Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 129: How Do I Get My Kid Off His Smartphone?

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP DIVE: Is Organization the Opiate of the Knowledge Work Masses? [1:02]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS - How do I choose skills to work deeply on? [15:18] - What if I don't know what I want to do with my career or life? [20:11] - How do I stop my students from overwhelming me right before deadlines? [23:38] - When should you say "no" to interesting projects? [27:13] - How do I preserve deep work now that I'm back in a real offie? [30:08]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - What are my (Cal) plans regarding my next book? [40:50] - Would I (Cal) consider interviewing my wife? [41:32] - What are the origins of my (Cal) ideas on leisure? [44:12] - How do we get our 13-year-old off his iPhone? [50:31]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. 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. Episode 129. The good news about this moment, this afternoon moment in which I'm recording this episode of the podcast, is that it is a nice enough day outside that for the first time since probably June, early June, I do not have the air conditioning running here in the Deep Work HQ. The bad news, of course, is that it is a nice enough day to not need air conditioning. and I'm in the HQ recording a podcast instead. I'm in a room surrounded by black curtains and sound dampening.

So absolutely isolated from the nice day out there. We have a great episode. Good collection of questions about deep work. A good collection of questions about the deep life. But before we get to those questions, I wanted to do a quick deep dive into a topic that's been on my mind recently. and that is the question, is organization the same as productivity? To clarify what I'm talking about here, let's define some terms.

As you've heard me talk about on this show before, there has been in recent years a growing anti-productivity movement. This is a movement that has been pushing back against what we can call productivity culture. They have a really clear definition of productivity. they're thinking about the economic metric of productivity, which is outcome optimization base. In other words, you're trying to increase the units of output or outcomes for a given amount of input. So when we think about productivity, at least if we think about productivity through the lens of the anti-productivity movement, increasing production is the key. That's the key attribute.

Now organization, let's think about that as things like time block planning, weekly plans, semester plans, daily weekly semester planning. Let's think about full capture, using task boards, using things like Trello to manage all of your different tasks. It's the organization of your time and the organization of what is on your plate. So typically you're looking to understand what time you have and make some intentional decision about what you do with it. keeping track of what's on your plate and making some intentional decisions about which of these things you should be working on and when you should be working on it. So the question is, are these two things the same? Now, this matters because if you listen to the anti-productivity movement, they see productivity

largely through a Marxian conflict theory lens, and they tend to apply a conflict theory style-based superstructure approach to understanding productivity. So they think the push for more production captured in our modern notion of productivity, personal productivity we're talking about here, is mainly constructed to help the base. That is, the help the owners of the capital get more production out of their worker so that they can gain more of the rewards of their capital and make more money, put simply. And then a lot of the culture surrounding productivity and why productivity is good and why you should hustle. In base superstructure theory, this would be the superstructure. This is cultural constructions designed to help support the base.

So it's a false culture that is created largely to promote the underlying goal of producing more production to help line the pockets of the capitalist. So if you apply this Marxian conflict theory approach and look at base superstructure theory, you're very suspicious of productivity and any of the culture surrounding productivity. Even if that culture is not explicitly saying you should work more for your employee, they say even if it's not explicitly saying that it's not explicitly saying that it's. It's at the service of that goal, right? Classic Marxian analysis. So through that lens, organization gets some suspicion. Why are you planning your day? Why do you have your task organized carefully?

What's with this multi-scale planning for the daily, the weekly, the quarterly, or semesterly? This looks like it might be part of the superstructure that support the base. You're just a stooge. You're just a stooge in this greater sort of capitalist exploitation machine. And I think from their perspective, it would be better to engineer a culture against the wishes of the capitalist in which, let's say, the demands on your plate are tractable enough that you don't really need that organization. You don't need to think really hard about full capture and keeping everything organized by category and time blocking your time, etc. I think that's, I'm paraphrasing, or maybe I'm projecting, I should say what they would say. But I think this would be maybe the standard answer of those who are sort of leading the anti-productivity movement.

All right. So is organization somehow part of this superstructure that's just exploitative fundamentally and we shouldn't need it? That's what we should be pushing for a world where we don't need it. Or does it serve other purposes? And we're missing out on a bunch of advantage to our personal human advantages unrelated to lining the pockets of capitalist if we. if we are dismissive of organization. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and my current answer is yes and yes. I think there is good insight on both sides of this argument, and neither side of this argument gets it exactly right.

I mean, the first thing I'll say is if we want to come at the issue of work entirely from a humanist perspective, from the perspective of the workers themselves, how do we make your life a sustainable and meaningful, full as possible in a world where you still have to work to make a living, in the context work of knowledge work as it typically functions today, organization is critical. That if you're intentional about your time and intentional and organized about your tasks, you can have a much better existence. Unrelated to helping your company, unrelated to helping lining the pockets of capitalism, you save a huge amount of unnecessary stress if you're organized.

you're more effective about making use of your time so you can do things with less time, therefore lowering the footprint of work on your life. You can also make progress on important projects much more consistently, which have satisfaction intrinsically in itself, but also gives you career capital faster, career capital, of course, being your best tool for gaining more autonomy of your career and moving it away from things that don't resonate in towards things that do. So it is the best tool we have right now in most knowledge work situations for

making your experience in the world of work better. So if you want to go too far down the Marxian conflict theory rabbit hole and say, I as a principled stand am not going to manage my tasks. I'm going to burn time block planners. You're probably going to make your day-to-day life worse. All right. So I think that's true. On the other hand, I think this vision that I extrapolated from the writings of the anti-productivity

movement that really we should be in a world in which you don't really need Cal Newport to figure out how to do your job. The amount of work should be reasonable. The expectations should be clear. The load should be equitable. You should really not have that much to do. It's pretty natural how works unfolds. You can unfold your work perhaps at your own rhythms. I think that's also right. Right? I mean, I think that's probably what knowledge work should be like. A lot of the tools I talk about or other people talk about for organization is a rearguard action against a chaotic state of the world of work, which is not in itself optimal. It's anti-human as it's bad for individuals, probably bad for organizations as well. So there's sort of truth on both sides.

I think the place where I differ most from the common back and forth in this conversation is that when I look at the chaotic nature of work that unfortunately requires so much thought from the individual about time block planning and weekly planning and quarterly planning and task boards. I tend to place most of the blame for that. And again, this is where I differentiate myself strongly from the anti-productivity movement. I don't think that's largely a Marxian master plan to maximize production in an exploitative fashion from your workers.

I don't give knowledge work managers or business owners nearly that much credit. They're not that smart. In other words, what I have observed, and this is the theme through a lot of my recent writing, starting with a world without email, but also knitting together a bunch of my recent work for the New Yorker, is that knowledge work is haphazard, not because of some plan, but because we're not thinking enough about it. That we have a culture of autonomy in knowledge work. We have a culture of just move fast and break things. We have a culture of, let's just rock and roll. Everyone's smart here. Everyone's creative.

We'll get things done. And we don't think that much about knowledge work. Knowledge work emerged as a major sector of the U.S. economy roughly in the 1950s, and there's been very little change to how knowledge work happens between 1950s and today, 70 years later. We're doing it in a simplistic haphazard way. And I think it's that lack of intention or structure on knowledge work that creates a lot of these issues. And the things spiral out of control, and we get things like the hyperactive hive mine. We get things like completely unregulated workloads. So you get these wildly divergent, inequitable allocations of work between different people.

as I wrote about the New Yorker recently, self-regulation and workloads leads people to use stress as a heuristic, and so they end up converging on about 20% too much work to do, which is really stressful and gives you very little advantages for the huge amount of cost that it produces. There's just a lot of chaos in knowledge work. I think if you were trying to exploit your labor, you're trying to get as much profitable production as you could out of your knowledge workers, you're not going to do something like put them on Slack, right? Because you can't monetize busyness. No one is buying it, right? It's much more complicated.

If you wanted to really exploit your knowledge workers, actually, what I would do is get them away from Slack. I would have these long hours I would demand where they have to do as focused as possible work. It would be basically cognitive sweatshops. You can think of all sorts of devious examples of how you would actually extract the most value out of someone's head. It does extract them all the time and give them a thousand little tasks. doesn't produce a ton of value. I think that, okay, so that's my biggest critique, I think, of the anti-productivity conflict theory approach is that I think they're too easy to associate the busyness that is crushing us with productive activity.

You know, if you're in an assembly line 100 years ago, activity is directly profitable. It's more hours you were there putting steering wheels on Model T's. And if you're more busy, more frantic, that means you're putting the steering wheels on faster, it makes more money. Answered a ton of email messages doesn't actually make your company more money. So again, I think it's haphazardness is probably playing a bigger role than exploitative nature. This is just broad stroke. So obviously there's plenty of angles within knowledge work in which there is also a sort of standard management worker conflict going on. And those do exist, too, especially where the work is more measurable and piecemeal. It's why you'll see, for example, freelance writers can end up.

up with very industrial labor style conflicts with, let's say, the publications they're right for because you have an actual product there. Produce us this many words, produce us this many pages, and you can get to some more traditional dynamics. Okay. Anyway, stepping back, this is what I think. I think organization, just to summarize, organization in knowledge work as it stands today is critical.

If you want to have a deeper life or a life that's less stressful, if you want to gain more control of your career, it would be really risky. right now to say, I'm just going to wing it. On the other hand, the anti-productivity movement's vision of a world where you don't need these tools is right. And if we were a lot more intentional about knowledge work and could have much clear dialogue between workers and their employers and we had knobs, we were actually willing to turn. Let's try to work this way. Let's try it that way. Let's do big experiments. I think we could be there, at least in more and more jobs. And that's a good place to get. And again, the place where I differ is what's holding us

back from that right now is I don't think it's mustache twirling. Let's get. some more model T's out of these workers. I think it's the haphazard chaotic nature of knowledge work, which we have to tame. We have to switch from a mindset of let's just rock and roll, everyone's smart, everyone's creative, I'll sure we'll figure it out, into a mindset of what does work mean and how do we want to do it. Yes, there will be plenty of exploitative dynamics that still remain. There'll be plenty of constructed cultures that are still going to push over work. All that exists, but I think this dynamic of chaos is one that we can't ignore as well.

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Cal to save $5 off. Let's get started with some questions about deep work. Our first question comes from SIE, who says, I recently got a full-time job as a software developer straight out of college. There are a bunch of things like different programming languages, CS concepts, etc., that I want to focus on learning to get better at my job. I also want to master machine learning where my interest ultimately lies. I feel overwhelmed by the number of things I should set aside for deep work,

and everything seems equally important and urgent to me, how should I prioritize what skills or concepts I should schedule my deep work for? Well, Sight, let's first do a quick vocabulary check here. Deep work is a mode of professional activity that has two properties. The thing you are doing is cognitively demanding, and you are doing it in an environment in which you have no distraction. So you're not context shifting in the middle of the work. Your focus is entirely on the content.

cognitive task. This mode of work has many different applications in most jobs. So as a software developer, for example,

the core thing you're doing, which is writing computer code, is an activity that is best served by being in the deep work mode, because it satisfies

the property, of course, being cognitive demanding. And if you do it without context shifts, you'll be able to do it at a higher level

of ability. Learning new skills is another activity that you should probably do in the mode of deep work. But I don't want you

associate, what I'm trying to say here, Sai, is I don't want you to associate deep work only with learning skills. Let's not conflate these two things together. So let me reword your question. You're saying, as a new software developer, I have my first job out of college. How do I figure out what skills to learn on the side? That is, skills that will give you career capital that you aren't being asked to learn by your employer, but you're going to learn anyways to get that capital that you can deploy to help improve your job situation. And honestly, my answer, answer is going to be slow down. You're in your first job out of college.

Let's figure out how to do that job well. And then once you've mastered that, ask the question of, okay, where do I want to go with this? What career capital is most accessible to get me there? And finally, then, how do I most effectively get that capital? You've jumped ahead to that last step. And like, I want to just be, you know, concentrating hard on learning new skills. We're not there yet. So let's focus on your job as it is in front of.

of you right now. I mean, a couple of things you want to do. I've talked about this before, but if you're new to a job, you want to be dependable. Things don't fall through the cracks. If someone asks you about something, you answer. If someone tells you to do something, you get it done. You tell them when it's going to get done. You deliver at that point.

If you can't deliver at that point, you tell them in advance when you're going to deliver it instead, and you deliver at that point instead. Full capture, organized tasks, you're making use of your time, you're planning on multiple scales, progress happens on things, people can count on you. Being dependable is the absolute foundation on which any growth is going to happen in your career. The second thing you want to do is deliver with good quality. Write the best code you can when they ask you to do code. They pull you into some committee to help on the marketing of a new product. You do that really well. That's where deep work, the mode of deep work will be quite useful. Okay, when I code, I do it without

distractions. I focus really hard. I'm not worried about the hard effort. So you want to focus on being dependable and delivering at a high level. Dependability, delivering. Do that. Feel comfortable. You know, I've got my foundation here. I'm doing well. My bosses like me.

I'm making progress. Maybe they're giving me some more responsibilities. You know, do that. Get there. Feel out this job. Feel out where you are. And only then I think should you ask, okay, what's the path I want to take now going forward once you feel really good about that other stuff?

And this might take a year, I would say, if you're really focused on it, Sae, about a year to figure out the mechanics of working. All right, then once you're there, you say, where do I want to go? Who is an example of someone who has gotten somewhere that resonates with me? How did they get there? Let's look at the TikTok of their path. All right, so they went from here to here to here. Where are the places that require some sort of demonstrable rare and valuable skill?

What are those rare and valuable skills? Figure out the type of thing, specifically that you have evidence for that's going to help you get to the next stage you want to get to you. Then you have your list of things to master one by one, regular deep work, before work, after work, during work, if you can get your work done real quicker because you're organized, however you want to do it, you make that regular hard progress mechanically, relentlessly, evidence-basedly, you start working through these skills one by one. So I'm just trying to put a lot of structure to what you're thinking here, Sai.

Don't just jump to you. I wake up early and read machine learning textbooks. Let's be systematic about it. So hopefully that game plan I gave you. will help you find that structure. Our next question comes from Rue. Rue says, much of your philosophy

appears to require a clear vision of the life or career one wants. What if you don't really have that? Well, Rue, I'm going to push back a little bit here. I would say a big part of my philosophy is not having to have a super clear vision in advance of exactly what you want your career to be. I mean, the premise of my 2012 books so good they can't ignore you is that the popular Western notion that's been around since roughly the 1990s, that you are wired to do one thing that we often call your passion.

And the key to career satisfaction is discovering that thing. And once you do, you will be happy that that fundamental assumption is flawed. Most people are not wired for one thing. Satisfaction your work is cultivated over time. So I don't want you to have to figure in advance. this is what I want my working life to be like. Okay. So hopefully that takes some pressure off.

That being said, if we go back to my answer, I just gave the SIE. I'm often talking about things like, well, where do you want to go? Let's deconstruct it. I want to say this is different than having a vision, a long-term vision of a career in life. The stakes are much lower. If you are like Sai, a computer program where you're a couple years into the job, you figured out how to work, how to talk to adults, how to organize your task, how to be reliable, writing good code.

Now you say, where do I want to go next? This is not a question of what is my one true passion. This is now that I've been here for a while, and I know the industry and I know my company and I've seen other jobs that other people have, I'll tell you what resonates with me. This person over here in startups, and that just seems exciting. And I want to run a startup or whatever. Okay, so that's what I want to try next. How do I get there?

It's a relatively medium or short-term vision of what might be the next stage to go to, and then you make a plan to go there and deliberately move towards it. After you get there, what happens? You do something similar. And then after you get to that next place, what do you do? You do something similar. Where do I want to go from here? How do I build that capital?

Let's invest. If you link together five or six of these links in this chain, you end up somewhere really cool. You have a career that you love and is incredibly impressive and you're passionate about. And to the outside world, they'll be like, wow, Rue, how did you know that this is what you wanted to do? I want to follow my passion like that. But you didn't know. You never really knew more than the next step ahead of you, but you did that step well. You built career capital.

you invested a career capital wisely and repeated, that's going to get you somewhere cool. So I guess, Roe, the right answer here is that you don't need a clear long-term vision of your career, but you do need a good medium to short-term vision of where you want to go. Have a tractable medium and short-term version that you are deliberately working towards. If you keep doing that, you'll end up somewhere cool. If you're trying to figure out the whole game plan in advance, you're going to cripple yourself with indecision, or you're going to hobble your attempts by trying to make too big of a swing right up. front. If you don't do any of that thinking and just think about today, what am I doing in my job

today? How do I make my boss not be upset this week? If you're doing no vision past the immediate future, that's also bad because now you're not deliberately building career capital. So your career capital stores are going to accumulate slowly. You have less to invest in your career. Your career's not going to move as quickly to interesting places. So I think that's the sweet spot, rue. Forget the long term, forget no vision. Look in this next couple of year windows, always have a good swing there that you're over time, you're going to hit that ball pretty far. All right, we have a bit of an insider baseball academic question here. It comes from Francisco.

Francisco says, despite careful planning and midi iterations, I often receive papers for my PhD students that I need to review within a very short time. This is the tangible output of their work in mind. So it's important. I don't want to just discard it by saying, sorry, too late. Well, Francisco, the big picture answer, I guess I have for you, is if you're an academic at a research institution, in some sense, deadlines are going to be time intensive. I think that's, especially if you're in something like computer science, and I should probably clarify this for the confused listener because computer science and some other related technical fields are very different from other fields. But in computer science, we don't do most of our publishing in journals.

we do most of our publishing in very competitive peer-reviewed conferences. So it's like journals. I mean, these end up being, if you're a theoretician, 30-page papers with huge proofs, it's incredibly difficult to get the papers published. But there's deadlines. You know, if you want to try to submit your paper to this conference, you have to submit it by January 24th. Right. So you have these deadlines, right?

And a lot of work gets generated right before the deadlines. When I was a postdoc at MIT, for example, my postdoc advisor would order in food, usually Indian food on the deadline days because, hey, we were going to be there. Often these deadlines are at midnight Eastern or something. We're going to be there. So you'd order in food and that's what was going to happen. All right. So there's some degree, Francisco, you can't avoid that.

Deadlines, if you're in a field of computer science, are going to generate a lot of work. I just submitted a paper two days ago, so I am speaking from recent experience. And so you just have to plan around that. You've probably, by the way, heard me implicitly discuss this. When people ask me on the podcast about my fixed schedule, productivity approach where I fix the hours I want to work and then work backwards to try to make the hours fit. And I have this roughly 9 to 530 time that I do my work. I always list one exception. I have listed this exception from the very beginning paper deadlines. If there is a paper

deadline, I expect that I might have to work on the weekend, if it's like a Monday deadline, or I might have to work late on a weekday if it's a midnight deadline. So I've sort of given into that. And that being said, if you're an advisor, it doesn't mean you have to be up till midnight it like your students. This is just a game of being very structured about your interaction with your students in the two weeks leading up to the paper. Two weeks ahead. Okay, this paper deadline's coming up in two weeks. What's our plan?

Let's meet every other day. I mean, you basically have to take the time to what happened on that deadline and spread it out in a structured manner in the weeks leading up to it. Let's meet every other day. How did this go? Let's push this. Let me give you feedback on that. And you're doing this feedback, doing this feedback.

And so they know when you get to the deadline day, yeah, you're going to have to look at things. You might have to stay a little late and order them Indian food to eat. But I'll tell you this about my postdoctoral advisor. He would order that food and he would be there when we're eating the dinner. But he wasn't there at 9 or 10 o'clock when we were finishing the paper. And that is your prerogative as the advisor is that, yeah, you might have to stay late that day. But because you've been very structured about we're going to talk about this every other day, make progress, make progress. The final things you're pushing on that final day aren't going to take till late at night.

You know, like, okay, this is our final time I'm looking at it. Here's my final feedback. I trust you. You have to do the final work and submit it. And you have to have the confidence to do that. So there are things you can do to reduce the last-minute push of deadlines. On the other hand, you cannot eliminate the fact that deadlines in some of these academic fields are going to be times that monopolize your time allocation in a way that is different than the other times of the year. All right.

We have a question here from DJ. DJ asks, when do you decide to say no to an interesting project? Well, DJ, my answer is most of the time. No is my default. Now, occasionally, with enough reflection and convincing, I will say yes to a new project, but it really is my default because there's a lot of things out there that are interesting. Now, depending on your situation, you might get exposed to more than others. I probably get exposed to more interesting opportunities than, let's say, a normal professor in my situation,

because I have all the writing-related stuff that's going on, and that's relatively high. profile and some people are more serendipity seeking. They're out there more exposing themselves to more people and ideas. They might see more opportunities than someone that's more inward focused. But in general, once you're at an interesting point in your job, interesting things will come your way. I think the default should be no. Now here's my logic behind it.

A, yes is unsustainable. Projects take a ton of time. By any reasonable definition of project, you have just committed. yourself to hundreds of tasks and dependencies and stresses and back and forth, it's a major thing to ask of someone to put onto your plate. There's only so many you can have. Almost certainly many more will come your way than you can have. So no, just by definition, probably has to be your default answer. Now, the problem is most people, even though no, if you've really tabulated it, is their default answer? Say yes, 20% too much.

Which doesn't make a big difference in terms of their impact on the world, but makes all the difference in their stress. B, my second point here, is what gives you meaning, satisfaction, and impact in your career is that you are regularly working on interesting things that are satisfying and meaningful and that have a chance of making an impact. Increasing the quantity of those things doesn't scale up the meaning, doesn't necessarily scale up the impact. Being someone who is working on something interesting gives you all the benefits of being someone who works on something interesting. Spreading yourself thin over four things does not make your life seem more interesting. It does not make your work seem more meaningful and more satisfying. Now, what about impact?

You might say, wouldn't working on three things give me three times the impact just working on one? Not really, because the time is a fixed resource. One thing you can give more time to versus three things, you're spraying yourself thin between, and you get the plate spinning mode, where you're just bouncing emails back and forth to temporarily get them out your inbox and setting up standing Zoom meetings because you don't have enough bandwidth left to actually figure out how to make progress and at least then there'll be something on your calendar, you're not doing very well in any of the projects. And I would argue that a small number of things done really well is almost certainly going to be higher impact and a larger number of things done worse. So DJ, that's my mindset. Yeah, say no unless you really

convince yourself and are convinced by others that yes is the right answer. All right, let's do one more question here about work. This one comes from Teresa. Teresa says the company I work for has required all employees to return to the office. Before the pandemic, the company remodeled our workspace into an open office. The problem is I'm a writer slash editor for our company publication and I need uninterrupted time to get my work done. I work so much better and faster at home, but my manager insists that I return to the office because otherwise it's quote, unfair, end quote, to the other employees. Well, Teresa, I have a strategy for talking to your boss I'm going to offer here.

Don't come at this conversation through the frame of, can I stay remote? But think about what happened with that frame. So can I stay remote? He immediately just thought about that work mode versus the in-person mode. It's not fair because some people have to be in person. Why should some be remote? And when he says fair, what he really means is it's too complicated. I don't have a policy to figure this out.

I don't want to develop such a policy. I don't want to hear the complaints. I want you basically to have a massively impactful decision about your work situation to save me a little bit of annoyance and having to do a little bit of managing. So, okay, that's the situation. So I'm not super on your manager's side. But don't frame it that way. Come at it instead from the deep to shallow work ratio perspective. You come to your manager, you say this is what deep work is.

This is what shallow work is. both is important. All right? I mean, deep work is what is necessary for me to write and edit at a high level and actually produce the publication. But there's all these shallow work things I need to do too. I need to attend these meetings and hand in my timesheets or whatever, right? Both is important.

What is the right ratio for someone in my position? If we look at the hours of a typical week, what is the ratio of deep work hours to non-deep work hours that would optimize my value I produce for the company and my utility? and settle on a number. Probably if you're a writer-editor, it'll be something like 50-50, maybe 60-40. All right,

once you have that number, you say, great, what's the best way for me to hit this? Because, you know, I have a hard time doing this in the open office where my current office is.

So let's figure out what is our plan here because we want to hit this number that we think is going to produce value. Now I'm going to predict there's going to be some answer like, well, if it's 50-50, then what you should do?

is, you know, work from home for the first three hours of the day and come in every afternoon, so you're available for meetings. Now you're 50-50. Or take two days. You work entirely from home just on this. And then the other three days you're in the office and doing other types of things or whatever. Maybe not your home. It's like you have the conference room. And it's for you, two hours every morning, one hour every afternoon. This is when you go and do your deep work on the publications and you won't be disturbed there. Whatever. But there'll be an answer. the reason why this is more effective than saying, can I work from home, is that you're working towards a mutually agreed upon positive metric, a metric that you're trying to hit to increase value. Now there's a very clear goal, and you've taken away the complexity and anxiety for your manager of, I don't want to have to work out a policy for who gets to work at home or who's not.

This is outside of that frame. Now it is, we have agreed on hitting this ratio of deep to shallow work hours, and I'm just coming up with a particular work plan for the, this individual so they can hit this ratio because they're trying to maximize their value. And a lot of innovation is possible. And people who try this deep to shallow work ratio strategy are always surprised or often surprised, I should say, by the degree to which they assume that the work culture that they were involved in was entrenched and could never change, they have this conversation, major changes happen. I do, however, want to give you a word of warning. I'm reading between the lines of your message here. And your boss may be reading between the

lines of this message too. You say, I need to be at home so I can actually do my work as a rider. Your boss might be hearing, you say that, but you want to be at home because of other advantages. You don't want to commute. You want to have more flexibility. You want to be able to pick up your kids. You want to be able to go to the gym in the middle of the day. They might be thinking you want these other benefits of being at home that have no direct connection to the value produced for my company. And if anything, maybe makes things a little bit worse. And you're saying it's about deep work. to be wary of that. In other words,

here's how I want you to think about this, Teresa, if your boss comes back and says, we have found you a completely interruption-free

conference room here at our office that you can go to for three hours a day and is protected for you. If that's not a good answer for you, if you say,

no, no, I need to be at home, then that's telling you that there's more going on here than just, I need to do deep work as you want

the other benefits of being at home. And I think it's better just to be honest about that if that's really what's going on, you know,

that's a different discussion, and we'll put that aside for now. I'm just going to give you that warning, though. That might be where some of this resistance comes. If your boss senses that, there may be some hesitation about, you know, I basically don't buy this story that that's why you want to be at home. So just be careful about that and be ready to have the conference room solution and be able

to accept it. But when it comes purely to this issue of deep work, the deep to shallow work ratio question is strategy is a really good one. This other issue that we just touched on about other reasons why you want to work from home is a huge issue because I think those are good. regions and there's a lot of radical rethinking we can do about what work means in the role of the office. I'm working on a new New Yorker piece right now that's going to get into that. It's going to talk about this guy who has this really radical, compelling philosophy about

the future of work. You know, so I'm not going to give too much away, but that's a huge other topic that I'm working on. And just now put a pin in that, that's separate. We'll get to that. But if it's just purely, I don't want to be distracted, my open office is too distracted. The ratio conversation is probably your best bet. I want to take a moment to talk about another sponsor of the Deep Questions podcast, and that is ExpressVPN. You have heard me before talk about how VPNs work. Instead of you connecting directly to the server that you're interested in,

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All right, let's do some questions now about the deep life. The first one comes from Edo. Edo asks, what are the plans regarding your next book? Well, Edo, that's still in progress. Roughly speaking,

I would like to be writing this winter. So I'm finalizing ideas this fall. So stay tuned. Things are still coming together. probably going to focus on two ideas instead of just one. Probably one of these ideas is going to involve the deep life. Probably another one will have something to do with slow productivity,

but a lot of this is still being developed, so again, stay tuned. Camathie 31 asks, Hi, Cal, would you consider interviewing your partner? Well, the short answer is no, but I thought I would answer this question in a little bit more detail because I've had some few questions about similar topics recently, and I thought I should just be clear about my policy here. So I've been sort of in the public eye in the sense of I receive scrutiny,

I receive feedback, I receive a lot of criticism. My entire adult life, I still remember the first piece of hate mail I received. My sophomore year in college as I started writing a humor column for the Daily Dartmouth, And I remember that word for word, the first piece of hate mail I got, you think you're so funny. It's only gone downhill from there. But, you know, I've just been in the public eye for a long time. I started writing books at a very young age. I began touring the country and giving talks in front of big crowds, radio, TV, doing all of that at a pretty young age.

And there's been a lot written about me. I get critiqued a lot. I've had the honor of having an op-ed in the New York Times written specifically about why one of my ideas is wrong. I've been ambushed on national radio where the whole thing is set up to try to prove what's wrong. We brought in these people just to come back and push back on what you've said. Many articles, many columns, bring me up negatively, associate me with all sorts of negative things. This is all to say, it's the life I signed up for and I'm pretty used to it, right? Because one of the things you learn when you're in the public eye, for example, is that X percent of any audience exposed to anyone is going to be negative about that person.

And so if you expand that audience, no matter who you are, that X percent gets big. It's going to seem like there's a lot of people who are really mad at you. You kind of get used to that. Other people who did not choose to have a life in the public eye find this rightly so disconcerting. They do not want people talking about them. They do not want people questioning them. They do not want people making assumptions about them. So my policy is that anyone who's in my private life, family members, close friends, etc.

If they are not in the public eye themselves, I just don't. just don't talk much about them. So this is why I don't talk a lot about my wife. It's why I don't talk a ton about, I give some details about things I specifically do, but we don't talk a ton about our setup and our house and our kids and et cetera. And it's all because of that policy. People who are not in the public eye, it's not my right to put them there. So there's no mystery. I didn't invent my wife. These people exist. I just have a policy of not talking that much about them. So am I going to interview? her, no, I'm not. She would hate that. We got a question here from Daniel. Daniel says, could you share a bit about the background of your ideas on high quality leisure? You know, Daniel, I got more systematic in my thinking about leisure when I was doing the research for digital minimalism, which of course has relatively long sections on leisure and the value of leisure. I think it's something that we don't we don't think a ton about anymore. In part, I think this is a side effect because of the success of attention economy tools

and in particular social media related tools that basically monopolizing surplus time and attention, which reduces the urgency born of boredom to figure out what to do with your excess time. This sucked up all that time. Of course, it's not the first technology to do something like this. television had a similar effect, but social media because of its portability, and it's the way that's engineered to press your buttons in an individualized fashion is even more effective at this. And I think we lost sight of leisure because we don't need it in the immediate sense of there's plenty of things on that glowing piece of glass in our hand to keep us away from short-term boredom. So I thought it was important to get back into it. In terms of influences on my thinking, two I would point to in particular would be Aristotle.

So again, if you read the ethics, this is one of the things he gets into is the value of activity done just for the sake of that activity. So non-instrumental activity is somehow being unique to humans. And that's probably not actually true, but he thought about it that way. And being core to our humanity, he pointed towards thinking, that Greek style, internal, inductive style thinking. would this be deductive thinking? I mean, this is deductive thinking. I mix up inductive and deductive. That Greek style of just putting the eye of your intention internally and working things through rationally.

And he thought that was the heliological necessity of humanness, but you could bring out this broader message from the ethics that non-instrumental activity is crucial to our character. And I make that point in digital minimalism. I was also influenced by how to live in 24 hours a day by Arnold Bennett. It's a book from the early 1900s that was grappling with this issue of there's a new type of work, middle class work, where you get on a commuter train in your suburb of London, you go to an office, you do boring bureaucracy stuff, you get on that commuter train, you come home, it's 530, now what? You don't have land to tend. You don't have a farm that you're keeping track of, but you're also not a gentleman that is just wandering your lands and looking at your renter. but not having to do any efforts.

What should you do when you have a day where you work, but no real, that's your work, and it's done at a certain time. And he had this argument that, well, you should be really careful about it. You should be really careful about what you do with the eight hours that is not working and the eight hours that's not sleeping,

that eight hours in between. And he thought people wasted it and were frivolous with it, drinking and playing cards and smoking cigars. He was, of course, completely, I'm not even going to say dismissive, just the idea of women, and child care and any other type of work that was happening in the household was completely off his radar.

But again, this is a novelist from the late 19th century, early 20th century, so what do we expect? But anyways, the details of what he suggested is very much of its time and snobbish. It has to do with poetry and literature. But that's a really important book because it's the first time we see, this is something we might actually have to think about. We might have to have some structured thinking about what it is we want to do with our time when we're not working and we're not sleeping and if we're careful about it, there's great fulfillment to be had.

His basic argument is in that eight hours between work and sleep. Again, if you're in a position where you have nothing else you have to do, you're as free as any aristocratic gentleman. You have full control of your time. And so why not use that towards really ennobling pursuits? Let me say this, by the way, about that book. When I went back to my office at Georgetown for the first time in 16 months earlier this summer, a few weeks ago, right?

Because the campus is back open. There was a big stack of mail that people have been piling in my office from stuff that people had been sending me. In that stack of mail was a first edition copy of how to live in 24 hours a day. A reader and the card was lost. So I don't know who sent this. So I'm just going to send out my thanks to the anonymous benefactor here. A reader sent me a first edition.

First edition of that book. Fantastic. I'm very excited to have that. That's very meaningful. So I'm very excited to have an actual, I think it's 1909. edition of how to live on 24 hours a day. But that's an influential book. Again, not because of the details of what Bennett suggests, but because of that mindset

shift of, huh, we might, again, in this new constructed world of fixed-hour middle-class working, care about what we do with the other time. So those were influential to me. Of secondary inspiration, but still important, I were throwing Diane Ackerman's essay on deep play. I think that's a really sort of important and interesting essay in this particular field. I also derive, you see this in digital minimalism, some interesting influence from the fire community, financial independence, retire early community. It's a community that works to drastically reduce their expenses so that they can drastically save most of their salary.

And in a seven to 10 year period, save enough salary to, in the perpetuity, support their reduced expenses and therefore be financially independent. They have to think a lot about what did they want to do with their time because the, the serious practitioners of fire find themselves at the age of 42 not working or not needing the work. And it can actually be existentially pretty challenging. And so reading their blogs, reading their books, I've interviewed some of them as well. It's very useful. A good insight into the struggle and value of trying to figure out how to structure time. There's no longer instrumentally aimed just towards producing income. So Daniel's a good question. Rich topic. There's many more sources.

but those were some of my inspirations. All right, I think we have time for one more question here. This one comes from Concerned Dad. He says, we gave our son an old iPhone 6 after he started school to communicate with him while he was out. Although we do not let him keep it at night, he has the phone during the rest of the day for pseudo-intertainment. Beyond the obvious solution, which is parental control, I would like to hear your recommendation on how to make him stay away from this diabolic machine. The boy used to read a lot of books. Now he does not care anymore for that.

Peer pressure is an issue here too. His friends are even worse than him. Well, Concern Dad, do not let him hear this podcast answer as he will forever curse me, but I think you take the iPhone away. I don't think most 13-year-olds can, from a psychological or social perspective, handle being given that sort of unrestricted access. not just to the internet, but internet-enabled apps that have been designed and evolved over time to capture as much possible attention from its users. I really do think it's an issue. I mean, I know this is a topic that's in debate,

but what you're seeing with your son is being seen by parents again and again. They won't stop looking at these things once they have it. And everything else of value to them goes away. So let's look at the objections. Well, number one, you need to communicate with them. Easily solved. Give them a non-smart phone that you can do text. messages with. Okay, problem solved. Number two, peer pressure. I think I would rather,

I would rather face that challenge of how do I navigate the social impact of my kid not being able to do this thing other people do. I think that is a easier problem to solve and the problem of how do I deal with a kid who is spending every bit of discretionary time they have staring at this glowing rectangle. Which problem do you want to have? They're both problems. So which one is worse. And I think the peer pressure one can be dealt with. In some sense, it's like imagine your kid had a health, you know, God forbid, but a health issue that made some things difficult. You know, you have to type 1 diabetic, you have to do these shots and have the insulin pump and be very careful what they eat and there are certain activities they can't do. You

would say, yeah, this is, this is hard, right? These are things that are hard, but we can still build a really good, deep, interesting, meaningful, fulfilling life for our kid. Yeah, we have to work around that and that's hard, but there's other things we focus on that are great and, you know, it's okay, we make it work is a great life. You can almost see it that way. Yeah, it's a problem. His friends are on it and they're playing Fortnite and Minecraft Pocket Edition and texting each other all the time. And he can text them on the phone, the non-smart phone we get them with text capabilities, but there's this other stuff he can't do and good. That's our issue we have to deal with. You know what? That's easier than a bad health issue. Let's count ourselves lucky.

this is as hardships go, this is not the worst parenting challenge we'll have to face. I'm increasingly leaning towards that solution. I think a lot of other people are too. And by other people, I mean people who are directly encountering their own teenage kids and their relationships with these phones and saying this is not healthy. And that's where I think we are. I think we're getting to this inflection point where we have two sides of a, we have two sides here of this chart do we have to grapple with. We have the chart of the growing negative impact of unrestricted smartphone use in adolescents, especially early adolescents.

And we have the other side, social and other cost of not having access to this technology. These curves are going to cross. I think they've crossed. Other people don't think they've crossed yet, but I think that's where we are. So at the very least concerned, dad, I want to plant that in your mind as an option to consider. I could be wrong here. You could be on another side on those curves. The social cost curve might still be higher than the negative cost to your kid's side of the

curve. That's fine, but I want you to be looking at those curves and actually thinking about this as an option. Thinking critically about that extreme measure is being one of the things you want to have on the table here. The other thing I want to add here more generally is the reality of these curves crossing being a key inflection point in terms of our technological encounter with these tools in the context of adolescence, which in itself is probably the most academic sentence I've said, that is pure academia, that convoluted sentence there. I've been doing too much academic work recently, guys. But this question, here's what I've been thinking about this question. One of the things that those of us who are concerned with this issue can be doing and should be doing

and are doing is lowering the social cost curve. And I think this is often missed out in this discussion, but it comes up often in the one-on-ones I have when people are talking to me about their encounter with my book, Digital Minimalism, when I hear from individual parents, when I hear from individual adolescents reflecting on their relationship with this technology, that one of the most useful things we can do is lower that social cost.

I've heard Jonathan Haidt talk about this before. You don't have to get everyone in your 13-year-old's class to stop using a smartphone before it becomes socially appropriate for him to not use a smartphone. You need like three people. just enough person that's not one outlier, there's enough people doing it that it is a legitimate identity that you can don. I am one of the people who doesn't use smartphone and social media. That is my countercultural stance, and over there we have the people who are in the theater, and over there we have the lacrosse kids.

It's just another group that you can acceptably join. So it's actually, we don't have to lower the social cost curve that much before it becomes clear that the negative is overwhelming the negative of the usage is overwhelming the negative of the social. social cost. So that's a good place, I think, for parents and educators and stressed out overwhelmed kids to be aiming. We just have to make the social costs of not using these tools at a young age low enough that the pain of it clearly is the pain of using the tools is clearly going to be larger. Right. I mean, and I think that's, I think that's where we're getting. And we'll see. I mean, look, we're on the right timeline here. You look at any new technological trend that has large societal impacts and rearrangements, you typically have very roughly speaking, a 10-year

period of exuberance with wide adoption experimentation. We then learn from that experience. There's a pushback phase that we come out of with a reconfigured relationship with the tool. This happens with any tool that has some sort of large societal impact. We began this curve with social media roughly around 2012. That's roughly when we get to that 50% of the population using social media point. That's when it became widespread. We're about 10 years out. We are getting the pushback now, right?

So we're leaving the exuberance curve four years ago when I would say quit social media. People thought I was crazy. Today, when I say quit social media, people are bored of hearing it. It's that common. So clearly we have shifted to a phase where we're now going through that period of reflection and rearrangement. I'm not quite sure how we'll come out on the other end. Typically, we do not come out of these periods of rearrangement saying we make no change. Typically there is some changes.

Sometimes it's a drastic change. You know, oh, kids should not drink alcohol. Maybe we should have a drinking aid. Sometimes it's drastic. Sometimes it's not. Television, we ended up somewhere in between. You know, we got more careful about television time with younger kids and TVs and kids' rooms and caring about how much we watch TV or not. Our cultural understanding of TV went from, this is just great to, let's be a little bit wary.

So we'll see where we land with social media, but I think we're not going to, we're not going to, land probably at, come on, kids will be kids. This is this generation's rock and roll, give to a 13 year old a smartphone. I could be wrong, but that's a lot of random thoughts on the issue. What's not random, however, is my commitment to wrapping up this episode. Thank you for listening. Go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how to submit your questions for the show. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.