Joe Fuller: Georgetown computer scientist Cal Newport has made a name for himself challenging conventional wisdom about work. He set the tone early on with a New York Times opinion piece refuting the hoary admonition to “follow your passion” in choosing a career. He’s gone on to examine the nexus between digital technology and human creativity and productivity. He argues that business’s use of distributed systems is still in its adolescence, if not its infancy. He goes further, though, to suggest the proliferation of digital platforms and tools is actually undermining productivity and inhibiting creativity.

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School Professor and Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. It’s my pleasure today to welcome Cal to the show. A prolific commentator, he’s a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the author of a half a dozen books deconstructing knowledge work. He’s also a podcaster in his own right. As host of Deep Questions, he dispenses advice on work-life balance and focus. We’ll talk about deep work, the future of the office, the Great Resignation, and quiet quitting. And we’ll also discuss issues like virtual reality, the movement for a four-day work week, and how to sustain concentration in a distracting digital environment.

In a Managing the Future of Work podcast first, we’ll be presenting this wide-raging discussion over two episodes. Welcome to the podcast, Cal.

Cal Newport: Well, thanks for having me. I’ve been looking forward to it.

Fuller: I’m very interested in how you got interested in the future of work, particularly given your tech background. I got interested in it through the lens of general management, working with senior executives and companies, and hearing them complain about the skills, the workforce, who was available, the productivity of people. How did you get interested in the topic?

Newport: I stumbled into it. I was training to become an academic computer scientist. But going all the way back to my undergraduate days, I was writing public-facing books that at first had nothing to do with my academic career. So I wrote a trio of books aimed at students, and then right around the time I was doing my postdoc, I wrote a book about career advice. I was taking a contrarian look at career advice and making this argument that “follow your passion” was actually not very good advice; it was too simplistic. It missed the nuances of how people actually cultivate a career that they really love. As part of that book, I made this argument that what really matters is building up rare and valuable skills. So I put that book out in the world—this is sort of completely distinct from my academic work. I’m a theoretical computer scientist, got hired at Georgetown, a professor there. And there’s this feedback to that book, where people are asking, “Okay, well, how do I get really good at things that are rare and valuable? If that’s going to be the foundation for building a career you love, how do I do that?” That led to a book I wrote relatively early into my assistant professor position at Georgetown that was called Deep Work, where I was talking about the power of unbroken concentration. That was my back-door entrance into the world of the future of work, because what that brought up was all these questions about, why is deep work so difficult if it’s so valuable? Why is it so hard? And a lot of the answers had to do with technology. A lot of the answers had to do with work processes. And that kicked off a trilogy of books—I call it my tech and society trilogy: Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and then A World Without Email—looking at the intersection of technology and work, intersection of technology and our lives, both of those threads.

Fuller: Well, I certainly got introduced your work through the Deep Work book. Let’s decouple those for a second. Let’s go back to your proposition about the shallowness of—and really, kind of platitudinous-ness of—“follow your passion,” but rather, developing really honed, valuable skills as a way to build your career. Is that a function of, when you’ve got those skills, and it gives you opportunities to exercise your expertise and have a great impact, that that, in turn, becomes an object of your passion? Or how do you explain the difference?

Newport: Well, I had an economic analysis of career satisfaction. Essentially, I was saying, as you get better or accumulate more rare and valuable skills, imagine that what you’re accumulating is some sort of metaphorical substance that I called “career capital.” And I was arguing, that’s your leverage to push your career toward attributes and traits that resonate in a way from attributes and traits that don’t. The fact that a job matches a content area that you’re interested in doesn’t actually get you very far in terms of the day-to-day feeling of fulfillment. It’s much broader traits—things like autonomy, the type of lifestyle it supports, feelings of mastery, feelings of connection. Rare and valuable skills are your currency. The problem with telling people to follow your passion is that, if you really dive down deeper into that proposition, it is supposing that most people are hardwired, perhaps even genetically, with a predisposition for a particular career that happens to exist in the 21st-century knowledge or job market, and that by matching somehow your work to this preexisting inclination, that you’re going to love your work every day. That was just way too simplistic, and it didn’t match the stories. It’s something you cultivate, and you cultivate it by building skills and then taking that skill out for a spin, and say, “I’m getting better. What do I want to do with these skills?” That’s how you craft a career more often than not that you end up passionate about.

Fuller: And certainly, if you’ve got those valuable skills, then you do get more choice, more flexibility, more self-direction, the ability to shape the environment around you to one that satisfies your aspirations, both inside and outside the workplace. And, of course, you can pursue a passion where you don’t have a very high aptitude quotient, and that doesn’t necessarily lead to a very good outcome. So let’s go to the Deep Work book, which described how the way technology is evolving has increasingly impinged on the ability for people to land substantial, sustained focus on the most essential parts of their job, because there’s this incredible technology-supported, enabled, hurly-burly of all sorts of things bombarding people. How did you first observe that? And talk a little bit about how you feel organizations need to change the way they’re designing work and workplaces to enable deep work.

Newport: Well, so first of all, “deep work,” just to throw out definitions, is my term for when you focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. So there are two pieces to that definition. One, the fact that it’s cognitively demanding—this matches the reality, especially in the American context, knowledge work jobs, in particular, becoming more elite, in the sense that it’s more and more relying on and rewarding complex, cognitive skills. Robert Reich would’ve called this the “symbolic analyst.” And this was the new, emerging sector that had to do all this complicated stuff with their brains. Now broad sections of the knowledge sector are dependent on what I would say “non-trivial cognitive work” or outsourcing and automating the easy stuff. So you need to be able to do elite-level cognitive work increasingly just to succeed in your career. Then the “without distraction” piece is founded in neuroscience. So in order to actually get anything near your full value of thought potential out of your brain, you have to avoid context switching. If, while trying to do this hard thing, I temporarily glance at an inbox or I temporarily glance at Slack or someone comes by my open office and taps on my shoulder, that’s going to initiate a really complex neurochemical process that’s going to bring your focus away from that main task and actually make it pretty difficult to get back to that for a while. And as you pointed out, we have accidentally created an environment of ongoing ad hoc communication email Slack teams and a proliferation of meetings. So we’ve accidentally created an environment where exactly the skill that produces the underlying value at most organizations is getting harder to do.

Fuller: You were very clear about talking through the lens of cognitive work. Is it cognitive work, or is it non-routine work? I’m thinking about an artisan, let’s say. Maybe building a custom cabinet or making a beautiful pot is inherently cognitive, but I also think of that, of course, as non-routine work that requires real focus. Is that distinction one you’ve thought about and you think is relevant?

Newport: I think so. I think you could just as well use “skilled” or “skilled non-routine.” I mean, interestingly enough, artisans don’t need to read a book about deep work. They already figured that out. They already know, “I can’t produce this beautiful piece of woodwork or artwork if I’m checking my email.” Writers know the same thing, especially literary novelists. They figured this out a long time ago. They will go to incredible lengths to get away from distraction. Athletes know this. You have to visualize and lock in on the skill you’re trying to build. So skilled non-routine work in a lot of other fields, people recognize you need full concentration. The last place where we recognize the importance of this is knowledge work, where we say, “Eh, I’d rather you just answer my Slack.” It’s like it’s the last bastion of people doing skilled non-routine work, where we pay no respect to the actual mechanics of how the human brain operates.

Fuller: Let’s go to your book about nirvana, A World Without Email. How has that communications overload brought us to the breaking point here, and how do you think we can interdict it? When you’re talking to business leaders, even people you work with at the university or in writing, what are you saying to them about how to address the systems effects of having this all intrusive 7/24—the sender decides whether something is relevant to the recipient, and the sender defines the way that data is defined and presented, and when and how it’s sent?

Newport: Well, I think there are two forces that are coming together here, and this is at the core of that book. A World Without Email started with a question of, why can’t we do more deep work? It was actually trying to understand that history. And I think there are two things that came together. So partially, just introducing low-friction digital communication, when that happened—this was largely in the 1990s, when email technologies moved through front offices—it makes it possible to collaborate in a way that I call the “hyperactive hivemind workflow,” where you just figure things out on the fly with unscheduled ad hoc messaging. It’s a disaster, because what happens is, once you have a non-trivial number of ongoing ad hoc conversations, you really have no choice but to constantly monitor these channels, because there might be, let’s say, four or five messages have to go back and forth to reach a decision on some question. Maybe that decision has to be reached today, because it’s relevant to a client visit tomorrow. That means those four or five messages have to get passed back and forth in the next few hours, which means I have to see each of those pretty soon after it arrives, which means I have to check my inbox once every five or six minutes—and I’m not making that number up out of nowhere. That actually comes out of data. That’s what the average knowledge worker is now checking their inbox at that frequency—once every five to six minutes. That is a feature of the hyperactive hivemind. But then, the other force is, well, why would we use that mode of collaborating? I mean, email is not bad. It’s a great way to broadcast information or send contracts. So why did we start collaborating that way once email came along? And there, I argue, the issue is that knowledge work embraced too strongly this notion of workflow autonomy: The knowledge worker is autonomous. It’s management by objectives. Give them their objectives, give them motivation, let them figure out on their own how to do their own work. I think it was in that culture of individual autonomy that work structures fell into this Nash equilibrium of inefficiency, where it was the lowest common denominator, it’s the easiest thing to do, and no one individual can escape from it. Because if you stop checking your inbox, you’re now the problem. So we’re stuck at a local minima in the fitness landscape of possible ways of collaborating, and we’re stuck there because we have this reliance on autonomy. Productivity is personal. That’s not my job as a manager. You read David Allen. I don’t know, that’s up to you. It’s not my job to tell you how to do your work. I just want to make sure that you see the OKR [objectives and key results], and we have a mission statement hung up on the wall. And so I think those are the two forces that created the disaster we see right now.

Fuller: So it would seem, it’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy—the more you fall into that loop, the more you’re a victim of it, because it just compounds, and you’re constantly being interrupted. And immediately, each person that’s in that email chain is being interrupted. And suddenly, everyone is just waiting for the next interruption, as opposed to actually making some progress. It would explain, I would think, empirically why so many corporate processes—and that’s of course, a domain I live in a lot—always get attenuated. Deadlines are always missed, or things are hurried at the last minute. One of the wonderful but bizarre illustrations of that is corporate budget processes, where often 90 days is invested in creating a budget. Then the budget is submitted. It’s rejected by senior management. The whole thing is redone in three days. Now you’ve written off a massive investment in scientific management of constructing the budget, only to have it tossed out simply because what the deliverables should look like and what the results that are being sought have not been communicated. We’re talking in the fall of 2022. We’re entering what I describe as a next-normal relative to Covid. What’s your point of view as to how the Covid experience, the move to remote work, how has that reflected these trends you’ve been tracing for a while, and what do you think the implications are?

Newport: Well, early in Covid—so we’re talking now early May 2020—I published a forward-looking article in The New Yorker about remote work, and I made two predictions. So the first prediction I made is, due to all this haphazardness I’ve been talking and writing already about—the way that we just rock and roll with ad hoc back-and-forth hyperactive hivemind communication—I said the sudden shift to remote work is going to make what’s bad about that worse, and that we’re going to see people push to a limit of absurdity and exhaustion when we shift to remote. My second prediction was, there’s optimism here, because that might actually spark action, and that might be the pressure we need. It becomes so intolerable that companies will say, “Wait a second, we actually have to rethink how we collaborate. We can’t just do this in an ad hoc fashion.” The issue is, I was only right about one of those two.

Fuller: Right, the first.

Newport: The first was right. I mean, it got crazy. I would get these messages from people who say, “My biggest issue is figuring out when to go to the bathroom, because I have eight hours of stacked Zoom meetings,” which if you zoom out from that reality, it’s like a Kafka play. It makes no sense. It’s like a satire about work devolving into just talking about work. I mean, it’s almost a joke. Things got terrible because of the increased overhead. We needed new work, and communication was less efficient because we lost all the informal heuristics of grabbing people in the hallway and after-meeting chances. And so things did spiral to a pretty bad place. But it didn’t spark change. And the reason why I think it didn’t spark change is, everything else was bad, too. And so people were just in a mindset of, this is a tragic bad time, so this is no worse than any of these other bad things that are happening right now. And everyone just sort of threw up their hands. People were not in a mindset of, let’s make changes. Instead, they were a mindset of, how do I get my kids, who are home instead of being in school, out of the room when I have to Zoom with the COO? And now, I think when we see the current unrest or knowledge work labor organizing that’s happening around remote work, I happen to think that’s pretty symbolic. I think a lot of that is an expression of the frustration with how inefficient and how poor our work processes are. But people lack more nuance about what we can change, what we can improve, and the only thing they can get their arms around is, well maybe we should stay working remotely, or maybe we should make the work week four days. I think the fact that people are so energized about those speaks to the bigger truth that they’re ready for change. It’s just, we don’t know—or they don’t know—what that change could look like. There’s almost a failure of imagination in this current moment, which is kind of rough, because we’re frustrated, but people don’t really know where to aim that frustration. And managers are saying, “Well, yeah, I guess you could just work remote,” but that’s not really making things better. It was pretty hard during Covid. Being remote wasn’t a cure-all. And that’s where we are right now. We’re stuck.

Fuller: When you think about these responses, and you think about maybe how we ought to be framing the discussion, what would you introduce for discussion—rather than, well, let’s control the chaos by just making it four days a week as opposed to five days a week? And also, how does this feed into your thinking about back to work, which is what a tremendous number of companies are wrestling with right now, where they’re consistently finding—it’s like some kind of universal mathematical constant—they can get a third of their workers to show up, but it’s not always the same third, and it’s never a whole lot more than a third.

Newport: Well, so here’s an important observation I think about what happened with Covid is, there is a sector of the knowledge economy that, even before Covid, had a lot of success with remote work. There’s been very large software development shops that over the years have figured out how to successfully be remote. I don’t know that Covid was even much of a big disruption for a lot of these companies, that they already had everything figured out. The reason is that software development, for various historical reasons, has much more structured processes. Most software development shops are running some sort of agile methodology, probably a variation of Scrum or Kanban. They have shared transparent task boards with statuses of task and assignments to people. They have structured collaborative moments to figure out who’s working on what. They use a pull system, which I think is critical. You pull something new on your plate to work on when you’re done with the thing that you just finished. So there’s no notion of this sort of informal overload as people just throw more stuff on your plate because they’re trying to get it off of their own. The only way remote work is going to be successful is if you have similarly evolved and smart processes. Remote work is not compatible with the hyperactive hivemind. If you’re not going to overhaul your processes to be more structured and transparent—like it is in software development—remote work is just going to be in some sense a benefit you’re giving employees that’s going to actually drag down your organization. And I think that’s what we’re going to see in the near future is, because most companies aren’t doing that change, remote work capability is going to be pulled increasingly in. It’s going to be diluted down to a hybrid schedule, or maybe you get one day a week. And it’s going to be seen sort of as a pill the company has to swallow, basically, because it’s a benefit that’s going to be similar to ping pong tables or the dry cleaner being at the Googleplex or something like that. It’s not going to actually be some sort of major move for productivity. Until we fix processes, remote work is just not compatible. Flip side, once we figure out smarter ways to work, we have all had a taste of, we don’t have to be in an office, and there could be really rapidly a reinflation of a more remote world. I think that’s possible, if not inevitable, in the future, but it’s not going to be next year. I think things are going to get worse before they get better.

Fuller: We have a concept developed here that you’ll be certainly familiar with about disruptive competition, and to a certain degree that’s become an infinitely elastic concept. But one can imagine the emergence over time of remote native companies that are drawing on this type of insight and not trying to hybridize hybrid work by splicing it into the old system. How extendable do you think that software engineering model is? Can you see that going into innovation processes and sales processes in a way that we’d really get the type of benefit that you’re calling out, that those software engineering firms can gain from relying on a remote model?

Newport: Well, first I think, yes. And you can start to find examples of it. I’m working on a book now where, I found a really good case study in the MIT Management Review. It was actually at the Broad Institute right there in Cambridge, and how they switched to a pull model, first for their actual sort of genetic assembly line of moving samples through their sequencers—that was one of the things they were doing for a lot of different research groups. But then the different groups at the institute pulled that model into their knowledge work, and it worked really well. I also want to underscore the thing you said just earlier, because I think it’s absolutely right, which is the disruptive potential of remote native companies. And I wrote an essay about this in the fall of 2021, where I was talking about the theories of an entrepreneur named Chris Herd. And his claim, which I thought was pretty persuasive, is that the important thing that happened vis-à-vis remote work in the pandemic was not Apple temporarily going remote. It was the fact that you have a whole generation of startups that were native remote. Now, his argument is that as these companies grow, they are going to have a competitive advantage from that native remoteness. They have access to more talent, and their real estate overhead—their office space cost per individual—is going to be lower. That advantage means they are going to flourish in their relative ecosystems. So you’re going to have these successful strategies evolve from the native remote startups. And then what he argued is that you’re going to have cross pollination of these ideas through the vector probably of investment capital. So what’s going to happen is, you’re going to have then some sort of investment fund saying, “Hey, wait a second, if we hire one of these experts from one of these native remote companies that grew big, we could then use the same expertise for all of the companies in our portfolio, get a 10 percent to 15 percent competitive edge. That’s exactly what we’re looking for, that’s what these type of proprietor capital funds are doing anyways, and then that’s going to cross pollinate these ideas into many other industries. So his thing is, and I think this is smart, forget 2023, this will take more time. Fast-forward to 2026 and now, you’re going to see in many industries a very mature evolved remote native style processes in place more broadly speaking. That’s where we’re really going to reap the transformation that the pandemic actually seeded.

Fuller: That makes good sense. I mean, I can easily imagine funds that are predicated on, “We look for remote native companies independent of their sector. We are looking for operating partners with deep expertise in remote native management, as opposed to somebody that’s worked in six different firms and is now going to come in as an operating partner to my PE or my VC fund to bring their expertise in the world that’s gradually fading into the rearview mirror.” Can we talk about this a little bit though as work as a sociological event? Most people, certainly white-collar workers, have historically spent a majority of their waking hours of their lives working. Don’t we risk kind of siphoning off the type of human interaction that begets motivation, teamwork, esprit de corps, commitment, moral purpose if everyone is sitting with several bank monitors in some room in their apartment or house or condo?

Newport: Yeah, I think it’ll be incredibly disruptive to the sociological fabric of our culture. If we actually do get to that future where, again, we see these ideas, it spreads to multiple industries, and soon 80 percent of knowledge workers are in their condo, they’re living wherever they’re leveraging geographical arbitrage to live near family or near nature, and everyone is just remote. You were right to say we should not dismiss or be utopian about what that impact will be. I mean, we’ve seen shifts like this before in the history of commerce. I mean, think about what happened with the rise of industrialization, how big of a dislocation that was for the human experience, which for the prior 10,000 years had been very autonomous. You’re with your family, you’re in your village, you’re in a field, you’re in control of the details of your day-to-day work. Your work is in rhythm with the seasons. That’s how we’ve been doing things since the Neolithic Revolution. Two hundred and fifty years ago, suddenly, it’s you leave your family, you go to a city, you live in a tenement, and you’re working set hours doing the same repetitive motion. This is why the arts and crafts movement blew up in the 1800s, late 1800s, trying to push back against, “Wait, this is incredibly alienating.” I think you’re right to point out this could be equally as alienating. I don’t know if that’s going to stop it. It never has before. Factories were a huge generator of capital. I think it’s going to be a more probably efficient distribution of cognitive capital to be in some sort of very smartly controlled remote world. But I think you are absolutely right. We shouldn’t just be utopian, like, “Oh, it’ll be great. We don’t have to commute, and I can wear shorts instead of having to wear a suit, and we’ll all be happier.” There’s trade offs.

Fuller: It certainly suggests that we might get innovations and things like residential real estate, where rather than it being based solely on location, it might be here are the type of people with these types of interests that this is designed for. So you track people with more shared interests, more natural community groups. It might be some interesting opportunities to disrupt in those complementary sectors, as well as in product and service strategies.

Newport: But then the disruption of commercial real estate, that’s where it gets interesting. We could be optimistic though. All right, that’s a lot of capital. It could be reinvested into other things that maybe will better support human flourishing than more class A office skyscrapers. But it’s interesting, it’s an interesting question to try to untangle.

Fuller: Well, it certainly gets you into all sorts of intermediate-term questions for policymakers about what type of development are you trying to encourage and how quickly do you allow people to repurpose buildings. You mentioned that there are certain movements like the four-day-week movement that are gaining some currency certainly from progressive voices. How do you feel about those? And do you think that they’re going to, if we were to move forward with them, they would actually do anything substantial to address the phenomena that you’ve been setting?

Newport: I think you have to get to the deeper issues. And the problem I have with the four-day work week proposals, the problem I have with can’t we all just stay remote proposals, the problem I have with the French experiment with trying to actually pass labor laws about things like email behavior or whether or not you can work during lunch, it’s all missing the fundamental issue. And the fundamental issue is this hyperactive hivemind workflow that’s fueled by this culture of haphazard autonomy. You fix that, work becomes sustainable. Everything is possible. Not only does that improve work, if you fix that issue, you actually can create realistic targets for labor reform. So if we actually have to all agree, here’s how we assign work and make sure that people aren’t overloaded, here’s our collaborative processes. When that becomes more centralized and transparent, now you actually have a target for reform. Now you can actually say, “Look, the way we run things here is that no one should have more than seven projects at a time, and we’re very careful about that. Seven is too much, it should be five.” You now have the ability to do fine-tune labor organizing reform. Without that, we just have these blunt instruments. How many days we work? That’s an industrial optimization. That’s something that makes sense in an era of factory labor, and this was the context in which the Fair Labor Standard Acts was passed in the 1930s, where if you work in a factory, the only knob you can turn that’s relevant was really how many hours you actually work. It makes less sense for knowledge work, where you have a pile of work on your plate that you have to get done. The work week is roughly just an agreement about when it’s appropriate to set up meetings. It doesn’t change anything about what you actually have to accomplish or how stressed you are or how many days you really have to work. And it’s going to be in processes getting rid of the hivemind that we make those corrections.

Fuller: It’s interesting the degree to which you see this closed-loop architecture where government policy in the United States, certainly in the E.U. is essentially as it relates to work, essentially a reflection of Taylor-ite thinking, and that regulation, for example, assumes that normalcy in work is you are employed full time by someone. And I do everything from tax to benefit status through that assumption. And anything that’s different from that is an exception. And that it’s very, very hard for a lot of policymakers. A good illustration right now would be how Brussels is very interested in trying to inhibit the growth of the gig economy in the E.U. because they equate that with Uber and they equate Uber with badness. They don’t equate it as a way to solve the dire digital skill shortage in Europe by taking digital talent and making it accessible to all those companies that can’t find people to provide them digital skills on a full-time basis. The stickiness of tradition is not limited to just what happens in big companies, that metastasize into rules, regulations, even the way the company, the government funds its cashflow with bimonthly deductions from your payroll. Let’s shift focus, because you and I are both in a benighted industry called “education.” How do you think about the role of education in two ways? First of all, how has it been affected by the phenomena that you’ve studied and commented on so articulately? And how will education have to change if some of the types of changes that this conversation is anticipating actually start coming about?

Newport: This is an industry, as you know, where this notion of autonomy is pushed to an extreme. So in a company, yes, we have this issue of productivity is personal. But you also have managers who can say, “I’m looking at the bottom line, this isn’t working.” You can’t even do that in academia. And so you really see that unfold in academia with all of these different independent fiefdoms that are all trying to optimize whatever it is they want to do and justify their existence. And the fuel for these fiefdoms, their currency, is time and attention of other people. So then you have a sort of uncontrolled megaflora of all these different committees and groups and administrators who are all trying to pull from this finite pool of attention from, let’s say, the faculty among other people to fuel their own things. And there’s no actual control over it, because it’s not the culture of academia. So I wrote a piece on this for the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years ago, and they titled it “Is Email Making Professors Stupid?” But my argument in that piece, and this is very utopian, is higher education should be the opposite. It should be the one place, maybe this could be the place where you are exposed to what happened when you’re actually trying to optimize for life of the mind, trying to actually optimize for the cognitive production of original ideas and the shaping of new minds that can produce original ideas, that the universities could be citadels of concentration, that students come out and have that skill, and they see that and they’ve experienced it and they see what that’s like, and they go off to start companies or to be employed by companies and they would bring that thinking there. If you wanted to start a university that would have Nobel Prize winners, Turing Award winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, so that the top faculty in the world attract that within just a year, all you would have to do is make one guarantee: If you come here, we’re not going to give you an email address.

Fuller: Well, I must admit there are days in my week where, not that there’d be much demand for my service, Cal, but I would jump at that. I’m particularly interested in the notion of deep work as a learned skill. Certainly, if we look, for example, at the data about average hours for students enrolled in four-year universities of study declined by a factor of 50 percent over the last 20 years. And of course, universities are now maybe a little bit platitudinously fighting over, we have climbing walls and we have lazy streams going through campus, and we have great collegiate athletics or whatever else, and competing more on the distractions and many things that would breed those distractions. Is that a legitimate aspiration, that we could extend the logic that you’re expressing about faculty to the students? And this is really a discipline that we ought to be trying to instill in people?

Newport: I think so. I think it should be. What is our business in 21st-century America? It’s sharp thinking—the ability to add original value to information. That is what we do. But what are we missing? The building of a culture that inculcates that ability starting at a very young age. I think we could be doing that. I think concentration is a skill that can be practiced. I think it’s something we should be teaching as early as grammar school. It’s something that we should be emphasizing. I think, for sure, we should be doing that at the university level. I think we should have educational and cultural aspirations and structures around concentration as a tier-one skill. That would then bleed out and help create these changes we were talking about earlier in industry. Because if you really admire concentration, you really respect concentration, and then you turn around and see the average inbox of a corporate knowledge worker, it’s horrifying. I do think we need a more rigorous pedagogy around life of the mind, sustained concentration, cognitive discomfort, pushing through that discomfort when working on something hard, stretching yourself appropriately. How do you actually stretch your mind in a way that you make progress and it’s not just frustrating or too easy? All of this is skill that we don’t talk about and just kind of hope that people pick it up. And what happens is, of course, is the few number of people that, for whatever reason they do pick it up, are superstars. It’s a huge unfair competitive advantage. But I would really like that competitive advantage to be more widely spread.

Fuller: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.