Cal Newport: The Attention Crisis Is 400 Years Old — and So Is the Fix

Information overload isn't new. Cal Newport traces it to a 17th-century scholar, Nicolaus Steno, who faced the same flood we do after the printing press and solved it with a habit we'd now call time blocking: pick one hard thing, wall off specific morning hours for it, and refuse to skim everything at once. "A harmful hastening should be avoided," Steno wrote. For an agent buried in listings, leads, and notifications, the takeaway is blunt — the tools change, the discipline doesn't. Avoid overload, do one thing at a time, and protect the hours that matter. Originally published by Cal Newport at Study Hacks Blog. Read the full piece here: https://calnewport.com/the-original-attention-crisis/