Dr. Cal Newport

So they opened that building the year I started the doctoral program.

And what did they want to show me when they brought me to this $300 million building?

Look at our whiteboards.

That's what they were proud of.

They had filled the common space on the sixth floor, the theory floor, with these freestanding double-sided whiteboards.

It was like a maze of whiteboards.

And this is what everyone was so excited about was, yeah, look at our whiteboard coverage, surrounded by a $300 million meal.

I was trying to explain this to someone recently.

Having good whiteboards, to us, is like an astronomer saying, look, we got this great radio telescope.

Like this is going to allow us to get data to work on that we wouldn't otherwise have access to.

I think to a theoretician, that's why you see a whiteboard because, you know, if you want to think at the very highest level, you need two or three people staring at the same thing, taking turns with the marker, pushing each other past where they're comfortable.

Yeah.

So you work on it just like someone's there.

The other hack is using really good notebooks.

That's always made a big difference for me.

Paper notebooks?

Paper notebooks.

Okay.

Yeah.

Though recently I've been messing around with a Remarkable, which is one of these digital notebooks where it's e-ink technology.