NotitiesDr. Cal Newport — How to Enhance Focus and Improve Productivity
Huberman Lab
Dr. Cal Newport bespreekt de impact van technologie op productiviteit en de cultuur van constante werkdemonstratie, wat heeft geleid tot burn-out bij kenniswerkers. Daarnaast benadrukt hij het belang van verveling en pauzes voor creativiteit en neuroplasticiteit, en hoe deze elementen kunnen helpen bij het verbeteren van focus en het succes van diep werk.
Demonstrating Effort in the Front Office IT Revolution Summary: The integration of technology like computers, networks, email, and later tools like Slack revolutionized how productive effort was measured. The ability to demonstrate effort at a very fine grain level through email and messaging tools throughout the day, including from home with smartphones, led to a culture of constant labor demonstration. This shift in productivity dynamics, combined with the onset of knowledge worker burnout and exhaustion, was exacerbated by an increased expectation to constantly display productivity. The clash between traditional productivity measurements and the new tech-driven demonstration of effort led to a significant shift in the productivity landscape, as evidenced by the change in tone in productivity books from the early 90s to the early 2000s. Transcript: Speaker 1 The problem came when we had this general way of measuring approximating productive effort, which wasn't very good, but whatever. I want to see you're at the office and you're doing things. The problem was the front office IT revolution. I'm essentially a technocratic. I see everything through the lens of technology in my writing. We got computers, we got networks, we got email. Pseudo productivity can't be sustainable in that context because now with something like email, then later tools like Slack, I can demonstrate effort at a very fine grain, because I can send an email, respond to this, jump onto a Slack conversation. I can now do that at a very fine grain level and essentially everywhere and anywhere. All throughout my day, I can be demonstrating labor. At home, I can be demonstrating labor because we have mobile computing. We get the smartphone revolution. There's now an ability to constantly be demonstrating effort at all points of our day. That's where I think the wheels came off the bus. Led to this point that got worse and worse, starting the early 2000s and hit ahead in the pandemic of knowledge worker burnout, knowledge worker exhaustion and nihilism of what's going On with my job. All I do is zoom all day. What's happening? I think that's shooter productivity plus front office IT revolution. They did not play nice together. You can see this, by the way, if you look even at productivity books, you see this huge shift that happens early 90s versus early 2000s. It's like a completely shift in tone. (Time 1:10:29)
Tags: geloofjehetzelf
Embrace Boredom for Improved Focus Summary: Embracing moments of boredom without seeking distractions helps in breaking Pavlovian connections in the mind. By occasionally not giving in to distractions, the brain learns to operate in a varied cognitive landscape, making it easier to focus when needed. Making boredom more tolerable increases the likelihood of success in tasks requiring intense focus and repetition, such as deep work. Transcript: Speaker 1 Now, this is an idea I've written about before. In Deepork, I had this chapter called Embrace Boredom. That was the entire idea. So the idea was boredom by itself is not I think laudable. There's a reason why it feels distressing. When things feel distressing, that's usually an evolutionary signal that there's something going on here. But what I was arguing in that chapter was exactly what you're talking about. You should have some moments every day where you're free from distraction, even though you could be accessing distraction and you want to. And like a little bit each day, 20 minutes each day, and then maybe a longer session once a week, like a couple hours. My argument for that was it's about breaking a Pavlovian connection in this sense. So if it's every time I feel bored, I'm lack of novel stimuli, I get this release of the phone. Your mind is really going to make that association of like, this is what we always do. If sometimes you don't, it's a different cognitive landscape, right? Your mind is sometimes we get the distraction, sometimes we don't. That's a much better place to be because now when it comes time to actually focus on something, your mind's like, I've been here before, we don't always get the distraction. So it isn't going back early 20th century psychology, there's probably a more neuroscientific way to think about this. But it's like breaking Pavlovian loops. If like sometimes we at the end of the day, I'm exhausted. It's Instagram time and it like scratches an itch. But other times I'm bored, I'm in line at the pharmacy and I don't look at the phone. My brain learns, like, yeah, we don't always do it. And so the idea is that if you make boredom more tolerable, then you're much more likely to succeed with doing things that are boring but hard. And I think deep work, for example, is boring. Just in the clinical sense of there's lack of novel stimuli, you're just doing the same thing for a long time. So I've always advocated for that is like, you shouldn't be super uncomfortable with boredom. Like don't go seeking it. (Time 1:31:35)
Tags: creativiteit
Embracing Pauses for Accelerated Neuroplasticity Summary: Boredom is a catalyst for creative insights, indicating the need for a change. Pauses in learning and activities trigger neuroplasticity similar to sleep states and deep rest. Gap effects, observed in music and math practice, show that intermittent breaks can speed up neural rewiring processes, enhancing learning and memory. Transcript: Speaker 1 I'm not a big believer of, and boredom is where all creative insight comes from. I think it's a strong evolutionary cue, like, leave this state. But you do have to have some tolerance for it. Speaker 2 I wonder if we need a different word than boredom. Are you familiar with this notion of gap effects in learning? These gap effects are similar to the effects of neural processing during sleep, focused attention with some agitation triggers neuroplasticity and learning, but it's during sleep, In particular deep sleep, rapid eye movement, sleep, states of deep rest, maybe in some forms of meditation, that the actual rewiring takes place. And then there's this literature about gap effects, which have been demonstrated for music, for math, for many things, in which if people say are practicing new scales on the piano, For instance, but can be any scale. And then they intermittently are queued by a buzzer to just stop and do nothing. The hippocampus, which is involved in learning memory, replays the action, sometimes in reverse, just as it occurs during sleep, at a rate of maybe 20 or 30 times faster at the neural Level. We're not talking about boredom. What we're talking about is pauses during which perhaps we are obtaining accelerated neuroplasticity. (Time 1:33:21)
Episode AI notes Embracing moments of boredom without seeking distractions helps in breaking Pavlovian connections in the mind Making boredom more tolerable increases the likelihood of success in tasks requiring intense focus and repetition, such as deep work Embracing Pauses for Accelerated Neuroplasticity. Boredom is a catalyst for creative insights, indicating the need for a change. Pauses in learning and activities trigger neuroplasticity similar to sleep states and deep rest. Gap effects, observed in music and math practice, show that intermittent breaks can speed up neural rewiring processes, enhancing learning and memory. (Time 0:00:00)