Dr. Cal Newport

And so I trained myself that I could actually write a couple paragraphs in my head, maybe not word for word, but basically word for word, like figure out how I'm going to do it or figure out enough steps of a math proof to capture

Like a key insight.

Like, okay, now I'm going to get around this.

Then you have to sit down and actually formally capture that.

Yeah, for me, that's still working with notebooks.

Though when I was coming up in grad school and I was just excavating these thoughts recently.

We were talking before we recorded that, you know, I just wrote this essay about what I learned as a grad student that impacted all my writing.

As a grad student in the theory group at MIT, which was just purified concentration, this is where all the deep work ideas come from, right?

I mean, it was just world-class concentrators.

There, the method was very still, more than one person, whiteboard.

So if you have two or three people staring at the same whiteboard, you're actually going to up the level of concentration you achieve because if you let your attention wander, you disengage that attention, there's a social capital cost.

Because now I've fallen out of the whiteboard effect discussion.

That's going to be a problem.

So you actually maintain your focus at a higher level.

And then when someone else is making their move, okay, what about this?

And they're working math.

It's all math on the board.

You're giving that the highest attention you're capable of because you want to keep up.

You don't want to fall behind.

So it was like this hack that was figured out in the theory group that if you put two or three people at the same whiteboard to try to alchemize these insights into actual mathematically precise proofs, you get a 20%, 30% boost in your concentration level.