The Stanford Consensus

My technology habits are eccentric. I use an old fashioned, non-Internet connected Samsung flip phone with a postage-stamp size screen. I’m not on Facebook or Twitter, and my RSS reader is an emaciated husk, subsisting on a small number of feeds, mainly the blogs of friends. Long ago, I configured Gmail to automatically mark every message as read when it arrives in my inbox, frustrating my attempts to perform distracting quick scans for new messages during the day.

The rational foundation of my eccentricity is the increasingly alarming research coming out of Stanford’s Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) lab.  Pioneering researchers from this lab are converging on a scary consensus. It’s long been understood that you’re less productive when you’re constantly switching your attention; that is, the claimed benefits of multitasking are false. Researchers  at the CHIMe lab, however, have found that the impact of electronic multitasking goes beyond the momentary sense of distraction, it can also create permanent changes in the brain.

As reported in a recent New York Times article, subjects who were identified as multitaskers did “a significantly worse job” on experimental tasks that required them to filter out irrelevant information — even though they weren’t multitasking during the experiment.

“Other tests at Stanford,” reports the same article, “showed multitaskers tended to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work.”

Or, as Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford, summarized: “the scary part for [multitaskers] is they can’t shut off their multitasking tendencies when they’re not multitasking.”

This is why I invest so much effort in isolating myself from electronic distraction. In my two fields, theoretical computer science and writing, the ability to focus on hard things for long uninterrupted periods is my most valuable currency.  If I lose this ability, I might also lose my livelihood.

As the computer scientist Donald Knuth once said, “Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.”

The Danger to Students

That’s the rational explanation for my behavior. If you want the emotional explanation, however, turn your (perhaps distracted) attention from Stanford’s CHIMe lab to my blog e-mail inbox.

I consult with around one to two dozen students a week — offering advice on how to find sustainable success. Over the three years I’ve played this advisory role, I’ve noticed an alarming trend: The current crop of undergraduates, who went through high school in an era of Facebook and smart phones, is suffering from serious concentration issues. I receive an increasing number of e-mails from students who have an expert level knowledge on how to study, but are simply incapable of giving the task at hand more than a few minutes of concentration before seeking what the Times article aptly described as the “dopamine squirt” that comes from discovering a novel stimulus.

This recent e-mail is typical of those I receive:

I’ve read your red book, I have an autopilot schedule, I have a to-do list, I block off specific times for each task…and yet I procrastinate like crazy…I have a very difficult time following through.

The sad news is that, according to the Stanford consensus, the longer students have spent working in a semi-distracted state, the harder it becomes to rebuild an ability to concentrate on something hard, like a knotty chapter from a philosophy text, or a tricky calculus problem set.

This leads me to the deliberately provocative title I gave this post. When a parent allows a son or daughter to study in a state of distraction, the impact goes well beyond the assignment at hand. This behavior could be rewiring the young students’ brain, making it all but impossible for him or her to perform the feats of increased concentration required later at college and beyond.

Resisting Disconnection

Surprisingly, when I advise parents of the necessity of enforcing focus (my most infamous advice being to remove the cable connecting the modem to the router during homework time), I’m often met with equivocation.

And, I’m not the only one noticing this trend.

The above-mentioned Times article profiled a hyper-connected family in which the young son, Connor, started receiving his first C’s due to an inability to focus on his homework — an outcome that’s not surprising considering that he shares his work desk with two computer monitors, “one with his music collection, one with Facebook and Reddit.” He also adds to the din an iPhone relaying a constant stream of text messages.

Faced with this obvious problem, Connor’s always-connected father, baffling, expressed pride in his son’s distraction. “He’s a fact hound,” the father bragged. The mother, who is perhaps more aware of the problem, nonetheless threw up her hands, claiming that technology is “part of the fabric of who he is.”

I get similar responses to my own pleas with parents. In addition to the traditional apologist tropes about the Internet’s advantages — Improved visual acuity? The ability to do faster Google searches? Really? This justifies a persistent state of unadulterated distraction? — I also hear contrived scenarios in which being online would add some incremental benefit to the school work at hand (the need to look up word definitions is a common explanation).

A Crusade Begins

This is where I’m drawing my line in the sand. The tired debate on the advantages and disadvantages of hyper-connectedness is fine for adults. A 27-year-old, such as myself, can make his own decision about what mental skills are important. But for teenage students, immersed in a developmental stage where impulse control is dangerously weak and the brain is at a peak of malleability, guardians should have some responsibility for helping to preserve their ability to focus. The teenagers can choose to discard this ability later in life, but by allowing a 15-year old to study while bombarded by three screen’s worth of distraction — even if he is a fact hound, and it’s part of his personality, and he might need to quickly look up a word he doesn’t understand — you’re making this choice for him.

I’ll continue, of course, in my role as an informal source of student advice, to preach the benefits of sustaining focus during this fragile period. Are you willing to join me?

(Photo by worak)

“I’ve always been a good student and I know that I’m smart and capable, but lately I’ve been having such a hard time,” she began.

“I’m having trouble completing assignments, even though I have sufficient time.  I avoid seeking out help, preferring instead to just freak out alone in my room.”

This student recognized her trouble as deep procrastination — the exceedingly common student affliction of losing the will to work.

While responding to her message, I had an interesting realization: deep procrastination, though scary, represents something important and perhaps even exciting. It marks that key transition where the momentum of “this is what you need to do” — the momentum that carried you through high school and into college — begins to wane, leaving you to discover a new source of propulsion — not just new, but also more durable and more personal.

It’s important to side step the self-help cliches in this situation. It’s unlikely that you’ll unearth a burning life’s mission hidden conveniently just below the surface of your psyche. What you seek is more fundamental: an acceptance that doing things well is hard, and always will be, and that you need to spend more time than you thought was necessary deciding which such hard things gain rights to your attention.

None of this is easy. All of it is exciting.

With all of this in mind, I had no magical solution to offer this worried sophomore. I could only suggest that she take a step back and reduce the frantic Yale pace, maybe for just one semester, leaving space for her new propulsion to build a head of steam.

The late summer of 2006 was a heady time for Terry Tao. First, in August of that year, he received the Fields Medal, an elite prize, given only once every four years, that honors the world’s top mathematicians. (One of Tao’s fellow prizewinners in 2006 was Grigori Perelman, the eccentric Russian who roared to international celebrity by solving the long-standing Poincaré conjecture.)

Next, less than a month after his return from the Fields ceremony, Tao learned that he won a $500,000 MacArthur “Genius Grant” — leading the LA Times to dub him a “Mozart of Math.”

Here’s what interests me about Tao: on his well-trafficked web site, he has a contact page that starts…

The best way to contact me is via e-mail.

It then goes on to list 22 different types of e-mails that he will not respond to — a list that includes invitations to “collaborate,” “contribute data to a project,” “give [a] talk,” or “attend seminars or conferences.” He also declines requests for “career advice” and “copies of his work.” On a separate page, he notes that he’s “not giving [media] interviews at this time,” and diverts all other queries to a representative of the UCLA office of media relations.

In other words, Terry Tao doesn’t want to hear from you.

And this is completely understandable.

The world’s top math mind is most valuable to society when it’s solving our knottiest combinatorial quandaries. Dedicating hours to interview requests and career advice seems somehow wasteful.

But this motivates an intriguing question: why have a public e-mail address at all? Certainly it would be simpler for him to omit any contact information from his web page.

I don’t know the specific reasons for Tao’s pseudo-accessibility, but his story emphasizes a general trend I first identified in my essay on quitting Facebook: our society has a warped relationship with communication technology. Instead of deploying tools like e-mail to maximize our effectiveness, we grant them default positions in our lives protected by an impossibly high threshold for disuse — a threshold usually articulated as: “If there is any possible negative consequence of abandoning full-throttled use of this technology, I won’t.”

The scenario that intrigues me is not to move to an opposite extreme and promote a world of techno-Luddism. I like to ponder what the middle ground might look like — a philosophy of work where communication technology is isolated and tuned to specific circumstances where it provides unambiguous benefit, and ruthlessly culled elsewhere.

I’m not sure what such a future would look like, but I can only hope that it doesn’t include contact policies so complex that only a mathematician can fully understand them.

(Photo by Christopher Albert)

A Bold Decision

At the end of his first semester at Penn, a student whom I’ll call Daniel was disappointed to learn that his GPA was a lackluster 2.95. Following the Study Hacks orthodoxy that study habits should be based on evidence — not random decisions or peer pressure — Daniel asked himself a crucial question: What are the better students doing that I’m not?

When he surveyed his classmates, he noted something interesting: “the high-scoring kids weren’t on Facebook.”

Emboldened by this observation, Daniel decided to do the unthinkable: he deactivated his Facebook account.

His GPA jumped to an exceptional 3.95.

In this post, I want to share the details of Daniel’s story — revealing what actually happens when you quit one of the most ubiquitous technologies of your generation. I’ll then make the argument that although most students don’t need to leave Facebook, every student should at least give the idea serious consideration.

The Reality of a Post-Facebook Existence

Daniel’s decision to leave Facebook wasn’t easy.

“I was worried that I would be out of the loop,” he admits. “That I would miss event invitations, not know what was going on with my friends, or be able to effectively lead the organizations I run.”

What really happened?

“Well, as expected, I did miss some invitations to events,” Daniel recalls. “But my friends would forward me invites, and I never missed anything crucial.”

“I also didn’t lose any friends, or even really lose touch with anyone. I still had e-mail and a phone, and I see these people every day.”

Daniel’s mom, not surprisingly, was “ecstatic” about the decision, while many of his friends were shocked. “After my deactivation,” he recalls, “I started getting texts that demanded: WHY DID YOU DEFRIEND ME!? WHERE IS YOUR FACEBOOK!?”

But pretty soon people stopped caring. They had their own lives to lead.

The Monastic Pleasure of Post-Facebook Studying

In contrast to the mild negative effects to his social life, the benefits to Daniel’s academic life were significant.

He was initially worried about “symptom substitution” — the idea that with Facebook gone he would simply find another online distraction to fuel his procrastination.

But this didn’t happen.

“After clicking around the web for a bit, I would become incredibly bored,” Daniel recalls. There’s something about the “endless trickle of messages” served up by Facebook that proves especially addictive. Without that steady supply of attention crack, it became easy for Daniel to “swear off the Internet.”

Consider, for example, a calculus final he faced during his first Facebook-free semester.

“With the time and concentration I regained, I was able to hunt down and complete problems from 20 different practice final exams, and then get tutoring on any issues that remained.”

The average grade on the exam was a 34. Daniel scored an 80.

He has since persuaded several friends to follow his lead in deactivating their accounts, and they’re enjoying similar boosts to their performance.

A Different Way to Think About the Technology in Your Life

I recently received an e-mail from a high school student who estimated that her Internet-obsession was slowing down her work by “a factor of 5.” When I suggested that she ask her parents to unplug the modem until her homework was done, she balked.

“I can’t do that,” she exclaimed. “I have to hand in assignments for one of my classes online, and there are really good web-based dictionaries I use for my Spanish homework.”

Take a moment to ponder this reaction.

This student was experiencing extreme suffering and poor performance because of the Internet. Yet, she judged the trivial inconvenience of plugging in a modem before submitting a completed assignment, or using a slightly less effective paper dictionary for her Spanish homework, as outweighing the exceptional benefits that would be yielded by going offline.

To me, this reaction captures the problem with ubiquitous technologies, like Facebook, that make claims on your attention. To many people, the burden of proof falls on the Luddite — you better have a pretty damn good reason for eschewing this technology! Like the girl from above, or Daniel’s shocked classmates, any inconvenience generated by opting out of a popular technology can be a sufficient argument for maintaining the status quo.

I argue the you should reverse this logic: before adopting a technology that can make a regular claim on your attention,  insist that its benefits unambiguously outweigh its negatives.

It’s important that I’m clear: for many students, this assessment would lead them to keep Facebook in their lives — they get social and entertainment benefits from the service, and because they have no problem turning it off while working, they suffer few negative consequences.

For students like Daniel, however, who discover that the technology is wreaking serious havoc, there should be no hesitation to quit.

This same philosophy led many professional thinkers and writers, including Alan Lightman,  Donald Knuth,  Neal Stephenson, and Leo Babauta to quit e-mail. In their line of work, the benefits of e-mail were swamped by the negative effects. Their criteria was not, “is there anything bad that would happen if I quit e-mail?”, it was, instead, “do the benefits outweigh the negatives?”

My bottom line here is simple: Technologies are great, but if you want to keep control of your time and attention have the self-confidence to insist that they earn their keep before you make them a regular part of your life.

(Image by Etienne)

Feeble Focus

A student who I’ll call Ron recently sent me an e-mail with an ominous title: Loss of Focus.

“I really enjoy most of my courses,” he started. “And I’m definitely not in the wrong major…But there are some courses that I find extremely difficult and uninteresting.”

There’s nothing surprising about this observation. As I’ve said before, you have to expect that not every course is going to incite scholastic reverie — some subjects you just have to grin and bear en route to becoming “educated.”

Ron, as it turned out, was having trouble with the “grin and bear” part of this equation.

“I sit down, stare at the books, and nothing happens,” he told me.  “After reading and solving problems for 15 minutes I get bored and distracted, start surfing the web, checking email or such.”

He concluded with a key question that I receive often:

You mention that hard focus is necessary. I agree, but my question is: How can I focus on difficult, unenjoyable, painful tasks?

It sounds like a job for the grade whisperer…

The Scatter Shot Attack

As I explained in my original post on hard focus, learning to concentrate when you don’t want to is a practiced art. A lot of students, however, are so turned off by hard work that they can’t even muster the small blocks of hard focus needed to start building toward something more substantial.

I have time-tested solution to this issue. I call it the scatter shot attack because it’s comprised of a large number of small tactics — not one magic bullet.

For example, here was my advice to Ron:

• Use Your Autopilot: Make sure your dreaded work is tackled within a trusted autopilot schedule. Having to decide each week when to do this work is an extra hurdle that you want to avoid.
• Use Location: Identify a unique isolated location for each type of dreaded work. When in that location all you’re allowed to do is work. Absolutely no Internet will be tolerated. If you want to go online, or otherwise change mental gears, you have to physically leave the location. No exceptions.
• Be Reasonable: Make sure that you’re scheduling more than enough time for each dreaded task. If your schedule is unreasonably tight your mind will recognize this reality and summon intense resistance.
• Embrace Specificity: Throw out your vague plans to “do reading” or “work on a problem set.” If you want your mind to cooperate, you need to reduce your work to a set of unambiguous and specific actions that will clearly fit into the time set aside.
• (Wo)Man Up: Finally, you need to recognize that throughout life you’re going to have to do work that you don’t want to do. This is perhaps the defining trait of being an adult. College is as good a time as any to recognize this fact, man up (or woman up, as the case may be), and just do it, even if you don’t want to. You’re not sixteen and living at home anymore…

I haven’t yet heard back from Ron, but I’ve recommended this same scatter shot approach to dozens of students who suffered from similar issues. If you know what you’re supposed to be doing, but just can’t make it happen, don’t seek a magic bullet that will make things instantly better. Instead attack the problem from multiple angles until your mind has no option but to submit.

Next week, I’m giving the Theory Colloquium lecture here at MIT’s computer science laboratory. This means I’m facing one of the most common and most dreaded tasks of academic life: writing a talk.

Constructing good talks slides is grueling. The task is not so large that it can become a harmless background task in your life, and it’s not so small that it can be dispatched in a single inspired dash. In other words, like all medium-sized hard projects, it’s a catalyst for procrastination.

Here’s how I’m handling it…

A Morning Brainstorm

This morning, I brought a notebook, a cup of coffee, and my dog, Bailey, out into the courtyard of my apartment building. I spent a half hour under the shade of a tall maple tree working out the big ideas of the talk while simultaneously frustrating Bailey’s life ambition to fully devour a tennis ball.

Then I put the work aside and did something else.

Later this afternoon, when I arrived at my office on campus, I spent another hour building the slides for the first 10 – 15 minutes of the talk.

And that was it for today.

Tomorrow I’ll make a hard push to finish a full draft of the slides, leaving almost a full week for my standard cycle of practice talks and polishing.

The Ice Bath Method

I want you to notice the general structure to my approach:

1. Start with a half hour brainstorming session. Go somewhere interesting, armed only with pen, paper, and caffeine. (Dog optional.)
2. Later that same day, use the results of your brainstorming to set the foundation for one hour of hard focus.
3. Wait until at least the next day to do your first multi-hour push on the project.

I call this the ice bath method in reference to the training methods of cold water swimmers, who prepare themselves for the bracing cold by a series of short exposures to ice water. I claim that it’s a smart strategy for any medium-sized project; i.e., a project too large to knock out in an hour or two, but too small to handle with a regular session in your autopilot schedule.

The first step of the method is designed to overcome your resistance to starting. Staring at a blank computer screen that needs to soon contain a hundred slides is daunting. Brainstorming under a tree is romantic, and therefore much easier to actually do.

Once you’ve taken some action, it’s easier to dive into the second step which requires some hard work, but is limited to only an hour. This limit will help you follow through.

The third step is where the real hard work happens. Because you’ve already made non-trivial progress during step two, however, this work is much easier to start — you’re not staring at a blank screen, you’re instead continuing with a specific set of known next actions.

The ice bath method is simple, but it’s also how I manage to get started on (and finish) terrible projects surprisingly early.

A reader recently sent me an e-mail in which she admitted:

I think I am starting to suffer from deep procrastination — and it’s only six weeks until my exams! I need some motivatiom for this final push, but I just can’t seem to find it.

She’s not alone. I’ve noticed an uptick in similar e-mails, and this doesn’t surprise me. For students teetering on the precipice of deep procrastination, exam period, with its significant increase in work, is a perfect catalyst for pushing them over the edge. If you see exams looming but simply can’t muster the energy to start seriously preparing, then you may already be in the grips of this scourge.

In this post, I describe a collection of simple tips that can help you escape this pre-exam slump. It’s not a long term solution to your potenital deep procrastination (for this, you need to evaluate your relationship with your major and reconnect to your studies). But it will help in the short term.

Five Tips to Fight the Pre-Exam Slump

1. Remove Decision Making From Your Studying.
   Some students construct their study plans one day at a time, each morning asking “what should I do today?” For someone suffering from deep procrastination, this is a recipe for falling deeper into a slump. Instead, you should remove decision making from your day to day work. Use the project/folder method to plan your exam prep and plot this work on a visual panic schedule. Then follow what you planned.
2. Take Days Off.
   There is something magical about putting aside a day in which you do nothing related to schoolwork (outside of attending classes). No to-do lists. No studying. Just relaxing. Maybe you go see a movie in the afternoon or have a long lunch with friends. Because I’m a nerd, I use my off days to spend absurd amounts of time browsing bookstores. In the lead up to your exams, try to schedule one day off per week — even if it means piling up more work on the other days. The idea of working every single day for over a month is enough to drive even the happiest students into procrasination.
3. Break the Rules.
   Identify the conventions that direct most students’ study habits. Then try to violate as many of them as possible. For example, convention says that most students start studying for an exam a few days in advance while the organized students might start a week or two in advance. Consider, therefore, doing something radically different, such as starting to study 6 weeks in advance. Does convention say that studying happens in the libraries on campus? Take the early morning train into the nearest city and work in a major art museum. Does convention say that you’re supposed to reread all of your notes? Build an elaborate system based on colored index cards. The novelty of approaching your work completely differently than your peers has a way of breaking the cycle of resentment that builds to deep procrastination. When your mind doesn’t recognize the work as conventional school work, it doesn’t generate the same sense of going through the motions.
4. Blow the Curve.
   Combat your feelings to do no work by instead resolving to do the opposite. That is, choose one course and decide that you’re going to get the best grade in the class. Plan a strategy that has you ready for the exam a week in advance, then spend extra days really mastering the nuances. If it’s a non-technical course, for example, you might start reading some sources that weren’t even assigned. There’s a sense of purpose behind an A* effort that can neuter the impulse to curl up and do nothing.
5. Make an Exciting Summer Plan.
   It’s a curious phenomenon, but human’s are willing to take on massive amounts of hard work if they feel it’s building to something worthwhile. (Consider, for example, the training top athletes endure.) You can simulate this effect by planning, and then getting excited about a cool summer project. This transforms your exam prep from a meaningless task among a long line of meaningless tasks, into the last challenge to overcome before your summer plot unfolds. For students, vision can act like a deep procrastination vaccine.

Exams are hard and deep procrastination is serious. But it’s surprising how often the little changes, like those described above, can knock you out of even the deepest ruts.

(Photo by xtheowl)

Our friend Leena once told me a sad story. It was about an old high school classmate. This guy was a certified math whiz: he took college-level courses while still in high school, then, after arriving at Stanford, jumped into upper-level subjects and advanced research. Somewhere around his junior year, however, his drive began to falter. As Leena recalls, his energy for math mysteriously faded away. He told her, at one point during this period, that he looked forward to surviving until graduation so he could go find a job in banking and make some money.

He wasn’t overworked: he could easily handle his classes. And he wasn’t lonely: he had plenty of friends. Something inside him just petered out.

Leena’s friend burnt out, and he’s not alone. An increasing number of students suffer from this mysterious affliction, which is marked by a sudden, unexpected drop in enthusiasm and academic performance in a once promising student.

In this article, I want to talk about a common cause of burnouts — a cause I call deep procrastination — and provide some understanding for why it happens and how to prevent it.

The Danger of Deep Procrastination

Deep procrastination is not the standard urge to goof off that afflicts every college student. It’s much more powerful. A student suffering from deep procrastination will delay important work to an excessive degree. He won’t start studying until late the night before or will delay paper writing until the sun is about the rise. After a while, he might begin to chronically miss deadlines, and find himself constantly negotiating with professors about extensions. Sometimes it gets so bad that he misses the extended deadlines — failing courses instead of completing the required assignment. No matter how dire the stakes, starting work becomes an insurmountable prospect.

I’ve advised numerous students suffering from deep procrastination of various levels of severity. In all cases, the causes were basically the same:

• A major and/or post-graduation job aspiration that doesn’t match the student’s real interests,
• combined with a difficult (though not necessarily unmanageable) workload.

Many students, of course, have difficult workloads. But when the hard work is motivated by a goal that’s misaligned with their real interests, students can develop resentment toward the work. They begin to see the effort required to keep up with their double major or crazy activity load as an intrusion from an outside entity — almost a literal attack on their happiness. Eventually a deep psychic aversion to the work develops, and they find themselves mired in deep procrastination.

This might be what happened to Leena’s friend at Stanford. His entire life, he had been told that he was a math whiz. But at some point, he began to resent the work required to live up to other people’s expectations. Eventually, the resentment boiled over: he was through with math.

Avoiding Deep Procrastination

My advice for side-stepping this problem is both easy to understand and hard to put into practice: figure out what you really want to accomplish at college, then choose your path based on an honest answer to this question.

To help you ponder this prompt, keep the following cautions in mind:

• Don’t major in chemical engineering to please your dad. As I’ve discussed before, allowing other people to influence your choice of major can sap your motivation.
• Don’t take on ridiculous course and extracurricular loads because you feel like impressing people with the hardness of your schedule is what makes you special. It’s not. It’s just diligence. And in the end, people don’t care that much about diligence, so you might as well use your weekends to nurse hangovers with friends.
• Don’t major in business because you think it’s “practical.” Your theories about the importance of various majors are probably wrong, so your best bet is to excel in something you like.

There’s a lot more to be said on this topic. For example, it’s important that you don’t mistake serious mental issues, such as depression or anxiety disorder, for deep procrastination. With this in mind, if you find yourself unable to work, always talk to one of your college’s counselors as part of your recovery effort, just to be sure that something else isn’t lurking. (It’s not a big deal, they don’t bite, and they love when students come in to chat.)

But the most important advice here is to avoid this mess altogether by taking the time to answer, on your own, the important questions about what you’re really trying to accomplish with your college career. After that, do your best to keep your choices consistent with this answer.

It’s an obvious idea. But trust me, it can prevent some serious problems.

Some students have no trouble with e-mail. Others, however, find themselves constantly checking their inbox — in class, while reading, while studying — making it hard to concentrate. This article is for the latter group.

The modern information consumer knows that the most efficient way to handle e-mail is to check your inbox just a few times a day and always process it back down to empty. For a lot of us, however, this is easier said than done. It’s just so damn tempting to take a quick peek; a glance to see if something cool has slipped in over the past few minutes.

In this article I’ll describe a simple but devastatingly effective hack for curbing this bad habit.

Eliminate the Difference Between Read and Unread

The hack works as follows:

• Setup a filter that automatically marks every incoming message as read.

(In Gmail you can accomplish this by creating a filter with a wildcard — * — in the “From” field, then selecting “Mark as Read” as the action to apply.)

This hack eliminates the difference between read and unread messages — no more bold message titles or increasing inbox counts to titillate your senses. It makes your inbox monotypic — a term I’ve stolen from botany to capture the idea that your inbox now contains only one “species” of message.

The Power of a Monotypic Inbox

If you apply this hack, here is what will happen: At first, you’ll maintain your old habits, taking frequent quick peeks to see if anything interesting has arrived. As usual, this breaks your concentration and makes it hard to make serious progress on the studying or paper writing or reading before you. As you continue to take quick e-mail breaks, however, the number of messages in your inbox grows; and they are all marked as read.

Once your inbox gains a few dozen messages, things start to get annoying. You can’t easily remember which messages you’ve already glanced at and which are unread. You find yourself re-reading some messages and missing others.

Eventually, you get fed up and clean out your inbox. To avoid this pain again you stop checking your e-mail so frequently; making sure to now always leave yourself enough time to process it back down to empty so you won’t confuse new messages with old.

This of course is exactly the behavior we hoped to achieve. It’s a rough tactic, I’ll admit it. For most people it’s unnecessary. However, if you’re someone for whom frequent e-mail checks is scuttling your ability to concentrate, then it might be time to pull out the big guns. The monotypic inbox might be crude, but it works.

(Photo by dampeebe)

Once again I’m using Thursday to publish a bonus post about my E-mail Zero project. For the uninitiated, this short series questions the idea that all people should use e-mail and related technologies in the same way. It seeks out examples of alternative communication lifestyles.

Today, I’m happy to report that the venerable Merlin Mann from 43 Folders has recently published an article series on a similar topic. I wanted to point your attention to another E-mail Zero practitioner that Merlin recently wrote about: author Neal Stephenson.

I’m a Bad Correspondent

Here is a key excerpt from the author’s web site:

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time…If I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all.

Which leads to:

If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time…there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.

And then the big finish:

For me it comes down to the following choice: I can distribute material of bad-to-mediocre quality to a small number of people, or I can distribute material of higher quality to more people.

What Does This Mean For You?

The big picture point: Ultimately, you gain respect and reward in this world for the hard things you do. Ask yourself this: what distractions disrupt your concentration? Does being constantly available by text message, or e-mail, or on Facebook make you better at being a student? Or does it make you worse? Do you really need to be that accessible?

The right answer differs for different people. But the one thing this series makes clear: not every communication technology is right for every person. Even if it seems like everyone is using it…

If you’re curious about the types of places such questions might lead you, consider this fact: I do not have — nor have I ever had — a Facebook account. And yet, mysteriously, I still have friends who know my relationship status and what movies I like.

Crazy. I know. But once you start asking the right questions, interesting answers shake loose…

(Photo by dampeebe)