A sisterly chat about productivity bros

After I sent last week’s newsletter, my sister Carrie immediately texted me, “Wait, you read Deep Work? Lol.” It turns out we both have a love-hate relationship with the recent books of on-trend productivity guru Cal Newport, and neither of us really understood why. So we decided to talk about it. The books we discuss here are Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. They’ve really permeated a certain stratum of internet culture, so it’s likely you’re familiar with their key ideas even if you haven’t read them.

Lizzie: Do you want to describe Cal Newport’s work for people who don’t know it?

Carrie: I’ll take a crack at it. Cal Newport is a computer scientist who teaches at Georgetown, and basically over the course of these two books, he advocates for a quality-over-quantity approach to your work and how you use your attention. He wrote a couple books before Deep Work, but I think that was the first one that really broke out. And now he’s kinda everywhere in the world of productivity bros and people who want to talk about technology’s effects on the mind, blah blah.

Lizzie: I am fascinated by the productivity bros and I also hate them. Which brings us to why we are talking about this. We both read these books (I actually listened to them on audiobook), and I think we both found them helpful to a certain point, but also extremely annoying. To the point where we both described them as hate-reads.

Carrie: I’m hoping this conversation can help me process my feelings about that a little more, because to call it JUST a hate-read is too simple. There are plenty of things I straight up hate-read or hate-watch, and this isn’t like that, and it also sticks with me more. Did you find yourself feeling similarly?

Lizzie: I think about these books every day. And I don’t know why.

Carrie: RIGHT?! Okay, me too. I feel better. Haha.

Lizzie: Why did you decide to read them in the first place? I’ll go first. I genuinely feel like the commodification of attention is one of the most important philosophical problems and psychological challenges of our time. And I had heard a couple of interviews with Newport (on podcasts, naturally), his ideas on this just seemed to be everywhere, and I’m interested in what people who are thinking deeply about this subject have to say.

Carrie: Yeah, it was similar for me. I completely agree about attention and focus and what those things mean now that we basically live on the internet, and particularly social media, way more than we did when we were kids, for instance. Deep Work arrived in my life as part of a productivity bro binge that started when I realized I hated how much of my time the internet was eating. I had also heard Cal Newport interviewed on some of these podcasts I’d started listening to (which I have a similar love/hate relationship with) and was like okay, let me dive in here. Because this makes sense to me, even though for some reason I also find it extremely irritating.

Lizzie: You told me Newport was your favorite of the productivity bros. Why? What does he do better or differently? I haven’t read other books in this genre.

Carrie: I think he does a better job of articulating a philosophy, if that makes sense. A lot of my gateway drugs to this weird world, so to speak, were more amalgamations of different people’s ideas than one sustained worldview. I appreciated the through line.

Lizzie: Yes, he is very good at constructing an argument. But let’s just get this out of the way—these books are not well written.

Carrie: They are NOT. From the minute I even saw the cover of Deep Work, I was like “Oh.”

Lizzie: They are rigorously structured, which makes them propulsive and coherent, but they are business books at heart. Not like, cultural criticism. 

Carrie: They feel like they’ve come off a conveyor belt.

Lizzie: YES! So many times I was like, THIS is what it takes to write a book? He did not seem to have one original thought. But he does articulate feelings we are all having really precisely. Which is hard to do and extremely valuable.

Carrie: Totally agree, which is why I can’t just write him off out of hand despite the fact that these books look and read like they were self-published without any oversight whatsoever. Like, he’s right about so many things, and the things he suggests legitimately have been helpful to me at different points.

Lizzie: So let me just lay out the core argument of each of these books. Deep Work is about how attention is a skill a lot of people (i.e. knowledge workers, the only people in Newport’s world) are losing, but one that you can consciously train and cultivate. If you do, you will be a more valuable knowledge worker and can win at the new economy. Digital Minimalism is about cultivating a rewarding relationship with your phone and other digital technologies, turning them from distractions into tools that benefit you in some way. The benefits can be social, economic, whatever. What’s important is that you understand why and when you are using them, and that you have consciously decided that the benefits outweigh the downsides. The centerpiece of this is a 30-day digital detox, which I did not do. After the detox you reintroduce the digital tools you’ve realized add value to your life and leave the ones that don’t behind forever. 

Carrie: You nailed both of those. The way I’ve heard the difference described (probably by him?) is that Deep Work is more professionally oriented, and Digital Minimalism is more for one’s personal life. I didn’t do the detox either.

Lizzie: I think my core issue with Deep Work is easier to articulate, and it comes from that last part of my summary—that attention and concentration (and trying new things, and challenging yourself, and sticking with hard problems) are only valuable because they will let you create more value for your employer and/or earn more money for yourself. Which is just unspeakably fucked up.

Carrie: HAHAHA well said.

Lizzie: It bears mentioning that Deep Work was published in 2016, and I read it last month. There is a DEEP gulf between those time periods when it comes to technology and capitalism, or at least our popular understanding of them.

Carrie: Oh most definitely. I think that gets at one of my core issues with his whole schtick, which is that it exists in this apolitical vacuum. When that has never been my actual experience of life and will never get to be no matter how successful I am or whatever. I can be the world’s best steward of my time and I will still never get to occupy that space.

Lizzie: Exactly. There is absolutely no discussion of the political and social structures behind the challenge of managing your time and attention, aside from some recognition in Digital Minimalism that social media and all the rest are designed to be addictive.

Carrie: Right! The only systemic relationship that exists in these books is the one between you and Instagram, basically.

Lizzie: But like, societies and governments regulate other addictive things. With the internet, we’re on our own. Maybe we won’t be forever, but we are now. Which lets Newport and us, his reluctant acolytes, manifest our superiority by managing our relationship to technology more responsibly than the rest of the plebes. It’s a short walk over to “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

Carrie: “Reluctant acolyte” is exactly it. And right! It whitewashes (I’m choosing that word purposefully, by the way) so much else out of the picture of what your life can and should be like. I can’t remember which book it was in, but he gives the example of a professor who basically puts on his website “I won’t ever email you, leave me alone.” The idea of even TRYING to get away with that as a woman who does any kind of work online is hilarious.

Lizzie: Seriously. It’s literally my job to read emails from strangers. Part of it, anyway. And it’s a part of my job I struggle with and sometimes resent. But I can’t not do it.

Carrie: Right! And I completely understand the argument (and agree) that if the internet is part of our job lives, we should work with it like professionals. He’s totally right on that. But for women in particular, “I’m just going to straight up ignore you” isn’t the value-neutral or totally-achievable proposition he makes it out to be. I’ve gotten a lot more liberal with my use of auto responders since reading both of these books, and you know who always comments on it? Other women. Literally the other day: I had put an auto responder on at work for a week that said something like “We’re wrapping up a big program right now, so I’m going to be delayed in writing back, thanks for your patience.” And I had a meeting with another woman who works at a consulting firm, and the FIRST thing she said when she saw me was how flabbergasted/impressed she was that I felt like I could get away with that. She wasn’t chiding me, she was fascinated. (Note too, by the way, that I never said “I’m not writing you back, bye” the way these dudes seem to.)

Lizzie: Wow. Bleak. Relatedly, there was a part of Deep Work where Newport talked about making time to write the book partly by going to his in-laws’ house with his wife and kid and then writing in the guest bedroom. And I thought, what an asshole. 

Carrie: Seriously!! Douchebag Express.

Lizzie: But also, I am extremely envious of how clearly he recognizes and protects his priorities. 

Carrie: Yes, same! But the question he never answers, or even bothers to ask, is who gets to do that and why.

Lizzie: For various reasons I often feel like I have to react to what other people want, and that I always have to have channels open so that they can tell me what they want at all times. Which I don’t think is actually true or helpful. That is something that Newport has helped me see.

Carrie: I feel the same way. It’s helped me recognize how many of these anxieties I have around availability, obligation to others, etc. are largely phantom fears. I can push those boundaries a lot more than I ever gave myself room to in the past. But that’s largely because I have so many advantages stacked up in my life already, I can afford to like, get yelled at for not checking an email or whatever. But Newport and the like are on a whole other level than even that, this weird alternate universe where nothing you do has negative consequences whatsoever.

Lizzie: Yes, neither of us is worrying about clocking into our fast-food job 30 seconds late lest it literally leaves us homeless.

Carrie: People in that situation aren’t even a thought in this guy’s head. I think what we’ve just been talking about, though, is helping illuminate why this isn’t just a straight up hate-read for me.

Lizzie: Go on.

Carrie: I find it incredibly frustrating and annoying and dumb that he can waltz in and completely erase any systemic forces from the picture of your life. BUT. Seeing this philosophy laid out so plainly, without (frankly) much nuance whatsoever, has given me a lot of insight into just how much latitude I have that I never gave myself before. Turns out I CAN leave that auto responder on and the world won’t end. I may take more heat for it or have to answer more/different questions about it than Cal Newport ever will—because he’s expected to occupy this “solitary genius” seat that I’m never going to be offered—but I can employ parts of this philosophy to push back against those very systems he glosses over. And honestly, I’m like, “if this is literally how some people think, everything is way easier than I think it is.”

Lizzie: So much of it comes down to recognizing your priorities, which actually is an important skill. And saying no to everything that takes away from them. It was refreshing to hear someone say, you can decide how you want to use social media, and your time more generally. You don’t owe anyone anything, and especially not your attention.

Carrie: I think I get some kind of perverse satisfaction out of knowing that I can use these tools to make myself unavailable to…people like Cal Newport.

Lizzie: HAHA

Carrie: I’ve met so many people like him, smart men that are high and mighty about it without acknowledging or recognizing that they are. The “just to play devil’s advocate” guys. And I’ve NEVER cared what any of them had to say to me or thought of me whatsoever. So the idea of one of them giving me the tools to just be like “no thanks, see ya” is delicious.

Lizzie: I hate them. But we can learn from them.

Carrie: The ideas themselves are incredibly useful, but the way he presents them feels cheap. Which, again—I feel like I could NEVER get away with that and be taken as seriously as he is. Also, I feel like he’d be insufferable if a woman in his life did the things to him that he does to other people. If a woman he’d come to rely on just decided that she was no longer going to be available to him, using his very same justifications, he would short circuit. Of course I do not know him personally, and I’m prepared to be totally wrong about that—but that’s just the way it reads to me. It’d be a very “no, not like that” reaction. “I didn’t mean YOU.”

Lizzie: Totally. I do NOT want to meet him. But I do want to mention one other thing I actually liked from Deep Work, and that had a sensitivity that surprised me—I thought his approach to scheduling was refreshingly humane. Basically, the idea is that you decide in advance what you’re going to do with every 30-minute chunk of your time, but you can and should be constantly revising it throughout the day. I always saw micro-managed schedules like that as something you were supposed to stick to no matter what, which is impossible and thus I’ve never made them. But in his model, just because things inevitably come up, it doesn’t mean you suddenly have to cede all control to them. You still get to decide how to spend your time.

Carrie: Agreed. As an anxious person, I historically haven’t been good with change, and it was a relief to see the need for flexibility articulated so generously. Things can change midstream and you’ll still be fine, and in fact, you should expect them to.

Lizzie: My “favorite” part of Digital Minimalism, though, is when he discovers manly crafts.

Carrie: AND ACTS LIKE WOODWORKING IS THE TRUE ESSENCE OF MASCULINITY OR WHATEVER.

Lizzie: Of humanity really.

Carrie: Yes, that was straight up hilarious. So much of both of these books is the “man discovers himself in the woods” thing. It’s just got a new sheen.

Lizzie: Which we all know was always a lie, what with Henry David’s mom doing his laundry.

Carrie: Who does Cal Newport’s laundry, that’s what I want to know.

Recommendations

For more of Carrie’s genius, follow her on Twitter! She’s literally an internet star among queer disabled teens, so do yourself a favor and catch up. Plus she has a cute cat. I’m considering this newsletter appearance the official launch of her 2036 presidential campaign.

Bored and Brilliant. Carrie calls it “an interesting companion piece [to Cal Newport] that I discovered at the beginning of my productivity binge. It gets at a lot of the same ideas behind Deep Work and Digital Minimalism—its emphasis is on retraining your mind to be comfortable with a lack of stimuli in an oversaturated world—but it’s written by a woman of color, Manoush Zomorodi. She opens the book talking about her relationship to her iPhone and her son, since they were ‘both born in the same year.’ So immediately it’s more grounded in what I think is actual reality—there are other people in your life and other concerns beyond your relationship to your tech or how much money you make. Like Cal Newport, she makes concrete recommendations about how to slash your useless tech time and how it can improve your life if you do. But it’s so much more nuanced. Surprise!” I haven’t read this yet but now I’m looking forward to it. Thank you Carrie!

“Why 536 was the worst year to be alive.” I know, I also thought it was 2019! But let science and Science remind you that it could always be worse. My esteemed colleague Ann Gibbons just won a big award for this article, and it is very well-deserved!