About - Cal Newport.

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Cal Newport
About Cal Newport
I’m a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to my academic
research, I write about the intersection of technology and society. I’m particularly
interested in the impact of new technologies on our ability to perform productive work or
lead satisfying lives.

I’m the author of six books, including, most recently, the New York Times bestseller, Digital
Minimalism.

My work has been published in over 20 languages and has been featured in many major
publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Washington
Post, and Economist. I’m also a frequent guest on NPR.

This page provides a detailed treatment of my ideas, my books, and my bio. For a more
succinct summary of my work and my bio, as well as related resources like author photos
and book jacket images, please see my media kit.

MY IDEAS

For those who are new to my work, I’ve created a short summary of the main ideas I’ve
developed and explored in my writing over the years.

Ideas about Technology and Society

In recent years, I’ve been primarily writing about the intersection of technology and Media Kit

society, with a particular focus on professional productivity and personal satisfaction. Members of the press / media, see the media kit
Here are some of the main ideas I’m developing… page for high resolution cover images and more.
VISIT THE MEDIA KIT PAGE »
The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to concentrate without distraction on a
demanding task (what I call “deep work”) is becoming more rare at the same time
that it’s becoming more valuable in the knowledge sector. As a result, those
individuals and organizations who put in the hard work to cultivate this skill will
thrive. (I wrote a book about this.)
Digital Minimalism: The services delivered through your devices have become so
alluring and addictive that they can significantly erode the quality of your life and
your sense of autonomy. My solution is a philosophy I call digital minimalism,
which argues that you should radically reduce the time you spend online, focusing
on a small number of activities chosen because they support things you deeply
value, and then happily miss out on everything else. (I wrote a book about this as
well.)
Attention Capital Theory: In modern knowledge work, the primary capital
resource is human brains; or, more specifically, these brains’ ability to create new
value through sustained attention. At the moment, most individuals and
organizations are terrible at optimizing this resource, prioritizing instead the
convenience and flexibility of persistent, unstructured messaging (e.g., email and
IM). I predict that as this sector evolves, we’ll get better at optimizing attention
capital, and accordingly leave behind our current culture of communication
overload. (I’m currently writing a book about this for Penguin Random House; its
working title: “A World Without Email.”)

Older Ideas

After I finished my PhD at MIT in 2009, I began a two-year postdoc during which I
entered the academic job market. For obvious reasons, I became interested during this
period about the question of how one develops a satisfying and meaningful career,
eventually developing the following framework:

Career Capital Theory: “Follow your passion” is bad advice if your goal is to end
up loving what you do for a living. A more effective strategy is to work deliberately
to develop rare and valuable skills, and then use the resulting “career capital” to
 shape your career into something that truly resonates. In this framework, passion is
something you cultivate through hard work, not the starting point in your quest for a
satisfying career. (I wrote a book about this.)

When I started this blog in the summer of 2007, I was a graduate student who had
written two student advice guides and was in the early stages of planning my third such
book. Here are the main ideas I explored in these books and on this blog during these
early years:

The Straight-A Method: Studying is a skill. If you get good at this skill, you can
earn much better grades while spending much less time studying than your peers.
The fact that more students don’t take this reality seriously still baffles me — they’re
literally wasting dozens of hours a week on unnecessarily inefficient work. (I wrote a
book about this.)
The Zen Valedictorian: Students at competitive high schools and elite colleges
inject unhealthy amounts of stress into their life due to the flawed belief that
the quantity of things you do as a student controls how impressive you seem to the
outside world. This is not true. You’re typically judged on the thing you do best. My
approach to the student stress issue (which I used to speak about at universities
around the country) was to encourage students to: do less, do better. That is, focus
on a small number of things; do them really well; and leave yourself margin in your
schedule for recharging and curiosity. It’s possible to be both happy and impressive,
if you know what you’re doing. (I wrote a book about this.)

MY BOOKS

My first three books provided unconventional advice for students: How to Win at College
(2005), How to Become a Straight-A Student (2006), and How to Be a High School
Superstar (2010).

The “radical” idea behind these books was to treat the student reader as an adult and
take the goal of doing well at school seriously (achieving this tone was helped by the fact
that I was still a student when I wrote them).

As a graduate student, I was invited to speak about the topics covered in these titles at
some of the country’s top universities, including Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Dartmouth,
Middlebury, Duke, and Georgetown.

In 2012, I published So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which tackled the question of how
people end up loving what they do for a living. The most controversial finding from my
research was that “follow your passion” is bad advice.

I wrote this book during the period when I was preparing to enter the job market after
graduate school — so the topic had an urgent personal relevance. The New York Times
op-ed I wrote about the book’s ideas created a stir, becoming one of their most emailed
articles for over a week.

In 2016, I published Deep Work, which argued that our ability to focus without distraction
is becoming increasing rare (due, primarily, to distracting technology), at the same time
that it’s becoming increasing valuable (as the knowledge economy becomes more
cognitively demanding). As a result, those individuals and organizations who cultivate
their ability to perform “deep work” will enjoy a major competitive advantage.

The book seems to have hit a nerve. On publication, Deep Work became an instant Wall
Street Journal bestseller, and received praise in the New York Times Book Review, The
Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The Guardian. Amazon named it the best
business book of January, 2016, and put it on its list of the best business books of the year.

In the summer of 2017, I signed a two-book deal with Penguin Random House to continue
the exploration of technology’s impact on society that I started with Deep Work.

The first book produced from this deal is titled Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused
Life in a Noisy World, and it explores the benefits of radically reducing the time you spend
online.

This book was a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Publisher Weekly, and USA
Today bestseller. It was named to best books of the month lists by Amazon, USA Today,
and Time. (Click here for a more detailed list of related press and interviews.)

The second book is tentatively titled A World Without Email, and it will argue that the way
we work today — in which we constantly communicate through email and IM — is deeply
flawed, and is a phase that the knowledge sector will soon move beyond. It is currently
scheduled for publication in 2020.

MY BIO

For the very few who might be interested, here’s a superfluously detailed biography.
Shorter bios, as well as high resolution headshots and cover images, can be found in my
media kit.

I graduated Dartmouth College in 2004, and earned my PhD in Electrical Engineering

and Computer Science at MIT in 2009. After a two-year postdoc, also at MIT, I started
during the 2011 – 2012 academic year as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at
Georgetown University. I earned tenure in the spring of 2016, and my current title is
Provost’s Distinguished Professor of Computer Science.

In my academic career, I specialize in the theory of distributed systems, which means I

spend more time proving theorems than compiling code. To date, I’ve published more
than 60 peer-reviewed papers that have been cited more than 3,500 times.

In my writing career, I sold my first book to Random House in the summer after my junior
year of college. At the time, I was the editor of the Dartmouth Humor Magazine (the
Jack’o Lantern), and had been a humor columnist for the student newspaper.

I started blogging here at calnewport.com soon after the publication of my second book,
and have been posting here regularly ever since. The blog is named “Study Hacks”
because when I started it I was primarily writing advice for students. I famously, however,
have never had a social media account (it turns out that this is allowed).

I currently live with my wife and three sons in Takoma Park, Maryland, in a cool old
Victorian house that has a study with a fireplace and a custom-built library table where I
do my deep work.

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