Criticisms and implementations of Newportian Principles, or how to improve knowledge work

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Intro: I’m a huge fan of productivity gurus

I’m a huge fan of the online productivity space. I don’t actually take their advice, I just enjoy the sheer absurdity of their recommendations.

For example, there is this guy who has single-handedly broken the laws of physics by working 21 days a Week, and then there is Gary Vee, who motivates people by encouraging them to visualize their closest family members getting shot in the face.

So while it’s not exactly a high benchmark to clear, Georgetown University professor Cal Newport is one of the better voices out there when it comes to giving practical advice to improve one’s career. For one, he understands that the majority of people have no desire to get rich by flipping houses, daytrading crypto, or becoming a social media influencer. As a result, his books and articles have gained a great deal of traction in the knowledge economy.

Summarizing Newportian Principles

Originally, this post was going to be a review for his latest book Slow Productivity — but as I continued reading, occurred to me the book is itself a summary of his previous works. Much like that one virgin who sat under the apple tree and discovered gravity, Newport has distilled the physics of successfully navigating knowledge economy into three basic laws.

Newport’s first law: “Do less.”

This one is self-explanatory. The majority of knowledge workers are constantly shifting between a number of disparate tasks, which creates a lot of context switching and attention residue. In several of Newport’s books — particularly Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and A World Without Email  — he define strategies which cut away secondary or tertiary activities, which he calls “shallow work” or “pseudo productivity”.

(Sidenote: if you’re suffering with attention issues, I’ve previously written about how to get your attention back)

Newport’s second law: “Work at a natural pace.”

Again, nothing truly revolutionary here, though it is somewhat cathartic to read about; if the entire self-help productivity space could be summarized in a single phrase, it would be: “choose long-term over short-term.“

Newport’s third law: “Obsess over quality.”

This law is effectively a distillation of his previous book So Good They Can’t Ignore You. In that book he essentially refuted the idea of “following your passion“ as useful advice, instead explaining that developing rare and invaluable skills would be more useful, as they can be leveraged to obtain creativity, control, and compensation.

Of course there's a great deal more detail in this books, these videos serve as a good starting point to better understand his key ideas. So good they can't ignore you, Deep work, Digital minimalism, A world without email. 

(Kinda sorta) critiquing Newportian Principles

To reiterate, Newport is light years better than the majority of people who give career advice. Many of his principles, while obvious at present, ran counter to the prevailing narrative at the time they were introduced.

For example, when he released So Good They Can’t Ignore You, "follow your passion" was the dominant method in which people attempted to navigate their careers. Additionally, he was one of the first few people calling out the downside risk of social media, as well bringing as the idea of context switching into the main stream — especially as it relates to the feeling of burnout in the workplace.

Nevertheless, even after reading his work and listening to his most recent batch of interviews in the podcast circuit, I do believe the overall thrust of his message has some blind spots.

First, some his conclusions are occasionally founded on sampling biases. For example, he has often concluded that people who almost completely remove social media from their life are much better off for it.  I don’t think this conclusion is incorrect — the preponderance of evidence with respect to social media and mental health overwhelmingly favours him — but it’s worth noting that he took a sample from his own mailing list. These are people who are already predisposed to Newportian principles, and so the prositive effects of such a complete reduction might be overstated.

A steadier solution for several corners of the knowledge economy would be to bifurcate the two basic parts of most social media apps. The first part, an algorithmically driven feed which is designed to deliver “maximally engaging content” is relatively toxic, and can largely be removed without any negative consequence; the second part, the DM function — which is just a text messaging function wrapped in an aesthetic — tends to be less harmful.

Second, when it comes to doing deep work, I have found that simply “cutting out the distractions” can have its own negative side effects in practice. Specifically, I found that optimizing my physical and online workspace to minimize unwarranted notifications actually made me more distractible. I became so used to having everything calibrated to my needs such that anything less than perfect would greatly diminish my workflow.

In order to counteract this, I believe it’s important to occasionally adopt a "distraction immersion" practice. Which is to say, intentionally going to an otherwise sub optimal place to try and get work done. It doesn’t have to be critical work; even reading a book in a noisy environment does the trick. The ideas to build a capacity to remain focused on task even when there are outside circumstances beyond your control. It’s the attentional equivalent of running with ankle weights on.

Tangentially, I’ve been on zoom calls where the other person doesn’t seem to notice that their fire alarm is chirping ever so often. Their brain has literally filtered out that noise. While this particular example is irritating and potentially unsafe, in the abstract it’s actually a good thing; they’ve accidentally trained their brains to keep focus in the presence of intermittent noise.

Third, I believe that Newport occasionally suffers from a sort of “academic affluenza.” Which is to say, many of the assertions he cooks up in the abstract fail during implementation. For example, he uses a lot of anecdotes; in Slow Productivity, he pulls from the stories of people like Jane Austin, Benjamin Franklin, Jewel, and the Beatles. Occasionally he acknowledges the lack of applicability of the specific circumstances, but instead focusses on the general principles — but again, it's the details which cause these anecdotes to fall short at the time of implementation.

I refer to it as academic affluenza because, as far as I can tell, Newport himself has a relatively high degree of prestige within his field (H-index, citations, etc.). This, coupled with the fact that he’s never actually had a job outside of academia (as far as I am aware), leads him to believe that certain conversations and situations are almost always going to play out in a particular manner. For example, he very often gives the advice that being transparent about your workload and pushing back on assigned tasks will prompt managers and team leads to reassign the work to others, or otherwise slot it in to the backlog so that it might be prioritized at a future period.

This works when you are Cal Newport, or have otherwise attained some degree of status in your respective domain. If you find yourself on the wrong end of such a status discrepancy, however, the more likely answer you are going to receive is a polite variation of: “Tough luck, I don’t care how much stuff you’re working on, these are the timelines, get it done.“

This is not to say that he is wrong in advising people to do less stuff, be less responsive on slack channels, and focus on deep work; rather, I believe it’s important for him to occasionally caveat these statements with “this may be less applicable to your situation if you’re an intern.” (side note: I've previously written about status, and how to deal with being a low status individual)

Which leads to the fourth criticism…

Notice me Atlassian senpai, OR: Some top-down implementations of Newportian Principles

Much of Newports advice — especially around minimizing workload, reducing the “Hyperactive hive mind” of emails and slack messages, and streamlining meetings — can really only be implemented in a top down fashion. If one or two people in a given department are attempting to make good on deep work principles, but they are working in a cultural milieu which runs counter to such ideas, it’s going to lead to frustration and burnout.

That being said, I do think there are relatively simple changes that we can make to our workplace tools that will shift the incentive structures and make deep work and slow productivity more viable. Some of these ideas are so simple they appear borderline dumb, but I honestly do think they could be revolutionary.

(And if I’m being honest, I’ve tried reaching out to the people at Atlassian, Microsoft, zoom, and slack in order to discuss these ideas; as a surprise to absolutely nobody, I received no response. So if any reader actually has the clout to get their attention, feel free to rip these ideas off.)

First: Forced Raking in Jira. Right now, tickets are normally given five levels of prioritization: lowest, low, medium, high, and highest. This is borderline useless. Whenever there is a deadline crunch, the majority of team leads and managers simply assign everything as “high” or “highest”. This creates stress, because the onus falls back onto the worker in order to figure out what to prioritize on any given day.

Instead, imagine a scenario where tickets were forcibly ranked numerically for a given worker with a given sprint. This way, for every additional ticket assigned, it would naturally be given the lowest rank out of all of the outstanding items for a worker. If the team lead decided to increase the priority of this given ticket, it would automatically deprioritize everything of equal or lesser rank.

I honestly think this would be revolutionary, as this would reverse the effort between middle management and worker bees. Right now, middle management can get away with saying “everything is important right now” leaving the worker bees to figure out which activities to take up. With a forced ranking system, the worker bees can blindly choose the activity of the highest rank, and it would be left for middle management to actually think about those rankings.

Second: A separate “Standup” function baked into outlook. Right now, most outlook calendars block out time in one of two ways (appointment or meeting) which is usually connected to some other tool (zoom, WebEx, teams). Adding a separate standup function would be useful, as it would manipulate the typical online meeting environment to be more equitable and productive.

For example, a common occurrence in most stand-up meetings is that the majority of the discussion gets monopolized by a small number of individuals. I propose that a separate standup function would automatically limit the amount of time any given individual gets to speak. In other words, they get a certain amount of time where they get to unmute themselves, and when this time runs out, they are forcibly muted.

Of course, the time limits can be configured, and in order to reset the time limit a person can drop and rejoin the call — but I think even this small bit of friction would keep both team leads and individual contributors cognizant of the fact that standups are supposed to be a high-level discussion of future work items, rather than a technical discussion of immediate action.

Third: implementing “Deep Work” to outlook/slack statuses. Right now, most messaging systems have some variation of the following statuses: available, busy, presenting, do not disturb, away, or off-line. Another simple but effective method of acknowledging deep work is simply make it one of the available statuses that a person can choose from. A worker might be able to block out their calendar specifically for deep work, and the separate status would let everybody know that they are engaged, and cannot afford to task switch.

Of course, “Busy” and “do not disturb” kind of have the same function, but busy usually refers to being in a meeting, and (in my opinion) do not disturb generally has a harsher connotation. Creating a separate status somewhere in between "available" and "do not not disturb" lets people know that you will eventually get back to their message, but it won’t be immediate.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Hopefully some of these deep work principles actually make it into the knowledge work zeitgeist in the near future. If not, we can just do what Gary Vee does, and maximize our productivity by swallowing our chewing gum.