archives of the New York Times business session in the 80s and 90s to exactly document the rise of email and how people were talking about email when it first came onto The business scene. And I made the case the way we work is arbitrary. This hyperactive hive mind was not a plan. It wasn’t seem to be more productive. We stumbled into it. So we really should change it. So that was that book. And then the most recent book, Slow Productivity from a couple of years ago. In that book, I argued, oh, wait a second, workload matters too. The other issue of this problem is we don’t put any limits or transparency on how many things we’re working on. And if you pile too many things on your plate, too much communication interruption becomes unavoidable because they each have little issues they need you to deal with. So I’ve now, over this 10-year period, have kind of broken down this problem. There’s like training yourself to focus, fixing your communication protocols, like how do I communicate in a professional context? How do we collaborate? And then managing workload to be more reasonable. All three of, and this might be why this problem’s not solved. There’s no one thing to fix, right? So all three of these things go into the issue and they’re each complicated. (Time 0:12:42)
  • Focus Practice And The Default No
    • Prioritise two levers: deliberate focus practice and strict workload control to gain outsized returns.
    • He calls saying no the nonlinear optimization: beyond a point, adding commitments reduces value. Transcript: Cal Newport Three books. Me I think the the big two that give you the biggest results and I’ll tell you the one that’s the hardest and that’s why this book probably sold the least the big two that gives you the biggest Results is taking focus seriously like a skill that really does make a difference practicing focus you get better at it and it has a demonstrable difference you sit down to work and you’re Just producing better stuff or you’re trying to pick up some complicated new thing like, oh God, I can learn this faster. That makes a huge difference. And then the second one, which was more recent in my life was, oh, you really got to control the workload. So much is downstream from how many things you’ve agreed to work on. You have to leave the mindset of everything I say yes to brings with it value. So saying yes to more things, it’s just going to aggregate more value. That’s not the right mindset. That’s not the way it’s a nonlinear reward function there. There’s a certain point as you add more things that not only does value stop growing, it begins to go down on the other side. That there’s a real saying no to many more things is actually a way to optimize reward and output, which is not natural. It doesn’t make sense at first. It doesn’t feel like common sense. So workload and focus training, you can control those more than you think, and you’re going to have huge results from those. (Time 0:15:00)
  • AI Amplifies Existing Sloppiness Into Workslop
    • ‘Workslop’ describes quick AI-generated outputs that add noise and increase others’ work because quality is too low.
    • AI lowers peak cognitive strain, smoothing effort peaks but producing low-value artifacts that slow teams. Transcript: Cal Newport So Workslop is AI-generated work products in the knowledge work sector. So like emails, reports, and PowerPoints, or what have you, that are generated quickly by AI, but they’re so low quality that they actually, it’s very difficult. They make everyone else’s jobs harder. This seems to be, this is like the defining aspect of work slop. It’s quick to produce, but it’s so low value that it actually no real progress is made. So like you get a work slop email from, you know, your boss or whatever. And like, this isn’t useful to me. It’s this weird, wordy thing that’s broken up into sections and it doesn’t get to the core of the problem we have to solve. So you made that email quick, but in the bigger scheme of things, we made very little progress towards what we want to do. Or you put together a work slot PowerPoint presentation so that you would have something at the meeting. But now we’re spending 20 minutes looking at this nonsense and nothing is not helping us. It’s not helping us actually do things. (Time 0:35:47)
  • New Yorker Essay Hallucination Taught A Hard Lesson
    • Newport recounts asking ChatGPT for an Asimov quote and getting a plausible but fabricated quote that fooled him until fact-checking.
    • That personal false-positive taught him not to assume chatbots retrieve exact source text. Transcript: Cal Newport Yeah you can like wikipedia you can ask questions of yeah so so um i was using i was writing a an essay and it was on isaac asimov’s um rules robotics this was a new yorker essay and um i left My copy of i robot i was here at my studio and I left it at home. I was like, oh, I needed to add this quote, right? Oh, I left it. And I was like, oh, you know what? That story’s in the public domain. It’s all over the internet. And this seems like it would be perfect for ChatGPT. Like, hey, can you just grab a copy and find me that quote? And they’ll save me a little bit of time. Like, yeah, here it is. Here’s the quote. I was like, yeah, it’s roughly I remember I put in there. And then the fact checker was like, where’s this quote from? I was like, yeah, it’s from the story or whatever. I get the book. It had just hallucinated a quote that was more or less like what was said, right? Because again, it’s kind of playing the game of this is the type of text that would make sense giving the prompt, but it wasn’t the actual quote. It had full access to it, right? You can search this. It’s in the public domain so that the actual story is everywhere. So I had just naively assumed if you ask it for some information that exists on the internet that, oh, it’ll just go find it and format it for you. It didn’t. And then I went through a whole dialogue with it where I was like, this is not the right quote. And it’s like, yeah, you’re right. You know what? I thought you meant paraphrase a quote. Here it is made up. I was like, that’s not the real quote. Can you go get the real quote and give it? At this point, I was just experimenting. I’d already filled it in the article. And I was like, you’re right. You know, I was being tasty. Here you go. I could not get it to give me the real quote. So anyway, I learned my lesson. (Time 0:45:28)
  • Markets Predict Narrow Near-Term AI Impact
    • Market moves suggest LLMs will have selective, near-term impacts on narrow industries rather than automating most jobs quickly.
    • Stock shifts in ‘SaaS-pocalypse’ show investors expect limited short-term disruption. Transcript: Cal Newport We saw this actually, the week we’re recording this, we actually saw this reflected in the stock market. It was this interesting paradox that was going on this week where the stock price of software companies that deal with stuff that is well-suited for an LLM went down. They call it the SaaS-pocalypse, the software service-pocalypse. So, companies that do legal advice, companies that do graphic design like Figma and Adobe, because a lot of we have gender of image generation is making building images from scratch Is less useful. Customer service, so companies that do a lot of customer service type software. We saw the stock was sliding on these very specific software industries because like, look, I think LLMs are going to be able to do this. It was triggered by Anthropic releasing some plugins that made it easier to integrate LLMs into your services without having to hire these other companies. But you would think that would be good news for the big tech companies building the AI that’s going to replace all this. Their stock was sliding as well. And so the big tech companies had this big slide that at the end of the week, we’re recording this, there was a rebound at the end, but it was like a trillion dollars in market cap disappeared From the big tech companies at the same time. So what does that mean the market was betting on? What are investors betting on at that point? What was going to happen? And they were betting that in the near future, the next year or two, what we’re going to see is selective impacts in specific fields from generative AI, but also that too much money is Being invested in these AI companies already, which means they’re betting that they’re not about to automate most of the economy. They’re not about to, you know, just one more iteration away from a huge economic disruption. They’re not, they’re not at this peak of like complete transformation, because if they were, you would be trying to increase your holdings in these companies. Like, I don’t care how much money they’re investing. These companies are going to be worth an astronomical amount of money, but the market is betting. I think the impact is going to be more limited in the one to two year window than a lot of the commentary was seen. (Time 0:49:32)
  • Run Toward Cognitive Strain Regularly
    • Seek cognitive strain deliberately and get comfortable thinking hard to build the key skill the AI age rewards.
    • Newport likens cognitive effort to weightlifting: discomfort signals capability growth. Transcript: Cal Newport Think you need to begin thinking about the feeling of cognitive strain, the way that a weightlifter thinks about the burn of a muscle or a runner thinks about burning lungs as a thing That is uncomfortable in the moment. But man, I’m excited about this feeling because I’m getting stronger. You got to make yourself really comfortable thinking hard. That is the differentiating factor. I mean, obviously, I’ve been saying this since 10 years now, but that’s even more now going to be the differentiating factor, right? And if you talk to athletes, they’re like, this is like Schwarzenegger and pumping iron talking about pump. And And that’s really painful what he’s doing, actually, right? Like lifting the level of weights. The physical pain he’s in is high and he compares it to an orgasm, right? Because if you’re a weightlifter, you’re like, oh, that pain is directly translating to more strength and more muscle mass. You got to think that same way about your brain. You cannot flee cognitive strain. You have to think about it in a knowledge work cognitive age. That is the feeling of my brain getting more capable. Yeah, I want to seek that out. Let’s go get it. Let’s go get some, right? Like I want to, this, nope, bring my focus back to this thing. I’m going to try to push this through. And then when you’re done, be like, oh man, I exhausted my brain. That’s awesome. That was like a, that was good cognitive workout. So while everyone else is using AI to run away from strain, you should be the person running for it. (Time 1:01:13)
  • Practical Team Rules To Escape The Hive Mind
    • Restructure teams with explicit workload tracking, ban hyperactive hive mind messaging, and create protocols plus office hours.
    • Newport prescribes team plates, WIP limits, morning stand-ups and afternoon check-ins for accountability. Transcript: Cal Newport I mean, I would do a few things. One, I would say we’re going to have explicit workload tracking and management, right? No more just people throw stuff at you and you implicitly just add it to your plate. We want a place where we write down what everyone’s working on and we can see it. And now we can start talking about things like what is an ideal WIP? What’s an ideal work in progress limit for an individual? How many things do we want someone working on at the same time before that curve starts to go the other way? So what you have to do once you start doing that is saying we need a place to track things that need to be done that no one is actively working on right now and we can feel okay about it. So I would definitely want to set up where things enter into our radar of this needs to be done. There’s a place for that to go and to be stored. Chris Williamson It’s like an organizational getting things done inbox. Cal Newport Yes. And it’s not on anyone’s plate because as soon as you are responsible for something it generates email slack and meetings so once it’s on your plate it begins to spin off administrative Overhead and slow productivity call it the overhead tax that gets spun off as soon as it’s on your plate so everything by default goes to a team plate no one’s working on it then we keep Track of from that plate as we move things to people’s individual responsibilities we have like i’t, you should do three things at a time. That’s it. And when you finish something, you can pull something else in. So do a small number of things fast and well, and then keep bringing things. So I would definitely do that. The second thing I would do is I would say no more hyperactive hive mind. If you send a message that requires more than a single message in response, that should not happen over digital communication. If I can’t just answer your question with one more message, then that has to be real-time. Now, we can’t have that turn into an explosion in meetings, so what we’re going to do is we’re going to have daily office hours for everyone. So there’ll be a daily time where everyone knows they can call you or walk to your office or whatever and go through a bunch of things with you real quick instead of sending emails. We’re going to have morning stand-up meetings within the teams for sure. Who’s working on what this morning? Who needs what from who to get that done? Go do the work. We’re going to have, so we’ll definitely do those as well. We might throw in phone hours. It’s a new idea I’m thinking about where you say, look, there’s a longer period of time, like maybe all afternoon where you can always call me if there’s something that’s so urgent you Can’t wait till the next office hours. There’s enough friction in phone calls that that actually turns out to work pretty well. Like, I’m not just going to call you because I want to get something off my plate. I won’t call you unless it really is serious. So, I would do that as well. And then I would say, okay, what ongoing work does this not work for? What type of projects do we work on on a regular basis where this isn’t working because it’s too long to have to wait till the afternoon’s a problem? I say, great, let’s identify those. And for each of those, let’s build a protocol. Here is our protocol for collaboration on this type of work and however that’s going to work. But it’s like the information goes into this spreadsheet and then whatever. Someone checks it in the morning, they move things to shared files. I don’t know what it is, but whatever it is that prevents us to have ad hoc unscheduled messaging isn’t necessary. So explicit workload management, I would have this rule of no hyperactive hive mind. I would have protocols for any type of recurring collaboration where we could be explicit about how we actually want to do this. And then I would have a culture of talking about deep work and concentration, like a tier one skill. How’s it going? How many deep work hours did you get in this week? Are you happy about that? What was getting in the way of that? Did you have a particularly good session? Tell everyone else about it. Like what worked? Oh, I see you, you, you did music. You have a different look. Oh, let’s all think, you know, here’s a good idea that we can borrow. (Time 1:14:12)
  • Use Communication Fasting With Standups And Checkouts
    • Implement communication fasting like ‘no Slack before 1pm’ but pair it with morning stand-ups and accountability checks.
    • That combination makes deep morning focus sustainable and enforces follow-through at day’s end. Transcript: Cal Newport Yeah, it works, especially though what really makes that more sustainable is if you have that quick morning stand-up on the team scale at the beginning of the day, where everyone says, Here’s what I’m going to be working on during these morning hours. Here’s what I need from each other to make progress on this. So what would have unfolded over Slack and email, you’re doing in 10 minutes. So you say, okay, here’s what I’m working on this morning. I’m working on the new white paper. Here’s what I need though. I need those figures from you. When can you get them to me? By 9.30? All right, you’re going to get them to me by 9.30. And I need those quotes you promised. Can you just do that right away? Okay. So you all know what I need from you? Okay. Now I’m going to put my head down and write that report. So having that meeting ahead of time where everyone says what they need and what they’re going to do, that makes that time work better. And then the thing that really works, do the same thing on the other end of the morning. All right, said you were going to work on this, this, and this. What happened? So there’s accountability on the other end. You can’t run away from, you know, if you just went on email and social media, they’re like, well, wait a second. I thought you were going to write the white paper. Yeah. And if other people flake, they don’t send you the figures. They don’t send you the quotes. You’re like, I got stuck, man. I never got this. Chris Williamson Cal didn’t do what he said he was going to do. Cal Newport And they’re there in the same room and they’re like, oh, okay, I get it. I get it. I can’t just ignore stuff, right? Like I actually have to do it. I think that’s a great idea. (Time 1:20:20)
  • Reading Rewires The Modern Mind
    • Reading rewires the brain for deep modern thought; page counts act as cognitive steps like daily walking.
    • Newport recommends regular book reading (e.g., 20–25 pages/day) to build higher-resolution frameworks. Transcript: Cal Newport So if you’re a 10,000 steps a day person, it’s like this is just like a baseline to make sure that like at least my physical systems are being used. You should have a page count, 25 pages a day, 20 pages a day of reading a book. It just is like getting those cognitive steps in because I think we recognize more and more reading it. I would say it’s the cheat code, but it’s better to think about it as like reading is the thing that formed the modern brain. And I’m like, I’m more and more convinced about this. I have a book idea I’m working on now where I’m sort of exploring this idea. The brain before we had the Neolithic revolution, it was the same neurons, right, 15,000 years ago that we have right now. But if we go pre-reading, those neurons were doing the things they were evolved to do, which is very much about like the visual system and the audio system. And we could communicate through spoken language and that’s fine. And then we invent reading. And this is not something that our brain has evolved for. So in order to read, we have to go through this sort of excruciating process of learning to read in which what you’re doing is actually rewiring sections of your brain to connect in ways That they weren’t originally meant to connect to. So we’re reforming our brain when we learn how to read. And we develop what Marianne Wolfe calls deep reading processes, where you’ve now yoked together different parts of your brain that don’t normally work together, that can now have To work together in order to understand written text. Once your brain is wired to do that, if you reverse this and write, you can generate much, much more sophisticated thoughts than you can if you haven’t done this wiring and your understanding Of things. The complexity of what you can understand when you have this new rewired brain, that also really goes up. So reading is like, it’s not just, oh, I get stronger in my brain. (Time 1:33:10)
  • Long Books Build Deeper Mental Models Than Short Posts
    • Long-form books provide interconnected arguments and multiple perspectives, producing durable mental models that short web posts rarely create.
    • Newport warns Substack-style skimming yields shallower frameworks and overconfident quick judgments. Transcript: Cal Newport A lot of this is captured in, the best book on this would be The Shallows, Nick Carr’s book, The Shallows. When we’re reading something like a webpage or Substack, for whatever reason, we skim much more aggressively. That’s the main issue. We jump around much more aggressively just trying to pull out the key points. I think that’s all just acculturated, right? Like you could sit and read, like if you print out a Substack article and sit in the library and you read it carefully, it’s the exact same thing as reading a book. It’s the exact same thing in sense of the experience. On screens, we tend to skim around more. The other advantage of like a book that was actually published versus like a post you see online, it’s just better thought through, right? So when you write a book, you spend a couple of years on it. Like you’re really, you spend a couple of years crafting the book and you might’ve been based on a lifetime of thinking about this topic. And so you take your time when writing a book and it gets edited and re-edited and you go back. Like I’m writing a book now. I’ve been working on it off and on for like three or four years. I’ve rewritten this book like three times. It’s like, this isn’t right. This isn’t clear enough. And so when you go through text that has been that carefully thought through and structured, that’s also you just get a different experience because the pieces click together at different Scales. It just uses you build in your brain these intricate interlocking pieces that all hook together and is beautiful and you get that aha moment feeling there’s an actual physical endorphin Rough you get in your brain so you know i think reading smart books written by smart people that took a long time to write (Time 1:36:15)