Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 11: Work Resistance, Techno-Criticism, Tales from MIT, and the Depth-Destroying Power of Children | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions on work resistance, the state of techno-criticism, tales from the MIT theory group, and the depth-destroying power of children. I also play some question roulette and tackle the audio question of the day. (Hint: it’s about my reading habits.)To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com (I send a survey to this list soliciting questions on a semi-regular basis).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:* The organizational power of plain text files [1:18]* Confronting an overwhelming number of obligations [4:00]* Getting back on track after lockdown disrupted work habits [7:15]* Dealing with resistance to work [9:39]* Audio question of the day: managing a variety of different inputs [18:28]* Avoiding social media on the phone browser [23:26]* The need for a distraction-reducing phone operating system [26:06]* Tracking birthdays without Facebook [28:32] * My podcast habits [31:07]* Humane tools and the state of techno-criticism [33:57]* Question roulette:  my book reading habits [43:46]* Life inside the MIT Theory Group (bonus: cracking the superstar code) [48:47]* The seeming impossibility of deep work with kids [1:02:42]* Curing your spouse’s Facebook addiction [1:14:10]* On the deep value of work [1:16:12]Thanks to listener 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 Deep Questions. The show where I answer queries from my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. So today, among other topics, we will tackle work resistance, the state of technocriticism, and the depth-destroying power of children. We'll also do some question roulette, and I will throw in an audio question of the day. As always, you can send me feedback at Interesting at calnewport.com As I always explain to people,

I read every message that comes into that address even if I'm not able to respond to most of them. So I will see your comments if you send them there. Now, if you want to ask a question that will be potentially answered on the podcast, the right procedure there is to subscribe to my mailing list at calnewport.com. Roughly once a month, I send out a survey to that list from which I select solicit the questions that I then use on the episodes I record in the weeks ahead. All right, enough administrative details.

Let's get started with some work questions. H asks, how often do you capture everything in your productivity system? And then in his elaboration, he indicates that he's concerned about the speed at which new things come at him or arise during the day and actually keeping up with all of it, getting all of that captured. Well, H, here you really want to look towards David Allen as probably your guru. His getting things done system, I think, correctly emphasizes the importance of low friction capture. Now, this means systems set up that you can get task or obligations or ideas or notes or whatever it is that you don't want just in your head, whatever obligation

that's just arrived in your life that you now have to handle at some point. How to get those into a collection been as quickly as possible with as low friction as possible. That's the whole game. So David Allen, again, this book came out in the early 2000. So this is a bit of a different time. He talked a lot about actual physical inboxes, so like a plastic tray. So he would talk in his interviews often, he would talk about, look, I just jot something down on a piece of scrap paper and throw it into the nearest tray.

And now it's safe and I have some routine of once a day or whatever going through there. What I actually do, H is maybe a little bit more digital, but not that much more high tech. I have a text file on the desktop of all of my computers called working memory. dot text. It's a plain text file. And I use that for a lot of things. I call it working memory dot text because it's essentially an extension of my brain. I can throw things in there, capture things in there, so I don't have to keep them in my neurons.

I can work out notes on things. I can plan. I can elaborate. It's like having a digital neurolink. So Elon Musk and Neurolink style extension. into your brain with the simplest possible digital technology. Among other things, if anything pops up and I'm at my computer, I just throw it into working memory.com. No special format, no special tools, no clicking to a website, no clicking on a button, no clicking add new task. I just,

whatever plain text is natural, I throw it in there. If there's a lot coming at me, I might just throw a bunch of notes in there. Let's say I'm in a conference call and well, Cal, can you do this? And what about this? And you look into that. And I'm just throwing notes into that working memory. text. That is my safe collection bin. I will always come back to that. I will always empty what's in that bin. And I can put things in there at roughly the speed of thought.

The friction is so low that I never have to worry about things coming in too fast to be captured. So that'd be my advice, H, deploy the philosophy of David Allen and think about instantiating that philosophy with something as simple as just a plain text file. Here's a related question. I'm kind of coupling together to related questions. Air Gunster asks, How do you deal with the situation

where you collect more tasks per day than you're able to actually accomplish or resolve? Well, Air Gunster, my big picture piece of advice here would be don't run from it. I think this is a tendency that a lot of people have when they have too much on their plate. They have too much coming in for them to actually accomplish is to just cower to put their head in the sand

and say, okay, let me just let that build up in my inbox. are ignored or they'll bother me again if it really becomes urgent. I don't want to deal with the impossibility of what's on my plate. And I say that does not make things better. You need to face it. So do the capture. Like I just told H, have working memory. Text, get everything zero friction so everything gets recorded.

Move it into systems and face it. And if it's an impossible load, then quantify how impossible it is. See it there in black and white. Is it 400 obligations and they're all due tomorrow? then look at a list of 400 obligations that are all done tomorrow. Quantify the impact of the catastrophe. Don't run from it. Face it.

You think it's going to make you more stress, but it's not. Seeing the dragon, this is classic mythology. Seeing the dragon is always better in the long run from a fear perspective than just looking towards that cave with the smoke billowing out and shaking and saying, I don't want to have anything to do with that. In all of the classic mythologies, the hero actually goes into the cave. Facing the dragon is almost always better. It seems stressful.

It seems scary, but to know what you're dealing with, it's like when you confess to the crime that's been nodding at the back of your head, there's some relief into it. Okay, now I'm facing the full consequences of what's in front of me. Okay, now what happens? Let's say you're facing the reality of all these tasks. It's more than you can get done in a reasonable amount of time. Well, there's some options here.

I mean, you can't magically make it go away, but there's some options here. And A, you might actually start making some changes, right? You might say, if you're self-employed, I'm doing too much. This is crazy. I can see it black and white. Something's got to give. If you work for someone else, you can quantify it.

You know, hey, boss, I'm looking at this list. I'm very studious. I'm very studious about capturing everything I need to do and organizing everything I need to do. And I'm looking at this list. And this seems like it's too much. We have to do something about this. also you can optimize if 400 tasks they're all due tomorrow right in this extreme scenario well you can't do 400 tasks

but you can choose the best five to do and you know what you're probably better off getting the best possible five tests that were possible in the time you had getting those done than you would just saying i don't want to face the reality and i'm going to sort of randomly do some work and randomly do some emails and feel exhausted so that's what i would say ergunster always face the dragon see everything on your plate keep it clear, keep it organized, respond to what's there, do the best with what's there. It seems more stressful in the moment, but in the long term, you are going to end up with less stress, feeling more control, and getting more done with what you actually have available. Okay, Jinz asks, how do I get back on track with my deep life after working from home for a longer

time or a long time due to quarantine? And having done so, this has interfered with my deep work happens. Well, so, Jens, if you're working from home like almost everyone is in the U.S. context still, the time has come to set up some new rituals routines. There's a grace period at first. You know, hey, this is new. This is new for all of us. You know, my kids are here and it's not a normal schedule and it's a little bit chaotic and, hey, we're all, we're all trying to make do. And we all are still trying to make do, but we're no longer in that period of the chaotic adjustment. This hard situation, which we're in now, we've been in for a while and we know about it.

So you are going to be better off saying, let me try to adapt to this new knowledge work normal. You know, what are my routines? What are my rituals? You know, if you live with someone else, let's figure it out. If you have a spouse, let's figure out, how are we going to do this? What's the tradeoff? What are we doing about child care? What are we doing about school or lack thereof? I mean, none of the answers are going to be great, right?

None of the answers are going to be, yeah, it'll be just as good as it was before, but you you confront the reality to make a plan for it. What are my routines? What are my rituals? How much deep work can I get done now? It's going to be a lot less, but don't you want to optimize what it is? You know, how can I stay on top of my task? Again, it's going to be harder. You have less time, but you're better off optimizing than not. And so this is what I would say. You're setting the bar lower. You were not going to be able to get as much done as you were before you were forced to be home with your kids all the time. You're not going to get as much done as before. And it's not fair.

And it does suck. All right. Stipulated. What's next? How do we make the most of it? And when you get back into what your routines and rituals and schedules, systems, whatever it needs to be, it's time to actually make concrete plans for what work is going to mean in this really unusual situation. So that's what would be my advice, Jens, is to make this mindset shift right now towards, okay, this is the challenge in front of me now. Great.

what am I going to do with that? And to leave the mindset of we are temporarily shifted away from the normal way we work and I'm just kind of holding on until we get back to the way things work. All right. We're moving along nicely here. I like this pace that we're setting. I think the vacation I just got back from has me really energized here. All right.

Ann asks, what are your strategies for dealing with resistance when you have to work? Now, Anne gave me a backstory to this question, where she's talking about in her role, which is partially academic and partially administrative with a lot of volunteer efforts as well, both professional and non-professional. In these roles, she has a lot of different obligations, all pulling at her time,

and she's beginning to feel this sense of resistance of just this is too much. I just don't want to dive back in to this chaos of, competing demands for my time. Well, Anne, I would start by saying my diagnosis is you're probably doing too much. Now, this is something I'm a little bit familiar with from a different context. So back when I used to do a lot of student advice writing, there was a topic I discussed a lot, and I documented because I felt like this wasn't being talked about enough in, in particular,

the student stress literature at the time. I used to write about a topic I called deep procrastination. And it was a trend that I was seen, especially among elite students, especially at schools like MIT, where I was at the time. So I was dealing with a lot of MIT undergraduates who had come to me for advice because they had read my books and they knew I was there. And then I would often tell their anonymized case stories. I would talk about them on my blog. And I began seeing this trend where students would lose the ability to do their work. So it's not just normal procrastination where it's, you know, I waited to the last. minute to study for this exam, it became the complete inability to do work. I just can't do it.

I can't write this paper. I just can't put it in the effort. And the professor's like, hey, this is due. And they're like, I'm sorry, I don't know what's going over me. I just can't do it. And the professor gives some of an extension. Okay, I'll give you an extension. You know, you really got to get this done. And they just can't do it to the point where they will fail the class. this seemed like a really striking phenomenon, and it kept coming up, especially among students at elite schools, and so I really got into it.

And I ended up coming with the name deep procrastination. And what I uncovered, at least what my working hypothesis was, based on talking to these students, is that they were eventually burning out. So they were pushing themselves really hard. And a lot of these students were trying to prove that they belonged at MIT,

and the way they did, the only lever they really knew how to pull was doing lots of things. So they would double major. They used to triple major, and then MIT said you can't do that anymore. So they would double major. They would have research going on. They'd have multiple clubs going on. They just, they really, you know, often kids coming into MIT, unlike some of the other ivies where maybe it was a family thing.

You know, I'm a senator. My grandfather was a senator and he went to Harvard and his son went to Harvard and his daughters are going to go to Harvard. MIT was different because MIT tends to select for people. people that have the sort of pre-natural mathematics or science abilities. And it's sort of of goodwill hunting over there, right? I mean, these people come from all over the world. You just, you could be the son of the senator or you could be, you know, the son of the sanitation worker. It was just selecting for people that could do math really well in their head. And so you had a lot of people showing up at MIT who it was a big deal for their family and for their schools that

they were at MIT. And they really felt like they had to prove that they belonged. So, well, what lever can I pull to try to make myself as successful as impressive as possible. The only one they knew was the lever they had learned from college admissions, which was do lots of stuff. So they would burn out. It was a huge drain on their energy, both emotional, cognitive, and physical to be doing all the different things they were doing. And they weren't really sure exactly why they were doing all of these things. It wasn't like, look, I'm training for the Olympics. And yes, I am swimming six hours a day because swimming six hours a day is going. going to help me earn a spot on the team. It's more amorphous.

They just felt generically like doing lots of stuff was better than less. So the motivation wasn't really clear. The motivation wasn't really intrinsic. There was often the sense of, I just need to do this so that I'm impressive because people back home are looking to me and kind of counting on me and are proud of me. And that mismatch of an incredibly demanding load combined with extrinsic slash ambiguous motivation would lead sometimes to this extreme state of burnout where the reaction would be that the mind basically shuts down and says, no, we are not going to stay up tonight and write that paper.

And that's what deep procrastination was. It was a really big issue. All right. So why am I telling the story, Ann? Well, it happens in the professional world as well. It can happen in the professional world as well. And where does it happen in the professional world? Not if your job necessarily is just hard, but if you have a ton of demands on your time, And you're doing so. It's not always clear why you have so many different demands. It's just generally trying to be helpful, generally trying to be useful, generally trying to be a team player, generally trying to help.

You say yes to a lot of things. But it's not really clear. Again, it's not the six hours in the pool that's going to get you to the Olympic podium. It's just, I don't know, I said yes to this volunteer thing, and I'm on this committee. And it doesn't fit together into a clear storyline of this. Laser-like focus is going to get me this really important goal. And it's all pulling at your time.

emotionally exhausting and cognitively exhausting and is physically exhausting. At some point, your mind starts to say, why are we doing all of this? I don't have the clear picture for why we're doing all this. I don't want to do all of this. Now, adults can often fare better than the teenagers can in college. They don't as often fall into complete deep procrastination, but they start to slow down. They start like I hear in your question and feeling this quote unquote resistance to getting into work. So what do you do? Well, the solution for deep procrastination is probably the solution for you, which is you need

to do less, which is a hard answer to hear, right? I mean, it seems like if I do less, I'm going to let people down. It's going to be bad for my job. It's going to make me less valuable. It's going to make me worse of a person. Nothing could be farther from the truth. So, Anne, I'm going to recommend you the Bible on this topic. That is my friend Greg McEwen's book, Essentialism.

read essentialism. He's right about that. His central premise of this book is right. We do too much and that makes us much worse and much less happy. And so that's what I am going to prescribe to you, Ann, is that you're going to need to probably significantly reduce what's on your plate. And yes, read that book. You can do it in a way that means that you're not going to lose your friends.

You're not going to lose your job. You're not going to lose the respect of your friends and community. You can do it. You're going to cut back towards what what Greg calls the essential few. You're going to give that energy. And you're going to find that your experience with work is completely different. When you have the sort of the essential few, things that are really valuable, maybe hard, but really valuable, maybe to you or to other people,

but it's, I know the value here. I've chosen to do it. The locus of control from a motivational psychology perspective shifts from the extrinsic end of the spectrum towards the intrinsic, that sense of resistance, that sense of deep procrastination will begin to wane and you'll find it's easier to get into the day. So I think that's a good question

because it's a point that's relevant to a lot of people. Doing too much, especially for extrinsic or ambiguous reasons, can have a huge psychological toll and you're kind of playing with fire. Some people like the chaos. Typically people who are metabolically high energy slash socially extroverted. Maybe they just kind of like the chaos.

They want to crush it, right? and it just feels like energy and energizing. But for other people like me, probably like for you, Ann, that can be a recipe for a psychological mini disaster. All right. So solvable problem. Do less is my prescription. Sounds scary.

Shouldn't it be? Read essentialism. Greg will get you there. I should mention Greg has a great new podcast. It started a few weeks ago. I'll be on it soon. I was one of his original guest. And I think my episode's coming up soon.

So keep your sort of digital ears open for that. All right, that was good. Enough work questions. Why don't we throw in now a audio question of the day? Hi, Cal. Joe here from Glasgow, Scotland. I love your books, your blog, and the new podcast. My productivity issue is about inputs.

I have a range of different inputs for both notes and tasks, whether that be the day-to-day tasks, projects, meetings, colleagues asking for help. Where I struggle, I guess, is capturing all of this in one place. being able to store it, prioritize it, and rank it accordingly. I've tried paper notebooks in the past, to-do list software, etc. I always end up having notes and tasks spread across different tools and get a little bit lost trying to know what I should be doing.

What would you suggest? Joe, that's a good question. So if we apply my capture, configure control framework for productivity, you are basically asking about the capture and configure, steps and how to apply those steps of the framework when you have a ton of different inputs coming from a ton of different places. Well, when it comes to capture, listen to my earlier advice from this podcast about low friction capture so that as you have task flying at you from many different sources with many different types of urgency, you can capture them all right away

without getting backed up. I recommend, as I talked about before, working memory.comer. file on your desktop. You should also probably have some sort of analog notebook-based capture that you use for when you are away from your computer. That should probably be it. You have a very simple and well-defined set of systems that can capture task very quickly with very low friction. These should be separate from the systems in which you then long-term store those tasks and organize them. Otherwise, where you execute the configure step of my framework. Now, based on what you're talking about, which is you have such a wide variety of different types of obligations flying your way, I would think it's very important for you to have

a single system in which you do this long-term storage and organizing. I would not use a straight-up list-based or to-do list software in your case, because what you're telling me in your audio question is that you have multiple distinct types of obligations coming your way, so you probably want a system in which you can distinguish these obligations by the types because when you're ready for one type of work might be different than when you're ready for another, but also organization of your tasks, you probably want to do this within category. So let me deal with what's on my plate in terms of my obligations. I'm just making this up, but my obligations to help oversee this tech system. That's one type of obligation. I want those all together so I can kind of understand

what's going on there all at once. Then I have other types of obligations like I'm on the marketing committee for my company. And let me put those in a separate place. So I can see those all together and make sense of them and organize them, make a plan for them. So with this in mind, I'd really recommend virtual task board style systems like Trello or like Flow. Or if you're in the software world, you might use one of the more scrum-oriented tools like Sana. But basically what these tools give you is a way to have categories. Think of them as columns on a board. And then you can have individual obligations as cards tacked under particular categories. So tacked onto particular columns. I've talked about this in earlier podcast where we were diving deep into the configure

step of my capture, configure control productivity framework. But I want to mention it again because I think it is uniquely well suited to your particular problem. What you need to do is, A, get everything out of your mind right away, and then B, have a way of making sense of this really overwhelming and complicated and variegated group of tasks. And being able to move things in the categories under these columns makes a big difference. And being able to have the functionality that most of these tools give you of flipping over these virtual cards and attaching files and writing information

and taking voluminous notes or links to other types of information so you can consolidate all the relevant information as it comes in for a given task onto the card. And that card is under a particular category. Now you can get your arms around this. You get your arms run. Now, like I told Air Gunster, you know, previously in this podcast, it might be overwhelming what you see, but that's fine.

Face the Dragon, don't run. You will always do better facing the dragon head on than trying to run away from the cave with the billowing smoke. But having it all captured very low friction, having all in the same system, and then within that system, having a very natural way of moving these within the category so that you can apply your energy sequentially with some buffer from one category. let me just think about this type of work, then to another, let me just think about this type of work. You're going to get a much better handle on what you face. All right.

So, Joe, that was a good question. I enjoyed it. So speaking of technology, why don't we move on now to technology questions? Entertainment Strategy Guy, that's an unusual name that your parents gave you. He asks, what do I do about using social media on my web browser on my phone? So in his elaboration, he explains that he took off social media apps, in particular, Twitter from his phone, but he just logs in using the Safari browser on his iPhone, which is very common. You go on there to get your hit.

It's only a couple extra keystrokes. In fact, it automatically fills in Twitter once you get the TW. And then there you are, and you're back in that world you are trying to avoid. Well, Entertainment Strategy Guy, what you want to do there is change your password. change your password for the social media services into one of those auto-generated strong passwords where you have 12 to 15 characters, a mix of upper lowercase and digits. In other words, something that is impossible to memorize. Once you change that password, don't enter it into your phone.

Okay. And now if you have to check these services on your phone in an emergency, then be very clear to not save the password into your password keychain. So the idea here is that there is no real easy way. for you to check social media on your phone using your browser. You would have to go get wherever you had that password written down, which should be on a piece of paper somewhere at your house. And you'd have to go get it and open up the browser and then using that little keyboard, type in this whole long, big thing to log in the social media. Now you could still do that, but now you've added, what's that, like 15, 20 seconds worth of friction. That's usually enough.

That's usually enough to kill the impulse to say, I'm just not going to do it. It's usually enough for the other part of your mind, the sort of noble steed, if you want to look back to my platonic metaphor of the soul that I talk about in digital minimalism. Your noble steed is willing to see what the ignoble steed is up to and be like, no, no, no, no. Remember, we're not checking Twitter on the phone. If you can do it real fast, the ignoble steed can slip in there. Like, too late, we're here. Look. But if you got that delay, you're better angels, if we're going to mix soul metaphors here that all kind of get at the same.

India now have a chance to speak up. So that's what I would recommend. The nuclear option there is there are ways to remove Safari from iOS altogether. I know a lot of digital minimalist types who do it. It's a bit of a pain to do. And the worry there is that there is really useful stuff to do with your web browser on the go. Like looking up the address of the restaurant you're supposed to meet someone at and you forgot what it was. You know, there is a lot of useful stuff you can do with the web browser.

So erasing the web browser's a nuclear option, change. the password, that should be enough. All right, so here's a question that's along those same lines. Jeff asks, do you see an opportunity for a third smartphone operating system? He was talking about a third in addition to iOS and Android. As he elaborates, the motivation would be to have an operating system that is less distracting. So it's organized in such a way that it's harder to be distracted on it. Jeff, I don't know that that's necessary.

You know, iOS, for example, you give me a phone with iOS on iOS itself is not distracting. What's distracting are my social media accounts and my streaming news services and my habit of wanting to check the latest going on with the MLB season. So you can fix those problems without having to change iOS and you can recreate those problems on any operating system that is going to give you even basic internet access. So I wouldn't focus on the operating system. I would just do my standard advice, which is to dumb down your smartphone. Go back to the original Steve Jobs style vision for iOS if you're an iOS user,

which means it has a great map. It has a great music player. The text messaging interface is good. The phone interface is good. You have a web browser that is serviceable if you need to look up some piece of information, but you have no app on there in which someone makes money off of your time and attention every time you use it. That's way too dangerous.

that's not on there. And like I just talked to entertainment strategy guy about, you know, if you ever access social media on that phone using the browser, you should have a really complicated password that you don't have with you normally

and that is not saved. A dumbed down smartphone is probably the better strategy than trying to build a new OS from scratch because let's be honest, a lot of effort has gone into these OSES to make them work really well. I mean, the way that iOS, for example,

not to geek out too much, but the way that they have optimized that for power management, the way it integrates closely with the particular chip set that Apple uses so they can really get as much power saving as possible out of the various low power modes that the chip does or the low power modes of the various radio chips do. There's a lot of things that you don't see below the covers, but that a lot of smart engineers spent a lot of time working on.

And so, you know, you lose a lot of that if you go to a brand new OS. It's not so easy to do. So just dumb down your existing smartphone, that probably is sufficient. Joe asks, how do you keep track of birthdays if you don't use Facebook? Well, Joe, I use my brain. I guess what would be the answer.

And I probably don't keep track of as many birthdays as people now do using their social network. So the birthdays I have memorized is my three siblings, my two parents, my wife, my three kids. Right. I've got those memorized. And so I know when those people's birthdays are coming, I don't know the birthdays of my friends. I don't know the birthdays of my colleagues. I don't know the birthdays of my roommates ex-boyfriend who I friended on Facebook nine years ago. And that's fine, right? I think in general, in general, this idea of, you know, sending a quick, low friction, happy birthday to everyone you know on their birthday is something that Facebook invented because it basically had people's birthdays information and could just prompt you. hey, this friend of yours is their birthday. And with just one click, you can kind of say happy birthday in some sort of digital Askees style manner.

And I guess that's okay, but that's a largely contrived and recent behavior. And I don't think it's all that necessary for sustained, successful social interaction. I will say this though, Joe, and this is interesting. When Facebook started getting more popular, I did notice the amount of birthday wishes I received went down.

because I was the only person not on Facebook. And so people really got used to, Facebook will tell me when it's someone's birthday. So why would I remember someone's birthday otherwise? So I definitely noticed that as Facebook got more popular, people weren't as likely to remember my birthday. I think that people I'm related to learn pretty quickly, oh, I should put this on my calendar, but friends or stuff who maybe used to know when we were younger, you want to hear from them as much anymore. Ironically, however, I now get a lot more birthday greetings from people I don't know well because I don't use Facebook. And here's how I would connect those dots here.

You know, because I've become a well-known author in part because of the fact that I don't use social media, I now have a, you know, Wikipedia page that lists my birthday. And when people search for my name, that pops up right next to the screen and they see what my birthday is. So ironically, not using Facebook really cut down on the amount of happy birthday wishes I used to receive, not using Facebook has more recently increased those. So, you know, you never know how these technologies are going to affect your life. All right, Jarno asks, do you have a set list of podcasts you listen to? And what is your podcast ritual or habit?

And how do you keep this listening in moderation? Well, it's a good question. obviously I'm a big advocate of podcast. It's why I host one of my own. I don't have, I would say I don't have any podcast where I listen to every episode of the podcast. What I tend to do instead is have in my subscription folders on my Apple iTunes app is a lot of podcasts where I like the interviewers. I think they're good interviewers. And then I keep track of who their guests are. And then if it's a guest I'm interested, I'll listen. Right. So I'm kind of, uh, I guess, kind of treat it. I don't know how you would think of it almost like a library. I'm sort of looking

through the library. What are your, what are the new releases that just arrived at the library this week? Oh, I want that one. I want that one. And I, I want that one. So I tend to do that instead of sticking with a particular podcaster. Now, I don't recommend that in my case. I think you should listen to every podcast I release, uh, course. But when it comes to people who are doing interviews, I often do that. If you're a great interviewer, I'm going to keep track of who you're interviewing. And if I'm interested in that person, I will be listening. I don't listen to as many serialized podcast. I mean, sometimes in car trips I do because my wife likes them.

But I just for whatever reason, I don't get as much into the serialized podcast. When do I listen? Usually during labor, manual labor. So, you know, dishes, yard work, putting out the garbage and recycling. There's a lot of stuff that comes with being, you know, a homeowner and a parent where it's just boring work. That's when I listen to podcast. when I drive places, that's when I listen to podcast. I do a morning walk every morning.

You know, my wife and I trade these off. She does the first one. I do the second one. I often will listen to a podcast during those, but sometimes I bring with me, I use it as solitude about half the time, where I bring with me a problem or issue in my life I want to make progress on and just mull it over,

mull it over as I walk. By the way, I treat audiobooks the same way. You know, I put audiobooks sort of into the same category of podcast as a sort of similar type of entertainment. And so I listen to them in the same times as I would podcast, which is doing manual labor when I'm driving or sometimes during my morning walk. I actually just see the audiobooks I have unread

as sort of another option sitting there right next to the newest podcast episodes. And so if there's not a particular new podcast episode that captures my attention, maybe I'll put on the audio book I'm listening to and back and forth. All right. So that's how I treat that. and I think that keeps things in moderation, and that tends to work pretty well for me.

So good question, Jarno. Okay. CS asks, is using too many technologies affecting people's emotion negatively? How can we solve this problem and be more humane? Well, this is a really good question. CS. I think it's definitely true that there is a potential negative impact from a lot of the technologies we use. This impact comes in part from using too many technologies.

It comes also in part from how we use them or what happens when we're working with that tech. So if we want to step back a little bit, maybe put this question into context. Within the broader world of techno-criticism, there's one school of thought that I like to call the techno-humanist. Now, the techno-humanist really focus on this issue of how can we make a lot of how can we make sure that technology is amplifying things that humans need to thrive and avoid technology from actually dampening the things that we hold to be valuable. One answer to this question

focuses on design principles. So how do we actually design technological tools so that they amplify what we care about help us thrive? I think Tristan Harris for sure is an example of someone who's really focused on this idea of can we have ethical design principles where we're actually training engineers to design technologies. They're going to make people's lives better, not worse. I think Jaron Lanier also looks quite critically at design principles for technology, but he comes out of from the negative angle. So if you look at, for example, you are not a gadget, his manifesto, which I think is one of the really important founding documents of modern internet age technocriticism, he focuses on the way that design principles can actually be

dehumanizing. So he comes out of it from the negative aspect, but really highlights the perspective that the way you actually design these tools has a real impact on your humanity. So when that book came out, and I think that was 2007, might be 2009, I think it was 2007. It was somewhere in that early range when social media was first ramping. up, Lanier focused, for example, on Facebook quite a bit. And he looked at the interface of Facebook and talked about this notion that you have to reduce yourself to these attributes selected from these drop-down lists and how this really was dehumanizing. It was, in some sense, rounding down or filtering down the interesting, variegated nature of the human experience into checkboxes. I'm this, not that.

My status is this, not that. I actually don't know if Facebook, you still do that on Facebook. I mean, look, I don't know a ton about modern Facebook usage, but certainly back in the early period where Facebook was taking off when Jared Lanier was writing that manifesto, you were not a gadget. This was one of the key activities on Facebook was personifying yourself through the selection of items from various lists and checkboxes. And he really talked about how this really took out a lot of what made humankind

diverse and interesting, right? So that's one aspect of techno-humanism. You've got to focus on the design principles. How you actually design the technology, the interfaces, how you express yourself, etc. can matter. You've got to care about that. I think that's important. The other threat of thinking within techno-humanism is also thinking about the human interaction with the technology and how intentional that interaction is. So I write a lot about this. I think my most recent book, digital minimalism is a techno-humanist tract, which really focuses on this question of, are you engaging with your technology through intention or haphazardly? And if you come out of through intention, if you say, this is what I'm all about and this is

what I care about, and I know that, and I'm confident in that. So now I'm going to go back and find tools when relevant that amplify these things I care about, then you can get a real boost from technology. But if you instead use the technology as a numbing device or a, a distracting device or just a psychological pacifier. I don't want to deal with the world, and this thing just pushes some buttons in my brain. I don't really know what neurotransmitters are at play,

but it just sort of distracts me. It numbs me. It makes me feel something that is vaguely appealing, then the technology can actually lead you astray. So that's another thread in techno-humanist thinking, which is what is your philosophy for approaching technology? And if you don't have a philosophy, you're probably being taken for a ride by the tools.

So, CS, I would say those are, broadly speaking, the two big directions that techno-humanists look at. The principles for how we design the tech, that can matter, how we engage with the technology, our philosophy for how we as individual users engage with the technology, that also can matter. Now, techno-humanism is not the only, game in town under the broader umbrella of techno-criticism, the force that actually gets a lot

more attention in recent years is what I tend to refer to as techno-activism. Now, techno-activist, more so than techno-humanist, tend to stipulate that some of the big technological forces that are relevant today, like social media, are fundamental. Yeah, these are an important part of our lives. part of our civic discussion. And so what they focus on is just reforming how these platforms operate to make sure that they operate better, that they operate in the right way. Now, techno-activism is interesting because it actually spans the whole political spectrum.

So actually, the first big voices in techno-activism were from the right side of the political spectrum. So you had voices showing up starting around 2014, 2015, to thought, hey, these platforms like social media are very important, but they are somehow censoring, let's say, conservative voices. Now, we have another thread of techno-activism that comes from more of the left side of the political spectrum that says, no, no, we need to actually censor these fundamental platforms more because there's misinformation or hate speech or the wrong things are being said. And actually, they're so important that we have to be very careful about what they are allowed to disseminate. They need to be more editorially responsible for what they're disseminating.

So it's kind of an interesting, as a movement's go, as criticism movements go, they tend to be either politically neutral or associated with one side of the political spectrum or the other. but techno activism actually has threads that are on both sides of the political spectrum. Now, I think both types of techno-criticism are important parts of our current encounter with technology. I think techno-humanism, which is where I cite myself, is crucial. I think techno-activism is also really important. There's a lot of issues in there that I think there does need to be pushed back on. the thing about techno activism that gives me a little bit of pause is that the idea that they stipulate that all these technologies are fundamental.

Like, okay, that's a given. So now we need to argue about how they operate. Where I think the techno-humanists are much more likely to say, you know, before we get too far down this line of trying to figure out how to fix Facebook, maybe we should ask a question, why are we still spending time on Facebook? So I think, you know, there is a little bit of a division in approach there, that there's a lot more skepticism towards technologies or specific technologies in the humanist camp. And I think there is in the activist camp, which tends to be more way more ingrained. These technologies are way more ingrained their day to experience. Both camps within the techno criticism umbrella are important. I think it's useful to understand that these two different camps are, they're all trying to make progress, but they're coming at it

from different angles. So, C.S, I think the, the answer to your particular question is probably found in the techno-humanist camp. So if you look to me, if you look to Jaron Lanier,

if you look to Frank Forer, if you look to Tristan Harris, if you look to Matt Crawford, if you look to Kevin Kelly, I think you're going to get a really interesting treatment about the glories and the deprivations that are possible with technologies

and how individuals and society can kind of moderate their engagement with these tools to focus on thriving and to get away from accidentally dampening progress. So, I mean, this is such a rich area. I love it. I think from an academic philosophical perspective, there's a lot going on here. And I love having a chance to talk about it because I think it's relevant to everyone.

And understanding these rapidly mutating philosophical ontologies is really crucial right now to being an engaged citizen in a world that has a lot of technological, both powers and disputes going on. So I'm glad you asked it, and I'm glad you gave me a chance to geek out a little bit on some of these techno-criticism issues. All right. So that's it for technology questions. Why don't we, before we move on, play a quick round of question roulette. The idea here is simple. I select a question at random from those submitted to me by My listeners, a question I have never seen before, and I do my best to try to answer it in real time with zero preparation. So here we go.

I have it loaded over here. I have not yet looked at it. Moving over to my browser, I can see that this question roulette question is from Greg. And let me scroll down and see what we're dealing with here. All right, here we go. How do you decide what book or books you are going to read? is there a certain process you go through when you see a book that catches your attention?

Also related, how do you find your long articles that you read? Do you follow certain authors that interest you? Or do you have RSS feeds set up? Do you follow them on your site, etc.? Well, when it comes to books, Greg, I read a lot of books. I don't finish them all, but I read a lot of books. I would say, to be honest, in a normal week, it's not unusual for me to impulsively buy three or four books on my Kindle,

because I hear about it. I'm like, I want to know about it. I get it and I read it and I get into it. And if I like it, I keep going. If I don't, I sort of move on. I also probably buy a few books a week from Amazon that get delivered. So how do I find what these are? Oh, I'm answering. It's a good question. Sometimes it's from existing books. You know, you follow a reference or a citation. It points you somewhere interesting. Sometimes it's recommendations from friends. Sometimes I hear about it in an article or on a podcast. I listened to an author who's interviewed. They're talking about their book or talking about another book. My general strategy is if it might be interesting, you should probably buy it. Because worst case scenario, you've spent 15 bucks and it's not so interesting. Best case scenario, you get a life changing nugget out of it. Average case scenario, you learn a little bit more than you knew before. And I think information is very valuable. I think ideas are very valuable, especially in my line of work where I make a living with ideas. And so there's no real strategy to it other than Greg a bias towards when in doubt buy it and try it and so a lot of

books cross in front of me so how do I find articles I think that's also a good question my answer probably doesn't generalize very well it's not something that I think most people can put into place in their own life but I have an address an email address clearly advertised on my website it's interesting at calnewport.com. And if you go to my contact page, it says clearly, like, hey, if you have an article you think I should read or a book, you think I should know about, send it to this address. Now, a lot of people use it, so I'm really clear. I have what I talk about in Deep Work as a sender filter.

I say, look, I can't answer all these emails, but I do read them. And so my readers send me things based on what they have read from my own writing, and things they think I would be interested in they send me lots of links. They send me lots of articles. That's honestly probably where I find 80% of the interesting long form articles I read. It's readers sending me things through that address. Also, I get a lot of books through there as well. Like, oh, someone will send me a book recommendation and I'll buy it.

So I don't know if that's a really satisfying answer, Greg, because it's not really generalizable. I mean, unless you have a very large audience who has known you for years, it's going to send you links. but that's the honest answer, right? So when it comes to books, buy it and try it is my default bias. I buy a lot of books.

I try a lot of books. I finish, you know, I don't know, maybe 30% actually make the cut and I keep going. I would rather waste money on a book that doesn't end up being influential

than I would miss out on that book altogether. In terms of how I find things to read, I mean, a lot of that comes straight from my readers. I've been blogging at calnewport.com since 2007, so they know me well. I've written six books. They've known me well.

You know, they just have seen me a lot. They know what I'm interested in. They know what I like to write about. And so that's one of the great blessings of my life is having this whole sort of army out there of curators who see me stuff that would be interesting. Beyond that, I mean, you know, obviously there's there's certain things I read the New Yorker. You know, and that has interesting articles. There's a few other magazines that I'll often browse online on a,

semi-regular basis and I find interesting articles there. My friends will sometimes suggest articles. My wife often will suggest articles. You know, family members will suggest articles. But, you know, for the most part, this stuff comes in over the transom from my readers. So, you know, I don't know if that's a satisfying answer, Greg, but that is an honest answer. And I appreciate you submitting a question that ended up being this week's question roulette submission.

So thanks a lot, Greg. And now let's move on to questions about the deep life. Okay, so Rob asks, can you talk more about the environment of the MIT Theory Group, sort of a day in the life overview. So what Rob is talking about is that I mentioned this in the last episode. I mentioned something about my time I spent at the MIT Theory Group when I was working on my doctorate and he was just curious. He thought it sounded interesting and it was a really interesting place.

And so he wanted to hear a little bit more about that experience. So just to put this all into context, so at MIT there's a big department called electrical engineering and computer science. Within that department, there's something called the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory. So that's sort of their, that's where all their computer science professors live. Within that laboratory, there's a bunch of different groups. So there's like a group that focuses on systems and there's a group that focuses on artificial intelligence. When I was doing my doctorate, I was in the theory group. So that's the group that is computer scientists who focus on theoretical computer science research.

So that's theorems. You know, we sit at whiteboards. We prove theorems. We're actually not that good, ironically, at using physical computers. So I was in a theory group. I arrived in the fall of 2004 and I finished my doctorate in the summer of 2009. So I was in the theory group from 2004 to 2009. So what are my memories of it?

Well, first of all, it was very intimidating when I first arrived. You know, that's definitely a vivid impression I have of that time in my life because I was coming from Dartmouth. So I was a computer science major at Dartmouth, which is a great school, but it's a small program. So Dartmouth is the smallest of the Ivy League. It doesn't have like a huge state school style. computer science program. And so, you know, I was a maybe a big fish in a small pond in the Dartmouth computer science program. It showed up to MIT. And, you know, at first you sort of feel

like you're not even a small fish in a big pond. You're like a fish in a fish bowl that is on a hill overlooking the pond from a distance. And that's definitely the way it feels. Because here's what happens. You show up and, oh, here's the building that the computer science lab is, it's designed by Frank Gary. You know, it cost a billion dollars or something crazy, right? You know, so you go into this Frank Gary design building. You go up to the floor for the theory group. And the students are in like, let's say, groups of three in their own office, but they lead out

into these common spaces that are just full of these freestanding seven or eight foot tall whiteboards that are all sort of staggered at different angles to maximize the amount of surface area. And then there's just students out there with professors just working on these various large whiteboards. The whiteboards were like the primary tool the theoreticians use. So you show up, you're in the Frank Gehry building, all these whiteboards are everywhere. And you look around at the professors and they're really, really famous. So there's a lot of really famous people. There's multiple Turing Award winners in the theory group. There's multiple MacArthur Genius Grant winners

in the theory group. There's a professor in the theory group that was 19 when he got his professorship at MIT, 21 when he got tenure, right? So it's not a normal group of professors. These are some of these smartest theoreticians in the world, which is very exciting but also very intimidating. What are the other students like?

They're from all over the world. Right? So from all over the world, people send their best math talent to places like MIT. So you had students from all over the world, sort of the best that each of these countries had to offer, that were being sent over here. It could be very intimidating. I mean, you have, like, the students who come out of former Soviet bloc, Eastern Europe-style countries have these math systems where you're drilling college-level discrete math, you know, in junior high. So you have some students coming.

You have like chess prodigies from Russia, Israel, since their best students. sends their best students. India sends their best students. It's just, you know, really smart people from all over. All of them very talented. Some of them more eccentric than others. You know, there was, speaking of young people, when I first arrived, there was a student there who was starting the PhD program.

He was in the theory group, he was in a, but in the computer science lab. And he was 16. And the crazy thing about the 16-year-old who was starting his doctorate is that, you know, not only did he have his college degree, but he had gotten his college degree and had spent two years working for Microsoft before deciding to come to MIT. So at the age of 16,

he had already been out of college for two years before deciding he wanted to go get his PhD. So you had a lot of that type of thing for sure going on at MIT. The environment there, very exciting, very intense, very entrepreneurial. that's the other striking thing that comes to mind when I think back to that experience is that you think about being a PhD student in a lot of fields that means, you know,

you work for your advisor and your advisor has these big projects and you're helping the advisor on their projects and then maybe late in your career you might graduate to working on your own project. That's not the way it happens in the theory group at MIT. It's basically sink or swim. Like, your advisor might give you a problem when you first get there to work on, but you're basically expected to find collaborators, you know, among the students, prove yourself, and start writing and publishing papers. Almost entirely unsupervised in a lot of cases. You're also expected and free to work with other professors. You know, less than half of my publications as a doctoral student had my PhD advisor as a co-author. That's very normal for the MIT theory.

group. So I'm just remembering now. I mean, another thing that was common there is that there was often visiting professors. They had a lot of visiting professors come through. And so you would work a lot with those visiting professors. They'd come through. You'd match up with a professor, write a bunch of papers. So it's very entrepreneurial, very competitive. Not with each other. It's just a very competitive field because the way it works in computer science is you have to publish papers in top peer-reviewed conference venues. The problem is it's very hard to get your paper into top reviewed computer science conference videos. We don't use journals that much in computer science. They're too slow. So we have these conferences, except for I'm putting conferences and quotation marks,

because the papers you publish are 30, 40 pages long. I mean, they're complete full papers like you would traditionally publish in a journal, but journals are too slow. But they'll have acceptance rates of 15%, 20%, 10%, right? Very low. And so you're competing against all these other really smart people, all these other really smart professors who all came out of top programs, all these other really smart grad students from all around the world are all competing for one of these 15% of slots to get into the conference. So you have to have one of the top, you know, 15% papers out of all these papers being submitted to get in and you just have to do that again and again and again. So there's a sense of competition like you're an athlete or something, right?

There's no, there was no notion of like just show up and work hard and you'll be rewarded. for it. It was results, results, nothing else mattered. And there were really hard results to get. So I do remember that. And it was very entrepreneurial. You had to find collaborators. You had to prove yourself. You had to find professors to work with. You had to get papers in the places. It was hard to get papers in the places. You traveled a lot. So I would be in Europe once or twice a year, I would say, for like most of my time at MIT, because you'd go to conferences. You'd go to visit other professors. I mean, there's a lot of that just old fashion going to old cities in Europe, going to old universities, and spending days just working with other smart people trying to solve problems.

So I did a lot of European travel during that period. So the whole thing was very exciting. So Rob, that's what it was like in the MIT Theory Group. Definitely a magical time. It was definitely shaping for me. Definitely shaped the way I think about things. Let me just pull out one general lesson so that we can get some general utility out of your question. Let me pull out one general thing I learned from the theory group that I think is

relevant to lots of pursuits, which was one of the things I did was study the superstars. You know, I mean, I think I fell into that upper tier of students who were publishing a lot and it was kind of known we're going to go on and get professorships, tenure track professorships at R1 universities, but I was probably at the bottom of that tier. At the top of the tier are the superstars who were publishing multiple breakthrough papers. and they were not just going to get R1 tenure track professorships, but they were going to get those at really top schools. And I would study those superstars,

especially the ones I worked with. And so what was the difference? And obviously, they had big horsepower brains. They could do math very fast in their head because they'd been trained to do that as kids. They could hold a lot of ideas, concepts, variables, numbers, graph images, whatever, in their head. So they could make progress in their head very quickly on problems, which helps makes things more efficient. But none of that by itself,

is a sufficient condition to publish breakthrough papers. What, at least in theoretical computer science, it seemed to me the clear thing that defined them is that they took the time to learn and read other papers. That sounds flip. Like, sure, yeah, go read other papers. You know, that'll help. Why not read more papers?

But the thing to keep in mind, I mentioned this in my last podcast episode, reading and understanding a computer science paper, especially in theory, is very, very difficult. These are complicated mathematical proofs that are often somewhat condensed, with a lot of steps skipped or elided, with techniques that are, you know,

often at the very cutting edge of applied mathematics. So it's really hard. It's a cognitive equivalent of, you know, someone says we're going to go do a really hard CrossFit workout today. It's like very uncomfortable. You get stuck. It's ambiguous. You come back to it.

It's frustrating. It can take days sometimes, right? The superstar students would just do that again and again and again. You know, it was Whoya Whoya Master Chief Send me back into the surf To use a Navy SEAL reference

And that's what gave them the edge. Now, I ended up writing about this abstractly in my 2012 book So Good They Can't Ignore You Where I said, If you want to understand where people get really innovative or high impact ideas

In a lot of fields, almost always, it comes from what the complexity theorist Stuart Kaufman called The Adjacent Possible, the space that's right beyond the cutting edge in a particular field. You get to the cutting edge in a particular field.

You can start looking at how cutting edge ideas and techniques can be combined in novel ways, and it's in those combinations you find the breakthroughs that move the cutting edge forward. Those innovations occur in the adjacent possible beyond the cutting edge. So how do you get to the cutting edge in a particular topic of investigation within theoretical computer science? you read and understand the papers at the cutting edge, the most recent best research. And if you do, and I saw this again and again, you had a toolbox that was filled.

And what were the breakthroughs? The breakthroughs were rarely, rarely were the breakthroughs coming out of nowhere. Rarely were the breakthroughs just, I stared at a whiteboard that was blank and had an aha moment. Almost always, these breakthrough papers were, oh, if I, you know, apply,

this sort of interesting committorial structure that so and so deployed in their paper last year at stock and I combined that with this graph shattering technique

for speeding up the terministic distributed graph algorithms that I saw win an award at Potsy or Spa two years ago I can make a breakthrough on this paper that was left as an open question

at soda last year, et cetera. That's the way it happens. You learn to things of the cutting edge. Suddenly all these options are open. The times when I would do that, I would get a lot of papers out of it. I didn't do it as much as the superstars because it took a lot of time and it was very difficult. You know,

so it's all about cognitive pain tolerance. So I think that's an interesting observation that applies to a lot of different cognitive fields. If you can get to the cutting edge, you can make breakthroughs. If you don't do the work to get to the cutting edge, do not think that naval gazing is going to give you the lightball moment that's going to change the world, right? Edison was able to invent the light bulb because he was a master of all of the relevant technologies involving electricity. He had been working with vacuum pumps

and he got really up to speed with arc lamps and what the early light bulb innovations had tried and why they had failed. He was completely up to speed with the cutting edge. And there in the adjacent possible, he's like, okay, I think we can now find a way to tweak, adjust, introduce a few new elements and get a sustainable distributed power net.

work style light bulb working. All right. So Rob, that's what it's like in the theory group. Great place. Love the time. Very influential for me. If you want a lesson from it,

that's the lesson I would give you. If you're looking for a breakthrough, you have to get to the cutting edge. And in a lot of fields, the path there is steeply uphill. So you have to lace those metaphorical hiking boots uptight and get ready to get out of metaphorical breath. All right.

So Matt asks, from your experience, How can one even have a shot at being productive and finding deep work whilst also being a parent to young children? By their very nature, children under five seem to mean sleepless nights for days or weeks on end, built in unpredictability, and every minute apparently conspiring against you getting anything but the most basic task done. I wonder if you could share your experiences facing no doubt a similar set of trials when your children were small. Well, Matt, in my experience, the key is when you're dealing with your staff of well-trained governesses, nannies, and night nurses, you need to make sure their instructions are clear that the children should not be allowed to bother you during work hours. I'm joking, of course, the governess knows not to bother us.

Now, seriously, though, Matt, it is a good question. I think work admits children is always a relevant question, and it's probably been very relevant. relevant or particularly relevant right now. So what I want to do is actually separate out my initial answer from our current coronavirus induced circumstance. So let me give you the general answer and then let's try to adapt that answer to the sort of terrible circumstances in which working parents are in right now. Okay. So the general answer in times where things like offices and schools exist, at least for me has always been the separation principle. You know, being, taking care of kids.

Like if you are in the moment responsible for a kid, you're the primary caregiver, you know, in that moment, and that kid is under the age of whatever, 15. That's a really hard job. And it's not a job that you should expect to be able to do other jobs at the same time as, right? Like you don't, you don't hear firefighters often complain. Like, man, I'm just really frustrated. You know, we, we, uh, we were putting out all these fires today. There was a warehouse fire down by the dock. And I found it really hard to make progress on my novel during that time. You know, you, you wouldn't expect that because like, well, you're, why would you be able to work on your novel while you were putting out fires down by the dock? That's already a really hard job. And I think that's the reality of, uh, of caregiving for children. In the moment when you're caring for children, it's very difficult to really do. anything else and it is a it is a hard job so the separation principle says you know to the extent it's possible you want to try to have separation there's time where i have responsibility for caregiving

and time when i don't and when i don't and i need to be squeezing everything out of those moments and when i do i don't want to kid myself that okay maybe i can still get a lot done while i'm also trying to keep tabs or watching the kids because again that's like the firefighter trying to work work on their novel. So what does separation mean? Well, obviously it depends, you know, on different circumstances. So if you're in a, let's say a traditional circumstance where you go to an office every day from nine to five, then obviously when you're at the office, that's when you would be separated from your caregiving responsibilities. And so when you're in your office, you would be working as hard as you could, deep work, you know, capture, configure control, productivity, whatever you can do to get the

most out of that time. And then when you're home from work, then, then, you know, you're maybe not working here with the kids, right? So that's, that's one setup. Or maybe you work from home like you're a solo entrepreneur, you're a freelancer or something like this. And there's periods where your kids are in daycare at school. Remember those places our kids like vague memories. There's these places our kids used to go. And so when they're at school, that's your separation moment. Then it gets much work done as possible. When they're, when they're back from school, then you're like, okay, I'm no longer in that work mode. Right.

So there's different circumstances here. You know, if you are a primary caregiver for the kids and there is no child care, there is no school, there is no daycare, it's just you watching the kids, that's just a really hard situation. And you don't want to sugarcoat that and you don't want to try to convince yourself, I should be able to still get a lot done, you know, because they could be watching TV or this or that. I just, you want to acknowledge that for the difficult situation that is.

There's no way to sugarcoat that. You're the firefighter trying to write the novel. So that's the advice I usually give people. I mean, people often will say, like, well, how do you get deep work done with young kids? I was like, well, when I'm, you know, when I'm working at the office, I'm not watching my kids. And so that's what I'm doing deep work. And then when I'm not at the office, then I'm home and I'm not doing deep work. I'm watching the kids.

That's just kind of the way it works. And, you know, sometimes people say, well, that must be nice. That means you have other people watching the kids, like they're at school or there's, you know, daycare. or something like this or your spouse is watching him at certain times. And the point is, well, yeah, I mean, I think that's how work has worked for basically ever. There's periods where you're work and there's periods where watching your kids. And that's just how the standard setup unfolds. I don't think there's anything sort of unusual there.

But I think that separation thing is useful because what it does is it pushes you to get as much done as possible when you don't have caregiving and then not to have unrealistic expectations for when you are doing caregiving. I'm a huge believer in having a confined workday with clear shutdown. So when I'm working, I'm working when I'm not, I'm not. Because I know it's really frustrating, again, to be the firefighter writing the novel. All right. So now let's talk about today. This is one of the reasons why right now in the U.S. in particular, so I'm sort of exempting from this, you know, my listeners who are in, you know, Austria or Switzerland or Finland or Sweden or wherever where actually life is a lot more.

than it is right now in the U.S. where we're still having a few issues. I'm not sure if you heard. Right here in the U.S., part of what makes this situation very, very difficult is the fact that that separation principle dissolved, at least in the traditional way we were used to it. We're used to like, oh, maybe I go to an office or me and my spouse go to their offices and we have preschool or daycare. We have school and this one in my day and there's aftercare and then I pick up the kid and you have this clarity. This is when I'm working. This is when I'm with my kids and it all went away because your office went away and the schools went away and the caregivers went away and it's all mixed together and we're realizing oh my god we're all firefighters trying to write novels and you know

our hair's on fire so right now it's really really hard does that mean we should completely give up no i think the separation principle is still valid it's just that you're going to get much less separation so for example matt let's just i don't know your situation but let's imagine, let's imagine that you're married, you and your spouse both work, you both have office jobs, you have multiple young children, and you're all at home. The separation principle would say probably the right way to do this is you've got to divide the work day in half. And when it's your half to work, you're all in, you know, complete control, really focused trying to get as much deep work done as possible. And then when it's your spouse's time to work, you have no expectations

you're going to get any deep work done. I mean, you know, let's be realistic. There may be a lot of shallow work you hope to be able to make some progress on even during your caregiving. You're answering emails while your kids are watching Njago on Netflix or whatever. Okay, I get that. But you have no expectations that you're going to get something deep done. Or you trade days.

You're deep work. Monday is your separation day where it's just you working. And, you know, then Tuesday is your day when you're just with the kids, etc. Right. I mean, so you can seek to try to try to. try to apply the separation principle. You were not going to get, unless you have a really fortuitous situation right now, you are not going to get the same amount of separation or hours that you used to,

but this still will help you make the most out of whatever you have. And as I keep telling people about our current situation with this pandemic, there's two things. There's two things I know for sure. One, it is going to go away because every pandemic in the history of humankind has a gone away and things have gone back. In fact, there's been past pandemics that have been just as bad as this one in which we didn't even change things that much. Like in 1957, we just said, all right, I guess the hospitals are closed, you know, you could look that one up. It's interesting.

But whatever, every pandemic has ever gone away, this will, right? So it's not, it's not endless. It's, this is not, it's not World War II is starting. It's not the Revolutionary War is starting. And it might be 10 years. It might be 12 years. It's, no, it's, it's, we, we know that time horizon. The second thing I know is in hard times, and, you know, I'm putting a little bit of quotation marks around hard right now because what we're talking about is work productivity. And when it comes to work productivity, I mean, it's a bummer. But, you know, again, it's not war. In hard times, you're always better off trying to make the, trying to make the most of the difficult challenges ahead of you than it is just throwing up your hands. So, okay, we've just lost

half of our time we have available. I guess I'm going to have to see if I can become 2x more productive. All right. That's a challenge. I might not hit there. But if I get to 1.5 or 1.75, you know, by being incredibly intense about when it's my time, I'm separated, I'm really clear. And then when it's not my time, I rest my brain from deep work and I'm just doing the kids. We'll just figure this out and make the most of it. You know what? Maybe it won't end up being as bad as you thought. Or maybe it is really hard, but because you're pushing yourself to the limit that when this ends, as again, look back to point one, it will eventually end that when this end, suddenly you're back in the office and you're a superhero. Because given eight hours every day, you're producing like Elon Musk, you know, at your office, right?

So that's my long answer, Matt, would be it's all about separation. Don't think you can do anything of significance while you're doing caregiving. It's a really, really hard job and we can't delude ourselves. And nothing frustrates me more than bosses that think that that delusion is true. firefighters can't write novels when they're putting out the flames by the dock and in this current time the separation principle still applies

it's just we have a lot less hours when we apply it but we can't run away from it to quote myself earlier from this podcast face the dragon go in the cave face the dragon you'll always end up better off than running around and complaining to the townspeople that you're really upset that the dragon's in the cave

finally Matt as a quick coda you did mention that I'm going to quote you here. By their very nature, children under five seem to mean sleepless nights for days or weeks on end. If you're talking children under five years old, you might want to think about doing some sleep training. I would say, I'm a pretty loving parent, but if I had a five-year-old that was still up all night every night, I don't know. I guess I'd be dusting off the firber and say, you know, I'll pay for your therapy bills later, but I got to get a little bit of sleep. All right, Matt, thanks for that question.

nothing gets to be trouble more than talking about parenting. So, you know, I'll tip my hat to you as I get the flames in the inboxes and the days ahead. All right. So Marcia asked, my spouse is always on Facebook, what to do. My two-part answer to that, Marcia is usually first. Demonstrate in your own life the types of changes you would like to see him do. So, you know, you should be someone who's not on your phone all the time. you should practice something like the phone foyer method

where you leave your phone by the front door whenever you're in the house. You should dumb down your smartphone so it doesn't have distractions that attract you. Basically, to apply, you know, Gandhi's quote in a much more procreal setting, be the change you want to see in the world of your marriage. All right, once you've done that,

then you can talk to him. Here's the changes I've made, and here is why I think they've made my life better. Would you be interested in trying this? Okay, and now this brings us to the second piece. If he says yes, then have a simple but impactful, concrete step to suggest. All right? So don't just say, why don't you try to use your phone less?

You say, great, then why don't you try doing the phone FOIA method with me for the next month? You know, when you leave your phone by the front door. Or why don't we try only using social media on the laptop for the next month? We'll take it off the phone and we'll make the password complicated. so that you have to use the post-it note on the monitor and type it in manually to use social media, whatever it is, but be really concrete. So that when he commits to, okay, I want to try a change,

it's not a vague thing. It's actually a concrete thing that you'd spine or you're either doing it or you're not. But if he does, it'll lead to many more changes. Finally, you might give him a copy of my book too. Give him a copy of digital minimalism. Definitely parents have had success with this with their teenagers. So, I mean, I don't know how mature your husband. is, but it might work with him as well.

You know, it's sometimes it's helpful to have this message come from a neutral third party. And so I can play that role as a neutral third party for your husband. So good luck with that, Marsha. All right. Let's do one more question here about the deep life. This comes from Nimrod. He says, a question about craft. What is this whole thing for?

I often struggle with motivation in the broader sense. I often ask myself, what am I working toward? Yet another top tier paper? I've already published several. I know I can publish more if I apply myself. But it's hard to see the purpose of this whole experiment. In a broader sense, the question seems to be, according to the deep life mindset,

why do you get up in the morning and go to work? Well, I think that's a fundamental question. And I'm glad that you asked it. So I would say historically, if you want to think about the role that work plays in people's lives, there's two broad categories of answers. There's pragmatic and philosophical answers.

So the pragmatic answer is utility to yourself, to your family, to your community, to the world. You have a trade, you master that trade. You execute that trade reliably with high quality and with integrity. By doing so, you're able to support yourself, you're able to support a family if you end up having a family.

You're able to be a part of your community. You're able to give charitably to causes that you care about. You're able to support other businesses or services in your community. You get to be a well-integrated member of society. And there's incredible satisfaction in that. And I think we downplay that too much, especially in the last three decades, when we talk about career advice with kids,

where we give them this Disney story that, you know, what's important is that you have this passion and that you follow this passion and it's some big bold thing and it gets a lot of attention for you and you just feel really great about it every day. We give them that Disney fairy tale, but for most of the history of work, people get great satisfaction out of work and it's for these pragmatic reasons. I have a trade. I'm good at it. It's valuable. People will pay me to do it. I can support myself. I can support my family. I can support my community by doing so. Don't underestimate. the satisfaction of those pragmatic principles.

There's an interesting TED talk by Mike Rowe. I mean, it gets sent around a lot. I used to get sent this talk a lot because he talked about follow your passion being bad advice, but it's really interesting because he talks about straight to this point about pragmatism in work satisfaction. He talks about the various tradespeople he met doing his Discovery Channel television show dirty jobs. And he was using the experiences he had, spending time with these people, that they were

often in dirty jobs, the trades, they were skilled, but they were often literally dirty. You know, like septic tank cleaners, roadkill picker-upper was one person, a lot of like plumbing, but having to deal with sewage and stuff like this. Some of it was more agricultural-based, you know, I think he worked with people at some point that milked venom from snakes. and there's an episode where the snake just bites them and is hanging off his hand like its fangs are in it.

All right. Anyways, the point is he spent time with these people that do these skilled trades, but they are nothing to any kid ever said, that's my passion. And what he talked about on this TED talk is, they're happy.

You know, I see the guy who cleans septic tanks. I see him whistling on the way to work. He's happy, satisfied. And there's no way that that was his passion that he identified when he was nine. So what's going on here? And Roe's point was the satisfaction that they're getting, the satisfaction they're getting from work is not about having some bold professional gesture or matching your efforts to some preexisting inclination.

It's they have autonomy. They're good at something. They've built up a business. That septic tank cleaner has a few trucks. It has a pretty successful business. and he's able to support his family and they have, you know, we're able to buy, you know, a house on the beach, if I remember that example, right, that they could go to and he had a lot of pride because he built that from scratch and he's useful and people need their septic

things clean and he runs a good business and he does it with integrity and he gets great satisfaction out of doing it. And again, I think we really have diluted the value of the pragmatist satisfaction, the pragmatic satisfaction of work. We dilute it when we try to use slogans or Disney-style fairy tales when teaching people, especially young people, about teaching them about work. So that's the first part of my answer. So, Nimrod, I know from your elaboration and from your question that you're in academia, you know, you work on publishing academic papers, do that craft well.

Be good in your field. Be a leader in your field. Be a leader for your students. Be a really good teacher. Take on good responsibilities in your department and make it a better department. By doing so, be able to support yourself. be able to support your family, be able to be a part of your university and the community where you live. All of that is a deep source of satisfaction. Don't overlook that.

The second category of professional satisfaction is what I called philosophical. And what I mean by this is that there can be satisfactions drawn from work to go beyond just the pragmatic, the pragmatic rewards it gives you. There's satisfactions that go deeper than that, especially when you're talking about any type of skilled craft. So this is a thread that goes through a lot of human history. It goes through a lot of philosophy. This notion that learning how to do something at a very high level, to be able to encounter really high quality in your field,

to recognize really high quality, to be able to then produce your own things of high quality, has in itself an intrinsic philosophical satisfaction. There are a couple of books I'm going to point you to, towards here. I'm going to point you towards a book called All Things Shining. It's written by a philosopher from Harvard and a philosopher from Berkeley. I talk about this book in deep work. But they go back, these philosophers, the name is Kelly and Dreyfus, they go back through a lot of classic literature. And they really get into the way that there was the world in some of these

classical worlds that are captured, these literatures had this type of transcendence sort of transcendent, almost magical attribute. It was just the world itself was all things were shining. That's where that title comes from. So if you were back in the classical Greek period, you would literally understand people as being infused with a God at certain moments, you know, or in the medieval period, the medieval Christians were almost animist in the way that they just saw the

sort of the influence of God and ordering everything around them. The whole world was like alive with theological energy, sort of like transcendent, exciting energy. And you were saying, you know, a lot of that went away post-Nichi, right? We kind of lost that. The world became kind of boring. But their conclusion was, you can get back some of that sense of sacredness that the world used to be infused with. You can get that back to some degree through their conclusion, skilled craft. And the subject of the craft didn't really matter. This is what's important. It's agnostic to the actual subject of the craft. So they talked about a wheel right, for example, and we don't really

have many wheel rights anymore, but this used to be a very skilled job because you had to bend wood to make a wheel for a wagon. And they talked about how the skilled wheel right, they would just learn over time, all these little attributes about what makes a piece of wood good or bad or what's happening. You know, they bend it and how to get it just right. And it's this sort of objective truth of this is quality and this is not. And this is being done well and this is not. And this wood is not good for bending and this is and that these these sort of intrinsic qualities that they learn to pick up as they learned their craft are in some sense sacred. There are sources of value that aren't just completely contrived in your head.

It's not coming from an arbitrary value system. It's this is a good piece of wood for bending. You know, we know it objectively because it bends. And this other piece is not because it breaks. And they said you should not underestimate the value that comes from being in a world of skill where you can start to understand these distinctions in things around you. Another book that really gets at this is Shop Classes Soulcraft by Matt Crawford. And that gets into it.

Again, he really gets into some of the manual trades, but talks about the huge satisfaction in mastering some of these things. And he talks about, you know, I remember this quite well, the passage where he talks about looking at the skill with which industrial electricians, so electricians for large commercial buildings with which they could bend conduit out of junction boxes. So the metal tubes that come out of the junction box that are containing the high voltage wires. And he had that he was electrician for a while. He did some of this just enough to recognize, wow, the skill at figuring out spatially how all those conduits were going to fit together aesthetically and functionally.

To carry away all those wires in a way that works and is accessible and whatever property. you need for good conduit bend. And he said, there's something in that. So there's something in that. He said, and I'm paraphrasing him, but he talked about there's something intrinsically satisfying. You can look at this thing you did with your hands. You did it really well.

And you know how hard it was. You know why it's good. He said something like it's been known to make a man easy. I believe his phrase was something like that. And you don't need to. And now I'm really paraphrasing, but he went on because I thought it was relevant when I wrote about this in deep work that, that, you know, when you have built things of high value and skill and you can understand that you don't really feel the urge

to be out there boasting and trying to convince the world you're great, which I think is, you know, nowadays code for social media. So that's influential to me. So skill, skilled work in itself is intrinsically valuable. It doesn't matter if it's the, the wheel right, or it's writing a really impressive academic paper that moves to field forward. There is value in developing, ability, developing taste, appreciating quality, producing quality yourself. Aristotle talked about this. I mean, Aristotle, if you go back and read the ethics, that'll be my third book recommendation. Now, if you want to guide to the ethics, by the way, I would say there's a book called, I think it's midlife. I talk about it. It's a philosopher, I think, at MIT.

Might have that wrong. Almost certainly he's a philosopher at MIT. I talk about it in digital minimalism. But he does a really great exegesis on the Nicomachean ethics. If you go back and read the ethics and if you go and read that interpretation, he really gets into how Aristotle finally concludes that sort of cognitive work that's done for no other sake, but just to produce new quality cognitive output is the sort of teleological purpose of man and the only true source of satisfaction in the world. So especially as an academicianian, they make greets some Aristotle, you'll feel better about what you're doing. Right?

So those are my two answers. When it comes to work, we have the pragmatic, right? I mean, there has been and continues to be great satisfaction and having a trade that you do well and by doing so support yourself, support your family, support your community. That's really important and have pride in that. Second, this philosophical value, you're doing something skilled. Develop that skill. Hone your taste, hone your craft, appreciate the really great products.

in your field and try to produce some of your own. There is sacredness in mastery. Aristotle knew it. Matt Crawford knew it. Dreyfus and Kelly knew it. Psychologists know it. If you look at, you know, Ryan Decky's self-determination theory,

it's a really well validated psychological model for human thriving. It talks about mastery as one of the, what they call psychological nutriments. But like having mastery on something is crucial for psychological well-being. So the psychologist can measure this in experiments as well. There is great value in doing something well, just doing it well itself, agnostic to whether it is, you know, creating a vaccine or shaping a wheel, there is value. Though I will say, if you know how to make vaccines, especially for coronaviruses, and you know how to shape wheels, we would appreciate if you focus on the

vaccine right now. But outside of that particular example, you get what I'm taking. It's somewhat content agnostic, the value get out of mastery. So that's my advice. That's why you get up the morning, go to work, right? It's not arbitrary. It's not something we just started trying. It has been at the core of human satisfaction for millennia, and it will continue to be if you allow it to be.

If you appreciate and take pride in the right things, I think you will find your experience with your work will be much better. All right. So we've gone long here, so we should wrap things up. Thank you to everyone again who submitted their questions. If you want to submit your own questions to the podcast, sign up for my mailing list at Calnewport.com. I send out a survey soliciting questions roughly once every month.

Feedback, you can send to Interesting at CalNewport.com. If you like the podcast, please consider subscribing and or leaving a good review in Apple iTunes store. That really helps. Now that I'm back on vacation, I hope to have a. mini episode come out as well this week. And otherwise, until next time, as always, stay deep.