I think we'll look at headphones / earphones like cigarettes as well.
Can you expand on that?
- Common habit
- Probably more damaging to our ears than we expect
- Damage is cumulative and takes a while to show the effects
Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes
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Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes
#72I was recently searching for a metal box that I could put my iPhone in when it's time for me to focus on family. After seeing a few vintage cigarette boxes pop up in the search results, I realized that sticking my phone into a box built for cigarettes would be a helpful reminder of how addictive my phone can be. I even considered getting a Camel-brand tin, but decided to get something classier/more subtle.
Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes
#73I was recently searching for a metal box that I could put my iPhone in when it's time for me to focus on family. After seeing a few vintage cigarette boxes pop up in the search results, I realized that sticking my phone into a box built for cigarettes would be a helpful reminder of how addictive my phone can be. I even considered getting a Camel-brand tin, but decided to get something classier/more subtle.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Richmond-Straight-Cut-Cigarette-Tin...
Yeah I searched Etsy and eBay. It was hard to find one that was big enough for my iPhone 7 Plus and my wife's SE (in a thick case). I eventually found a few brass and bronze candidates that were big enough and quite handsome.
Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes
#74I was kind of with him right up until this: > But if you ask yourself who's the healthiest person you know, almost certainly they subscribe to some sort of named philosophy that helps them make consistent and value-driven decisions about what they eat and how they move. Maybe they're vegan or paleo. Maybe I’m an outlier, but that tends to be more true of the least healthy people I know. Named philosophies with strict…
Healthiest person I ever knew was my gradma. She sure as hell wasn't vegan or paleo.
She was Catholic and she was practicing the virtue of temperance every day.
We often adopt lifestyles, we do certain things, in order to become healthier, fitter, smarter, richer...
She wasn't doing it because who she wanted become. She was doing it because of who she was.
Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didnt someone do a summary of that book in like a single page somewhere? As in, there were good ideas but it could be summed up to a short paper. I can't find the link now.
Three sentences: https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/business/d... I think the author himself has a one page blog post summarizing it as well. I agree with him about the smartphone cancer that has crept into all our lives though I imagine there will be much worse distractions in the near future like deep learning phones that can tell us everything going on in a room the moment we enter it (since everybo…
> I think the author himself has a one page blog post summarizing it as well.
Link please.
Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes
#76I don’t buy the analogy. Do we look back at TV saying the same thing? Granted we have to learn how we can live in balance with smartphones and the always-in mentality. Compared to cigarettes there are a lot of positives things you can do with smartphones.
Yeah. People have been saying it for a long time about tv. At least as long as I can remember. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahaelle/2015/12/02/heads-up-... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-tv-rot-your-...
People used to say the same thing about reading if you go back far enough.
Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
This book follows the recent trend of: find obvious slightly un-talked-about idea, create a fancy sounding term to describe it (preferably with as few words as possible - one is best, like Blink or Outliers .) These words should be vague and have hundreds of meanings - 'work', 'deep', or 'source', for example. Then, while you could summarize the idea in a single page, write 100+ pages framing the issue as a fundament…
Though I completely agree with your sentiment, Cal explicitly defines the meaning of Deep Work, and I think it's an important thing society should think about as technology progresses. It helps to have the terminology to describe the state of our lives. From page 3 of the book, Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limi…
I read 75% of it, does that make me qualified to trash on it? I thought it was complete garbage. Not the idea, mind you, the _book_. It's a blog post's worth of information that's comically stretched out in an early college I'm-trying-to-meet-a-word count way.
The book is almost entirely pointless fluff.
Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes
#78Related tangent: Newport's book "Deep Work" is excellent. It makes a strong case that deep work is increasingly rare, valuable, and meaningful. But it goes way beyond the "what" and the "why", providing the "how", in the form of specific, pragmatic, actionable guidance for achieving just that. Anecdotally, it's been very helpful for me.
This book follows the recent trend of: find obvious slightly un-talked-about idea, create a fancy sounding term to describe it (preferably with as few words as possible - one is best, like Blink or Outliers .) These words should be vague and have hundreds of meanings - 'work', 'deep', or 'source', for example. Then, while you could summarize the idea in a single page, write 100+ pages framing the issue as a fundament…
That describes every "self-help" type book, where you take a single positive but novel concept or attribute, and find a way to talk about it long enough to fill something that can be printed and sold in airport bookstores.
Eckhart Tolle has written a dozen+ books about being in the moment, for instance.
Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes
#79Related tangent: Newport's book "Deep Work" is excellent. It makes a strong case that deep work is increasingly rare, valuable, and meaningful. But it goes way beyond the "what" and the "why", providing the "how", in the form of specific, pragmatic, actionable guidance for achieving just that. Anecdotally, it's been very helpful for me.
While Newport's idea is solid, the book really isn't worth reading past the first 50-75 pages, where the majority of the ideas are communicated. Unfortunately, bloat is a problem in almost all types of management/self-improvement books, so I don't want to single him out here. I have the same complaint about his earlier book, "So Good they Can't Ignore you".
Re: Cal Newport on Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes
#80I don’t buy the analogy. Do we look back at TV saying the same thing? Granted we have to learn how we can live in balance with smartphones and the always-in mentality. Compared to cigarettes there are a lot of positives things you can do with smartphones.
It's the difference between one-way and two-way methods of communication as well as past events vs live events. TV shows are static, they are completely unchanged by your personal opinion as you watch it. You cannot submit a comment on a TV episode, nor is there any mechanism for the episode to reflect the impact of your comment (likes, replies, etc.)
In fact, even FB/Twitter/IG aren't "real-time". They don't show all the likes as they're coming in. They specifically delay showing the full number so you have a reason to come back and re-check. If you see a higher number of likes, you're going to come back again to re-check.