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Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
In my writing on technology and culture I try to be judicious about citing scientific studies. The issues involved in our ongoing wrangling with digital ... Read more
Cal Newport
Official website of Georgetown Professor Cal Newport, author of the Study Hacks blog, Deep Work, and other New York Times bestselling books.
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Visit calnewport.com → On Hacker News Jul 2009 – Sep 2026
Life, Learning & Writing 32Career & Management 14Society, Policy & Culture 12Tech Industry & Business 8AI & Machine Learning 4Web & Frontend 1
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It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs
Over the last several months, the two leading frontier AI labs have shown some brazen behavior. It started with a series of carefully planned announcements ... Read more
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If you're busy, you're doing something wrong (2011)
The Berlin Study In the early 1990s, a trio of psychologists descended on the Universität der Künste, a historic arts academy in the heart of West ... Read more
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Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player (2011)
The Piano Player Confessions I recently received a message from an accomplished piano player. Let’s call him Jeremy. This is someone who majored in piano ... Read more
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Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
In Search of Silence Joel Spolsky is a well-respected figure in Silicon Valley. He created the popular Trello project manager software and is currently the ... Read more
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On the slow productivity of John Wick
I found myself recently, as one does, watching the mini-documentary featurettes included on the DVD for the popular 2014 Keanu Reeves movie, John Wick — ... Read more
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TikTok’s Poison Pill
Just a few months ago, it seemed that the biggest social media news of the year would be Elon Musk’s flirtations with buying Twitter (see, ... Read more
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Mastering Linear Algebra in 10 Days: Astounding Experiments in Ultra-Learning
The MIT Challenge My friend Scott Young recently finished an astounding feat: he completed all 33 courses in MIT’s fabled computer science curriculum, from Linear ... Read more
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Facebook's Desperate Smoke Screen
Soros vs. Facebook One of the big headlines from last month’s World Economic Forum at Davos was a scathing speech delivered by George Soros. The ... Read more
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Our Brains Are Not Multi-Threaded
In computer programming, it’s common to split your program into multiple different threads that run simultaneously, as this often simplifies application design. Imagine, for example, ... Read more
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Two narratives about AI
I want to present you with two narratives about AI. Both of them are about using this technology to automate computer programming, but they point ... Read more
12
Economists study what happens when people stop using Facebook
In the most recent issue of the prestigious American Economic Review, a group of well-known economists published a paper titled “The Welfare Effects of Social Media.” It ... Read more
13
Why didn't AI “join the workforce” in 2025?
Exactly one year ago, Sam Altman made a bold prediction: “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ ... Read more
14
Quit Social Media (2016)
Anti-Social Grumblings I recently gave a deliberatively provocative TEDx talk titled “quit social media” (see the video above). The theme of the event was “visions ... Read more
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Meta rediscovers the cubicle
Back in 2016, I reported on a rumor that was circulating about employee dissatisfaction at Meta (then, Facebook). Developers, it seemed, were unhappy with the ... Read more
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The high modernism of social media companies
A Revealing Memo A couple weeks ago, BuzzFeed leaked a memo written by Facebook VP Andrew “Boz” Bosworth in the summer of 2016. It contained ... Read more
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How to Cure Deep Procrastination
The Deep Procrastination Crisis Above is a snapshot of my blog e-mail inbox, filtered to only show e-mails from students struggling with deep procrastination. Notice ... Read more
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Edsger Dijkstra’s One-Day Workweek
Within my particular subfield of theoretical computer science there’s perhaps no individual more celebrated than Edsger Dijkstra. His career spanned half-a-century, beginning with a young ... Read more
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Your work matters – Build your schedule accordingly
About halfway through Laura Vanderkam’s sharp new productivity guide, Tranquility by Tuesday, we’re introduced to Elizabeth, an education professor who, worried about her ticking tenure ... Read more
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Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?
On my podcast this week, I took a closer look at OpenAI’s new video generation model, Sora 2, which can turn simple text descriptions into ... Read more
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Brandon Sanderson’s advice for doing hard things
A reader recently sent me a video of a keynote speech, delivered in 2020 by the popular fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson. The title of the ... Read more
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A Look Inside the Process of One of the World’s Most Efficient Studiers
Scott Young’s Graduation Gift to Study Hacks I have to give credit to Scott Young: it was talking blogs with him back in 2007 that ... Read more
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On Digital Minimalism
The Curmudgeonly Optimist People are sometimes confused about my personal relationship with digital communication technologies. On the one hand, I’m a computer scientist who studies and improves these tools. ... Read more
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Thoughts on Embracing the Social Internet Over Social Media
A Social Transition Last week, I wrote a blog post emphasizing the distinction between the social internet and social media. The former describes the internet’s ... Read more
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How to Ace Calculus: The Art of Doing Well in Technical Courses
Tangent Troubles Calculus is easy. Or at least, it can be. The key is how you digest the material. Here’s an example: when you’re first ... Read more
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The Pyramid Method: A Simple Strategy For Becoming Exceptionally Good
The Power of Good In early May, I received an interesting e-mail from a reader. After the standard introductions, he said: Though I’m progressing towards ... Read more
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On the Law of Diminishing Specialization
On Productive Technology and its Discontents Recently, I’ve been dipping in and out of Edward Tenner’s provocative 1996 book, When Things Bites Back. In following ... Read more
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Paperbacks and TikTok
In 1939, Simon & Schuster revolutionized the American publishing industry with the launch of Pocket Books, a line of diminutive volumes (measuring 4 by 6 ... Read more
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When Work Didn’t Follow You Home
In a recent article written for Slate, journalist Dan Kois recounts the shock his younger coworkers expressed when they discovered that he had, earlier in ... Read more
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What you know matters more than what you do
Insight into Impact I recently had an interesting conversation with some colleagues. We were talking about a young researcher in our field who happens to ... Read more