Cal Newport, the man who never procrastinates

The plan for the day, a bright Monday in late June with no classes, included two hours writing his new book, one preparing the next program for his podcasttwo to record it, two more for the interview with The weekly country and a 30-minute meeting in between. All told, around 4:30 p.m., Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and a writer of bestselling essays on work in the age of distraction and the pitfalls of technology, called it a day. The rest of the day, he said, he doesn’t open the computer again, trying to spend time with his wife and three children. He rarely works on weekends.

It sounds easy when he tells it from his home in Takoma Park, an elegant Washington suburb with a leftist pedigree that belongs to Maryland. There he has two offices. In the downstairs office—a bright room with a fireplace, Klein blue bookshelves with translations of his books into some 45 languages, and a closed laptop on an oak table custom-made by “a company in Maine that specializes in academic furniture”—cell phones and “fixed screens” are prohibited. Upstairs, like someone who packs away all the junk he wants to get out of sight in a room, is the printer, scanner, or desktop computer. “I don’t really know what procrastination is,” says Newport, a staunch defender of procrastination. time blocking (thinking the day before about how to organize the next day’s schedule and sticking to that plan to the letter). “It may take me a while to get started, or I may delay projects, but once I get going, I don’t waste time until I’ve completed the hours I’ve set for myself.”

Newport turned 42 the day before the interview. He was born in Houston, where he lived until he was seven, when his family moved to New Jersey, near Princeton. There, influenced by the Institute for Advanced Study, a center associated with the prestigious University that was the intellectual home of Oppenheimer, Einstein and Richard Feynman, he discovered what interested him: “The life of ideas” and “working in front of a blank slate.” At a very young age he had already founded a start-up“I grew up in the era of the Internet barons, the time of the rise of Microsoft and Oracle, and I was passionate about software,” he recalls. While studying at Dartmouth, an Ivy League university, he landed a publishing contract at the age of 21. From there came his first three books, offering advice to students.

After turning down an offer from Microsoft (“it was a lot of money, but I couldn’t have kept writing”) he ended up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he earned his doctorate. Then, while he was considering where to continue his academic life (he ended up choosing Georgetown), the idea of Do it so well that they can’t ignore youan essay from 2012 that Península has now published with a translation by Diego Pereda Sancho. His writing was born from the questions he asked himself when he was about to “undertake a professional journey that would possibly last the rest of his life.”

In it, Newport tries to convince the reader that being guided by passion when choosing a profession is not a good idea, even though in a famous graduation speech Steve Jobs told Stanford students: “The only way to have a good job is to love what you do.” Newport reviews the life of the founder of Apple to dismantle this myth, and concludes: “Much better than working in what you are passionate about is loving what you work on.” How? The title already says it: becoming so good that they cannot ignore you. Newport found the formula —becoming an expert and developing “rare and valuable” skills that allow you to accumulate the “labor capital” necessary to get “a great job”— and he applied the story: that is how he became a rare mix of technologist and writer, who also has a podcast, a Blog and one newsletter with 100,000 subscribers.

“They put in a lot of hours and still felt frustrated”

At first it was difficult. The essay that is now being published in Spain did not go as well as he had hoped. Four years later he published the following: Focus (Deep Work), its largest best sellerwhich he estimates has sold between 1.5 and 2 million copies in English. “I guess I could read the Zeitgeist,” he says. “It came at a time when knowledge workers were starting to feel increasingly burned out after a decade and a half of using email and other networked technologies and a brutal economic crisis. They didn’t quite know why. They were putting in long hours and still feeling frustrated with the results of their work.”

That was also the book that gave him the most successful label of his career up to that point, that idea of ​​in-depth work. “My work is not about convincing the reader of something he doesn’t believe in, but about helping him to better understand what he already knows. That’s why the act of naming what happens to them is so important. For many, hearing the title was enough to understand why they were frustrated at the office.”

The cultivation of deep work It’s not about working longer hours, but about working intensely and without distractions (emails, junk news, social networks, etc.) in order to finish earlier and at a reasonable time. “We thought technology would make us more productive, and that hasn’t been the case,” says Newport. “Innovations allow us to do certain things, like getting information much faster, but they have added so much noise that we actually produce less than our grandparents.”

In his later years, Newport deepened his criticism from within of technology, and its ravages in the workplace, with Digital minimalism (Paidos) or A world without e-mail (Reverté). The advice contained in these books is the result of theories that, he says, have been coming to him. He does not
have social media and has made his crusade against them public, despite the pressure he felt for years. “They seemed like a kind of progressive force capable of democratising ideas and connecting the world, as well as being essential for your career. Today, no one believes that anymore.”

Television is like sliced ​​bread; social media is like ultra-processed food

Just take a look at the website a couple of times a day. The New York Times. He can go for hours without checking his phone, to the despair of his family and friends. And he doesn’t plan to let his children have a phone until they are 16. “The eldest is 11, so things are about to get interesting now,” he says. At the boy’s school he acts as an advisor on these matters, although he does not agree with the idea that the new generations are lost because they were born under the digital influence. “I don’t believe in techno-determinism, in those people who say that because you are available you don’t have to resist technology. The human brain doesn’t change so quickly. My children’s brain is basically the same as my grandfather’s. The problem is how they relate to the new tools.”

Asked if he also believes that he contributes to the widespread dispersion as the author of two formats that have recently arrived in the wild market where our attention is bought and sold – podcastwhich he records in a studio a couple of blocks from his house, and the newsletter—, uses a gastronomic simile: “Reading a book is like organic food, you can stuff yourself, it won’t be a problem for your health. Moderately processed foods, like sliced ​​bread, are television, movies, podcasts and newsletters: They should be taken in moderation, but they are acceptable. And then there are the ultra-processed foods, Oreos, Doritos: their quality is very low and they are very addictive. That’s where social media comes in.”

The pandemic, with its shattered promise of liberation from remote work, the endless deluge of Zoom meetings, and the tyranny of Slack and other forms of instant communication between employees, pushed many of his ideas into the spotlight. “It accelerated all those problems, and in the end that was a good thing, because it put us on our toes,” he says.

In the time of confinement, began to collaborate more regularly with The New Yorker, where he addresses these issues from a position that he denies is that of “self-help.” He prefers to call it “pragmatic nonfiction.” “My books contain ideas, but also advice. And that misleads some who are looking for one thing or the other, and also critics.” Nor would he define his work as a critique of late capitalism. “The target of our darts may look similar, but those who make that kind of criticism from the left tend to place capitalism at the center of the problem, and I have a more techno-social perspective. When I criticize capitalism, I am more interested in the problem of capitalism.” e-mail I do this because the tool has wreaked havoc on workers, but by increasing distraction it also causes losses to companies.”

From his learnings during the pandemic came the idea for his latest book, Slow Productivity (still untranslated), where he advocates “doing fewer things, at a more natural pace and taking care of quality” to avoid burnout, that physical and mental exhaustion that seems to loom over everyone and that we now call burnout. The new essay he worked on for two hours on the day of the interview will be a continuation of that one, and “will take those lessons beyond work, to life in general,” he said before saying goodbye at the door of his house. Before, also, continuing with the rest of his strictly measured day.

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