For many people, this is what work sounds like nowadays.
It's a constant thrum of notifications, tweets and messages.
Every time we respond to an email or a text or Google, a question that's just popped into our head.
We pay a small price in the moment.
This price is imperceptible, but over time it adds up.
And we haven't quite come to terms with the cost of constant distraction.
We treat it, I think, in this more general sense of I probably should be less distracted, and I think it's more urgent than people realize.
Today we look at the challenge of.
Cultivating deep attention and what we gain by immersing ourselves in meaningful work.
I spoke to someone who might seem like an unlikely advocate for technological restraint.
A computer scientist.
Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University.
He's deliberately tried to break away from the distractions of modern technology, and he's trying to get the rest of us to follow his lead.
Cal is the author of deep Rules for focused success in a distracted world.
Cal, welcome to hidden brain.
Well, thanks for having me on.
You talk in your book about several highly influential thinkers, people like the psychiatrist Carl Jung, the writers Mark Twain, JK Rowling, and you say they all have a sense of set of habits that are quite striking in terms of how they're able to get great work done.
This was something I noticed.
It was very common to influential thinkers, is that they all seem to have this drive to, on a regular basis, cut themselves off from their lives of busyness and communication and distraction, and isolate themselves to think deeply.
What do they do specifically?