Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 135: Is Screen Time Bad?

Episode Date: October 4, 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 WORK QUESTIONS  - How do virtual office hours work with multiple participants? [4:26]  - Is time spent in front of a computer screen bad (bonus rant: we work too much!)? [8:18]  - How do I remember goals when I'm in danger of distraction? [14:20]  - Why do I ignore monthly planning? [16:26]  - How do I survive running two companies? [18:08]  - How do I make my YouTube channel popular? [22:43]  - How should I train new hires? [27:09]  - How do I avoid getting stuck waiting for a needed response? [30:43]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS  - Can I (Cal) give feedback to all submitted questions [32:48]  - Can my (Cal) philosophy be summarized as "deep intentionalism"? [34:33]  - Which phones and phone apps do you use? [37:18]  - What are some ideas for keystone habits in the creativity bucket? [38:41]  - How should a college student approach digital minimalism? [43:17]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 135. I have a trio of short, book-related, quick announcements. But number one, long-time friend of mine and friend of the show, Ryan Holiday, has a new book out. It is called Courage is calling. It is the first of a four-book series that Ryan is writing. each looking at one of the cardinal virtues. Ryan has really mastered this format that he now, I think, really owns, where he takes a topic

like stillness or in this case courage, and then he illustrates it through the erudite selection of different historical or literary examples. And I think it's a really effective format. It's something that suits well his hyperliteracy he reads all the time and is something that I'm sure he's going to sell, to use an official industry term, all the copies of. Anyways, I know you as my listeners like Ryan Holiday because my Ryan Holiday episodes do well, so check that out. Courage is calling.

Second announcement, some people are asking me how my ill-conceived decision to try to read a 600-page intro to film studies textbook in one week, how that was going. Well, I'm hanging in there. I've passed the 400-page mark. I'm making my way to that final 100 pages, which is a synthesis of everything in the book applied to the movie Citizen Kane. And my goal is I am going to watch Citizen Kane for the first time in my life, having made it through all 600 pages. I don't know that I would recommend casually reading a textbook just for no reason.

I mean, even for someone who reads a lot, it's a little bit of a slog. But I'm getting there, 400 pages in, 200. pages to go and then the big Citizen Kane watch. So to balance that out, I guess we can call this the third announcement. I've been reading, it's not really an announcement, it's just a note. It's called us a note. I've been reading this new book, The Big Picture by Ben Fritz. It's a couple years old.

The subtitle is the fight for the future of movies. It's a nice adjunct to the textbook reading. It might be considered a depressing adjunct, actually, because the textbook, the author of The textbook is so into Auteur, cinematography, auteur, writing, and all of the expressive possibilities of the film medium. I'm now very impressed by film as an artistic medium. The big picture is about how, in the last 10 years,

basically the model of making films for adults disappeared and why it disappeared and why now all of the movie in cinema is, all the money rather in cinema is focused on franchise movies built around worldwide recognized IP, be it Marvel characters, be it Hasbro toys, be it Legos for God's sakes. So anyways, really interesting book. Ben Fritz is an LA Times reporter

really gets into this is the economics behind why that change happened and here's the reality of how that change is being implemented. It draws heavily from those leaked Sony email so we get an inside look at Sony's, their film

divisions collapse. They were really built around star-driven vehicles. So Will Smith and Adam Sandler were their big stars. That all fell apart in the first decade of 2000s, now putting Will Smith as the star of a movie based around an original idea that costs $70 million to make. That was the bread and butter of the film industry throughout most of my adult life. Now you can't do that today. You would lose money.

Anyways, no ulterior motive here. I'm just saying I'm reading this book and it's interesting. And I read Ryan's book and it's interesting. And I'm reading this textbook. and it's interesting, but I wouldn't recommend doing that. All right. That is a enough preamble. Let's get started with today's show.

And as always, we will start with questions about deep work. Our first question is technical. It comes from Maria. She says, can you describe virtual office hours from the viewpoint of a participant? For example, if you are talking with one person and a second person arrives, do they just hang out in a virtual waiting room akin to standing outside of your office. Good question, Maria. One I have a ready answer for because, of course, as a professor, especially as a professor

who in the last year was doing everything virtual, I know all about these different technology platforms. And the answer is yes. The standard streaming video conferencing platforms have a waiting room feature. I'm most familiar with Zoom, but when I turn on the waiting room feature in a Zoom office hour meetings that I am hosting, I see in the participants pain everyone who shows up and they are placed in a waiting room. I then click next to a name and say, admit, that moves them to a different status in that participant list where I can see them and talk to them. And you can admit

multiple people, whatever configuration you want, and the people in the waiting room don't hear or see the discussion happening in the main room. It works great. But just as a reminder about this broader point of office hours. This is one of my big recommendations as a piece of low hanging fruit for minimizing ad hoc back and forth unscheduled messaging in your career, in your job. Everyone should have office hours multiple times a week at known times where your office is open. And if you're at all virtual, your Zoom with waiting room is turned on or whatever technology platform you use. And you want to defer as much as possible. Any conversation that's going to be relatively quick but involved multiple back and forth, move that to office hours.

Do not let those conversations unflow with back and forth emails. Do you think we should have a meeting? Yeah, I don't know. How about next week? No, next week is not good. What if we did it on the week after on Tuesday? Well, Tuesday afternoon could work, but Thursday's better. I could do Thursday?

Can we do it before noon? Yeah, but it has to be 10. Yeah, okay, how about 1130? Okay, that works. That interaction I just had in an office hours requires basically. is basically as much time as you just heard. 30 to 40 seconds. As a back and forth email conversation,

that's going to take 7 to 8 messages. Each of those messages is going to require up to 10 inbox checks to make sure that you see that message soon after it arrives so you can knock a ping pong ball back over the proverbial ping pong ball net. And so we're talking 50 to 100 context shifts induced by that message, that interaction. So this is why office hours are such an effective piece of low-hanging fruit. it seems annoying in the moment.

Why do I have to wait till tomorrow to talk to you about this meeting? Can't I just shoot you off an email and get it off my mind temporarily right now? But don't think about right now. Think about the 50 to 100 context shifts that that conversation will require if you kick it off with an email right now. And imagine replacing that with 40 seconds at your office hours. Just have a list on your computer, things to discuss that, you know, Cal's next office hours, throw it on there. It's out of your head. You get the office hours.

You have a list of four or five things. to talk about boom, boom, boom, we really should be doing this much more. Hey, by the way, just a quick note on office hours, when deep work came out in 2016, I wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review, and it was in this article, it was surrounding the release of Deep Work, but it wasn't really about deep work. It was the very early stages of me testing this idea about the way we communicate is broken. and the idea that I explored in that 2016 early stage thinking on email article was office hours. So we can actually place this idea at the very beginning of the intellectual trajectory that eventually led to all the theory that makes up my latest book, A World Without Email.

Our next question comes from Jeff. Jeff asks, is time spent in front of the computer screen a bad thing? Jeff elaborates that he works in IT and that he is a remote worker and has been even before the pandemic. He notes that he's at his computer screen almost all day. His time is split between quote unquote required, rather, tasks, but also doing other things like reading up on new technologies

or watching training videos. So he's wondering, is this a problem that I'm in front of my computer screen all day during the work day? Well, Jeff, I don't think being at a computer screen is fundamentally negative obviously as a writer and a computer scientist. Both of those roles, by definition,

involve quite a bit of time in front of a computer screen. I think the issue as you are probably intuiting or head nodding towards in your question is too much consecutive time in front of a computer screen. That can be draining. Not just in the obvious physical sense of your eyes get strained and you get those optical nerve located headaches, etc. Yeah, that could happen if you're staring out of screen too long,

but also you're sitting. So you're sitting a long time if you're stuck in front of a computer screen. That has its own negative consequences. And it can just be tiring to your body and your brain. Like, why aren't we moving? So take the screen aside and just look at what's induced with your mobility by looking at a screen is that you're not moving for a long time. That can be an issue in the long term. So in an ideal world, you might do something like my friend Brian Johnson does.

you might know Brian Johnson from my ad reads for Optimize. So this is the founder of the optimized network. One of the things he does is he has a timer. And I forgot exactly how long the timer is set for, but it's shorter than you would think. It's like 20 minutes or something like this. Anyways, he read somewhere that there's a maximum duration that you should sit before it's a problem.

And it's not as long as you think. It's less than an hour for sure. And he works from home. when his timer goes off, he jumps up and does a quick burst of exercise. I think he does something like 10 burpees or 10 pushups or some pull-ups, like pretty intense but really short exercise. Like it's all the blood flowing and the muscles moving. Then he goes back to work. So it's not like you're disappearing for an hour.

But he's doing that whatever two or three times an hour. Physiologically, that probably makes a lot of sense because it prevents your body from shifting into a shutdown mode where it's, we're not moving. We don't need our muscles. We don't need the blood really flowing. Let's conserve. So I like that idea. Also, ideally, you would probably have longer breaks outside, sunshine, light, being a part of nature in the seasons, cold in the winter, hot in the summer, two or three times a day. You start off your day with a long walk. You have a mid-morning, long walk, lunch outside, an afternoon, 20-minute walk before you finish out your day. Like, that probably would be optimal as well so that you're not just moving, but you're getting fresh air,

You're connected to your world around you and you're giving your brain a chance to unwind and release between tasks and get some break. I think that would be ideal as well. All right. So this is my ideal word prescription. Twice an hour, you just get up and do something real quick. It barely changes what you're doing. A couple times a day, maybe three times a day during your work day, you actually leave and go outside. That shouldn't be so hard, but it is.

And the reason why that is so hard. And I hope, you know, Jeff, you'll excuse me digressing here. but I think the reason why that is so hard comes back to this 20% rule that I talked about in a New Yorker essay last month, which is that knowledge workers tend to do about 20% too much. Like the collective, the collection of all the different things on our plates,

the tasks we have to do, the committees we're on, the meetings that are coming up, the projects that we are a part of, usually adds up to be about 20% more than we have time to easily handle. In those situations, you are continually feeling the pangs of time famine

So to get up and even do two minutes worth of pushup suddenly feels like a problem because you're rushing to get something done. Certainly to get up and go for a 20-minute walk, you say, how can I possibly do that? I have 30 minutes between these two meetings, and I have to respond to these 10 emails. So I think the fact that it is so hard for most people to do this common sense advice about,

yeah, if you're going to be at your screen all day, let's keep that day reasonably and physiologically aware, and in a sense of physiologically awareness, active. The fact of that so hard belies a bigger problem, which is that we do 20% too much. My argument from that piece

and my argument right here is that if you could wave a wand and change your schedule so that you had about 10% less than you had time to easily handle, doing the push-ups every 30 minutes, doing the walk every couple of hours, would be no problem

because you'd have give and breathing room in your schedule. Would it really change much, how much value you were producing for your company or for your clients? I don't think so. I don't think the epsilon between having a little bit too much to do and a little bit not enough to do. The epsilon in terms of what you produce, I do not think is that big. And yet the impact on your affect is really large. So I'm basically taking a simple question. Is it bad

to sit too long in front of a computer screen? And I'm trying to get from this to a much larger polemical point, which is the shift between having too much to do and not quite enough to do or an amount that's easily handable is a shift that could make a massive difference, not just for moving, but in all aspects of stress and effectiveness and quality of thought and recharging and creativity and everything. Just human happiness.

And yet we find that gulf to be really difficult to make and we should really think about why. Read that article if you want some theories about why I think we end up doing 20% too much. I go back and deconstruct Parkinson's Law. Interesting article. But I just wanted to make that point that type of activity should not be hard and it is we should worry about it.

All right, we got a quick one here from Safat who says, How do I keep reminding myself about my goals when I'm in a potential danger zone for distraction? Well, Safat, that is only an issue if you are running your day on the list reactive method. We're essentially just ask the question, what should I do next, allowing inputs like Slack, chats or emails helping to drive that decision. If that's the mode you're in, just reacting and stuff incoming and constantly asking what should I work on next, then yeah, you were likely to see your work veer farther and farther from your goals. You are likely to see the footprint of distraction get larger. The solution is to stop using the list reactive method and go to something like my multi-scale planning.

On the scale of an individual day, I would suggest time block planning. You go to timeblockplanter.com to see the video I recorded about how this works in more detail. But when your time block planning, the only thing you have to remember to commit to is I'm going to follow my time block schedule. And that's telling you what you should be doing at any given moments. You don't have to have this conversation of, oh, maybe I should go do something distracting. You commit to the schedule. You make reasonable schedules. You put breaks into that schedule.

You put time to do distraction to that schedule and you follow the schedule. Now you don't have to worry about constantly debating with yourself is now a good time for distraction. what about now, what about now? Then when you hook that up to the two larger granularity scales, weekly and quarterly planning, what you end up doing is then guiding these time block plans on trajectories informed by your goals. And so all you're doing each day is saying I'm trying to follow my plan,

but these plans are informed by your weekly plans, your weekly plans are informed by your quarterly plans, or those quarterly plans involve some serious thinking about what you're trying to do with your life. It all connects together. So, Safat, don't try to just wing this. Don't try to just be inspired in the moment and say, what can I do that's good for my goals? You're not going to get that far that way. You need more structure, multi-scale planning.

I think that was what you need to get there. Now, here's another good quick technical question. Sally asks, what do you think about monthly planning? Is it as relevant or necessary as to quarterly or weekly planning that you talk about on your podcast? Well, Sally, I think it's fine if you want to use monthly planning. I think it's redundant. A weekly plan is a good time to look at the week ahead of you and see how to move the chest pieces around on the scale of days to figure out how to get the most out of that week. Quarterly planning, I think, is a good scale to think about, okay, where am I on my bigger picture visions for my life and my career and what can I do this quarter to make progress?

The monthly scale, I've tried it before. I just think it falls into a gray zone between those two extremes that's not as useful. You know, it's too short of a interval for you to be revisiting, I think, your bigger picture goals and connecting your life to your vision. It's too short of an interval for that, but it's too rough of an interval to inform, let's say, each day what you should be doing, the nitty gritty of how you want to unfold your time. The week is a better interval for that. So I just find it redundant. I'm not going to be mad at you if you want to do monthly planning. All I would say is just don't give up the granulages that we know work quarterly, daily, weekly.

If you want to throw in a monthly in there to revisit your quarterly, that's probably what I would do if I did monthly planning. I would revisit and tune up the quarterly. Not start from scratch, but say, do we get a little bit off? Do I need to tweak this? Has something come onto our radar? Like that wouldn't be a bad discipline. And every month, you know, tweak that quarterly plan a little bit. That's fine.

But if you don't do monthly planning, I think you'll also be fine. Now, here's an interesting question. It comes from Diego. Diego says, help. I've accidentally become the amateur Jack Dorsey. I am seeking advice for an individual running multiple companies. So he gives a pretty long elaboration. He's young.

Diego is young. his primary company is a record label, independent record label, and it takes up a lot of time. During the pandemic, he found himself stumbling backwards into a tabletop gaming design company with a friend. He says, I have begun publishing my own games and have even started to earn a very small bit of money through it. A friend and I are in the process of setting up a formal company to publish more games in the future. He's worried about the time demands. and wants to know what he should do. Well, Diego, I guess there's two scales at which to answer this question.

There's the big picture scale about what you should do about this working life setup. And there's the small picture scale of given this setup. How do you organize yourself? Let's start with the small scale question. You know, I would treat these as two separate roles. Have a separate task board, for example, for each of these roles. In your strategic plan, you're going to want a separate vision. Let me actually unify my terminology.

Your quarterly plan, sorry, I'm trying to be better about that. In your quarterly plan, you're going to want to have a separate vision for both of these roles, so for the record label and for the tabletop gaming company. So you're clear about both. If you want to have two separate documents, I think that is fine. And so when you're building your quarterly plans, you have one for one company. You have another for the other company, each quarterly plan serving that. particular vision.

And then, so now you're keeping your tasks separated in the different task boards. When you do your weekly planning, you're looking at both quarterly plans, you're looking at both task boards, and you're trying to balance the two to the extent that is reasonable. Some periods will be way more busy for one company than another, and you just do that balance as needed. This is where having your quarterly plans for each is useful. So you see where you're trying to get at the end of the quarter, so even if one week is a little bit quiet on the gaming company, you have your reasonable goal that you might

catch up on another week. I mean, strategically, that's what you need to do. If it's too much work, though, if it's a source of stress, I would get out of one. So that's my bigger picture advice. Be very wary about running two companies. I would say in this situation, the tabletop gaming situation, you have huge autonomy over that. You're doing it for fun. It's not making you much money.

Configure it in a way that's going to have a minimal footprint on your schedule, maybe move that over into high quality. leisure territory, sort of out of your work territory. I would really suggest be careful about preventing that from moving into a big source of your logistical attention, generating issues that you have to respond to, headaches, large time requirements. That's when it's going to cause a lot of stress as it steps on the schedule for your other company. The context switching between the two would also be a pain.

So that's what I would do, honestly, at the big picture, is keep the game thing a hobby or invest in your friend to start a company that you are informally advising and can help when you can but don't have a huge day-to-day role. That's fine too, but keep that footprint smaller to be my advice. The one exception would be if you were trying to initiate a transition from your record label job to a gaming company job and you are implementing the strategy I talk about in so good they can't ignore you about letting money be a neutral indicator of value.

So you're going to say, I'm going to grow this game company on the side until it's generating more than enough money to live off of, and then that's when I will shut down my record label and switch over to it. All right, if you're doing that strategy, then yes, you do have to have both going on at the same time. You do have to be giving both a lot of attention. You are going to have to work harder than you normally do and have more stressed than normal.

The small picture things I suggested about multiple task boards or quarterly plans will help. But there, it's short term. I'm doing this to see if I can get the money from this company up to a place where I can take it over, and so there's a pain but it's a short-term pain, that's okay. But I would avoid a steady state if all possible, where they're just both taking up a lot of time,

and it looks like this is just going to be the state affairs and the perpetuity. I would rather have more free time to use autonomously and with less restrictions than have two different interesting things going on, but both making big demands on me. This podcast is sponsored by Blinkist. As you've heard me say before, ideas are power and the best source of good ideas are books. The problem, of course, is figuring out which books are worth your time.

This is where the Blinkist app comes in. Blinkist takes top nonfiction books, pulls out the key takeaways, and puts them into text and audio explainers called Blinks that you can consume in just 15 minutes. The way I like to use Blinkist is that when there's a top. topic I want to know more about, I will come in and consume the blinks of several books in that area, get the lay of the land and figure out which of these books, if any, is worth diving deeper into, and only then do I buy the book to actually read. Now, let's say, for example, you read Yuval Harare's Sapiens, and you're wondering, what's Homo Deos about?

What about his 21 lessons for the 21st century? Well, you could just go on the blinkist and listen to the blinks for both of those books and figure out right there, is this going somewhere I want to read? Or maybe you're interested in the blockchain. Well, I'm looking right now at the Blinkist website, and Blockchain Revolution is one of their more popular blinks. 15 minutes, get the basics, figure out if you want to spend more time with that book. Now, right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience.

Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off in a seven-day free trial. Blinkist.com slash deep. This podcast is sponsored by FourSigmatic, a wellness company that is well-known for its delicious mushroom coffee. Four-Sigmatic's mushroom coffee is real organic, fair trade,

single-origin, Arabica coffee with, lion's main mushroom for productivity and shaga mushroom for immune support. I like to drink this mushroom coffee right before each of my deep work sessions. The mushrooms give it a unique physiological footprint. So my brain begins to learn over time. That feeling means deep work. That feeling means deep work. And I can shift into that deep work mode faster.

Now, I know what you're probably thinking. Does this coffee taste like mushrooms? I can guarantee you. It does not. It will taste just like the coffee you love. It brews dark and nutty and taste incredible. And of course, with over 20,000 five-star reviews and a 100% money-back guarantee.

If you don't love every sip, you can get your money back. Now, we've worked out an exclusive offer with 4Sigmatic on their best-selling mushroom coffee, but this is just for deep questions listeners. You can get a. to 40% off plus free shipping on mushroom coffee bundles, but to claim this deal, you must go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. This offers only for deep questions, listeners, and is not available on their regular website. So you'll save up the 40% and get free shipping if you go right now to

F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-I-C dot com slash deep to fuel your productivity and creativity with some delicious mushroom coffee. Our next question comes from Shri, who says, Hi, Cal, I'm a big fan from India. I am an RF engineer, and I have also recently started a YouTube channel on productivity. I am finding it hard to build audience for it, though, without engaging with the social media black hole. Any advice on this can be very helpful for me.

Thanks in advance. Well, Shri, I'm not an expert on YouTube. but I tend to think about success on YouTube, in particular when it comes to pragmatic information delivery, nonfiction information delivery. So let's put aside other types of very popular things on YouTube. I think the rules that apply for succeeding as a nonfiction writer apply pretty well to doing nonfiction YouTubeing.

So traditionally my advice for this is if you want a nonfiction book to be sold, like a publisher to get interested and sell it so you have a chance of it doing well, you have to have an idea that is compelling. So something that people are going to say, wow, I have to read a book that's about this, or it's a unique point of view about something that's going to touch some sort of aspirational button deep down inside of people. And then two, you have to be the right person to write about it. It has to kind of make sense why this person is talking about that topic. So if you are extolling this idea of moving to a teeny house, for example,

and living this simpler lifestyle, it makes sense if you're someone who has done this. It's like, oh, this person has done this, and they're interesting, and their life looks so peaceful, and I want to see their advice about why living much more simply is going to be in smaller houses is going to be more meaningful,

and it costs less money, and then you can work less, and great, I want to read that, right? I think the same type of rules apply for YouTube. You have a message that people are going to say find really compelling or aspiration or they must read on you, the right person to talk about it.

So when you're thinking about starting a YouTube channel around productivity. If you want that to be a successful YouTube channel, you have to ask, do you have a unique point of view here, unique idea on productivity that people are going to find compelling? People are going to find aspirational? And is there something about you or your situation that makes you particularly well-suited to be writing about it?

Have you mastered this technique? And therefore your life is really interesting or aspirational, a demonstrable fashion. Is there the particular type of work you do? Are you someone who's holding down three executive jobs? and now you're going to talk about certain types of high-performance, productivity, habits that allows that to be possible. This is the ingredients for building a following. It's the ingredients for building a tribe.

If you don't have those things, going on social media doesn't matter much. And this is one of the big lies that the social media companies have implicitly implanted into our cultural understanding of content and community is this notion that vaguely speaking, being on social media talking about things will spread the word of those things and then people will come to you and that's how you build audiences and it's how you sell books and it's how you make your comedy shows sell out and it's how you get your foot into door in Hollywood or whatever it is. But that's rarely the case. I mean, ultimately it's producing the right thing, being the right person to produce it. There's a million ways audiences then grow and maybe through social media people talk about your thing using social media.

You know, my book is talked about, my books are talked a lot of about on social media even though I don't use it. But this idea that you being on social media is the key for you breaking out or not, I just don't think is true. So if you want your productivity YouTube channel to succeed, you have to ask and answer those two questions. And, you know, I checked it out and I like your content. But I don't know looking at your videos, what is Shri's unique point of view? What is his take here that is interesting or aspirational or presses a button or makes me feel like I need to know how to do that? That's a great goal.

I'm very excited about that. and what is it about you that makes you the right person to talk about it? And I don't think answers to either those questions are clear yet. So solving those questions is what I would do. And I think you absolutely can, by the way, use yourself as an experimentation, do something, build something interesting in your own life. Use productivity ideas, develop them or evolve them to an interesting way that makes your life interesting in a demonstrable way. You know what you want to say, be the right person to say it, and then come say it with confidence. and I think people will find it, whether or not you're tweeting about it a lot or launching a lot of TikTok videos about it or not.

All right, we have a question here from Patrick. Patrick says, what principles would you suggest focusing on in training new hires and coaching existing support staff at my law firm? Well, Patrick, there's a lot of different things, of course, that are relevant when training. I'll just focus on one that happens to fall within my sphere of interest, which is systems. I think it's really important when someone comes in there new to a job or they're in a support role in a job or it's a lawyer role or whatever the role is. To be clear, what is work at this office? What is your work? There's these type of demands that are going to come in.

They're going to come in from these places. As they enter your world, like how do you triage them? How do you capture them? how do you organize them? How do you take the hours available in your day and figure out what to do with those hours? How do you plan out your weeks and months? How do you actually execute the task of being a professional in this job? One of the big arguments I've made in my writing, I've made this argument a few times in recent New Yorker pieces.

I make this argument in a world without email is that the degree to which in knowledge work, we just leave this up to the individual. You say, we're going to give you good objectives. We're going to give you inspiring mission statements. everything else is up to you. I'm not going to tell you how to do your job. When we air too much on the side of personal autonomy when it comes to work organizations, people get swamped, people get lost, people get drowned.

Because it turns out it's really, really hard, actually, to figure out how to best filter and organize and tackle these complex shifting unrestricted incoming workflow. So that's actually what I would focus on in training. And I might even go through some basic version even of the type of multi-scale productivity systems I talk about. You know, you time blocking your day. Do you have a weekly plan for the week? Is there a quarterly plan in which you're looking at your whole quarter? Is there a place where external systems where stuff is stored and made sense of so it's not just in your head?

I would think through a lot about my company's culture of triage. To what degree do you have freedom to say no to things? When should you say no? When should you defer? How much work is a reasonable amount of work for you? to be doing and how do you measure that and what's the acceptable thing to do when that work becomes too much? I would think about communication protocols.

Here's all the different things we regularly talk about in this office. Let's think through ways to do that. That doesn't require as much of a dependence on a hyperactive hive mind-style workflow where it's constant unscheduled messages inducing context shifts and make it hard for the support staff to actually execute things, make it hard for the lawyers to actually think with critical, deep legal thinking. So that's what I would do. If I ran a company, that would be a big part of it.

How do we organize, make sense of, and optimally execute our work? That is the core of what knowledge work is, and yet we just think if we just leave this up to the new 23-year-old support staff hire and the new 29-year-old fresh out of law school legal hire and just say figure it out that I'm sure they'll be fine. But they're not. And the people who end up getting ahead are either those who through circumstances or Constitution can just take the stress and out work everyone. or you'll allow weasels like me who, for whatever reason, think a lot about productivity system to get a lot more done with our time

and get disproportionate advantages over our smarter peers who are maybe more overwhelmed. This is not what we want. So Patrick, teach them how to actually do the mechanics of work in a thoughtful way. Let's do one more work question.

This one's from McCool, who says, A few weeks ago, I joined a startup as an intern. I collaborate with the designers and the management team. We have a morning meeting every day and after that we all start working. There are some days when I need a response from the designer of the management team to move forward in my work, but most of the time the response is delayed. This leaves me with empty blocks of time.

Well, McCool, I'm going to say if this is happening regularly, you probably need to get more structured about the work you were doing. So, I mean, I think what's happening here is you just kind of start working on things. You get a few hours into the day and say, oh, I need more stuff. And it would be just convenient if the people I need that stuff from could just give it to me and I'll work until I get stuck again and then ask them for more stuff, have a question, whatever, and get that information and keep moving. The alternative is to get more structured about your work. You're really thinking through this is the thing I'm going to work on this week for the next two weeks. So here's one of the projects I'm working on.

And I really want to think through what's needed to do that project. And maybe it really kicks off with a meeting with the people I need. I can get a lot of answers from them. And it's pretty clear, like, what I'm working on for the next few days and where the choke points might be. And here's when I'm going to check in. And then when you get to those daily status meetings, you kind of know what you should be asking for

because you see the whole bigger picture of what you're working on. In other words, what I'm trying to get to here is that if you find yourself too often needing unscheduled ad hoc information injections to keep making progress, I think your progress is to ad hoc itself. I know it's harder and intern. Some of this might just be you don't know what you're doing yet. It's unclear what the dimensions of this project are. You are going to have some downtime.

That's okay. But where you should be moving is towards structure, projects that give you enough structure that once you get what you need, that daily status meeting is enough to keep these projects going. Even if one gets stuck, you have another one to go on. I think that is the goal you should be aiming for. All right, that's enough about deep work. Let's do some questions about the deep life.

I'm going to start here with a quick logistical question about the podcast. It came from Luca. Luca asked if I could give feedback to people who submit their questions. He said without feedback after you submit your question to the podcast using one of my surveys, that it can feel like you're just sending your message out into the ether to a bot. This is what Luca is talking about. And for those who don't know, the way I get the question, for these podcast episodes is every few months, I send a link to a survey to my newsletter

subscribers. Because these are people I know who know my stuff and my thoughts and my philosophy as well, so they're going to ask targeted questions. So if you want to participate, get to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com, and then a few times a year, you will get a link that gives you a chance to submit questions. So, Luca, I understand what you're saying, that it probably does feel like I empathize with this, that you submit a question to the show and you don't know. Is it going to get answered?

Did I get it, et cetera? The reason why I can't respond to each of these is simply just because I get too many. I have to go through a lot of questions to get the questions that make it onto the show. I was just looking at my account here for the first year of the show for 2020, for example, I think, and the show was only around for some of 2020. I had close to 2,000 questions submitted that I worked through. We are at close to 1,000 questions now in 2021 so far that have been submitted. So I do read them all because I go sequentially when trying to take out the questions I use for the show,

but it just would be infeasible for me to actually directly respond to them. So I appreciate you asking, and I just want you to know that I empathize with what you're saying there and wish I could help more. All right, we have a question here from Lorenzo, who asks, do you think it is correct to identify the core of your thinking as deep intentionalism? Lorenzo elaborates that he is an adolescent psychiatrist in northern Italy. Just as an aside, Lorenzo, when I first read this, I thought you meant that you were an adolescent aged psychiatrist like Dukie Hauser. And I was thinking an Italian Duky Hauser psychiatrist would be a great premise for a Netflix series. So for all you TV showrunners out there, keep that in mind.

All right, back to Lorenzo's elaboration. He says, your books and podcasts are full of insights to help my patients develop a deep life. Reflecting on how to convey what I have learned from listening to you, it seems to me that the direction you're thinking is summarized by the concept of intentional using a Greek metaphor. In following the practice of deep work and digital minimalism, we are like Ulysses, who decides to be tied to the ship's mass, to listen without harm to the call of sirens that lure us into the sea of distraction. It's a good, it's a good point, Lorenzo. I think intentionality is your correct to point out that that is a mainstay of my various

philosophies. So if we're talking about deep work in particular, being very careful about what it is you're working on is a big part of it. we're talking about the deep life more generally. There's a real intention. What matters to you? What do you spend your time on? Are you intentionally investing your energy in things that matter?

Of course, a subset of that is digital minimalism, which again is also all about intention. Figure out what you want to do in your life and put tech to use on behalf of those means, as opposed to using tech as a default or distraction. So intentionality goes throughout most of the philosophies I talk about. So I think that's a fair point. I don't think I would introduce the phrase deep intentionalism, however, because I think there's redundancy there. So to me, I basically used the word deep to capture both intentionality and focus in the sense of sustained attention on one thing of value. So because intentionality is implicit in my particular use of the phrase deep, I think deep intentionalism, as you suggest, might be redundant,

just like if I hear people talk about deep focus, that's redundant, right? Deep focused work or something. Well, the deep captures the focus part, at least in my definition. So I like you pointing out the intentionalism. I like you giving a Greek reference, but I don't think I'm going to introduce the term deep intentionalism anytime soon. Sikashi asks, which phone and how many apps do you use? Well, I use an iPhone. I don't know what type of iPhone.

The small one is usually how I describe it, because I think the big ones don't fit well in my pocket. What apps do I use? Look, I'm loading it up right now as I talk to you. So I use the text messaging to talk to my wife and family. I use Audible for listening to audiobooks. I use Spotify to listen to podcast. I have a bus app on here.

I use when I take my older two boys to the bus stop in the morning, there's an app their school uses with a GPS locator on their bus. So you can kind of see where it is on the route. We've really mastered what is the exact time to leave our house to hit the bus stop with a five-minute buffer to spare. So that app gets used every day when I walk my boys to school. What else is on here? I'm just scrolling through here. Oh, the MLB app is the other big one.

So the MLB app allows me to listen to the audio of Washington National Games or just check in on the evolving box score if I'm away from a radio or TV and a game is going on. Those are the apps I use. I go long periods of the day without my phone handy and it seems to work just fine for me. We have an interesting one here from Pedro who says, do I have any ideas for a keystone habit in the creativity bucket? So, of course, he's talking about the buckets that make up the areas of the deep life. And my advice that you define these buckets. And then for each you have a keystone habit you do most days, the signal that you take that area of your life seriously. And then you do other things.

You overhaul each of those buckets one at a time. And then over time, you maybe take one of those buckets and do something radical within its focus, etc. There's this whole trajectory here of building out a deep life. But the starting point in my advice is often to have in the areas that are around, important some habit you return to and track. Pedro is asking, let's say one of those buckets is creativity, that creativity is important to you. What's a daily habit that is going to help creativity?

He says in his elaboration, I struggle to make it a consistent part of my life. Do you have any advice on designing a keystone habit to promote to create a practice? For example, I am interested in drawing. And while I often do exercises to improve my skills, I rarely draw with the aim of producing original work. All right, well, my thoughts on creativity differs a little bit from the standard advice.

I would say the standard advice is about you've got to just create. And I think that's fine as a mindfulness exercise or as an exercise of expression. You know, I'm going to get my notebook and just draw. I'm going to write two pages of poetry every day, just get

in the habit of creating. That's fine. But let's be honest, those exercises are not actually about fostering a serious creative ability. It's more about blowing off steam or getting in touch with yourself or having a moment of induced mindfulness because you get lost in what you're trying to do. But just sitting down and saying, I'm going to draw one picture every day or I'm going to write five pages of journaling every day is actually not, I think, a commitment to improving your creative skills. So what type of keystone habits actually improve your ability to produce

creative output at a higher and higher level, I actually think more of the focus in that should be aimed at developing taste. This was a famous quote from Ira Glass that I recreated in my 2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, where Glass talks about what's important in, I'm paraphrasing, and creative production is increasing your taste or understanding of what's good and why it's good, getting that nuance, getting that exposure and refined understanding of your field. And it's the development of that taste that actually drives the quality of your own creative output. It gives you more ideas of what to try.

It gives you more ideas about where your work actually falls. It allows you to stretch your work and actually get better. So I would worry before I worried about producing. I would worry on refining that taste. So if you're interested in writing, I would figure out what are the habits I'm going through to become a better appreciator of literature. And maybe I have a curriculum, right, of I'm going to go through this course on literature appreciation that I'm going to take those books and read them one by one, one chapter a day.

That's my keystone habit. But I'm reading these books against the backdrop of this online course I took or this secondary source that really broke down what made this Melville classic so good. And then I'm going through the book piece by piece. I'm trying to improve my taste. If you're interested in films, you could do like the crazy thing I'm doing now. I'm going to read a little bit every day of a textbook until I finish this whole textbook. And then I'm going to apply it to watching Citizen Kane.

And really, see, can I understand that instead of just saying, well, it's at the top of the AFI list, I guess it's good, really kind of understand what's going on. And then after I watch Citizen Kane, I can go back and rewatch Mank. And instead of it being a bafflement to me what David Fincher was doing and why this was nominated for an Oscar, I can say, oh, man, I get it. Deep Focus style cinematography is, like, very difficult to work with. and I see what's going on here. That's what I would talk about with creativity. Building your taste by building your refinement of understanding of the field in which you want to be creative. That might be where my keystone habits would be aimed right now if I was you, Pedro.

As that taste increases, now you can actually start later doing some production projects. I'm going to write this, draw, this, film this, et cetera. Write reviews of this. In a way that you're actually pushing yourself, you know what you're doing. You know where you want to get that tension between where you'd like to be, but you're not now, it drives you to get better. Taste is going to be that propulsive force

that I think is going to drive creativity forward. All right, let's do one final question here. This one comes from Jake. Jake asks, as a college student, how should I approach digital minimalism?

Well, of course, the foundation to my answer, Jake, is to read the book, digital minimalism, get into the weeds on the details there. There's a lot of ideas and principles. Study them like you would study a textbook. There's a lot of college student examples in that book.

But I'm going to step back and give you a more focused piece of advice here. It's congruent with all the advice in that book, but let me just give you one focused piece of advice. Two and a half hours every day I want you to spend without your phone. Without it in the same room. No ability to look at it. no ability to answer a text message, no ability to look at social media posts in a moment of boredom,

you're away from it for two and a half hours a day. It doesn't have to be consecutive. There could be a half hour here, an hour here, an hour there. What you want to do at that time is up to you. Some of it could be outside. It could be walking or exercising, sure, but it could also be reading, right? My infamous, the longtime blog readers, Heidegger with Heffawizen Post,

you could be at a pub and you're having a drink and reading a book and your phone is not with you. It could be you go to see a movie. You know, you're on a college campus. They're going to screen interesting movies or go to interesting talks. But literally don't have the phone with you. That's the key. It's not just you're not looking at it. You don't have it with you.

You do that two and a half hours every day, most days. Just as a foundational first step, this is going to make a huge different pretty quickly to your mindset, your ability to be alone with your own thoughts, to appreciate the world, to break that addictive pull that I have to be looking at. at this all the time to destabilize that Pavlovian connection that says boredom means digital distraction. Bortem means digital distraction. You were going to see benefits of this to spill out into all parts of your life. You're going to notice a background hum of anxiety start to dissipate or reduce.

I'm telling you, if you want to do just one thing to convince yourself that this minimalism thing might be useful to you in your life as a college student, two and a half hours a day. Now, I know the complaint. Well, what if people need to get in touch with me that two and a half hours could ruin my social life. Like, who knows? What if that's when they announced the party? To which I'm going to call shenanigans. As someone who spent some time in college as a college athlete, you know, I was on the crew team at Dartmouth and we had a lot of practices. And to be at practice for two hours a day, two and a half hours a day would not be that unusual. We're fine. Probably have friends on the

lacrosse team or the football team or the track team. They're not on their phones when they're on practice. They're okay. They seem to be having a good time. They still seem to have friends, right? There's people who have jobs, campus jobs, where their job does not allow them to be on the phone. They're a tour guide for the campus. They can't be checking their phone with their tour guide. So you'll be fine. It's not, nothing bad is going to happen in the aggregate. If you spend two and a half hours a day without your phone. But the good it will induce, I think, is really potentially quite positive. So this is a new idea of mine that I've just started promulgating to my students at Georgetown. If you're not sure about this Cal Newport stuff, if you're not sure about digital. minimalism, if you're not sure about these first baby steps away from frenetic reactive shallowness towards depth and all of the satisfactions that can offer, start with this. Can you hit two and a half hours total each day with your phone not in the same room? Jake, if you try that, let me know how it goes, but I think you are going to find it to be positive.

And with that, I'm positive that I need to wrap up this episode. Thank you for all the great questions. Keep them coming. Sign up to my newsletter at caldnewport.com to gain the ability to submit your own questions. I'll be back on Thursday with a Listercall mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.