The Original Attention Crisis
AI Summary
Cal Newport reaches back to seventeenth-century Oxford to argue that the deep-thinking crisis isn't new and the solutions aren't either. An All Souls College historian sent him an essay on Nicolaus Steno, an anatomist-turned-bishop trained in the 1650s when the printing press and humanist revival had created the period's information overload. "Books were a leading distraction in the early modern period," the essay notes — and how envious we should be of those times.
Steno's response anticipates what Newport now calls slow productivity, deep work, and time blocking. "Harmful hastening should be avoided," Steno wrote — his solution was to "stick to one topic." In practice he blocked specific morning hours for the hardest cognitive work: "before noon nothing must be done except medical things," and "almost all the morning hours" reading Church Fathers and old biblical manuscripts at the Medici library. The technique combined master-notebook commonplacing (see William Powers' Hamlet's BlackBerry) with topic discipline and protected blocks.
Newport's takeaway: the use of human brains to think deeply about meaningful ideas has been at the core of human experience since access to information first became somewhat widespread. The best practices developed then are still the best practices — avoid overload, focus on one thing at a time, block specific hours for the hardest work. The toolset hasn't changed because the bottleneck (human attention) hasn't.
Highlights
- ▸The 17th-century printing-press information overload produced Steno's exact playbook: stick to one topic, avoid harmful hastening, block morning hours for the hardest work — slow productivity / deep work / time blocking aren't new
- ▸Steno reserved "almost all the morning hours" for one cognitive domain at the Medici library and refused to multi-thread — the same fixed-schedule discipline Newport now teaches
- ▸The bottleneck is the human attention system, which hasn't changed in 400 years — which is why 17th-century best practices still work and 21st-century tools that ignore them fail
Original excerpt
I recently heard from a historian of science at All Souls College, Oxford. He forwarded me an essay he wrote about Nicolaus Steno, a seventeenth-century anatomist and geologist who was later ordained as a Catholic Bishop.
Steno’s training as a scholar unfolded in a period challenged by a novel problem: information overload. Here’s how the essay describes it:
“Books were a leading distraction in the early modern period—and how envious we should be of those times. From the 1500s onward, with the development of the printing press and the humanist revival of ancient philosophies, knowledge became available at a much greater pace than ever before.”
This created pressing questions for aspiring…
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