Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 104: LISTENER CALLS: Saying "No" Without Saying "No"

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.   - Balancing the unpredictable demands of a small business. [3:16] - Taming emails when it's hard to say "no". [10:02] - Notebook overkill. [20:47] - On adverting and social media.[29:52] - My thoughts on video games. [35:45]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep questions listener calls mini episode. Quick announcements. I'm running a little bit low on the voice questions. Maybe we have about 60 or 70 of them left for me to draw from, so please submit more. Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how. It's easy to do. You can do it straight from your browser. Now I turned off my air conditioner to record and it's a hot day.

So as my studio rapidly heats up, I am motivated to get this episode started quick. So let's do a quick sponsor read and then get rolling with this week's listener calls. The sponsor I want to mention is Blinkist. As I've talked about often on this show, ideas are power, especially in today's culture. And the best source of ideas is books. The hard thing, of course, is figuring out which books are actually worth that investment of one to two weeks to actually read. This is where Blinkist comes in. You can find books about a topic that's important to you. Blinkist will provide you blinks, 15-minute summaries that you could read or listen to on the go to get you all of the main ideas of that book. So what you can do is surround the topic and get blinks for multiple books on that topic, get the lay of the land, learn the main ideas. and figure out which of those books is probably the most high leverage for you to actually buy and read. So now you can be much more strategic in what books you bring into your life.

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It gives you that push you need to recognize that this book is going to be worth reading. Now, right now, Blinkis has a special offer just for our office. audience. If you go to blinkus.com slash deep, you can start a free seven-day trial and get 25% off a blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial. That's at blinkist.com slash deep. All right, with that, let's get started with our mini episode. Our first question, has to do with balancing the many unpredictable demands of running a small business. Hi, Cal, my name's Marov. I have a small writing business, and I often teach in lecture on writing.

Here's my question, though. Besides my own strategic big rock work to scale my business, which often gets neglected, at any given moment, I'm working on longer projects like client, blog posts, or websites, short hourly projects like reviewing an email or writing text for a new app feature, which require a somewhat quick response and general add-in stuff like proposals and invoicing, which are also somewhat time-sensitive. The long projects usually take a week or two and involve a call, some research, and a few rounds of writing and editing. The short stuff in admin can be as quick as a few minutes or even require a little more time to think and put something together. I never know exactly what balance of the three I'll have.

How would you recommend time blocking and managing tasks in Trello or elsewhere in this case, as well as handling my email inbox and handing tasks or emails off to a virtual assistant or freelance writer that I work with? I'm sure there's a better way than what I'm doing. Thanks a lot. Well, Marab, I think there are two things that will help you. First of all, the daily time block planning, this really shouldn't be the place in at which you're making a lot of decisions about what am I going to work on today? A lot of that thinking should happen during your weekly planning discipline. That's where you can look at your entire week ahead.

Look at what's on your plate. Look at your strategic plan. Look at your task list and Trello, et cetera, and say, okay, what do I want to try to get done this week? And when do I want to try to get it done? Maybe Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, first thing for the first 90 minutes, I'm working on this big proposal. And then I want to block out Thursday afternoon is when I'm going to do this blog post writing for a client. Friday mornings when I'm going to do this app text writing. You have time then put aside for the admin. You've figured out when things are going to happen. More on that in a second. And you've left

a reasonable amount of time for at unexpected client communication admin for each day based on how much you typically expect to get on a day so that there will be time put aside this flexible. Then when your time block planning for the day, you sort of know what you're supposed to be doing that day. You sort of put in, here's from working on big rocks, here's from working on admin here is sort of variable time that I can use to handle request to come up at the last minute. And if they don't, then I can find a fallback thing to do during that block. So your daily time block planning for this type of business should be kind of boring. The interesting thing it happens during your weekly, your weekly planning. The other thing I think you really need to

think about here, Marov, is your processes. So this is where my new book, A World Without Email, is going to be quite relevant, especially part two of that book where I get into this idea. you need to list out, here are all of the things that I do on a regular basis as part of my business. I call those processes, but you can call them whatever you want. But the things have happened again and again. You need to then start figuring out for each of these processes how you want to implement it. How does information come into it? How is that information stored and organized?

When do you work on it? How do you collaborate or coordinate with other people involved? That could involve, you know, some of these processes might involve a conversation with a client. Some others might involve having to pass things off to a freelance writer or to pass things off to your virtual assistant. All of those things are part of the implementation of each process, but you want implementations for each of these processes. Now you know how this regular occurring work actually should occur. Now this is going to allow you, for example, to work much more smoothly with your freelancers and assistant because it's not going to be a hyperactive

hive mind approach of just, I'll grab you when I need you. I'll send you a quick message. You send me one back. Now it's, oh, this is when we do invoicing. It happens on Monday afternoon. I get you all of the information in this format by Monday midday, and then you, my virtual assistant, takes them to do the invoicing or something like this. Or for the freelance writer, there's a check-in on Monday and Wednesday where the assignments go into a Dropbox folder. There's a sort of virtual office hour period where they could ask you questions, whatever. But you've worked this stuff out, so it's not just on the fly. You know when the work that's somewhat regular is going to happen.

One of the key processes in here is going to be dealing with clients. Let's say they have a request, hey, can you do this kind of last minute? Like, well, how do we want to do that? How do we want them to make the request? What do I want to guarantee? How do I want them to send me the information? How do we coordinate? Again, there's a lot of options here.

If you're just throwing the hyperactive hive mind at something like this, you might just say, I don't know. A client can email me whenever. I have to keep checking my emails. If an email comes in with a thing, I need to go back and forth with that client, in a asynchronous manner kind of puncturing up the rest of that day to figure out what they really want and then try to scramble to get that work done. That's probably not the best way to do it. Imagine instead a process, I don't know, I'm just making this up, I don't know your business well,

but you have onboarding office hours, client office hours, one hour a day, three days a week. And for your regular clients you do a lot of work for, you say, yeah, anything you need, anytime you need me for something, just hop on to one of those office hours. I'm always there, just doing some background administrative tasks, hop on five minutes back and forth. We can boom, work it out, get a quick scope worked up, you approve it, and then you have some internal system of,

okay, here are the blocks when I do this type of freelance work or whatever, and therefore it goes under some cue and you have a whole column for it in Trello. I'm not trying to be too specific here, but what I'm trying to convey, what I'm trying to convey is that when you start to implement these processes intentionally, suddenly, you get breathing room. And you get breathing room because things are not reactive and things are not ad hoc.

It's not just rock and roll as everything comes up because that does not scale. It's we've thought through how we do things. We're all on the same page. I'm on the same page with my clients and with my freelancers and with my virtual assistants. And because of that, suddenly your days are going to seem like they have much more margin and much more space. You're much less reactive. Combined that with a really smart weekly plan, I think you're going to find that you could probably significantly even reduce the footprint that your work

currently has on not just your time, but your attention. You're not going to have to be checking things all the time. And yet you're going to make the same money. Now you have surplus cognitive capital here that you can use to grow the business or make more money or use it to go do other things with your newfound time. Maybe build up new skills that allow you to get to an even better business or just things unrelated to your professional life. A lot good will happen if you throw some structured planning and some structured process design at a small business of this type. All right, moving on here, let's do a question about anxiety producing email. Hi, Cal, my name is Rachel, and I'm a staff attorney at a small nonprofit.

The vast majority of my work is deadline-driven deep work, but I do find the greatest productivity challenge I face is email and related anxiety. I've read all your books, including a world without email, and I've listened to your podcast from the beginning. So I do feel I have a good handle on, say, 80% of my email load in terms of processes, it without much stress or impact to my productivity. For the remaining 20%, however, I find those emails cause me a lot of anxiety and even insomnia. These emails fall in generally two buckets. The first are emails from colleagues asking me to answer a quote-unquote quick question,

which I know might require, say, 30 minutes of research and maybe 15 to 30 minutes to compose an accurate response, so that I suddenly have a new, hour-long project to block off time for. The second type are emails asking me to join some project or initiative that overlaps with my job description, but which I know would steal hours from my core job duties. I know how I'd like to respond to these types of emails. For the first type, I'd say, I received your question. It will require some research. I won't have time until next week, and I'll get back to you then. And for the second type, I'd like to say, thank you for inviting me to participate. I'm at capacity with deadlines and will be unable to join you. But my sense is that some version of these direct responses

might go over well enough of coming from, say, a tenured male professor, but I suspect they'd be less well received from a junior female employee, even one with a high level of professional responsibility. Well, Rachel, a couple years ago, I didn't event at a big law firm here in Washington, D.C. and I was actually invited to come to the law firm by an internal group of female lawyers at the firm. And one of the big things they were talking about, and I learned a lot about listening to them, was exactly this issue within the law in particular. I think, first of all, you were right. Men are more comfortable often, not all men, but men are more comfortable often heroically saying no. And one of the reasons why we're more comfortable with that is

A, we're sometimes not quite so socially aware or adept as women, but also because we get away with it more. Or more likely, of course, as you're pointing out here, to get a round of applause, and man, what an iconoclastic genius that person is. Of course, they're not going to join this committee. And when the woman does it in the same situation, it's, Rachel's kind of difficult. So this is a real problem. So let's just start by underlying that. What can we do in the short term? Obviously, there's long-term, long-term solutions here that have to do with the entire workplace cultures.

But what can you do starting right away? Well, I'm going to give you a strategy for both types of anxiety-producing emails that you mentioned, which I think will help you get to the effect of the responses that you want to give but think you can't, while really minimizing the potential unfair blowback. All right, so let's start with the first type of email. So you mentioned the first type of anxiety producing emails from colleagues who are asking you to answer a quote-unquote quick question. It took them about 19 seconds. They write that question and hit send.

It's going to take you about an hour to answer it. One strategy here is to reduce the asymmetry. So it's not to say no and not to say you're not going to answer it, but what you're going to do is reduce the asymmetry and effort involved. I'll explain to you in a second some ways of doing this, but the idea here is by shifting things

with the question asker now has to actually do more work. You're actually going to have probably the majority of those questions more or less go away because, hey, if it takes me 19 seconds, bam, why not? It's going to take me more time. Maybe I don't really need this question asked.

for the questions that don't go away, if this asymmetry, this extra effort is designed properly, it's going to make it easier for you to actually do the work of answering it. So one way of reducing the asymmetry in these question-answered diads and email communication is to defer to, let's say, office hours for clarification and expansion. So here's the idea. You have office hours. Maybe it's every day, maybe it's every other day. In your office, your door is open. If there's a large remote contingent at your office, your Zoom or Slack or phone is on or what have you,

it's time that you're like, I'm always going to be there, well-posted, real obvious. When someone asks you one of these asymmetric questions, you say, oh, that's a great question. I think we need to flesh it out so I can answer it properly. Stop by at any of my upcoming office hours and we can kind of get into exactly what you're looking for

and so I can get you what you need. And then they'll try to get out of it. Like, no, not just like blah, blah, blah. You're like, yeah, it's great. Just jump whenever office hours, I'm always there. We can get into it and figure out what you need. That's asymmetry. They now have to think about that planet, come back and talk to you in person.

A lot of questions will go away. The questions that don't go away, having a synchronous conversation. So you're in my office or I'm on the phone with you in a non-interruptive way. Just let's go back and forth. It is surprising how much that improves the project. A, right there in the room, they might kind of feel. figure out what the answer is and not really need you to do any extra work. And if you do need to do extra work, it's now very clear what they're looking for and why. And it's going to

be much quicker and easier for you to actually do that. So that's the asymmetry strategy. There's other ways, by the way. I've seen, look, there's the Amazon method. There's a method where you basically, the person who has the question or wants to, the input on the decision has to do a lot of work up front, basically. In summarizing, here's the various points and here's the various decisions and why the pros and cons of each, they have to do a lot of work before they can solicit the input of other people. I call it the Amazon method because Jeff Bezos would demand that for meetings. If we're going to get together to make a decision, whoever called this meeting has to do that work first, and we need it X hours before the meeting happens. We're not going

to figure this out in the room. So there's things like that you can do too. But the underlying point here is asymmetry. Make the person asking the question do more work. It improves a lot. lot of things and you're not saying no to anybody. And in fact, not only you're not saying no, you're showing initiative about trying to actually be more useful to them. Oh, man, let's get into this. I want to get you what you need. I want to get you really good information. Great. So we've got to get into this. It's a surprisingly effective strategy. All right. The second type of email you mentioned was you being asked to join a project or initiative that overlaps your job description, but takes up a lot of time. I talk about this a little bit in a world without email. There's good research on this. I

talk about in the book. I believe the official term from this research was non-promotable activities. So it was a technical way of talking about activities that do not directly tie to you getting promoted. So let me join a committee to help figure out, you know, the layout of the cubicles when we do the office redesign. It's useful for the company, but not really tied to you advancing in your career. And that research showed, again, as you were pointing out, women are much more likely to take on, say yes to those and take on more of those than their male counterparts, and then that creates just by itself over time, sort of compound interest effect here,

different trajectories of upward movement in their careers. So what I would suggest here, and this is one that academics know a lot about because our whole life is being bombarded with service demands and trying to keep that reasonable so we can do our research, we get this problem really pronounced, is a quota system. You have a quota.

And in fact, work this out. If you need to with the partner, you work under whatever, hey, what is the right amount of non-core business type committees, projects, initiatives? I don't know the terminology. That's going to depend on your work in academia. It has to do with committees, journal reviews, program committee memberships, or certain things that come up commonly. You work out a quota. I want to do some of this because I want to be useful, of course. We all have to chip in. But what's the right amount so that it's not too much with my client work? And you can get your partners. your managing partner to help you agree. I guess you're not at a law firm, so you know, you might do this with your executive

director. You said you're at a nonprofit. Then you have the quota. And then when you hit the quota, you say, oh, you know, I have a quota of, you know, seven of whatever. And I've already hit it for this quarter. So I can't jump on this one right now. And when you're below the quota, you can just say, yeah, enthusiastically.

So you're not the person who's always saying no. You're like, yeah, let's do it, right? I mean, if your quota is seven initiatives, I'm just making this. number up, but that's seven times you get to say yes with enthusiasm. And then everything else that comes after you say, you know, I have this quota. I've hit the number so I can't go more. The reason why the quota system works is for someone to come back and say, yeah, but you really should do this. What they're arguing is your quota's wrong. And, you know, you can come back and be like, yeah, look, you're right, maybe this quota is too small. When I next meet with my managing,

partner executive director will talk about it. But you shift the grounds of arguments from, should you, Rachel, do this thing I'm asking you? Like, are you being accommodating or not? Are you being difficult or not? Are you helping me out or not? And instead saying, is your quota we establish a reasonable quota for someone in your position for non-promotable activities? And if it's a reasonable quota, then I don't have any ground to stand on. And if it is not a reasonable quota, then we can argue about the quota. But it's not about this particular thing I'm asking you anymore. It's about this more abstract cap on your different types of work. So again, I think that works well.

So what I'm trying to get out here, there is ways, if you think this through, to try to fend off this type of excess work, even if you can't do the, you know, crazy-haired antisocial male thing of just like, no. And everyone applauds and says, well, what a great mind. Even when you can't do that, there's more socially nuanced ways to do this, more. socially sophisticated ways to do this. The relevant chapter for anyone out there who's interested in this general point, the relevant chapter from my new book, A World Without Email, is a chapter on the specialization principle.

That's where I get into this issue that we're working too much and talk about ways about how we can reduce that, how we can reduce having too much stuff on each individual's place. All right, moving on here, let's do a more technical question about notebooks. Hi, Cal. I'm about to finish her at PhD Dade of Green. Minister Physics, and my work is mostly coding data analysis and extracts information from data. My question is about note-taking habits. My problem is that I think I use too many note-taking tools.

One physical big notebook for research notes. One small notebook for Beckham the envelope calculations and equations. And I also use the notes app in my MacBook to take more spontaneous notes that sometimes require me to type instead of writing because it's faster. For instance, during work meetings. The problem with the latter is that I end up mixing notes for meetings, research, and personal life in it, which makes them disorganized and inconsistent. It's all very messy, and I rarely use the big physical notebook.

Do you have any tips on how to write notes more consistently and in a more organized way? I think the primary thing I would say here is, in your situation, of exactly which or how many notebooks you have doesn't matter a lot. It's going to come down to an D&Personal preference. The two main uses of notebooks in knowledge work is A, an extension of your working memory. So let's say you're working on an astrophysics proof. There's only so many equations or variables or temporary or intermediate results you can keep in your head. So having a notebook in front of you that you're writing on, literally in that moment you're extending your working memory. This is why mathematicians use notebooks and whiteboards. That's very useful.

The other more common purpose for notebooks is to have a long-term storage medium for things. You don't want to keep track of just in your head. Ideas, information you need for future projects, etc. And so having a notebook you can use to extend your working memory and having notebooks in which you not only capture information that might be useful, but you trust it. So you know you will review that notebook. Things won't be lost. That's a big step from not having that is going to give you a lot of improvement in your working life. The step from I have trusted notebook systems to I have a highly organized and optimized notebook systems, that's a much smaller step. It doesn't mean it's meaningless, but I don't want you to get your expectations

up that optimizing your notebooks once you're already using and trust your notebooks is going to make a huge difference. I usually say 15% is the right rule. Getting your tool right and optimized can make things up to 15% easier. So it's non-trivial. You know, hey, it's 15% easier to get what I need for the projects I'm working on. It's 10% easier to get going with equations because I love this notebook and the pin I use. That's non-trivial. And over time, that friction reduced can lead to a lot more forward progress, but it's also not going to be a massively transformational relationship with your work. So in your case, if you feel like you have, you have a massively transformational relationship with your work. So in your case, if you feel like you have too many notebooks and it's messy,

you'll feel better if you clean that up. And feeling better is non-trivial and it'll help a little bit. So you might as well do it, but just don't expect this is what's standing between you and a Nobel. A little bit more concrete in your situation, given the notebooks you described, I would simplify this down to two. I would have one computer-based note system that you do any types of computer-based note taking on. So it's all in the same system. you can use something like Rome Research or you can use something like Evernote depending on the type of notes you take.

So you just know if I'm in a meeting or I'm at a conference or whatever and I'm on my computer. There's just one place where I'm looking at papers online or websites online. There's one place that all goes and I can have different notebooks and notebook stacks if you're using Evernote

or if you're using something like Rome Research, you're going to just have all these different note pages that are connected in different ways. That's useful. So you only have one place you have to look. That means you're going to trust it more and you're going to get more used to that interface. and then just have one really high quality.

You really enjoy it. Notebook, have a stack of them and a pin you liked. It works well in the paper, not too much bleed, but smooth rolling that you use for anything you want to do analog. So you can capture notes that you want to remember, but you can also do working memory type stuff. I am working on an algorithm right now, and I just need working memory to try to figure out how I'm going to make this nested loop structure work, or I have to do a quick master theorem application to see if this recurrence is really going to solve to something that's sufficiently efficient, et cetera. You know, this might help because then you can have really clear, really clear trust system. I just, everything's online, that's online, is in the same electronic notepaking thing, and then this is just my notebook for everything else.

And so I just know if it's in here, I always have it with me, I won't forget it. So again, you can make things 15% easier, 15% less stressful, 15% cooler. That's nice. You'll get a little bit more worked on. That work will be a little bit less stressful. You'll get into it easier. You'll get a little bit more done. It's not going to change you into Richard Feynman, but 15% is nothing to steal.

he's at. So there's basically a dichotomous answer here. I don't want people to get too falsely excited about what tool optimization is going to do for them. I think that was the pitfall of the productivity prong movement of the early 2000s. You see my New Yorker article, the rise and fall of getting things done for more on this. That promise that you could with the right tools make work effortless was a false promise. And if you think that's going to happen, you will be disappointed and never stop optimizing. On the other hand, getting those 15% improvements here and there, they do add up. It makes work less dragging.

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PolicyGenius.com. So head over to that website. Head over to policy genius.com right now to get started. PolicyGenius. When it comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right. Moving on, let's do a question from the business space, a question about avoiding social media, even when you need to use social media to grow your business. Hi, Cal, I have a question about online courses. I recently developed a course for musicians and would like to promote this course when it's time for it to be released. However, I am not social media, which has actually been a huge plus. In fact, being off social media has given me the brain space to actually come up with this idea. But to effectively market it, it seems that

Instagram is one of the main places where my target audience hangs out. I don't have an email list established of musicians. I am a musician, so I do know people word of mouth. What do you suggest in terms of how to market an online course when you don't have social media? Thank you. Well, I would suggest advertising on social media. I mean, the reason why these platforms obviously are so profitable is that they're very good at getting massive amounts of people for free to sit there and not only give a lot of eyeball minutes to look at ads, but to give the companies tons of information about themselves, their demographics, their behavior, the products and information that appeal to them and those that don't. So it makes it fantastically useful for an advertiser to get their ad in front of the people who matter. And so you should do that. If your target audience is on Instagram, do Instagram advertising.

If your target audience is also on YouTube, use YouTube advertising. You mentioned online courses. I think anyone who has used YouTube has seen about 7,000 master class ads. So they demonstrate, that's a company that's worth a billion dollars now. They demonstrate the effectiveness of YouTube advertising for online courses. go ahead, learn about social media marketing, do some campaigns, know how to do it right, very quantitative, what's the cost per acquisition, how is that compared to the cost of the course, and you can bootstrap up buys, do a little bit of buy, this generated this much

money, I can now take that money and do an even bigger buy. You'll learn how to do that. I think the way that social media companies often try to trick us about this is they want to obfuscate the reality that the user is the product. We have these huge virtual factories where people come in and clock in for free and sit there at their terminals entering information about themselves so that we can feed them ads. You sit there all day in the virtual factory, entering information about themselves and looking at advertisements that people are giving to them. It's a great trick they pulled. Now, we don't actually go to a factory. We look at our phone and swipe and tap on it all day long. What's the same idea? That's the product. The product is all these workers that are working in this virtual information advertising watching factory. The customers are the people who market to them. Now, they want you to believe, no, but here's the thing. If you're using the platforms, you could hit a nerve and you could have this audience and actually for free, what it is, it's going to be this free source of advertising. But that is not as effective or as common as they would have you believe.

Sure, there's influencers out there who do this, but this is typically people who have built up credibility other places who have brought it over to social media. but they're also still growing and maintaining that credibility in other channels. And if they took off the social media channel, it would still reach a lot of people. Just like, I'm not on social media. I can reach a lot of people. If I was on social media, I'd have a big audience there. But it would be incorrect to think the social media is why I had a big audience. You know, my credibility comes from books and articles that over time I've really built a large audience around just from the long-term construction of good quality content.

All right. So with that in mind, you should be the real customer here, which is the people advertising and take advantage of the product, which is all the people in that factory. Now, sometimes people are surprised to hear me recommend the businesses advertise on social media. They falsely assume that I have a universally antagonistic relationship with those services, that I think they're evil and I want to do combat with them. I'm not really in that camp.

I'm in the digital minimalist camp. I'm in a camp of if you're not intentional about your tech, it's going to eat you up. And when people are intentional about their tech, hey, these platforms might have something really useful for them. It might give them a real big advantage as long as they know why they're using it and tailor their usage around it. I mean, I'm not happy that these platforms use these aggressive tactics to try to enslave more people into this virtual factory, that they do the intention engineering, that TikTok very carefully doles out views and big burst just intermittently enough to make you think that you're about the, you're about to grab an audience, and how devastating that is

for a 14-year-old to have that, oh, I got a lot of views on this video, and I care so much about what people think about me, and maybe I'm about to become the next Justin Bieber. I mean, none of that is that pleasant. But it doesn't mean that I think these platforms should be completely ignored or blackballed, because, come on, that's yelling into the wind.

That's not going to happen. So as long as these platforms are here, and as long as they have things that could be useful to you, hone in like a laser on what's useful to you, whether that be I'm advertising my online course on Instagram, or I'm using a Facebook group because a really important group that I belong to organizes on Facebook groups or that I'm an artist and I look at other artists on Instagram, but I do it on my computer and I do it once a week and I only follow this other artist.

As long as this thing exists and there's value that you might get out of it and you can be clear about it and protect how you get that value to try to push back on the negatives, but then I say you might as well go for it. Just do not let this be an excuse to fall into becoming another one of factory, one of these factory workers in this virtual factory. Do not let the fact that there's a strategic thing you can get valuable out of these platforms be the reason you find yourself suddenly clocking in for long hours every day. All right, I think we have time for one more question before it gets a little bit too hot in this

studio. Let's do one here about, oh, here's one, video games. Hi, Cal. It's Mohammed from Iraq. I have a question regarding the social and productive impact of video games. Sometimes friends invite me to a game and I feel like I have to accept and not sound like, hey, I don't have time for the stupid games you're wasting your time with, etc. And from the other side, is it bad, like the negative side?

Like, do you play and how much do you? Well, Muhammad, I don't play video games. I do, however, occasionally program them. So it's something I do with my older boys. they help quote unquote design the game and then I program them the game because I find it to be entertaining and relaxing to do some video game programming. I just use Python with the Pi Games package. It makes it pretty easy to deal with the graphics drivers.

And it's fun to do. Actually, I didn't do it last summer. We usually did it over the summer. Last summer for various pandemic reasons, I didn't do much of it. The summer before, it took me a while because I can only do it a little bit at a time. I built from scratch a first person 3D engine, basically the same engine that was in Wolfenstein 3D, and I did it just from the physics principles.

So I had a tutorial that included no code. It was just a tutorial on thinking through the optics of, here's the camera plane, here is the objects, and you're ray casting, you're doing rays, and it's actually, okay, I won't go too far into this, but building a simple ray-casted Wolfenstein 3D-style 3D engine It's like a nice little piece of geometry practice because basically what you're doing is you have a conceptual 2D map of where the walls are. You know the position of your player.

You know the angle they're looking at. And then you have a focal plane, an actual plane in front of them. And you're sending rays from the person at an angle through various columns in that focal plane. And then they eventually hit an object. And you say, how far away is that object? You know how much vertical space to take up in the focal plane drawing that wall. And then the math just works in the physical. work and you have a 3D engine.

And so I made a maze game for my kids where you design a maze in 2D and then you switch over to someone else tries to then navigate that maze in 3D. So they can't see the 2D maze. They have to try to do it in 3D. So that was fun. And right now I'm trying to build them this summer

a turn-based strategy game where you have a map and you build up an army of different whatever. You choose what you want to add to your army And it's a turn-based sort of strategy war game type thing where they can help me figure out the balance of powers. And I haven't gotten very far. I'm basic.

I have to build a map builder first. I have to build a tool that allows me to actually design the maps. And it's annoying and I kind of got stuck. But okay, this has nothing to do with your question other than say I have no categorical problem with video games. So I don't play them, but I program them. My older two kids play some Minecraft. But in the kitchen on our computer when we give them time to, it's not something to have. their room. In general, I think video games can certainly be a part of a very intentional,

high-quality leisure life. I don't think there's anything wrong with I hang out with friends sometimes and we like to play this game as a social thing. I don't think it's that much different than we like to play pool or we're throwing darts or something. I think that's completely fine. I don't think there's an issue if there's a game you like that it's a way you unwind sometime. You know, you play some Minecraft or something like, I mean, I don't know what the games are these days, but what have you. There's only two things that. that worry me about video games. The first is adolescent males.

So if you're a young male with a, you're still having that develop brain, and you get exposed to video games that have been engineered to be attention-capturing and addictive. So these tend to be massively multiplayer games, so games that you play with a lot of other people over the internet,

so games like Fortnite, for example, there's a very strong, addictive relationship can be built. And I talk sometimes about how our addictions with technology or moderate behavioral addiction, is not really like our addictions with substance. The one place where that kind of breaks down is actually with adolescent male video game addiction. That can be really, really strong.

That can be rehab center strong. And so if you read Adam Alter's book Irresistible, he gets into how powerful those games can be. There's like a couple articles back when we were first grappling with phone addiction or this or that. There was a big one in the New York Times Magazine, etc. That I cite in digital minimalism where they actually go to these rehab centers

for people who were basically addicted to World of Warcraft. And so, okay, there you have to be dangerous. So if you're a 16-year-old boy with unrestricted access to a highly addictive video game, there be dragons. Like, you've got to be careful about that. The other issue with video games is if you don't have a intentional high-quality leisure life, so you're not just deploying them intentionally as part of a large portfolio of various things you do with your time that makes a rich, varied life. If you're instead using them as numbing. And this happens to a lot of people, especially in their 20s, where you are your, you're,

stuck and you can numb. You know, you got a couple choices for numbing. None of them are great. At one time it would have been alcohol. Now you throw opioids into the mix, which is really scary. Less chemically, you can do this with video games. I just sit in a basement and play these games because it's pressing buttons in my brain and it's something and you feel something. As a coping mechanism, as a numbing mechanism, video games can also be concerning.

So Muhammad, those are the two circumstances I care about. You're not an adolescent male, so I'm not worried about that. It doesn't sound like you're in a situation where you're playing for hours and hours every day as a way to avoid difficulties or hard things in your life are going on right now. So yeah, go play some video games with your friends. But keep those two things in mind if you're a parent or if you're a 27-year-old that's spending a lot of time in the basement. That is where video games, I think, can cross over to a place where you need to start to be wary and say, okay, there's an issue here that's going to require some real effort to resolve.

All right, and with that, I can resolve to wrap up this episode. Thank you, everyone to submit their questions. Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to get instructions for submitting your own listener calls. I need more. Otherwise, I will be back on Monday with our next full-length episode of the Deep Question podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.