The collapse of modern attention (and how to get it back) - Cal Newport - #1067

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Dude, you must be feeling like Cassandra at the moment. So prescient, the distraction, the necessity of deep work, the inherent bombardment of our attention. Do you feel like you saw the future earlier than what even at the time maybe felt late with deep work and focusing on quality over quantity and stuff?

**Cal Newport** (0:20)
I 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, then it makes sense. And everyone thought I was crazy. And 10 years later, it just kind of jumped from I was crazy to it's common sense. So it's not even that interesting that I'm saying it anymore. So I kind of skipped the part where it sounded prescient.

**Chris Williamson** (1:15)
Do you feel vindicated?

**Cal Newport** (1:17)
I think certainly on a couple issues. The social media issue was a big one because I used to get a lot of flack for that.
For going out, I wasn't even saying the social media was bad or that no one should use it. Really what I was pushing back on was just the idea of ubiquity. The idea that everyone had to use it. I said, this doesn't make sense. I get there are some people this makes sense for. There's a lot of technologies that have markets that make sense for it. But why is there this pressure for everyone to be on these services? This is not going to a good place. They're spending a lot of money to mine attention and they're going to get better at it. At the time, this was considered crazy. What do you mean you want to use social media? I wrote a New York Times op-ed back. I looked this up the other day. It was 2016
It argued maybe social media is not the biggest thing for a young person to focus on if they're thinking about their career. That's what it was. It was like focus on your career instead of social media, actually doing things well is what really matters. You would think that I had just come on and said, America has an idea is done and grandmother should be kicked. People were upset about this. The New York Times commissioned a response op-ed two weeks later. That went through mine and said, this is what is wrong about Cal Newport's op-ed or whatever, because it made such a fear to suggest it. Today, it's boring to suggest like, social media has problems and most people probably shouldn't use it. People agree with that. The one that upsets me though, that one I feel like people have come along to and more and more people are being much more selective and minimalist about their social media. The distraction, e-mails, Slack, constantly jumping back and forth between different things. That just got worse. I mean, I think people recognize it now. This is probably not a good way to work. But I thought because there was dollars and cents here, this is less productive from an economic productivity standpoint. To have all of your workers changing their attention all the time, you're just getting a really low return on all the money you're investing in these human brains. I thought, this is dollars and cents. This is the one that's going to change. Social media is fun. That's going to be hard to change people's behavior. But certainly, this hyper distraction thing in knowledge work, that'll change because we're leaving money on the table. It hasn't changed at all. It's gotten worse. It's worse than it was. I'm at the 10-year anniversary now of the book Deep Work. So this month is the 10-year anniversary.

**Chris Williamson** (3:35)
Congratulations, dude. That's fucking seminal. That has become a part of the lexicon. That's really, really cool.

**Cal Newport** (3:41)
Yeah, but it's got me a little bit depressed because I've been doing this 10-year reflection. Like, okay, it's been 10 years and the book was a hit and it's millions of copies, et cetera. And the issues I talked about are worse. They're like really worse than they were 10 years ago. So people know the problem, nothing has changed.