Cal Newport on Mission, Mastery, and Flourishing at Work

By Jon Hersey

Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University and the best-selling author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and most recently, A World Without Email. I recently spoke with Cal about living the “deep life,” how our standard operating procedures are diminishing our ability to do meaningful work and what to do about it, and about what he’s learned from heroes such as Lincoln and Socrates about building a better world. I’ve edited the transcript for brevity and clarity. You can listen to the original conversation on the “Philosophy for Flourishing” podcast.

Jon Hersey: Cal, it was great hearing you speak at TOS-Con, and it’s wonderful seeing you again. Thanks for taking the time to talk today.

Cal Newport: Good to see you again, too, Jon. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Hersey: First off, congratulations on your Netflix debut! I don’t often watch Netflix, but I made an exception when I heard that you’d appeared on The Mind Explained. You mentioned on your “Deep Questions” podcast that you were a little worried about your backdrop, that it was a bit messy because you transformed your office into a classroom for your kids during the pandemic.

As someone who has yet to have kids but is thinking about it, I’m curious how you made that decision. One of the common worries is that having kids makes it difficult or impossible to do big and important things. So, presuming that it was a conscious choice, what went into your decision?

Newport: When you have kids, there’s obviously a start-up period, which is highly disruptive for two to three months. But beyond that, it’s not a difficult feat—if not a standard feat—to set things up so that there is time when you’re at work and time when you’re not. The kids are in school, and I’m at an office, and then the day ends, and I come home. That’s not everyone’s situation, but it’s quite a common situation that if you’re working and have kids, you have two separate times.

My approach has always been—even before I had kids: Figure out the hours you’re going to work and work backward from that limit. I’m a practitioner of what I call “fixed-schedule productivity.” These are the hours I work; everything has to fit in there. So, I have to carefully consider what I put on my plate and how productive I am to set my sights realistically. And that same mind-set, I think, applies quite well once you have kids. You just have to have a clear separation. There are hours when you’re at the office, or whatever that equivalent is where you are not the primary caregiver for the kids. And when you’re not at work, don’t work.

What doesn’t work with kids is having a more blended approach of always kind of working and always kind of not working, thinking you can just fluidly move from one to the other. You end up working at all hours, and that’s quite incompatible with having kids at home. But if you have a clear bifurcation, there’s no problem.

Hersey: Speaking of work, let’s move on to the topic of your latest book, A World Without Email. There, you talk about what is, perhaps, the biggest impediment to flourishing in the world of work, which you call the “hyperactive hive mind.” What is that, and how did it come about?

Newport: This is a thread I’ve been pulling for a while. I’ve been trying to understand how we got to this place, particularly with office work, where we spend so much of our cognitive energy checking inboxes and chat windows. Email was introduced for pragmatic reasons. Asynchronous communication is needed for the modern office, and we were implementing it with fax machines, voice mail, memos; email was better. But once it was introduced, regardless of the original purpose, it enabled a new mode of collaboration where we said: “Look, we can just figure things out on the fly with back-and-forth, unscheduled, ad hoc digital messages.” This was a new mode of digital collaboration that did not exist before. It’s what I call the hyperactive hive mind.

The problem with it is that it does not scale. If you and I are trying to figure out one thing, and that’s the only thing we’re working on, fine. We can send messages back and forth. But when you have two dozen different ongoing asynchronous, unscheduled conversations that are unfolding with back-and-forth emails—most of which have to be tended to with some alacrity, because if you wait all day before you reply, it will cause a problem—the necessary consequence is that you have to check these email inboxes or chat channels all the time. The gears of your business depend on it. When we look at people who are overloaded with communication, it’s not typically an issue with them having bad habits. It’s not that they’re addicted to email. It is a necessary consequence of implicitly deciding that the primary means by which coordination and collaboration happen is with on-the-fly, back-and-forth messages. So, I gave that phenomenon a name. I went deep into the neuroscience about why this phenomenon is a really poor way to organize human brains to actually produce value. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how to get past it.

Hersey: How do we get past it?

Newport: The big picture answer here is: The hyperactive hive mind is the problem, and the solution is replacing it. Now that sounds simple. But it’s not what we have been doing. For the most part, we’ve been addressing the symptoms without addressing the underlying cause. We say things such as “batch your email,” “write better subject lines,” “have better norms,” and “don’t expect a response to an email after a certain time.” But that’s like being in the boat that’s filling with water and saying, “Hey, let’s get bigger buckets to bail it out when the real question is, why is all this water coming into the boat? Oh, we have to plug this hole.” And so, most of my advice, varied as it might be in specifics, comes back to the same general idea of looking at the things you do on a repeated basis at work and asking, “How do I coordinate and communicate about this work without relying primarily on unscheduled messages sent back and forth on a whim?” It requires process engineering, through and through, until you have a replacement method to get a certain type of work done that does not require just rocking and rolling in your inbox.

Hersey: Yes, many essentially use their inboxes as a never-ending to-do list instead of taking the time to set up a more thought-out system. I think, when you bring this idea to people’s attention, most acknowledge that they feel overwhelmed and that this isn’t a great way to work.

So, let’s say you take the next step and start redesigning your workflow. In your book, you bring up the idea of “locus of control.” Essentially, it’s important for people to have some say in and ownership of their workflow, not just be told how to do their work. And they should have a means of changing the system as needed.

One of the things that I’ve run into at several companies is that, at this point, it seems like everybody already has a favorite project management system, whether it’s Trello, Jira, Asana, or something else. Sometimes, it seems like getting broad agreement on a system is like pulling teeth. Do you have tips on building workflows and choosing software without violating that basic principle of ensuring that people have a reasonable level of autonomy in their work?

Newport: Well, I think there are a couple of relevant factors here. First of all, you’re right that locus of control is important. There is a strong culture in knowledge work that emphasizes worker autonomy. We designed the culture of knowledge work in explicit repudiation of what happened in industrial work, where we had the opposite of autonomy: a small number of management minds figured out in advance all actions that needed to happen and delegated those actions to individuals to execute them. That was the core idea in the early 20th-century industrial labor productivity revolution.

When knowledge work emerged mid-century, there was this idea, pushed largely by Peter Drucker, that this was different; you weren’t going to be able to have one really smart manager figure out, for instance, a paint-by-numbers process for creating new ad campaigns. As Drucker pointed out, the process is more creative, weird, and subtle, and those executing it need a lot of autonomy.

That was good because knowledge work is complicated, and it’s hard to break it down into a set of steps; it’s hard to turn it into an assembly line. The problem is that we took that autonomy idea too far. We said: “Yes, and the organization of work should be left up to the individual as well. It’s not our job to figure out how much work you should be doing, how tasks are tracked, or how we track the status of different projects. Productivity is personal; individuals should just figure out how to manage their own work.” It’s here that I think we get lowest-common-denominator systems such as the hyperactive hive mind.

So, now we’re in a hard place because the hyperactive hive mind does not work for us. Our minds cannot context-shift quickly back and forth between everything coming into our inboxes. This induces a huge amount of cognitive drag and makes it basically impossible to do knowledge work at a high level. So how do we get away from that? Developing new systems is going to require cooperation, and yet we have this culture of: “Don’t tell me how to work; productivity is personal.”

So, we have this clash, which is part of why buy-in is important but also very difficult. As soon as people feel like you have made a decision that will affect the way they have to behave—especially if it might add any inkling of extra effort or obstacles—all of their sirens go off: “No, I’m not going to go to your Web forum or register for an account in Asana. You’re not going to impose that on me.”

We have two options here. One is the buy-in option. I think this type of innovation should happen at the level of the team. It should be supported at the level of the C suite, but the actual details need to be figured out by the team: “All right guys, let’s all get together and figure out how we want to work on client requests. How do we want to work on our quarterly reports? What will our system be? How do we do this while avoiding unscheduled messages that require replies, causing context shifts and cognitive drag?”

The second option, if you’re making a change to your personal workflow, is to use an invisible user interface (UI). For instance, I have a pretty sophisticated system for managing my calendar and scheduling meetings, but no one else has to know about that. The people I work with don’t even realize that I have any sort of system, because I’m not making them directly engage with some new tool. I can use complicated tools on my end, and I can still guide their behavior toward my more systematic approach.

Hersey: Earlier today, I sent you an email, and then I felt this twinge of guilt about emailing the author of A World Without Email. I guess that’s probably unwarranted, given what you just said. But now I’m curious. Did my email go into some sort of complicated system? What’s your current email protocol?

Newport: I think once we understand the problems with the hyperactive hive mind, we can come up with some pretty nuanced solutions, and email can still play some part. It’s useful, but it’s just one of many tools, and it has enabled the hyperactive hive mind workflow, which we have to push back on.

I think of email as falling into three types. First, there are informational emails: These are things like email newsletters and announcements from HR, which don’t require a response and give you information that may or may not be useful. Second, there are questions or notes, like your email from earlier, which was like: “Hey, can you record locally?” These emails address you specifically and tell you something or pose a question that needs to be answered. And then, third, you have conversational emails. These are part of a back-and-forth where some sort of coordination or collaboration is happening, but the medium of exchange is digital messages.

Informational emails are fine. I think techy types focus too much on getting rid of these. They’re not really a huge problem. It does not tax your mind that much to see five hundred newsletters in your inbox. In fact, it feels good to be able to quickly delete or archive a bunch of emails.

What about question emails, such as: “Hey, can you record locally?” This is actually a very good use for email. It’s asynchronous and doesn’t require an immediate response. It’s not an ongoing conversation. It’s exactly the type of thing that you can put on someone’s plate, and they can deal with it pretty quickly.

Now, if you have a huge number of these to deal with, that creates context-switching problems. I talked about this on my podcast recently. You can basically freeze your brain if you have to answer, say, twenty of these in a row. It seems like it will be easy, but each message is on some distinct topic, and your mind locks up after three or four because it can’t switch back and forth between them. So, these can be problematic. But, usually, they’re OK.

What I really care about minimizing or eliminating are conversational emails. I do not want back-and-forth collaboration and coordination happening via email, because that is what drives frequent inbox checks. Maybe I have seven time-sensitive conversations going on, and I don’t know when the next message in one of these conversations will come. I have to keep checking my inbox, waiting for it, because I need to hit that ping-pong ball back over the metaphorical net as soon as it gets here so that we can all keep moving forward. That is the real killer. It causes a huge number of context shifts.

So, in regard to how I handle email, I’m primarily focused on things I do on a regular basis that require back-and-forth collaboration—on processes for those things that reduce or eliminate unscheduled messages.

So, for a message from you asking a quick question about recording or the like, there’s no reason for me to have a different tool for that. That’s a perfect use for email. It sits there until I’m ready to answer. But when it comes to, for instance, responding to publicity requests, dealing with contractors, producing my podcast, or handling questions from students, I have systems that don’t involve email. Those back and forth, ongoing conversations are productivity poison. That’s where I think we need to focus on having alternative systems.

Hersey: Can we dig into some of these alternative methods for handling common, everyday work?

Newport: I’ll give you three general categories of systems that are alternatives to the hyperactive hive mind approach.

The first is deferral systems. So here, the idea is: There’s some back-and-forth conversation we’re about to have on Slack or email; let’s defer that conversation to another time using a better medium. Using office hours is an example of deferral. Maybe a student asks, “Hey, do you have any advice on X topic?” With the office hours strategy, I’ll say, “Let’s defer that conversation to my twice-a-week office hours. You come to my office or call me.” And we’ll have a very efficient conversation. It might be less convenient for the student in the moment, because he can’t just initiate that conversation, and he might have to wait a couple of days. But you have eliminated unscheduled messages and context shifts by deferring that conversation to a set time and appropriate medium.

Scheduling tools provide deferral systems as well. If we’re trying to set up a meeting, we could just go back and forth, saying: “What about Tuesday? I can’t do Tuesday. Well, about Wednesday? Yes, Wednesday is good, but not in the morning.” That seems innocent. But a simple scheduling conversation can generate an absurd number of context shifts. Say it takes ten back-and-forth messages to figure out when we can meet tomorrow. This conversation has to happen today because the meeting is tomorrow. So, we both have to be checking our inboxes pretty regularly. Let’s say on average, I checked my inbox ten times for each of the messages, and you do the same, we have just generated, in one day, one hundred unnecessary context shifts—every one of those shifts, by the way, creating a five- to fifteen-minute period of reduced cognitive capacity. So, it seems innocent, but the costs can be huge. Alternatively, you could defer that whole conversation to Calendly or ScheduleOnce. Again, it might be less convenient. You might expend some social capital because now people are like, “Why do I have to use your calendar tool?” And, on your end, it can be a pain to set up a calendar tool.

But I don’t care about overhead or social capital. I care about minimizing context shifts. That might take more time right now. But if it saves one hundred context shifts, it’s absolutely worth it. So that’s one category: deferral.

The second is automation. Some things that we do regularly are well structured, requiring the same steps, one after another, every time. For example, this might be producing a report or even a podcast episode. If you know the steps, there are usually ways to coordinate the efforts of several people that do not require back-and-forth messaging. Take a weekly report, for example. The process could be that I have a draft in Google docs in this particular folder by close of business on Monday. You can comment on it, but your comments must be in there by 1 p.m. on Tuesday. I have office hours at 2 p.m. on Tuesday. So, if there’s anything we need to discuss, you come to my office then. The designer on our hypothetical team knows that whatever is in that Google doc at close of business on Tuesday is ready to be laid out and published to our platform. So, this report can be produced and released every week with zero unscheduled messages requiring responses.

The final category is externalization, which entails using task-board tools that hold all the information about the project instead of disorganized email chains and messaging channels. If we’re using a task board, we can see clearly who’s working on what. We might have well-structured status meetings at set times to take care of any back-and-forth conversation.

So, there are three general categories: deferral, automation, and externalization.

Hersey: Let’s turn now to social media. In your earlier work, especially in Digital Minimalism, you discuss autonomy, and you say something to the effect that social media companies are working to undermine people’s autonomy. Traditionally, “autonomy” means self-ownership. When someone such as Charles Sumner or Frederick Douglass spoke about autonomy, they were talking about the horrible rights violation that was slavery.

Some people, such as Sacha Baron Cohen, for instance, also bemoan social media companies for violating people’s autonomy, and they think the solution is lots of government restrictions on social media companies. Do you think those are the sort of solutions we need? Or, when you speak of social media companies undermining people’s autonomy, are you really advocating for individuals to come up with tools, techniques, and strategies for controlling their own time and attention?

Newport: I’ve been a long-standing critic of social media, and people might think I must be very happy about the general rage against social media going on right now. Whereas I used to be condemned as crazy for expressing any skepticism about social media, now this skepticism is widely shared among people all across the political spectrum. But there’s a very different character to the current pushback on social media compared to what my stance has always been.

If you look at the main critiques against social media right now, most aren’t criticizing its role in our lives or saying maybe we shouldn’t be using these platforms so much. For the most part, they’re criticizing the content, saying, “We have to force these companies to have the right content.” Of course, depending on who you talk to, the definition of “the right content” differs, but that’s mainly what they’re discussing.

My point is different. My argument in Digital Minimalism is that if you study average users, you see that many are uneasy about their relationship with technology. They’re looking at their phones more than they want to, more than they think is useful or healthy. And this takes away time and attention from activities that would be more fruitful, rewarding, or important for them.

This is the loss of autonomy I’m talking about. This is not an authoritarian loss of autonomy. It’s certainly nothing like Frederick Douglass had to go through. It’s the fact that they’re looking at their phone when they’re with their kids at dinner. When you’re looking at your device all the time, it impedes your ability to do more meaningful, important things, to build a more thriving, rich life. That’s why my take on what to do about this issue is very individualistic in focus, because that’s where we can get the maximum return immediately. You can change your life right now in a way that will give you massive return. Or you can say, I will wait for some legislation that somehow will get me to look at Instagram less—which, actually, is not likely to have a huge material benefit on your life.

The reason why I am so at odds with a lot of today’s social media critics is that they say of my position: “I don’t care if it’s right or not. It will distract people from the retribution we are trying to exact against our political enemies. Don’t talk about what individuals can do, because that will take people’s focus off being as mad as possible at Mark Zuckerberg. We need to keep everyone on the same narrative.”

Perhaps there are political and legislative issues to be discussed. It’s complicated, and I’m not a policy expert. The side that I think is not getting enough attention is what individuals should be doing to reform the relationship with technology. A recent New Yorker article of mine is about this exact issue. I looked at why, in all of the media coverage about the latest Facebook whistle-blower scandal, no one said, “Maybe we shouldn’t be using Facebook. Or, maybe teenagers should not use Instagram.” It was all about how bad Facebook is and how can we punish them. I don’t love that company. But how, after all of that data was released showing evidence of teenagers potentially having very harmful reactions to Instagram, did no major news outlet have an article saying, “Maybe teenagers shouldn’t use Instagram?” I tend to go on rants about this, but that’s the hill I’ve been slowly dying on.

Hersey: It sounds like we have a lot of common ground there. I think it’s on the individual to decide whether and how to use technology.

This discussion reminds me of a comment made by Willard Wigan, the micro-sculptor in the Netflix show you were featured in. He said that he doesn’t really get pleasure from doing the work itself, that he gets pleasure only when he sees people’s reactions to it.

This brought to mind a contrasting view, the craftsman mentality that you discuss in Digital Minimalism and that runs throughout your work. Part of my theory is that, whereas the craftsman derives pleasure and self-esteem from his work, those most prone to get addicted to social media are like the micro-sculptor in that they attempt to derive self-esteem from the reactions they elicit from other people. I’m curious what you think of this idea of attempting to derive self-esteem from outside sources and how it has impacted the trajectory of social media.

Newport: I think that’s part of the equation for some part of the population who use social media heavily. I riff on this in my book Deep Work, where I talk about the collectivist nature of social media. Part of the business plan for social media companies was figuring out a collectivist approach to holding people’s attention. Obviously, we like positive attention; it means that we have good standing in our community, and we are wired to really enjoy this. But attention is very hard-won. It’s very difficult to get to a leadership position where people are paying positive attention to you. The digital revolution, the Web 2.0 revolution, gave everyone a channel through which they could express themselves. So, I could now have a blog, for example, and anyone in the world with access to the internet could access my blog and see what I was writing. That still didn’t make it easy to get attention, because most people’s writing was ignored. The masterstroke behind social media was to collectivize attention, so you no longer have to really earn someone else’s attention. Instead, it was: “If you pay attention to me, I’ll pay attention to you. I’ll post things that, if they were on my blog, no one would look at or care about, but we have this implicit agreement that if you leave a comment or like it, I’ll do the same for you.”

I do think social media actually evolved past this. There was a big split around 2012 to 2014. Facebook led the charge when they realized that this model was not generating enough user engagement. It was compelling to receive attention, but this was mostly from your small group of friends, and it didn’t do enough to draw users to the service. This was in the “wall days” of Facebook: I post on my wall, my friends see it, and they leave comments. But once Facebook saw Twitter start to take off, the company made this change to a news feed model. Around the same time, they added buttons expressing such things as outrage, extreme humor, or absurdity. And whereas before, you had to go to a theater or watch a Monty Python rerun to experience something absurd, now with meme culture, social media could just show you this kind of thing all day long.

It’s like what happened with junk food and our hunger drive. It’s taking real drives we have but providing a cheap, purified form that causes cravings and leads people to become unhealthy. That’s my theory about what happened with social media. People used to use it to get others to pay attention to them. But platforms became very good at pushing our buttons, providing quick emotional jolts with popular content from a small number of users.

Hersey: You’re famous for having never had any social media accounts. How do you balance the desire to bring attention to your work, which certainly deserves attention, with this battle against the “attention economy”?

Newport: Those who create great things do not attract audiences by telling people on social media about what they’re creating. It’s just a myth. Yes, social media is involved in spreading ideas or spreading good work, but that’s typically other people talking about your work.

I go back again and again to the most important piece of professional advice I ever came across. I titled a whole book after it. It was from Steve Martin, from his Charlie Rose interview in 2007, I believe. They were talking about Martin’s memoir, Born Standing Up, and Rose asked him what advice he gives to aspiring entertainers. Martin said, in effect, “The advice I always give is never what they want to hear. They always want to hear, here’s the secret to catching the attention of an agent or whatever. But what I always tell them is, be so good, they can’t ignore you. If you do that, then good things will come.” I’ve built my whole life around that: Just work on your craft, work on the best possible ideas you can come up with, produce really good stuff, repeat. And if an interesting opportunity arises and it seems like it will move you in the right direction, just do it. Keep your nose to the grindstone. People will find your work, and maybe they’ll talk about it on social media.

But this idea that you have to build up some big audience, with all the cognitive costs that involves, that that somehow will be the secret to you being super-successful—it’s not. If something is really good, it will move people. They will find it. If it’s not really good, it doesn’t matter how many Instagram followers you have, it won’t go very far.

Hersey: So Good They Can’t Ignore You is one of my favorite books. In it, you talk about how “follow your passion” is bad advice. The alternative, what you need to do, is build up career capital, which will help you see the opportunities in what’s called “the adjacent possible” and eventually develop a mission. When you discuss mission in that book, you talk about Pardis Sabeti and a few other people because, at that point, you were still just launching your teaching career. This was nine years ago now, probably ten. In that interim, what have you learned about mission? Have your thoughts changed any?

Newport: I think my ideas on mission are more important now than they were even then. We have different issues now than back when I wrote that book, which was 2010–2011. I’m an old millennial, and millennials were the first generation raised with the idea that you should follow your passion. That phrase emerged into common usage in the late 1980s, early 1990s. In the mid-1990s, I was entering middle school. When I was writing that book, people were obsessed with this idea that they have one true calling, and they got really upset when they couldn’t find it. That’s actually diminished a bit in our culture since then. I think Gen Z is not as immersed as millennials were in this idea that your work is the full provider of your worth and happiness and that the only way it will provide this for you is if you’re courageous enough to match your job to an intrinsic, preexisting passion. Gen Z doesn’t hear that as much. But I think Gen Z is awash in wanting to have a mission-driven purpose in their lives, and they don’t know how to get that. So, they simulate it by joining a tribe and yelling on Twitter, which doesn’t lead to what they’re looking for.

The main idea I had about mission in So Good They Can’t Ignore You was that if you study people who really do have a life-defining mission, you realize that such a mission is not easy to find. You can’t simply graduate college and say, “I’m going to go backpack around Europe and figure out my mission.” Actually, people typically find meaningful missions, as you alluded to before, in the adjacent possible, just beyond the current cutting edge of some field. You get to the cutting edge once you’ve mastered some skill, field, or topic, and only once there can you see the possibilities beyond. That’s where a true mission can emerge. In other words, you can’t change the world until you’ve mastered a skill that enables you to see the next new way to potentially change the world.

I think this is more relevant today than it was even back when I wrote that book, because you won’t find your life-changing mission by seeing what’s trending on Twitter. You won’t feel like you have a life-changing mission if you just join a preexisting mimetic tribe and do pile-ons. You actually need to choose a productive field, master it as quickly as possible, get to the cutting edge, and then have the courage, independence, and creativity to take this new thing over here, combine it with that skill, and do things differently than they’ve ever been done before. That’s where all the exciting stuff happens.

Hersey: In the book, you talk about having a unifying mission, but you’re really good at several things. You’ve moved up rapidly as a professor, and you’re also an excellent writer. Do you have a unifying mission, something that bridges being both a computer science professor and a writer?

Newport: I chose those two things—computer science and writing—a little over twenty years ago. In my freshman year in college, I was rowing crew, but I had a heart condition, and I had to leave the team. I had this moment of starting over. I said, Here’s where I’m going to put all my energy: computer science (CS) and writing. I got very serious about my CS studies, and I got very serious about writing for campus publications. And I’ve just stuck with that plan for the past twenty years.

Along the way, it’s opened up lots of interesting opportunities. So, right now, I think there’s a nice unifying mission to my work. My last three books were about the various impacts of tech on culture. So increasingly, my academic work is relevant to my other writing. And, now, the university where I work is shifting toward becoming a center of excellence for thinking about these issues and about digital ethics. So, everything’s coming together.

But for the past twenty years, it was just: I’m going to do these two things. Now, choosing one thing is probably even better, but I wanted to have some sort of balance. I think three is too many, but two is possible. When I was not feeling great about CS—when I was newly arrived to the theory group at MIT and just getting my hat handed to me by brains so big their gray matter entered the room fifty minutes before the rest of the body—when I was feeling down about that, I was like: Yes, but my book just came out. I feel good about that. And then when I’m feeling down about my writing—and there have been long periods of my writing career where I just was stuck and frustrated—I was thinking: Yes, but I also have this CS thing going. I have some momentum, and I’m publishing some papers, and I think I’m going to get an academic job. So, I used two things as a counterbalance because both happened to be in incredibly competitive fields. I knew there would be a lot of punches to the gut, and this has helped.

But I don’t do a lot of things. I do a very small number of things. And I stick with those things through ups and downs year after year. That’s been my guiding light.

Hersey: You sometimes advise finding someone whose career you really admire and reverse engineering it, figuring out what they did to get where they are. Have you had any role models or mentors that you’ve done that with? And, more broadly, do you have a favorite philosopher or hero of “the deep life” that you regularly pull inspiration from?

Newport: I can’t really find a great exemplar who’s doing exactly what I’m doing. It’s hard to find full-time, tenure-track professors who have nontrivial careers as public figures and who aren’t also very senior in their career. There are people such as Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Cornel West, or Michael Eric Dyson. But I’m not there in my career. I’m not in an endowed chair at a major university. I’m an associate professor. I’m tenured, but I’m not there yet. And yet, I still have a lot of public recognition for my writing. It’s a hard model to find. So, I have to piece together exemplars for different parts. It’s a little bit schizophrenic, to be honest, because I’ll pull from writing exemplars, but they’re just writing. So, when I apply some of their ideas, it creates some friction with academia. And if I take academic exemplars, they don’t have the large following, the podcast, or books of the same scope and audience. So that creates some friction, too.

Philosophically speaking, I love the pragmatic intellectual philosophy encapsulated by Lincoln. He pursued deep understanding of principles but was also very focused on how to apply those principles in the real world. He was not asking, “What’s the most unalloyed, clean expression of this principle incarnate that I could possibly implement?” He wasn’t John Brown, right? He didn’t go to the gallows for a scheme to free the slaves. But he ended up passing the amendment that freed the slaves. He had this incredibly pragmatic application of deep intellectual investigation. He’s a model to me. He goes deep on ideas, then comes back to the situation at hand and tries, through a combination of eloquent craft and sophisticated understanding of people, to make as much progress as possible.

This is my aim in my work on social media, email overload, and the deep life. I try to deeply understand ideas and alternatives, but then I get very pragmatic about advancing those ideas in the world.

Hersey: Lincoln is certainly someone to look up to, and I think you’re doing a fantastic job applying some of his principles. I love reading your books because you really do engage with opposing views and try to understand what they get right. For instance, you use Henry Ford’s assembly line as an example of the scale of productivity revolution possible in the knowledge work sector. In A World Without Email, you talk about being at a wedding and hearing out someone who disagrees with you that this is something to strive toward. And then you really dig into the legitimate pushback to parse what we should and should not take from the analogy.

Newport: That is so critical. I guess Socrates would be another philosophic hero of mine. I think the dialectic method is so incredibly effective. I’m dismayed by the culture we’ve created where this is so difficult and rare. I believe that if you want to enhance your conviction, if you want to solidify your ideas, if you want to nuance or supercharge your ability to understand and apply your convictions to the world, you have to slam headfirst into the best possible counterarguments and alternatives. It is in that collision that really deep, sophisticated, intellectual growth happens.

This is what Lincoln did. Look at the Lincoln-Douglas debates: Lincoln threw himself into full-throated opposition. And it was in that collision that the sophisticated ethical foundation on which the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment were formed. Today, I think we’re afraid of that. I always tell my students, don’t trust anyone who implies, “You’re too dumb to hear another argument; you might be tricked. So, it’s better that we just keep that away from you.” Hearing opposing arguments does not trick you into abandoning your convictions; if they’re true convictions, it makes them stronger.

I’m a really big advocate of this, and I don’t think there’s a lot of it going on. When you move discourse away from interpersonal, analogue, in-person conversation to these weird, abstracted, digital, social-media environments, it becomes much harder to do that. So, I just want to throw in a big plug for that: If you feel strongly about something, you should study the smartest people on the other side. You won’t be tricked. They won’t trick you into saying maybe slavery is not so bad. It will give you the intellectual firepower you may need to free those slaves one day.

Hersey: Yes, and perhaps the pandemic made this whole thing worse. For more than a year, people had far fewer in-person conversations, far fewer opportunities to meaningfully engage with opposing views.

Other than reading all your books, which I heartily recommend, how can people learn more about your work?

Newport: If you like this type of stuff, you might enjoy my podcast “Deep Questions,” where I answer audience questions on all these types of issues. We cover a lot of ground. If you’re interested in productivity, the deep life, or any of the topics we discussed, check it out. You can also check out my twice-monthly New Yorker column, “Office Space.”

Hersey: Excellent. Thanks so much for your time today, Cal.

Newport: Thanks, Jon.