#calnewport — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #calnewport, aggregated by home.social.
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What skill have you developed in the last five years?
Ask most knowledge workers what skills they've developed in the last five years, and the honest answer is "email, instant messaging, and meetings." Not exactly skills you can sell. And AI is making it worse.https://nathans.blog/2026/05/15/what-skill-have-you-developed-in-the-last-five-years/
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What skill have you developed in the last five years?
Ask most knowledge workers what skills they've developed in the last five years, and the honest answer is "email, instant messaging, and meetings." Not exactly skills you can sell. And AI is making it worse.https://nathans.blog/2026/05/15/what-skill-have-you-developed-in-the-last-five-years/
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What skill have you developed in the last five years?
Ask most knowledge workers what skills they've developed in the last five years, and the honest answer is "email, instant messaging, and meetings." Not exactly skills you can sell. And AI is making it worse.https://nathans.blog/2026/05/15/what-skill-have-you-developed-in-the-last-five-years/
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What skill have you developed in the last five years?
Ask most knowledge workers what skills they've developed in the last five years, and the honest answer is "email, instant messaging, and meetings." Not exactly skills you can sell. And AI is making it worse.https://nathans.blog/2026/05/15/what-skill-have-you-developed-in-the-last-five-years/
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What skill have you developed in the last five years?
Ask most knowledge workers what skills they've developed in the last five years, and the honest answer is "email, instant messaging, and meetings." Not exactly skills you can sell. And AI is making it worse.https://nathans.blog/2026/05/15/what-skill-have-you-developed-in-the-last-five-years/
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In Defense of Thinking, by #CalNewport
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In Defense of Thinking, by #CalNewport
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In Defense of Thinking, by #CalNewport
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In Defense of Thinking, by #CalNewport
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In Defense of Thinking, by #CalNewport
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Interesting input on all this noise out there.
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Better Offline’s “Hater Season” - an ongoing roundtable with tech’s greatest haters - continues as Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about the ways in which the media fails to report the truth about AI. (1 h 6 min)
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The Energy Matrix
Not all hours are equal.
High energy → Deep work, creative tasks
Medium energy → Meetings, collaboration
Low energy → Admin, emails, routineMatch the task to the energy. Stop forcing it.
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Ever waste your energy trying to decide what to do?
Something I've been trialling with creative pursuits is having a focus for each day. Wednesday and Saturday I sew, Thursday and Sunday I practice drawing, and Tuesday and Friday I tackle complex knits. (Monday is my day of rest, and every day is a day for general knitting.)
Due to fatigue, I may only manage 30 minutes, or 10, or none at all, but at least my limited energy doesn't all go on dithering about what project to tackle today.
I'm finding the strategy very helpful, and look forward to using it in my writing work (drafting a new book, recording & editing audiobooks, formatting ebooks...) when health permits.
I got the idea from Slow Productivity by Cal Newport - a book well worth a read, even if (like me) you have to wait half a year in a library queue.
#SlowProductivity #CalNewport #knitting #sewing #drawing #ChronicIllness #spoons #LifeHack -
We spend hours on social media.
Are we stressing too much about what it does to us?
Cal Newport has a fresh take worth reading.
https://calnewport.com/are-we-too-concerned-about-social-media/#more-16578
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WRITING IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL DISTRACTION: 7 ways to beat clickbait and focus on work
Career Authors
Digital distraction is every 21st century writer's worst enemy. Here are seven ways to beat digital distraction--and get your writing done, come hell or email.
https://careerauthors.com/writing-in-the-age-of-digital-distraction-7-ways-to-beat-clickbait-and-focus-on-work/#Craft #Life #ATOMICHABITS #CalNewport #clickbait
@indieauthors -
Der Weg zur Slow Productivity
Auch wenn ich Cal Newports neues Buch Slow Productivity eher als eine Zusammenfassung seiner bisherigen Werke und Thesen empfunden habe, hat eine spezifische Methode des Zeitmanagements bei mir besonders gut „klick“ gemacht.https://niklasbarning.de/2024/12/20/der-weg-zur-slow-productivity/
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For 20+ years, GTD has helped me balance work, life, and deeper goals—something Newport's focus on only "deep" tasks overlooks.
Burkeman's Meditations for Mortals, discusses embracing limitations and making intentional choices. He and Allen bring practicality to productivity. Newport’s approach is great for those who can control every minute—but most of us don’t have that luxury.
🌱 #Productivity #GTD #OliverBurkeman #DeepWork #DavidAllen #CalNewport -
Disappointed by Cal Newport's "Slow Productivity":
Sarah Lang takes a deep dive into Newport's latest release, which #productivity buffs will recognize as a "greatest hits" of his other books 👇
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I’m trying another #DigitalDeclutter, as #CalNewport outlined in his #DigitalMinimalism book. I’ll be off Mastodon — and other social media — until April at least.
👋
https://twitter.com/RealAlanDalton/status/1620865064382173200
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@annaecook On that note, I’m looking forward to reading #CalNewport’s “#SlowProductivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout”, which should be available in March.
https://calnewport.com/writing/#books -
Excellent piece from #CalNewport on the importance of being thoughtful about new #Technology.
Are we compliant drones on the face of a #technopoly?
Do we acquiesce to easily to the latest and greatest #tech simply because it is new?
Should we regulate tech even if we lose the next whiz bang thing if it is likely to cause problems for a community? Who gets to decide?
Can we become #technoselectionists?
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/its-time-to-dismantle-the-technopoly
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@nazgul #CalNewport's advice on time-boxing, and to set aside a specific time of day (later rather than earlier: #EatTheFrog First) for limited interactions, is highly sound.
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@vortex_egg
One cheat approach to this I have is to go through the HN daily archive, where HN is a decent prefilter. Often there's a small set of the top 30 (or up to ~100) daily items which are worth a closer look. I'll read a few days behind.On Reddit, if you've got a good subreddit, you can set a date range (day, week, month, year) and then sort by "top" to get the most highly-rated items in that period. Reddit tends not to do a great job of quality selection, but it's not completely worthless.
The third of my two tricks is to just rely on random selection to an extent. If you've got too much material to make an informed choice on, shuffle your deck and select something at random. You'll miss some stuff, yes, but you're making an unbiased rather than a biased selection. You can also apply other filters to noise sources.
#Research #ResearchMethods #LiteratureSearch #InformationOverload #CalNewport #DavidAllen #GettingThingsDone #DeepWork #Zettlekasten #BOTI
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@vortex_egg There are two techniques in particular I'd like to suggest which ... well, they don't fully work but they seem to help:
1) Time block your information-gathering phase. Whether that's on a daily or weekly ongoing basis, or as a project phase, say "I'll scan Twitter for X minutes per day, only". And do that at the end of the day, when you've taken care of high-relevance/payoff tasks first.
2) What I call #BOTI: "Best of the Interval". On a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual ... basis, review the items you've selected as noteworthy from that period as well as the top items from the next smaller intervals, and select some n number of best items. You'll probably find that a good value is 10 <= n <= 100, but do what works for you.
BOTI draws on the 43 folders / tickler file concept, or the round-robin database. Essentially you're determining that no matter how long your research goes on, you're committing to a finite set of retained data.
(This is used in all kinds of IT systems and network monitoring, especially with long-term data history.)
You end up with higher resolution in recent / near periods, lower resolution as you go back in time. But you're constantly trying to filter up the best stuff. Since assessment can take time, you'll re-scan earlier selections to see if you'd missed something of relevance (and you can always break protocol for something especially good). But you've got a structure and have set limits on scope.
You'll also start to develop a sense with time as to what actually provides usefulness, and if you track sources, which of those are most valuable. Filter noise aggressively.
A source that sometimes generates signal but usually doesn't ... is virtually always noise. Signal tends to come through, eventually.
(This is related to my "block fuckwits" advice.)
#Zettlekasten #DeepWork #GettingThingsDone #DavidAllen #CalNewport #InformationOverload #LiteratureSearch #ResearchMethods #Research
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@vortex_egg This is a core challenge and failure of any academic. (Or unaffiliated researcher.) I struggle with this constantly.
That was the subtext of this toot:
https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/106933960589722037Cal Newport does a fair bit of writing on this, aimed at both academics and professionals. Deep Work is probably the best starting point.
A good academic programme (especially for re-entering / nontraditional students) should also address this. Talk to your advisor or department. That library-skills course you're taking is actually directly addressing this, or should (and I'd still reall like to see the course notes / outline / syllabus / readings).
David Allen's Getting Things Done is another good general time-management / goals-management guide.
Zettlekasten (or an equivalent notes-and-references-tracking system) is also very helpful.
#Research #ResearchMethods #LiteratureSearch #InformationOverload #CalNewport #DavidAllen #GettingThingsDone #DeepWork #Zettlekasten
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