A recent Gallup poll finds that American adults are reading fewer books each year: Americans say they read an average of 12.6 books during the past year, a smaller number than Gallup has measured in any prior survey dating back to 1990. U.S. adults are reading roughly two or three fewer books per year than they did between 2001 and 2016. … The decline is greater among subgroups that tended to be more avid readers, particularly college graduates but also women and older Americans. College graduates read an average of about six fewer books in 2021 than they did between 2002 and 2016, 14.6 versu ..read more

Life of Focus, the three-month training program I co-instruct with Cal Newport (author of Deep Work), is now open for a new session. We will be holding registration until Friday, March 17th, 2023 (midnight, Pacific time). This course aims to help you achieve greater levels of depth in your work and life. How would it feel to have more time and energy for the things that really matter to you? We split the course into three, one-month challenges. Each challenge is a guided effort to help you establish and test new routines, alongside specific lessons to deal with issues you might ..read more

Suppose you could add an extra two hours to every day: what would you do with your time? Would you take up a new hobby? Spend more time with friends or your family? Learn a new skill? Or simply give yourself more time to relax? In imagining how you’d spend an extra two hours, magically grafted onto each day, pay attention to what you don’t add. You probably wouldn’t add another meeting at the office or extra emails to respond to. I doubt you’d add more time spent browsing on your phone. Yet, for most of us, we already spend far more than two hours per day on activities we wouldn’t add in if m ..read more

Peter Drucker, the eminent management theorist who coined the term “knowledge worker,” made a compelling case for figuring out where your time goes: Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes. One difficulty of gaining focus is that we rarely know where our attention goes. How much time do we spend on email versus doing our most valuable work? How much time do we spend scrolling social media versus seeing our friends in real life? We feel ..read more

Cal Newport and I are running a new session of our popular course, Life of Focus, next week. For the next three months, we’ll be working with students to improve their deep work routines, safeguard their personal time and engage in meaningful projects. We hope you’ll join us! If you’ve read anything about healthy eating, you’ve heard a familiar argument: our bodies weren’t designed for modern diets.  For centuries, humanity’s challenge was eating too few calories, not too many. Food was perishable, and the average hunter-gatherer might not know when the next meal would arrive. Nature’s ..read more

Scientists receive fewer citations as they get older. Matt Clancy explains: Pick any author at random, and on average the papers they publish earlier in their career, whether as first author or last author, will be more highly cited and cited by a more diverse group of fields, than a paper they publish later in their career. … And the magnitudes involved here are quite large. In Yu et al. (2022), the papers published when you begin a career earn 50-65% more citations than those published at the end of a career. The effects are even larger for the citations received by patentees. Does the spa ..read more

My wife and I are happy to welcome our second child, Julia, into the world. Fortunately, I managed to get some writing done ahead of time, so there shouldn’t be much change in the weekly essays posted to the blog. However, I might be a bit slower with email as I plan to take this month off to stay at home with the little one! The post A Little Announcement… appeared first on Scott H Young ..read more

Say you want to learn French. Would you do better if you studied for 100 hours in a year-long course (~2 hours per week) or if those hours were compressed into a month (~20 hours per week)? Surprisingly, the answer seems to be that more intensive language education programs do better! This appears to be a fairly consistent research finding, in the dozen or so studies where the comparison has been made. From a paper by Raquel Serrano and Carmen Muñoz: [We] analyze the performance of adult students enrolled in three different types of EFL programs in which the distribution of time varies. The f ..read more

Two years ago, I decided to get off social media.1 Twitter made me anxious, and Reddit and YouTube ate up all my time. Undoubtedly, it was one of the best decisions I’ve made. The problems that pushed me off these platforms have only gotten worse. However, I’m a profoundly online person. I still spend considerable time reading and watching things online. My entire livelihood is anchored on this blog that I started seventeen years ago. The prospect of spending all my downtime reading paper books by candlelight, while holding a certain romantic appeal, isn’t realistic. The solution that works fo ..read more

I was recently a guest on a podcast where the host asked why people are less interested in learning as they get older. While there are certainly exceptions, the observation seems valid. Nearly all formal schooling is concentrated in our childhood and early adulthood. Stories of people going back to school in their twilight years are newsworthy precisely because this is rare. It also fits with my informal observation that people are much more reluctant to pick up new skills or topics as they get older. I learned to downhill ski at thirty, but I only personally know a few people who began much o ..read more