8/10/2023 0 Comments Cal newport keystone habits![]() Going analog with paper and pencil was the best advice I got.Productivity YouTube is filled with breathless videos about optimizing systems and squeezing every ounce of speed out of your common habits. The progress plot shot up and didn’t stop until I finished. I couldn’t stop writing: I wrote on the margins, between the lines, and on external pages. It made sense at the time but what I didn’t expect is that my creative (and editorial) juices started flowing that well. In one of the sessions, I mentioned the problem I was having with my writing and the counselor suggested I print my dissertation and edit it with a pencil. This is when I went to the university’s writing center and asked for help. I would stare at it for hours with little to add. I started pushing myself and set an almost impossible goal of 4 pages per day. A week later, I saw the scary truth I was slow, very slow. Then, at one of those “creative distraction” moments, I thought to myself “Given my rate of writing, how long will it take me to write, say, 130 pages?” I ventured into shell scripting and “gnuplotting” to plot the increase in pages daily (assuming 250 words/page). ![]() In the beginning, I was more lax and thought I still had time to write. I have just submitted my PhD dissertation after a year of writing. My advice to anyone else looking to take the plunge into disconnecting would be to figure out which tasks you “need” to be digitized and then work from there. In short, it has been a liberating experience, one of which I can see why Cal would take the time to write about. Maybe it is the fact that staring blankly into space while trying to think your way through a difficult problem is far more conducive to actually solving the problem than staring at a computer screen. When doing so, I’ve noticed that besides being detached from a box of distractions like Cal mentioned, the process of physically thumbing through my notes or books adds a dimension to my studying that has just been lacking as of late. Other tasks though, like the so-called deep tasks such as working through a proof, I too have found to be better suited for sitting down with paper, pencil, and my books (and any of the digitized notes that I now print). For me, this has been tasks such as taking notes in lecture (via a tablet) because the digital format both preserves them for the long haul and keeps them extremely organized for future reference. What I’m starting to realize is that there exists a balance between digital and paper, and rather than looking for ways to “go digital” for everything, we need to find the tasks which best lend themselves to being digitized. Over the past few years, I have become more and more digitized as I have fallen victim to the falsehood that it would simplify my life and make me more efficient. I’ve been experimenting with a similar idea for the last couple of weeks myself. Try it for yourself: you won’t be disappointed. I’m now more likely, for example, to venture to a library with only a notebook to work on a proof, or to leave my laptop in my bag at my office to dig into some paper reviews.Īnalog work is underrated. Inspired by this observation, I’ve found myself increasingly trying to carve out tasks that can be done free from a screen. Because we use these machines for so much of our efforts, the staccato rhythm of broken concentration they generate begins to feel natural - as if this is the necessary experience of work.Īll it takes, however, is a forced break from the digital - as I experience when polishing my books - to remember the levels of depth we’re missing, and the satisfactions they can bring. ![]() A computer is a portal to near endless distraction. The magic ingredient, I suspect, is the analog nature of the process. Because this work doesn’t need a computer, I tend to settle in somewhere conducive to concentration, like The Chair (above), and end up working with more focus for longer sessions than normal. When I polish a book manuscript, I always work with printouts and a pen (as I also advise, in Straight-A, for paper writing). Case in point, while many stages of pulling together a book end up going slower than expected, there’s one stage, in particular, that typically goes quicker: polishing the manuscript. I’ve written enough books at this point to notice trends about the process.
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