Peter Drucker, the renowned management thinker who first coined the term ‘knowledge worker’ perfectly summarized the problem of focus in work: Most discussions of the executive’s task start with the advice to plan one’s work. This sounds eminently plausible. The only thing wrong with it is that it rarely works. The plans always remain on […]

Next week, Cal Newport and I will hold a new session of Life of Focus. The course is a three-month training program to help you achieve greater productivity and peace of mind. We held our first session last fall. It was a resounding success. Students reported making major strides in their work, wresting back control […]

Ideas are powerful. Arriving at the right time, they can alter the entire direction of your life. But ideas also hide in the background, acting as assumptions. Quietly influencing your decisions, whether they’re true or false. Looking back, I can think of a number of ideas that shaped my life. Some are only obvious in […]

Recently, I’ve had an interest in learning more biology. Some of that curiosity is pandemic-inspired. Biology is playing an outsized role in all of our lives these days. Yet much of the interest predates our current crisis. As a teenager, I really enjoyed books like The Selfish Gene and The Red Queen. Evolutionary biology revealing […]