Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Combating the Whirlwind with a Single Sheet of Paper

Episode Date: October 5, 2026

One of the more debilitating experiences in our current digital world is the sense of being trapped in relentless, reactive, busyness. This “whirlwind” can separate you from both ambition and presence, leaving you feeling flat and fried. In this episode, Cal discusses a simple trick he deploys when he finds himself in this state. It requires only a single sheet of paper. More from Cal Download Cal’s FREE guide to cultivating a deeper life: calnewport.com/ideas Learn more about Cal’s books: calnewport.com/books Listen to Cal’s podcast: thedeeplife.com/listen (00:00:00) Intro (00:01:25) Why Overload Makes Life Feel Flat (00:05:17) The Two Plus Five Plan (00:21:54) The Long-Term Fix: Workload Management (00:26:04) Office Hours: Rebuilding After a Health Crisis (00:31:50) Landlining and Taming Your Phone (00:46:54) Talking to AI, Star Trek Style (00:55:57) September Books and Studio Update Thanks to our Sponsors:  https://www.monarch.com (Use code “DEEP”) https://www.superhuman.com https://www.pipedrive.com/deep https://www.scribe.how/deep Credits: Podcast Production: Jesse Miller Newsletter/Research: Nate Mechler Theme Music: Jay Kerstens Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If I'm being honest, the month of September wasn't that easy for me. I was overwhelmed with those sort of schedule-busting time-sensitive obligations that can really make it feel almost like you're drowning. The way I actually described how I felt last month was flat. Like, I was very busy, but not actually getting anywhere like I was existing more than I was living. Now, this is what I want to talk about today because actually I think that that feeling, that experience I had last month is one that more and more people are having, and technology is actually making it worse. And so I want to try to understand what is going on when we feel overwhelmed and flat. And then once we have this understanding, use that to figure out how best

to escape that negative state. And what I'm going to do is explain to you exactly what I did to get out of the sense of flatness I was feeling. It was a strategy that's so simple that it could fit on a single sheet of paper. And I will explain to you exactly how to do it in your own life when you end up in the same type of situation that I was just in. It is a strategy to get out of flatness and back into a deeper rhythm of your life. In our current technological landscape, it's a strategy that I think we all need in our back pocket. So let's get right into it. All right, I want to get started by looking closer at the problem. What was it that I was feeling and that other people are feeling increasingly today.

Well, it came out of overload. As I mentioned, I had an unusual amount of stuff that was landing on my plate and that was time sensitive and it was busting up my schedule. There's a lot of reasons for this. Some of it has to do with AI. I've sort of reluctantly, as you've probably seen, be dragged into a national conversation about AI and the AI labs and what's really going on and why it's going on and what we should do about it.

And I feel like it's my duty, but it generates a huge amount of last minute urgent. things that really dominate my schedule. But I also had other things going on as well. The back-to-school season is often something that puts a lot of non-professional obligations into my life. And I happen to have some other projects that were either ending up, like my book or just starting, like our studio renovation. So it's just all too much. But overload is not new. People have always suffered through periods where they had more going on than was probably reasonable to handle. What I have realized is that, technology makes overload worse. Now, a big reason why this is true is that all of these things

that are on your plate no longer just sit there until you're ready to work on them. They create these sort of constant digital intrusions into your life. I have a whole list here, email, Slack, WhatsApp, text messages, calendar invites, video conferences. These are all digital intrusions that each of these things on your plate starts generating and they require this constant vigilance because you never know when the next message comes in that you have to answer quickly or the next quick meeting falls on your schedule and now you have to rush from here to there and then from there back and now two hours have been completely eaten up. So the digital vector that these obligations use to intrude into your cognitive reality are incredibly numerous

and incredibly relentless. This I think is the real problem because if I'm a analyzing again my own experience in September, what happens is once you're completely in the state of responsiveness, your brain starts to, as a defense mechanism, your brain starts to actually slow down other types of natural ways of being. In particular, this is what I experience, that tendency or instinct to envision the future, to get excited about something that's coming up, to work on projects that are optional but are deeply important to you, that becomes subdued pretty quickly. And then when that becomes subdued, you also begin to lose your ability to just be present or have gratitude. This is where I think the flatness comes from. You just fall into a mode of I'm just trying to stay on top of all of these digital intrusions that are being generated by my overload. It never ends. My brain goes in the

self-protection mode. Suddenly I'm no longer excited about the future. Suddenly I'm no longer having those just moments of isn't this great. I just enjoy its nice weather out walking through my town. This weekend's going to be exciting. When that is gone, your world flattens. Now, I want to give a name to this. I'm going to borrow this from Greg McEwen from his book Essentialism. I call this force that creates this flatness, the whirlwind. Let's use that as our name because you're surrounded by all the digital intrusions that your overload creates. Worldwind is a bad, state to be in. I was not happy being in the whirlwind last month. Many of you have probably found yourself at the center of a whirlwind as well recently, and you have felt that same

type of numbness or flatness where you're living instead of just existing. All right, so that's the problem. That's kind of a bummer. But once we know the problem, we can come up with some solutions. And I think this is a key division, and this is something that I've missed before in my life, but I'm getting better about now. There's the short-term solution, and there's the long-term solution. So the short-term solution is what do you do when you're in the middle of the whirlwind? You can't stop that tomorrow. Long-term, yes. We'll talk long-term solutions here in a second. But when the whirlwind sneaks up on you, you're not going to get out of it right away. How do you avoid being flat during the worst of one of these whirlwinds? How do you avoid avoiding future thinking and

excitement and gratitude and presence? So in other words, how do you keep your life livable during the worst of these moments while waiting to execute or complete whatever long-term solution you have? So I want to talk about each in turn. I want to start with the short-term solution and then the long-term. It's the short-term solutions where I have been innovating more recently. The long-term solution, you can probably predict where I'm going there. I've written books about this, but short term, in the whirlwind, what did I do last month when I was in the middle of it? This is my one-page strategy. I call it a two plus five plan. All right? The idea is, and I'll show you an example in a second, but the idea is you're going to capture two practices that you're going to do daily, and five

projects are big tasks that you're working towards finishing as quickly as you can. Your goal is is to get through that whole list. And then you can reset or do something differently. That's it. Two practices, five projects and tasks. And you're going to keep up with those practices and just myopically focused outside of the stuff you have to do of just I want to knock things off of this one list of five. And that is it.

Let me show you an example here about what I mean by practices and projects. I'll write it up here on my trusty tablet. So, okay. So this white page I'm showing up on the screen. and you can imagine that is a blank sheet of paper. So you would start with your practices. So I'll just write the word practices right on here. Right.

Okay. So you start with practices. I'll give you two sample ones. Maybe you'll do ping one person. And I'll explain each of these in a second. And then two. reading lunch. Maybe I should add three practice calligraphy

because I'm just not looking great. Okay, so these are examples of the type of practices I'm talking about. I put down two under the word practices. Ping one person reading lunch. What are these examples? Ping one person means in this example, reach out to one person.

Call them, talk to them if you see them in person or send them a text message. But it's an example of a daily practice that's not incredibly time consuming. You can fit it in. takes five minutes in the worst case scenario, if not less. But it's a thing that is important to you. It's not mandatory.

There's no deadline. I want to stay in touch with people with my friends and my family. Reading lunch, that's a simple idea. The idea is when you eat lunch, don't look at your phone, try to read a chapter or two of a book. Again, a simple practice. You could do it almost every day because you're going to eat lunch most days anyways. So you can accomplish it even in the middle of the whirlwind, but it's something that is

optional and connects you to something that you think is important. in this case, developing your mind and getting lost in a world of either ideas or fiction. We're going to take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Now, some of my proudest moments from earlier in my life were hitting key financial milestones, whether it was buying my first home or finally paying off my student loans. But you know what I wish I had back then? Monarch, the personal finance app that goes beyond just telling you what you've spent to also help, you set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late

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To find out more about Superhuman Go, visit superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com for more information. All right, let's get back to the show. All right, so let's give some examples for what I mean by projects. So I'll write the word projects here. And I'll put some example ones. now we got room so that we can have a sense of the scope

I'm talking about here, right? Because the project is not going to be start a business and move it to $100 million of revenue. We're going to be way more narrow than that. So I'll put down some sample ones here. All right, Peloton split program. This is very specific, Jesse.

You don't know about these, but for those who have Pelotons, they have weight training videos on there as well, not just biking. And they have these programs called split programs, which they'll often be over, you know, four or five weeks. And it's like a normal type of workout where they'll have three different workouts to do in a week, and they're working on different muscle groups.

So you're splitting, like you would do like a normal workout. So when I put Peloton split program here, I mean, hey, try to get through one of these four-week programs, four weeks' worth of these classes. Okay. Here's a cliched one that everyone has done at some point in their life. Halloween Spotlight program. I actually was working on this last weekend, Jesse, but it's a project, in this case, a hobby project.

What this means here is, you know, I have a program to synchronize various computer-controlled spotlights to a soundtrack so we can do like lightning or other types of effects. But it's an example of a project that maybe takes a couple hours, and it's not instrumental, it's not critical to my job, there's no deadline, but it's, you know, hey, it's something I want to do because I'm going to enjoy doing it.

Let's say, I'm just writing, these are things I've thought about before some of these. Hiked O Wheaton. I've long wanted to do this. There's this Sligo Creek Trail near where I live. If you walk on it long enough and then are willing to go through some neighborhoods at the end, you can get all the way to this large park called Wheaton Regional Park that I liked that has some cool trails and gardens. It's like seven miles or something. Like that would just be a thing to do.

Figure that out. Find that afternoon. and you have to have someone come pick you up. But just do it because why not do it? All right. Here is a... Oh, I went to the eraser. The tablet is trying to erase that one.

It doesn't like that idea. I'll put something else on here that is like a little more professional. I'm putting down author photo rights. These are all actual... Some of these things are things I've done recently. So I recently acquired the rights to some photos, some author photos that were taken for a profile of me in an international magazine.

And I love the photos and I contacted the photographer and bought the rights to use so we can use them going forward. Not that my existing author photos are problematic, but they do make it look like I'm 24 years old. So we had to kind of be more reasonable. But again, it's like a project. It's like, hey, I should do this. It's not, no one's forcing me to do it. But this would be like productive and be useful in a non-urgent type of way. And then I'll put a cliched one down like replant garden.

So maybe you have like, I don't do this, but maybe you have like a garden box. And it's like, hey, why don't I get that set up for the fall season? All right. So what do these type of examples have in common? I have five projects. What's special about these projects? Doing a like a Peloton split program, a hobby project, a hike, like a one-time thing, kind of a productive, non-urgent thing in your professional life and a like a hobby household type of project, right?

None of them are urgent. None of them have a deadline. They're all things you would enjoy doing and or would make you feel like you have autonomy your efficacy. You're making progress on things that are important to you even when you're not being forced to do it. So with this two plus five plan, you would say, great, I'm going to try to do these two practices every day. They're designed to be done every day, even if the day is busy. And I'm going to try to get through these lists. When I'm thinking about my week or the weekend or each day, is there one I can make progress on or get done? They're not super hard. You can knock off

one in a week, even if you're very busy. But you make progress. You don't refill them. You're just like, I want to try to finish this list. All right. So, So what do you do with your 2 plus 5 plan? You print it and you put in your sock drawer. That's kind of the key here because that's the one place where it's safe, right? It's not out on a surface where you're going to lose it, but you'll see it every day. Every day that you wear socks, you'll open that drawer, be like, oh, yeah, yeah, there's my 2 plus 5. Let me remember do those practices.

Can I do one of these today? All right. So why does this work? What's the importance of this? Well, the key is that even when you're in the middle of the whirlwind, you feel like you have autonomy. You're still getting a minor but regular dose of doing things that you think are important or you're excited about, even though it's not something that's being demanded of you. And that resists the flatness.

These are easy enough that it's not setting yourself up for failure, but even amid the whirlwind, you're like, you know, I got a couple hours in on my Halloween thing. And that was just presence, gratitude, presence, enjoying it, or I worked for 30 minutes and kind of figured out this author's photo write thing. You're feeling like, hey, I'm making progress on my projects, things I want to do, not things that people are forcing me to do. And it only takes a little dose of this sometimes to have your mind avoid falling into the flatness. So these daily practices and then work here, work there, maybe even just once a week. It's just enough. That's what I found. maintain some sense of I'm still doing things I want to do. I'm still excited about things. I'm still in command of my own life. I'm not going to collapse down the flatness and just feel like I am

reacting and that's all I do. So it's all about immunizing yourself to the virus of whirlwind induced collapse into flatness. This is not about let's make sure that we accomplish your greatest goals. This is not about let's transform your life. And if you just can get through these five things, your life will be changed forever. No, these are minor things. It's about the psychology that gets you through whirlwinds in the short term without having your psyche collapse into that flatness. What about your normal time management system? Does this replace it or anything? Yeah, that's a good question, right? What about, like we talked about earlier this fall, I talked about having a slim down time management system, you know, when things are busy.

So is this even slimmer? Are we moving from a fully featured Cal Newport time management to a slimmer one down to just this? And the answer is actually no. This is separate from organizational time management. So you do need to control your time. You do need to have capture, right? So no matter what's going on, outside of like a day or two or like you're completely booked, you've got to get obligations out of your head.

That's capture into a trusted system that you do look at. And you have to have some look or say or autonomy over what you're doing with your time. When your schedule gives you breathing room, I like multi-scale planning. I think it's where you should have your, you're looking at your big picture, quarterly plan that might link out or semester plan or seasonal plan, whatever you want to call it, It has this big sort of big picture vision. It might link to more detail strategic plans. So like subplans for things like your professional life.

And then you look at that each week to build a weekly plan to make sure that you're making progress on these big goals that are important to you. And then each day you're doing daily time block planning, all with a schedule shutdown confirmed. So you have a separation between work and not. And you control the rhythm and intensity of your life. Like you turn these knobs. You have easy days and hard days, easy weeks, hard weeks, easy months and hard weeks. Like that's the full, the full featured.

system is what you want to get to in a steady state. And I will say, I've mentioned this before, Jesse, but in the book, my new book is coming out in March on the Deep Life, I have a section where I walk through all of that. I know I've talked about this all before on the podcast and bits and pieces of been another book, but I just have this section where it's like, let's just build you a time management system from scratch. Then when times are a little bit harder, like during a whirlwind period, fall back on the simpler systems like I talked about, I guess I was like early September that episode. Early September, maybe late August,

I had an episode about a sort of busy period version of that system where you get just the, you know, there is capture. You're looking at task lists. You're getting basic control over your time. So that oscillates. This is different, right? Because even when you fall back on that really simplified time management system, so you still have some capture and control, but you're not working on grand plans and multi-scale plan in any interesting way, even when you're there, you could still go flat because here's what happens.

You're doing your best to capture. Things are going to the through list. You're getting things out of your head. You're looking at your calendar carefully to make sure that your schedule fits. But you're still day to day just executing and reacting. And you'll still feel flat. Like I am completely organized with still feeling flat. So the 2 plus 5 plan is not a time management system.

It's a mind management system. It's a strategy you deploy when you're in the bunker with your simplified time management system trying to like keep yourself from falling into a stress spiral. It's that the time management system will do that. You throw the two plus five to get to a more positive subjective affect to get away from flatness and still feel alive, to still feel like depth matters in a time when that could be taken away from you. So Jesse, that was a good question because you got to have both.

If you give up on controlling your time and obligations, you're just going to fall into anxiety and stress. That's no way to live. But just doing that alone still can push you in the flatness. if there's enough whirlwind, and that's where the 2 plus 5 plan can help you in the short term. The long-term solution is to minimize the number of times you fall into the whirlwind. That should not be your steady state.

That should not be something that happens time and again. So when you're in the middle of the whirlwind, you kind of have to think, what is causing this? And almost always that means looking at your workload of things you've agreed to do professionally and personally. Because again, the interruptions, the distractions, these are being generated by the obligations. So we really got to understand this picture. You have the things you've said yes to.

Then digital technology is helping to affect how those things then affect you. How many intrusions it generates, how reactive it makes you, how busy it makes you. So the digital technology is changing the way that it actually affects your life. if you try to solve this problem at the bottom of this, like, okay, I'm going to try to organize all the digital mediated intrusions and be better about them. I'm going to be better about how I use my inbox and my expectations about Slack or this or that. That's going to be a losing battle. Once you're overloaded enough and you have these digitally mediated intrusions coming at this incredible volume,

eventually you're going to be moving the deck chairs on the Titanic. So long term to prevent whirlwind is really a workload man. management issue. It's saying, oh, how do I make sure I don't get so many things on my plate? And honestly, something that I've experienced, I've seen other people experience as well, is where this often gets hard is where they don't think about workload management in their personal life. And that begins to build up. And then when they have a sort of normal cyclical, you have a little bit more load than normal in their work, it adds up to too much and the intrusions really take over. So long term, workload management really makes.

matters. All of the strategies for this, the best place to find them in my canon would be my last book, which was slow productivity. Rule number one is do fewer things. It's all about workload management, all sorts of practical strategies in there. So that's the long-term solution is to say, this is bad. I don't want to be in this state all the time. So I have to control how many things I'm actively working on. And I do all the types of things I talk about in slow productivity, but I'll apply the types of rules strategies and ideas in that book to my professional life and of my personal family life as well, because I don't want to be back in the whirlwind. All right?

So short term, two plus five helps you from falling, preventing from falling in the flatness during the whirlwind. Long term, workload management to make sure that's not too common of an occurrence. So hopefully that makes sense. That makes sense, Jesse, that distinction between you got to have time management, but that has to be on a spectrum where you're able to pull it back to the simplest possible things when you're busy, but you never just give it up. And then you have these other types of things you do, like big, big picture, workload management to stop being in the busy situations.

And then psychological, mind management, psychology management, like the 2 plus 5 plan, to say when I'm in one of those situations, later I can figure out why and try to prevent it from happening. How do I prevent my mind from closing down or shutting down? Yeah, no, it makes sense. Yeah. So sometimes you got to, you got to hack the brain as much as you have to, hack your schedule. By the way, things are getting better now. I'm doing the

slow productivity stuff. I'm deploying new rules, no new this. I'm spreading this out. I'm saying no to a lot more things and I'm readjusting. But the 2 plus 5 plan helped. That helped. And there were some Halloween related things on there. Did you do a Peloton split? No, I don't do those anymore. I mean, I've...

Your trainer. Zach, yeah. That I stick with. That I stick with. Zach is always impressed. He's like, wow, you stick. at the very least, like you really don't skip workouts. But for me, it's become, that's my stress management. So that's just become something I really, really feel bad to miss one. And I'm going to catch it up one way or the other.

Like last night I was doing it, you know, pretty late at night. But I was like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to miss this. All right. So there we go. That's my, that's my deep dive for today. Because this is a Monday, we like to hold some office hours and see what is on your mind. Remember, if you have a question or a comment or something you want to share in the Office Hour segment, you can send an email to podcast at Calnewport.com. All right, Jesse,

who is first in our Office Hour queue this week? Our first question is from someone using a semester plan to move out of a hard situation. Yeah, this is, I was reading this before. So I, first of all, I'm going to say this is, I've anonymized this. I cut out a lot of details to keep it anonymous, but I thought it was important. I did want to share it because it is in the same theme of what we just talked about, but a much more extreme situation than I found myself in in September. Let me read it, but then you'll see what I mean, and then we'll talk about it. All right. In March, I came down with a rare autoimmune neurological disorder called Gianne-Burray syndrome.

My immune system attacked my periphery nervous system, and I was a rare autoimmune immune system, and I was a rare autoimmune immune disorder, and I was, I was temporarily paralyzed from the neck down. The timeline for GBS recovery is six to 24 months. And while I'm hopefully skewing on the shorter side, my doctors say it will be a year before I fully feel back the baseline. I want to give a couple little details here. I'll keep it anonymous. The correspondent here was explaining, you have to relearn.

The paralysis goes away, but you have to. to relearn all, like, how to hold something. Like, you really got to relearn all of this physical stuff that we take for grant. So this is, this is a hard recovery. All right, let me go back to the letter here. As you'll see in the semester plan I attach, so they sent me a copy of their, their semester plan for the fall, and they have a draft of their plan for the spring. They're academic related, so they're thinking about things in semesters like I do, as opposed to quarters like a business person. As you'll see in the semester plan I attached, very few things, if any, fall into the category of these must be done by this specific date.

Because I get very tired, very fast right now, and my energy is unpredictable. My plan focuses instead on creative endeavors for personal and professional nourishment, rebuilding my body and fortifying my mind. And fortify my mind. Oh, I put those together. but rebuilding my body and then the third one is fortifying my mind. Thank you for your continued work and inspiration. I feel like I'm finally on track, partly because of my disorder,

to do less, do better, and know why I spent the first 35 years of my life in a rush. And I don't want to live that way anymore. So this, A, it's inspirational. I think it's,

it's touching and informative. So this person has a major shock. I mean, it doesn't get more. much bigger than this, to be temporarily paralyzed and then having to suddenly be out of your busy life and trying to rebuild your body and your mind sort of from scratch. And instead of seeing that just as an obstacle that you curse, this correspondent said, this is going to be my wake-up call.

I was busy all the time. It sounds like the description of flatness that I was feeling in September that we just talked about. This was how they were feeling before the infection. And now when that's no longer an option, they're seeing, wait a second, obviously my situation is incredibly hard and I wish it didn't happen, but rebuilding from the situation is showing me that there's a different rhythm to life. There's a deeper rhythm that's possible where a lot of the things I'm working at are, they're instrumental in the sense, like, I want to get stronger, and I saw on the plan. There's very specific goals about steps and milestones you're trying to get to. But it's,

not ambitious in the sort of just professional sense. It's not urgent. It's not here's the deadline. I have to get this done or people be mad at me. It's I'm choosing to do this. And I want to get stronger again. And I want my mind to come back. And I want my soul. I want to nourish that soul. I want to be doing things that are going to make my soul feel better. So for the rest of us who aren't going through such a major disruption. I think there's a really key lesson in there. The power of simplifying and the power of beginning to insist on optional but important deep practices and projects changes everything. It can change things so much that even in the face of such a terrible situation, this correspondent is seeing a benefit. You know, there's benefits to this compared

to what my life was like before. So this is not like productivity hacks we're just talking about here. It's psychology. It's the human experience. It's the what's necessary for a deep life. I am insisting on doing things that no one is telling me to do and there's no urgent deadline, but they make my life better. And that's a big part of my life is embracing my life and seeking ways to get more

enjoyment out of it or to make my experience in this world better and more quality. and the easiest way to do that is not to always have a 2 plus 5 list that you're squeezing in, but to slow down, reduce your plate, so you have more than enough time to do those types of things. So I thought that was a really nice letter,

I think, and I wish them all the luck in their recovery, and keep me posted. I want to see how your plans unfolding. I'll give you some advice. All right, what else do we got? Eric points us to a product that supports one of our ideas. And a product that supports one of our ideas. Let's see.

Eric says, looks like a company commercialized your landlining idea. So remember, landlining is the idea of keeping your phone in the kitchen when you're at home. That's where you go to use it. That's how you communicate to people. That's how you look things up. There's all of this talk of all these different things you might do to make your life simpler and to simplify your phones.

But this is like the number one thing you can do because it has whole portions of your day where it's not your default mode diversion. There's all these benefits. So let's see. Let's load on the screen here. All right, here we go. It's coily.com. And we can see here on the screen.

They say the modern landline, give your phone a home with our retro wall perch and coil charging cable so you can hang up and get your evenings back. Let's zoom in. All right. So it's an iPhone on a perch on the wall with an old-fashioned telephone coiled cable that's plugged into it and plugged into the wall. So you would actually hold your iPhone with that coil telephone cable. connecting it to the wall. I like this, Jesse. What do you think?

If you're going to landline, you might as well make it look good, right? If you try to walk away, you have it. Did you have that growing up? Yeah. I remember vividly. People who did not grow up in the 90s don't remember that like the way

we dealt with privacy and phone calls is you just had a really long coiled cable. Like our kitchen phone had God, it must have been a 10 foot cable that you could stretch even more because it's coiled. So you would just like take the phone and walk down the hallway

and go into another room. And like I remember when wireless like cordless phones became a thing. There was like a game changer. You're like, oh, I can carry the phone around the house. Yeah, that was like the big deal. That answering machines?

Answering machines. When answering machines became digital was a big deal because it used to be, you would press the button. It was like a dishwasher. It was so complicated. And it would have to like rewind the tape and then play it and then go back to an empty part of the tape.

And I guess I had another tape that had the recording on it. And then they became digital so you could just like go through. And then you got telephone service voicemail where you would dial in. The telephone service would do your messages and storm and you would call in and type in a code. And then you, because you could call in from anywhere and type in a code and advance through your messages by like pressing buttons on your whatever. Those are the days. I like this. We should get one of these for the HQ.

That'd be kind of cool, right? Like when we come in, you can put your phone in one. Yeah. Landlighting in general, it's the easy, I mean, it's not easy to do,

but it's the easiest solution, right? Because you retrain your brain. Think about all the, if your phone at home was in the kitchen with like a coily or something like this, think about all the things

you would now do without a phone, watching TV, watching movies, being at the dinner table, talking to people, reading books, and your brain would get used to this idea, of I don't get digital candy

at the slightest hint of boredom. You do that long enough in the part of your short-term reward system that is trying to motivate you to pick up the phone chills out. It chills out. The grip on you gets much better. I think landlining is more important

than any number of apps that monitor your usage or complicated rules or digital Shabbats or any of that. This will beat all of that. It's not easy to do, but it's incredibly easy to describe. With the redesign, you might have to put one in the background.

Yes. Yeah, we could put one back. We could put one back here. What if I get a call? I could take it. Reach back. Hello? You used to have to say like,

hello, Mr. Newport. This is Jesse. Is Cal there? Like, you would have to talk to adults. It's like a whole thing. I want to take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible.

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Alfred has another idea about taming your phone all right Cal I listened to your latest episode where you talked about dumb phones versus boring phones

you can actually have a smartphone without the downsides you mentioned like being able to reinstall Instagram instantly you need to use

Android and install and off which adds an artificial delay before you can perform certain actions it's literally life-changing.

All right, let's look at this one as well. All right, what do we got? What we got here? Oh, man, this looks less cute. All right, so for those who are just listening instead of watching, we have basically technical release notes. This is not a polished product.

I think this is more of a tech product. But here's what it says. The main purpose of and-off, so it's the word and and the word off put together. The main purpose of and-off is to lock down Android devices. It provides features that allow you to take advanced control over your device

and the apps installed on it. And off can be used to reliably prevent yourself from using any app on your device, including Android WebView, factory resetting your device, or abusing safe mode to bypass common protection apps. Additionally, it can lock down configurations on your device that are needed for third-party services to function correctly, such as DNS or VPN settings.

I don't know, man. I think Coily might have more of a general public appeal So this is, A, if you're techie, this is what this is for. It's like bare metal control apps that, like, you set up and configure yourself and are super powerful. I, like, I get the idea of having these type of apps. I think they are useful to people. They go pretty far, though, which makes me not worried about the apps, but about people. Like, if you read this description of Andoft, they're like, yeah, you can't even factory reset your phone once you're never going to turn off this app.

It makes me nervous because what if you accidentally clicked the wrong thing and it's like you can't use your phone anymore or so you forget your password? Like they're like we want to make sure there's nothing you can do. It makes you feel like you're reading the like security constraints for a vault at a Swiss bank or something. Like the best thieves in the world will be trying to use Instagram on your phone. But they will not be able to with this app. At some point you're like, man, maybe you need a different, you need a dumb phone at some point. Like if you have to have such security. But really what I think is going on here is that this is just techie forward.

And there's versions of the software that's easier to use and download. And I think we did an episode about this a while ago. It's actually trickier than you think to have this type of software on your phone. If you use like iOS, Apple doesn't really want you to do this. You have to use their service screen time. And it's really easy to get around. But I'm glad this exists. But I'm telling you, landline.

You landline enough. the appeal of the phone goes down. So landline and take social media off of it. If you have to look at social media, do it on your laptop and in the web interface and you'll feel like it's 2007 and that you need to watch the season finale of Survivor when you're done looking at Friendster. So do that. Take the social media apps off your phone. Landline. Like, that's enough.

It takes back control of your phone. Make your phone boring. You don't necessarily have to have a dumb phone. Or you could use this more complicated software. but it makes me nervous. Did you see the profile about the Survivor guy in New York Times recently? No. Is my reference timely?

What happened? I haven't checked it out yet, but I saw a lot of advertisers for it and like notifications. I wrote about the, in slow productivity, I wrote about the first season of Survivor. So like I learned a lot about Survivor. It's been around forever. Yeah. It was like 2000. Yeah.

Yeah. Like the main point, I thought it was an interesting point. I found this memo from Les MoonVez at CBS where he was like really upset that they were in last place in the ratings, the network. And they're like, I bet if you were over at NBC at 5 o'clock, their parking lot would be full. And why is our parking lot like a third empty? You guys aren't working hard enough. You got to work harder. Be here more.

Be busier. That's how we're going to win in the ratings. They did end up getting the number one in the ratings not long after that. But as I chronicled, it was because of Survivor and CSI. And what made those shows happen, it had nothing to do with busyness or long hours. They're actually really idiosyncratic creative types that came up with those concepts and sort of saved the network. And so my argument there was raw hours and busyness does not necessarily directly translate into success. And this is slow productivity is all about.

lesser things, up and down rhythm, obsessing over quality. Like, that's the type of, like, the creative people that created CSI and Survivor. It's like, that's the mindset from which you get stuff that can really move to needle. Not necessarily, I stayed at work another hour, sending more emails. All right. What else do we got? This note is about one of your earlier books that we don't talk about as much. Earlier books.

I like it. This person's name is Damn you. I'm sure how to take that. Damn you. All right, Damn You says, after reading this book, oh, they're talking, all right, which book is this? I think they're talking about So Good They Can't Ignore You. All right, so this is about my first hardcover book from 2012, written while a postdoc at MIT. It was called So Good They Can't Ignore You.

It was a contrarian career advice book. We don't talk about as much on the show, but I get a lot of notes about it. So, Damn You has a note about that book. He says, after reading this book, I have so much clarity as I was. constantly thinking, what if I chose a wrong path or career or a work that I don't love, as I have to work some years later because I'm 20. After reading this book, I realized working right triumphs right work. So really, really thanks for giving clarity and telling people that I have never given a review to a book to an online website, but after reading this book,

I have to give it five stars and it like opened my brain so much. Here I am writing this email to you to give my gratitude. This also has impact on me. as I'm also a computer science student. So long story short, I really appreciate your learning and probably I will follow it my entire life. So thanks. All right,

that's really nice. The core idea of that book, I don't know, we have to ask, we should ask, like, Jimsy Nate on our team about follow your passion,

if that's still a thing. Jesse and I grew up, that's why I wrote that book. We grew up in the era, and I have the data that shows, you know, word usage.

Follow your passion was the number one piece of career advice that if you were in like a reasonably well-off middle class or upper-middle-class, you know, situation, what was to career advice? Follow your passion. That was all you were told. If you match your passion to your job, you'll be happy.

And if you don't, you won't. And we heard so much of that that I wrote this book where I was like, look, I looked into that. That's not how people end up passionate about their work. It's not really about this match up front. It's about what you do once you actually have the job. And so that's what that book was about. And it just, it churns around out there. So I don't know if kids these days hear that term,

but that book has sold many hundreds of thousands of copies. It just is sort of like sat there in the background. Generation after generation rediscovers at least some parts of it. I like that book. All right. What else will we got? Peter has a suggestion for AI used from an unlikely source. Unlakely source.

Let's see. Peter says maybe this is helpful. Crew members in both Star Trek, TOS and TNG. TNG is the next generation. TOS. I don't know. The original? I don't know.

It's like, excuse me, I believe deep space nine came third in the chronology. Crew members in Star Trek generally do not say please when giving commands to the ship's computer. The interaction style is direct and functional. I do the same when interacting with an AI program.

It's funny. I had the same conversation. conversation today. I was recording an interview for another podcast and the host was actually someone from the film industry. And he brought that up. He brought up the way they talked to the computer in Star Trek. And he mentioned that in the movie Star Trek 4, which I find very amusing. I know Jesse, you're a major Star Trek fan, but in case you missed this, Star Trek 4 is when they were, the, the motivation was we need to do another Star Trek movie, but we don't want to spend a lot of money. So the premise was, what if the crew went back in time to Los Angeles in the exact year that they were making the movie?

So then you could just like film them in normal locations. And one of the scenes the host of this podcast was telling me about, I've forgotten this, was Spock goes up to a computer and he's trying to talk into the mouse. And he's like, I don't understand what's going on here. And that's an important scene because I think what it emphasized. is actually talking to the computer, that's the thing to make sense. Like, that's got to be, that is the ultimate,

what they do in Star Trek has got to be the ultimate intuitive interface for computers. Like, I think Gene Roddenberry got that right, you know, because what we do now we're used to,

it's barbaric. We move a block on a table and we translate the flat 2D motion to vertical 2D motion so we can, we can click on things and then we we train our fingers through like great repetition to press down springy keys to represent like the letters of our language at all of this at a much slower rate than like I can just talk or normally explain ourselves I think they got it right a lot of futurists get

this wrong like I think minority reports a Spielberg movie I think it got it wrong where it's like yeah what people are going to want to do is have a super mouse or you know Tom Cruise would move to things with his hands on the AR display I think Star Trek got it right there's a lot of lot of bits of information in speaking. But, okay, let's get back to what Peter was saying. He's referencing something I said in a recent episode where, actually was last week's episode, or I said anthropomorphizing AI can be a problem. And it's creating psychosis and actual self-harm and even death among kids because

we're not ready for interacting with something that interacts like another being. It uses personal pronouns. It has a personality. Like, there's a lot of danger. Will Robinson in that. And I said, I like natural language interaction, but it shouldn't be anthropomorphized.

You know, it's just like the, and so Star Trek is actually a good example, is they're not friends with the computer. They're not having conversations with the computer. They're just using spoken language to say what they want to do as efficiently as possible.

You know, computer set, we get so much angry letters. I try to do Star Trek speak. Set warp engines to five Tesseracs. But it's just efficient. You say what you need to do.

Isolate the whatever area. I think the computer can ask follow-up questions. And it's always in like a robotic tone. I think that's right. And in fact, I think it's what people want out of LLMs. They don't want to hear the sci-fi ghost stories from these futurists anymore about how they're going to, you know, create a transhuman race of digital space babies or we're all going to die. Like, just stop. build useful products.

And what's the most useful product you can build? Natural language interface to software. I want that. I don't want to type and use a mouse anymore. Like I don't want to learn like Riverside we use or OBS is all this clicking and, oh, wait, where do we go? And like before we started recording, just today we were trying to figure out some problem. How do we get the video up on? It wasn't working.

And we had to figure out how to get to the right properties for the right video source and then switch from one thing and back to the other. Jesse, we could have just said like, computer, I'm not seeing the video, whatever, the video source is not up there fixed to the active video source. And it would just go do that. Or computer, we're doing podcast recording configure. And it's like, great, we'll get all the things set up for you. So I like that. I like the idea of natural language interfaces and I like the idea of it's got to be Star Trek style.

We're talking to a computer. There's no thing there. Do not try to trick the human mind into thinking there's a thing there. Tesserac is from Avengers Is that Is that the same universe? Is that

That's going to get us in trouble? I know the Avengers is a different cinematic universe than Star Trek. All right, what else do we got? Luis has a bone to pick with one of our recent changes to the show's format.

Oh yeah, this is controversial. All right. Luis says, or Lewis, I love the show, but I wish you would bring back the old intro music.

I always take a moment to jam out when it comes on. We're working on this, Jesse, right? So two points. Yes, in the new, as we're upgrading the show, we're in the middle of a rebranding, the sort of like 2.0 version of the show and more about that soon. Maybe we talk some about it. The intro music is shorter, but it's adapted from the original intro music.

So if you listen to that transition music, when I say, let's get into it, that's actually from the intro music. It's just a sort of slowed down and a piece of it. It's not the but we don't want to lose our classic intro music. So, Jesse, we're putting it at the end, right? Yeah. So if you listen to the end, Lewis, you can jam out.

To be going on the honest, I really like listening to it too. Yeah, I know. But we're doing the right thing. I have a lot of thoughts. I don't mind it at the end. I think it's fine at the end. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Basically what's happening, I'll open the curtain a little bit. Like the evolution that's happening in the world of podcast. is that all of these tropes that over 10 years evolved around what an audio podcast should be format and structured as are all starting to die off. And things are becoming a little bit more produced and a little bit more, I don't want to say visual first, but they're more in the style you would get from a like a radio program or a classic TV program. And so the tropes that are going away, for example, is stuff we can. got really used to like, hey, here's who I am, here's my show, here's what the show is about, we have some long music, there's some chatter up front, all this stuff that when Jesse and I started

was just commonplace, disappearing left and right, because the medium is evolving to a higher level of professionalism, which I think ultimately is good because this is going to, I want new media to be the new media and not just like a side thing. So this evolution is necessary, but we have to strip it away. So like if you want to see another example of this, like listen to if you listen to Ezra Klein's podcast, and he's got a really good team over there at the New York Times. You'll notice over the, especially this last year, a lot of stuff has been stripped out of his intro. Remember, it's like, I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein show. As always, like, questions and comments. You can send that to Ezra Klein at New York Times.com. All that's gone. All that's gone because that's old podcast thinking.

People know who you are. They know who they know what the show is. They don't want to say. stop the momentum to hear what email address they can use to contact you. So it's the new style for better or for worse. I think only for better is things they move a little bit quicker, intro footprints are smaller, no more like here's who I am, here's what the show is about, because they're kind of realizing like people don't do that really in shows and other mediums. People know what the show's about. They've watched it before or someone told them to watch it. So you don't need to host, you know, David Letterman want to come out and be like, you know, I'm David Letterman and this is a variety show where, you know, it's five days a week and there's a monologue, some sketches. And then we're going to have some celebrity guest.

Paul, like, what's, you know, what do you think about the show going on? No, there's like the music, the energy, like it gets right into it or whatever. So anyways, but I love the music. So it's still at the end. And remember, the music that's there now comes from the theme song. so we haven't, we haven't gotten rid of it. All right,

we like to end Monday episodes with an update about what I'm up to. I'm having a book crisis, Jesse, because I lost, temporarily, I've lost my book notebook,

the field notes notebook where I keep track of the books I've read. I'll find it, but I'm having a hard time finding it. I don't know what happened to it. I have a lot of field note

notebook because I buy them 50 at a time. I have probably 20 of them spread out between my various desks. I don't think we all knew that you write all the books in one specific field note No book.

One Field Note notebook. It's where I keep track of it. I like to keep check everything I've read. And I can't. Just books, right? Just books. Just books. It's month, year, and then the five books.

But so anyways, I had to go back and try to reconstruct this. We're recording this. We're still in September when we're recording this. But does this come out? It's still September when this comes out. It comes out on October 1st. It comes out in October 1st. Okay.

So we're recording this almost a week. I know. It comes out on October 5th. What's today? Today is the 29th. Okay, 29th. All right. So we're at the end of September because Jesse wasn't around. I've been talking about books. I'm trying to go back. I had to remember that. See, I had on my notebook. I had to reconstruct this.

But I do know I read earlier in September, I read the book Floating Mountains by Joe Road. So Joe Road is like a famous Imagineer from Disney who was in charge of animal kingdom and some other stuff. So we had a new memoir that came out in September. So I wanted to read it. And I enjoyed it. But I keep having the same issue with Imagineer memoirs, which is not a problem with the book, but a problem with me, where those books tend to go heavy on the art of creativity. So it's all about the brainstorming process. The Bob Weir's book Chasing Dreams was the same way. It's all about the brainstorming process. So like we were in the room trying to figure out like what the main thing in the center of animal kingdom should be and we were bouncing it around. There's no wrong ideas because they imagine rightly that like the.

average person isn't going to build rides, but creativity matters. And so that's how we're going to have a general audience. I wouldn't know how you build rides. And I always get frustrated. I was like, I want to know about the details, the electromechanical details. I want to know about how did you get around this problem and figure this out. So I literally went searching for a book like that right after I finished this one and I found it. This also came out, this is fortuitous. It came out in September, I think, or July. It came out recently. Steve Alcorn, right? writing with Jim Karsensen wrote a book called Journey Into Imagination, and it is exactly what I actually wanted, which is he was one of the ride engineers that was at Epcot when they were building Epcot.

They're just talking about trying to get the Journey Into Imagination ride running. and it's all about the circuits and the software and like how hard it is to debug those things and I was like, you have to get them on the show. This book is for me. This book was for me. Like he was getting into the control boxes

and why this wiring was too complicated and exactly what can. It was everything I want. That's really what I want. What I discovered reading that book is the imaginers like Joe Road really do, they're like artists. They do the creative stuff.

And then it's these other. engineers that have to figure out how to have a they have an optical sensor as the fins go by and they can use the brake and the brake beam to calculate which car is this and then calculate the position of each car and it goes back to the computer and the computer sends back controls to the tire motor controllers for tires that spin that move the cars around and like how do they do that i loved it and it's very this and that other book that bethincourt book i read about automation and Disney. So I was very happy about that.

I then read Dungeon Crawler Carl. It's actually for a book group I joined this, what they wanted to read. So I read that. Any comments on that? It's a genre called lit RPG. Like literature RPG.

So the character's like in a game essentially. And it's like you're watching a Twitch streamer in the sense of like they get achievements, they level up, they're moving through. And then it has like their, their personal,

you know, like what's going in their mind and there's drama and this and that. But it's all structured like you're watching a video game. I don't know if that's like really clever or depressing. I'm not sure.

But it was creative. Yeah. It was one of those books. Not to spoil, but it's one of those books. Like so there's this dungeon crawl, like aliens come and something, something.

And there's all these levels. And if they can get to you, it's set up pretty, early like, okay, to survive, you would have to get to at least this level. So you think, you're like, oh, this is great. I wonder how they get through all these levels. But then the book goes on. You're like, I'm really far in this book.

They're still on level one. And then, like, they get the level two. You're like, I'm really getting far in this book. And then at some point, you realize, like, oh, it's going to take a whole series just to get through this dungeon. It was the exact same revelation I had when I first watched the ABC series lost. Whereas the season was wearing down, I was like, man, there really. really running out of time to explain what's going on in this island and to get rescued.

Like, they're down to like a few episodes here. It really wasn't until the last episode that I realized, oh, God, this is going to be dragged out over many seasons. And then the book, I'm about to finish, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Corey Doctorow, who I like a lot. The Reverse Centra is a reference to, so in human computer interaction, there's a notion of a centaur system where a human is augmented by a computer and then they can perform better than a human alone can. So Cintar Chess is where the term comes from.

So if you have expert players playing with expert chess engines, that combination can play higher chess than a human or a computer by itself. The reverse Cintar is Dr. Routreau's term for like you are being used by the technology. So the like the AI is like using you basically and it's no good. So I will finish that before we, you know, tomorrow. So before we get to the end of October. then so it's going to be a race to the five books. I think I'm okay because I also, earlier in the month, got more than halfway through a 600-plus page Brandon Sanderson novel, which I count those as two books when I'm done.

So maybe I could count the first half as a book. Also though, I'm half, two-thirds of the way through a really good book. My neighbor loaned me called The Tree Line, which is, it's an environmental, environmental book, one of these sort of MacGiven, Elizabeth Colbert-style books where they're travel. The author travels to these locations. And it's great, but it's dense and slow going. So I might also, depending on what I do, I might finish that as well, pretty close. So I have a couple different paths to five. But it's because I spend a long time on that 600 page book, and then I spend a long time in that really dense slow book before I really got serious, but I got to finish some books. So it's coming down on the finish line, but I'll get my five in.

I think if I finish Sintar Guide, just I will tomorrow, I'm okay because I have the first half of the Sanderson book, but I'm going to try to get finished the tree line book as well. So I have like full complete titles. It just feels better to me. And then once you finish it, you'll find your field notebook. I gotta find that thing. It's also the flatness thing was an issue too. The sort of like overload thing that was happening in September was slowing me down and forcing

myself like, no, I got to hit my five. Going back in the books that are completely unrelated to my work actually was like very useful as well. Like that's why I put a reading example in there. Books are a good way out. All right. Also an update on the studio. We've got some notes about hey, if you're going to put

wood paneling in a couple shelves behind you, what's on the shelves matter. So that we got to figure out, Jesse. What are we going to put on I think we put one of those landlines. Put a landline on there. I like that. I don't know what else to... I don't know what else to do.

We might look a little weird. We can at least try it. But why don't we put an old-fashioned phone? Like an actual, like a, like a, like just get an actual phone. What a phone booth. Let's have a phone booth. Yeah, let's have it all just be analog things. I want a phone booth. I want a fax machine that's just constantly spitting out papers.

Before every episode, you just come out of the phone booth. Oh, hi. I didn't see you there. Welcome. Hold on one second. I need to get a fax. And then I'll go over the fax machine and get out of facts. We do have old-fashioned video game cabinets.

Someone suggested unhelpfully that we put a screen behind us that live streams video games being played while I do the show so that young viewers would actually tune in. I really don't know what the put on there. I do have some, you know, I have this sort of like the museum displays I'm doing for the HQ, but they're all too, all that stuff is too bad. I have the MythBusters memorabilia. I have the circuit painting from that famous painter that grandkids gave it to us. And I have the Mark Davis drawings that I got at the Disney auction. But those are all big. So I don't know.

I mean, books, yes. Some sort of light source. Yes, a plant, I think a plant of some sort of plant. I don't know. Maybe I'll get from a Disney auction like a mass, like a Pirates of the Caribbean animatronic. Yeah. It's like a full-sized pirate that's that distracting. it kind of walks

past and then just kind of comes back that's what I'm thinking about but it will make sense because it will be holding a landline so it's like the pirate is in a phone conversation or the pirate will turn

to the fax machine all right I got to talk to Steve Alcorn we got to program this up all right that's enough nonsense I believe we'll have a Thursday episode this week as well so stay tuned and then I'll be back on next Monday

as usual and until then as always stay deep Hey, if you've made it this far, you must be ready to join my fight for depth in a distracted world. Now, the best way to do this is to join over 125,000 people who receive my email newsletter each Monday. You can sign up at Calnewport.com slash ideas. And when you do, I will send you a free guide to my seven best ideas about cultivating a deep life. Sign up today, Calnewport.com slash ideas.