A Review of Cal Newport the person, sort of

Last night MaKayla and I were talking about Cal Newport’s latest book, “A World Without Email.”  I’ve read most of Cal’s previous books (and I liked them enough to gift copies of both Deep Work and Digital Minimalism), and I tend to agree with much of what he says.  We are both fans of Neil Postman.  We have clearly read many of the same books

(in the penultimate chapter of “A World Without Email” he mentions “Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days,” EXtreme Programming, Essentialism, Deep Work and Scrum, all of which are on my bookshelf a few feet to my left, and two of which are in my “greatest hits” shelf)

… and I have read his books and generally agree with him.  So you know … I’m a fan.

Anyway, what I brought up with MaKayla was that Cal Newport spends a lot of time thinking about how work is actually done — it reminds me of “metacognition:” when someone thinks about their own thought process.  I’m sure there’s a term for metacognition, except applied to work.  We’ll call it … metaproductivity for now, even though that’s dumb, but I don’t want to spend any more time trying to think of this term I can’t remember.

Metaproductivity (ugh) is the process of examining how you perform your work.  Most people don’t do this naturally, I think.  You come in, someone tells you what is expected of you, and you work.  Often you become so busy you don’t have time to stop and think about what you’re accomplishing. 

In “a world without email” Cal Newport described the “Hyperactive Hive Mind” approach to work, which involves emails flying all over the office as everyone feverishly attempts to get something actually productive accomplished, while still responding to every little ping and question they get via email, slack, text or whatever.  “Deep Work” (hey, that’s the name of another book!) requires dedicated, focused, uninterrupted time to accomplish, but the “hyperactive hive mind” robs anyone of the ability to focus for more than a few minutes.

In a situation like that “metaproductivity” becomes impossible.  People don’t have time to do their own jobs, let alone take a break from busywork AND their actual job to just … think about how they’re doing their job.  This is something I’ve seen over and over and over again.  People too busy to make things better.

I’ve fallen into that trap many times before as well.  It wasn’t until I got into a really difficult situation that I was forced to stop the treadmill, get off it, and figure out why I was running so fast and not getting anywhere.  I engaged in “metaproductivity” and started reading books that outlined how to do things better, and then trying experiments.

Cal Newport’s books appear to be basically that.  He is thinking about his own productivity, and then he has some really good ideas, and he writes a book to share those ideas.

But what would be really helpful is if he could share how to get people to engage in metaproductivity in the first place.

Here’s the example I used with MaKayla: Newport’s books are like an olympian telling other olympian’s how to get a little bit better (or a lot better, in some cases).  I wondered what it would look like if he wrote a book that teaches regular people how to become olympians.  Instead of saying “here are the results of my metaproductive musings” what if he wrote a book that said “here’s how you get yourself in a metaproductive mindset?”

It’s a flawed question, I suppose.  There are books like that out there already, for one (although I think Newport strikes a really good balance between readable and research-based that other books don’t quite hit sometimes).  And second, maybe the way to get people to start thinking about productivity is to write the books Cal writes.  Maybe someone demonstrating their own metaproductivity is sufficient to spark a metaproductive streak in others.  I’m not sure.

Anyway, let’s talk about the book now.

A review of the actual book

It’s good!

Part One talks about how bad email is.  It brings up some very good points, but if you’re already convinced that the constant interruptions of emails are bad then you don’t get a ton from the first 100ish pages.

Part two outlines four principles that can aid in the creation of your own personal “world without email.”  These are:

1. The Attention Capital Principle — basically, knowledge work requires sustained attention, so productivity can be vastly improved if we deploy attention with the same care we use when we deploy more traditional forms of capital.
2. The Process Principle — Knowledge work can (and should) be optimized like any other production process, which would both increase performance and decrease effort required (and subsequently increase satisfaction, etc. etc.)
3. The Protocol Principle — We should design our communication patterns deliberately, much in the way communication between two computers must be designed.  This takes up-front effort, but pays off in much more efficient operation down-the-line
4. The Specialization Principle — less, but better.  One area where specialized workers could definitely do less is administrative tasks, so those should be offloaded first.

Each principle has a chapter with examples, case studies, ideas for implementation, etc.  

There are some legitimately good ideas in the book, and some things I’m definitely going to try myself.

That said, it does feel like Newport is giving us a fish, instead of teaching us how to fish.

Here’s an example.  Much of Cal’s “Deep Work” thinking centers around the idea of “flow” as outlined in Csikszentmihalyi’s book “Flow.”  Flow is a book about psychology and talks about a lot more than productivity at work, but it does bring that up.

A person could read “flow”, think about how their team functions at work, and extrapolate out to create an environment that is more conducive to flow.  Given enough time they would probably arrive at many of the same conclusions Newport has in his various books/articles/etc.

Or they could read “Deep Work” and “Digital Minimalism” and “A World Without Email” and have many of those conclusions arrived at for them, by Cal Newport.  And, if I’m being honest, you will probably get through those three books faster than “flow.”  It can be a little dry, and Newport’s books carry you right along.

So I would recommend “A World Without Email.”  Even if you’re someone who regularly engages in metaproductivity, it will give you some new ideas to try out, which is great.  If you’re someone who does not do so, maybe it will get you started down the road of metaproductivity, in which case it is DEFINITELY worth reading.

The Term Metaproductivity still sucks

Seriously, I know I read about this before somewhere.  There’s a term and I’m going to be so embarrassed when someone points it out to me.  Cal Newport probably pointed it out in a previous book and I just can’t remember!  That would be the ultimate irony.