Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 142: LISTENER CALLS: Making Hard Work Routine

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP DIVE: On Facebook, Misinformation, and the Death of Collaborative Curation [2:59]LISTENER CALLS: - My thoughts on speed reading. [21:29] - My system for writing New Yorker articles (routinizing demanding work). [24:43] - The importance of media for academic careers. [34:07] - Re-assessing linked note-taking. [40:02] - The absurdity of live study streams. [44:12] - Time blocking without a time-block planner. [51:21]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.

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So go to magic spoon.com slash cow to grab a custom bundle of cereal to try today. Be sure to use that promo code Cal at checkout to save $5 off your order. Magic Spoon is so confident in the product that is backed with a 100% happiness guarantee. If you don't like it for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. So get your next delicious bowl of guilt-free cereal at magic spoon.com slash cow and use that code cow to save $5 off. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 142. So we're going to answer some listener calls today.

Those of you who listened to Monday's episode know that it took us 30 minutes to get through the first question between the deep dive and a really long answer to the first question. to the first question. It took us a long time to get rolling. Not today. We're going to get through these listener calls one after another. We're going to dispense some deep wisdom. I do, however, want to start once again with a brief deep dive. So this morning, which is Sunday, October 24th, that's what I'm recording this.

Because apparently, I'm the dad from the Christmas story. I was reading my paper version of the Washington Post in my living room with my morning cup of coffee and saw that the above the full front page headline was about Facebook. I have it with me right here. The headline reads, inside Facebook, January 6th fueled a torrent of anger and regret. The subhead of the particular article that caught my attention reads, On Violent Day, angst over missed signs. internal documents lay bare platforms enabling role. All right, so here's the spoiler alert about this article.

If you are expecting for there to be some sort of big revelation that this thing could have helped, but it got turned off for nefarious reasons, you will be disappointed. This seems like an article that an editor put up on the bulletin board, we need to write an article about this, and then they work backwards to try to fill it in because if you read the article, there's no particular precise claim or accusation. It's just a lot about all of these different things Facebook was trying to do to keep on top of information and misinformation and calls to violence surrounding the election and whether there could have been even more things they could do or why did they turn this one off but not this one. And the whole thing is a confusing mess. It's the confusing mess that I took away from this.

when you have 2.9 billion monthly active users, the idea that in any sort of effective way that you can curate this content seems fantastical. I mean, of course it didn't work. They had 70 different workforces and task forces and internal memos and they were doing this and not that and should we do this and what about that. And it's impossible, right? How are you possibly going to look at such a wide variety of content produced from

such a wide variety of people and try to figure out in some sort of way that's going to work, that's going to actually get the job done, what should be posted and whatnot. And they talk about in this article that they say, well, we try to turn off these groups, but then other groups emerged with basically the same name. And then we try to shut those down and exponentially more emerged. And how do we figure out what is this really about this topic or not? It's an impossible thing. Curation at scale is perhaps an unsolvable challenge.

What I wanted to bring up here in this deep dive is the techno-determinist claim that a lot of these issues were the unintentional consequences of tool innovations that at the time seemed completely reasonable and rational. Let's go back in time to 2004 to 2006. This is the three-year period between when Facebook was first introduced on a small number of Ivy League campuses. to 2006 when they opened up to anyone with an email address, this was the period in which Facebook emerged. It trounced my space, and it became clear that this was going to be a cultural force. By 2008, they had 100 billion active users,

and they were off to the races. If you go back to that period, if you try to put your mindset back into that period, there is two critical choices that Facebook made that helped them, help them succeed. One is they said, we are going to make your personally produced content look better. Late 1990s, early 2000s, if you as an individual wanted to post content on the internet,

you didn't have that many options. You could hand-code your own HTML website. I did this in the 90s as a nerdy teenager. It was called Cow's World. Very proud of it. It had a meaty player that automatically played songs when you came to the website. It had frames. Can't have a good website in the 1990s without frames and a, I would say, pathological number of animated gifts.

I really loved that technology back then. But anyways, back then, that's what you had to do. You could hand code it. Or eventually services like GeoCities, here's a blast from the past, or Angel Fire came along so that you could build a website without having to code it from scratch. But these things, they didn't look great. They looked very homemade. MySpace came along and made the same. that even easier, but MySpace was very individualized.

You really would make your MySpace page look like what you wanted to look like, and it was a whole mess of individual expression. It was really cool, but it was not good looking. Facebook came along and said, look, the big million-dollar websites emerging in the wake of the dot-com bust that happened in 2001 have this really slick Web 2.0 aesthetic, lots of white space, professional graphic design. deployments of color palettes. The whole thing looks great.

We're going to build our website along these really good-looking professional design standards. And so when you post on your Facebook wall, it's going to look really great. It's going to look like you would see at Apple.com. Now, of course, they had to give up a lot of the expressiveness and individuality of web content construction that existed before. If you want to see more about this read Jaron Lanier's important treatise, you are not a gadget, which was written around this time. And he really gets into how Facebook in particular cut down on a lot of options for expression and identification so that they could look nice.

So it would look nice. But this was a good play by Facebook because people said, I like the look at this. This is where I want to be. I love the fact that the things I'm posting looks great. It looks professional. This is professional Web 2.0, Apple aesthetic. The other big decision they made at the time is we will help you discover what you want to look on the internet. Like, this is a hard problem pre-Facebook. You know, I mean, you would hear about a website and then you would start visiting that website. Maybe you would bookmark that website.

They might start mentioning a website enough that you say, I trust this guy enough that he's referencing this website enough. I'll go check it out. Ooh, I like that one. Maybe I'll bookmark that. We had things like delicious. Remember delicious? the bookmark social bookmark aggregator. You know, so you could publicly list all of the different websites you bookmarked categorized under different sections.

You would go over to someone's delicious page and say, oh, let's see what they bookmarked. My friend, Rameet Sethi, had a great delicious page. I remember this back in like 2005 or something. You could find such good content. We had, remember blog rings, right? So your blog would be part of a ring for a different type of, for a top. and you would say, show me the next blog in this ring and you click a button and it would jump to a next blog and that's how you would discover it, right?

So it was kind of complicated to find interesting information on the Internet. So social media, in particular, Facebook, said, we will help that problem too. So we'll have everyone on our platform. As they shifted towards a news feed model, they said, what we'll do is we will surface stuff for you. We'll study you. We can break you down on a bunch of data points, put you into a statistical model, say you like this. You'll probably like that.

and we'll find this stuff for you. Your content's going to look great, and we'll find this stuff for you to read. And all you have to do now is open the app, and they'll just be interesting stuff there, and it'll all look great. So you'll look great, and we'll just find information for you,

so you can just start swiping and tapping. We'll press those buttons in your brain. Everyone will be happy. These are very rational decisions if you were running a Web 2.0 content company in the first decade of the 2000s, and it worked, and Facebook got very popular. However, again, let's put on our techno-determinist hats here.

There are unintentional consequences of technological developments, especially when they are done haphazardly and at scale. What happened is when we made those two decisions is that we broke, we broke a mechanism that was running in the first 15 years of the publicly available internet that people didn't realize existed and is what I call collaborative curation. You see, when you have to build your web presence more or less from scratch and you have these entry-level tools that are a little bit ugly, but with some more money you can make it look better, with some more experience, your text looks better, and it's frustrating at first to get links to yourself, but over time you establish yourself and more people link to you, when those mechanisms are in place, what happens is that you create a system that has no centralized control, that has no task force, that has no board of truth or whatever, but you develop a really good system for people being able to accurately locate things they encounter on the internet into this complex cultural matrix of content production.

When you come across Cal's World in 1997, you immediately can place what type of person is this, how serious is this, this is probably a kid, this is kind of fun, you can categorize that and know that this is very different. This is very different than CNN.com. the way it looks, the URL. Kalsworld was like something dot something, something, something.com slash tilda, Newport slash Kalsworld slash index. You look at that, you're like, I know exactly what this is. And when you have to find content organically, you're actually surfing on a network of person-to-person established trust.

Okay, I am finally going to read this website because I've seen it mentioned enough. And by the way, I remember this really clearly in the 2000s when I was building up study hacks, my blog presence, which I started after my second book. And I remember the frustration. I very vividly remember the frustration in those first years where bigger websites would be linking to other blogs. And I was doing mainly student advice back then. So when LifeHacker would link to other student blogs, I would think you should be. linking to me. I'm better than that person.

I've written two books about this. I have smarter thoughts on it. I'm the expert. I remember being really frustrated about that. And then eventually they did link to me, but it was just a slow accretion of social capital that you had to build up, the gain trust in that world. And I went through some redesigns of the site and my archive build and more people linked to it. And then over time, it became something people linked to all the time. Now people more likely discover it.

It kind of worked pretty well. I was curated. No one did it. It was just sort of emergent. So these mechanisms do a pretty good job. a pretty good job. I mean, if you were using the Internet in 2005, you were not going to come across probably really random conspiracy theories. If you're using the Internet in 2005, you could pretty easily say this GeoCity site, you know, that's giving political commentary with flashing A-Ref link, you know, link format.

I'm going to take that differently than, you know, Ezra Klein's political blog that was taken off at that time and it really kicked off his career. I can just see that's different. This looks better. The writing's better. Some money's been put into it. Okay. All those mechanisms, these collaborative curation mechanisms go away when you say we will homogenize how information works. We'll homogenize how discovery happens.

We'll handle that just algorithmically for you. You break down that mechanism. And now I can't tell the difference between anything. A Cal's World Post, a Disturmer post next to a learned political commentator's post next to a reporter's post, next to whatever. It all just kind of looks the same and what I encounter is determined by an algorithm. And then we say, oh, my God, I guess what we have to do is have councils of people we trust just look at everything and curate it in a centralized fashion. And as is pointed out in this article, when you have 2.9 billion monthly active users, that's not going to work anymore. And then we're kind of screwed.

So, all right, this is the point I wanted to make is that there is a nice, among all the complexities of these issues, there's a nice mini-case study of techno-determinism. Homogenizing interface and content discovery had very rational motivations in the moment for building a service that was more. clean to use and more entertaining in the moment, but it unintentionally broke this mechanism and now we have this moment we're in now of the completely conspiratorial tribal culture. It turned out that this collaborative communication mechanism actually was really important. Just to use a counterfactual analogy here, if you went back to 1930 when everything came through newspapers and you're reading the Washington Post and you said, here's our new plan. basically everyone can submit articles to the Washington Post and we will have random people look at them and see which ones they seem to look at longer and then we'll typeface those and put those into the paper with good typefacing printed in this really nice paper next to the articles from the reporters next to the articles of the experts we'll just put it all into one big paper so right next to the report on you know trade relations with the Soviet unions could be a really nicely typeset article from the guy down the street who thinks the

Soviets are using his fillings, the spy and get missile secrets. And we'll just put it all in there next to each other. We'd say that's crazy. Like the paper would be completely non-useful or it's going to create a weird conspiratorial world where no one knows what's going on. And that's basically what we did digitally. We just did it by accident. Final rant I want to add is when it comes to solutions, you read this article in the Washington Post. You're very mad at Facebook.

You know, Facebook did things, but not the right things. they should do more things and what have you. Nowhere in the article does it say, here is the obvious solution. Stop using Facebook. Nowhere does that come up. And I've been talking about this again and again on the podcast, but I implored the degree to which,

especially the media-driven conversation on social media and its issues, steers away from the very natural solution that maybe our culture should shift in such a way that these massive platform monopolies don't play a major, your role in our daily lives. This is not a rejection of what technology can offer us. This is not a move backwards. I can present to you a compelling image of a digitally enhanced meaningful life that does not involve Facebook, does not involve Twitter, does not involve Instagram,

and God forbid does not involve TikTok. I mean, I can imagine a life in which, yes, we connect with people we know digitally, but not on Instagram. We're using text threads or the photo sharing features that are on our phones where you can create a stream of photos of your new kid that your family can subscribe to and see when you have new pictures. We can use instant messenger services. There's lots of digital ways that we can be more in touch with people we care about than we could 20 years ago that doesn't involve us also seeing Q&on Shaman in those same threads. Now what about entertainment or distraction? I mean, again, like I argued on Monday's episode, I can imagine a world where we have.

access to these streaming services and podcasts, for example, where you get really high quality and interesting and off the wall in creative content production. You can be challenged and entertained. You can laugh. You can cry. This fantastic world of incredibly diverting high quality content. I don't need to see people yelling at each other in 240 characters on my phone. I don't need that for entertainment.

What about expanding our community and the people we can connect to? That's great. What if we look towards much more beast. spoke and niche social networks, this long-tail social media idea that I've long been arguing, that I don't need to be on Instagram to be connected to an interesting group. Maybe there's much more niche technologies where people that are very in the bicycle repair, we talk and meet and argue at length about, I don't know, spoke, wrenches or whatever people in bike repair talk about.

I'm really into trail maintenance. And there's this group of people that we talk about trail maintenance. and hey, maybe, and look, I don't want to get too radical here. We join things in our actual community. We can see people and we know them. We're unlikely to yell at them, you know, and we actually go and do things in person. And in other words, what I'm trying to say here is that there's entirely coherent visions of meaningful lives that leverage digital technologies to amplify what's possible versus what was possible before

that doesn't involve the anxiety shake that occurs when you have to go change. check, how do people feel about that tweet I did yesterday? Are they going to pile on me? Are they going to applaud me? And both of the options makes me nervous. Like, we can, we don't need it. It's superfluous. It's become superfluous. So that really is the ultimate solution, but we don't hear it. Because, look, if you're in the media and you cover social media, I think it just is impossible for you to imagine a world in which social media doesn't exist. Your entire identity and sense of self-worth, if not your professional fortunes are tied to these technologies that you can't get past.

Let's just yell at the people doing this wrong. Let's make it more utopian. But obviously, we all have to be on our phones all the day. This is just one more example after another. The mechanism of distributed collaboration going away is just one of many examples of why I just don't think having giant platform monopolies where everyone in the world uses one of three or four privately on networks. It just doesn't make sense. All right. That is enough about me ranting about social media.

We can consider this to have been social media rant week. I kicked it off with my appearance on Charlemagne the God show a week ago Friday where we talked about. I was on there with Tristan Harris and we were lighting into social media. And then I did two episodes this week of my podcast where I've deep dived against it. That's enough. We have it out of our system. Let's get to some reader questions here and get away from this topic. Let's see here.

Uh-oh. Our first question is from M. Zuckerberg. And it just reads, why, Cal? why and a sad emoji I kid I kid Mark Zuckerberg would never send me a note I think he would just have me assassinated by robots

with plasma rifles all right let's do some real calls here hey Carl this is Chad from Cincinnati again I was curious if you had any thoughts on speed reading and if you had any tips on how to increase reading speed well I'm not a big believer in the the classical notion of speed reading, where through exercises you can somehow consume pages of text

just a few seconds at a time and have really good retention. There's this miracle dream that's held out there that if you can master these skills, you're going to get through books incredibly quickly and massively speed up the rate at which you intake information. I don't think that works. I don't think the brain can actually function that quickly. When it comes, however, to consuming nonfiction written material where what you're trying to do is extract understanding and ideas that you can then later deploy. So if you're an academic or you're a writer, you're just an interested citizen wanting to understand more about a certain aspect of the world, most pros deploy what I call variable speed reading. So what this is more about

is bringing your speed up and down depending upon what part of the content you're at. So that when you get to an argument that you think is really important to understand or a description of a technology or idea that's really important to understand, you slow down. Give myself time to really try to understand what's going on here. Let me mark it up pretty carefully. And then when you get to, let's say, okay, now here's like a tangent or a case study. Like, I don't really need the details here. I get it.

You speed up and sort of skim past it. And then, okay, yeah, I don't really care about that. Oh, this is big. Let me slow down and taking that information. professional thinkers typically read idea or informative nonfiction in this way. So slow, fast, slow, fast. They don't skip completely. Like, I don't need this chapter.

But if it's a chapter that's a little bit tangential to what they really care about this book, they'll go pretty quick. A couple topic sentences, maybe jump down a paragraph. So variable speed reading helps you get through that type of information. When it comes to fiction reading or non-informative nonfiction, so you know, you're reading a nonfiction book because it's interesting. It's a history or something like this. I'm reading a biography of George Washington or what have you. I don't know why you'd want to speed up. Art has gone into this to create a world in your brain that you can be put into a time and place into a cognitive space.

And it's supposed to be an enjoyable experience. Just like you wouldn't say, yeah, I rented this latest movie from a director I admire, but I'm going to watch it at 1.5 speed. So I can get through it quicker. It's like, well, why bother watching the movie? You're going to miss the experience. Don't be in a hurry when you're reading something just for the enjoyment of reading. And when you're reading something, get information out, yeah, don't speed read, variable read. This all takes practice, but again, reading a lot, having a goal for how much you want to read, pushing yourself to read, this is how you get that practice.

This is how you get the enjoyment you get out of reading, the pace of your reading. All that will get better if you actually are just doing a lot of this crucial exercise. All right. Good. It's only 22 minutes into the episode. We're doing better than Monday where it took 30 minutes to get through the first question. We're much faster today. Let's keep rolling with another call.

Hello there. I am currently working as a pastoral intern in a church. Most of my time is spent creating content for the church, in-depth studies. But most of all, the most amount of the time that I spend is writing a sermon. The sermon writing process is a very deep work sort of thing, as you've pointed out in some of your books. It can sometimes take 20 hours a week to write a sermon and memorize it. It's a very in-depth process, but the most in-depth process is probably the memorizing part. I memorize my sermon so that when I deliver it, I can look at people in the eyes. I don't need to be looking at notes.

I think it's a more effective way of delivering a message. It just so happens that when I deliver my, or when I go to memorize my sermon, it's usually towards the end of the day because I've just finished writing it. Now, I'm wondering, since I've spent so much time writing the sermon throughout the day, sometimes multiple hours. I'm wondering, and when it comes to memorizing my sermon, if my brain is tapped, maybe it's hit that four-hour maximum, or if I just don't want to do the work. I think in this case, you've probably hit your maximum. You're running out of cognitive steam, and yet you still have a cognitively demanding task left to execute. So what is this solution here?

let's cast this question more generally. I think this is a question more generally about cognitively demanding work that you have to execute on a regular basis. What's the right way to tackle this? And I think the answer is if you know that this is a very demanding time-consuming thing I have to do every week, is that you need to systematize that process. This is when and how I do that work every week. These days, these times, in this order. and it should be a process that explicitly keeps in mind the actual functioning of your mind.

So it breaks it up in a way that allows you to actually maximize the value of what you produce so that you're not, for example, doing what most people do, doing what it sounds like you're doing, which is, oh my God, I have to give a sermon tomorrow. Let me just work on this all day until I get it done. That's not going to be your highest quality result. You want a system that you do this day, that day, then this day you figured out a rhythm that lets you execute at a high level without having to just grind your way through exhaustion.

So in case this is useful, I thought what I would do is talk about my system this fall for writing New Yorker articles. So this fall I'm writing essentially a column for the New Yorker. It's twice a month every other week putting out a piece that's somewhere between 1,500 to 3,000 words. A New Yorker pieces are very hard to write. The information has to be there. The idea has to be sharp.

and then the craft around the writing is really difficult. I mean, you really got to craft that pretty well. And I have a lot else going on. I mean, I'm teaching. I'm working on the podcast. I'm working on academic papers. I'm working on a book proposal. So it was not going to work.

If my solution was, my God, I owe them an article. Let me drop everything and just spend all day trying to pull together and craft the New Yorker piece. That was not going to work. I mean, maybe occasionally would work, but it would be very exhausting and most of this stuff wouldn't be very good. So I, through experimentation, came up with a system that has a multiple steps. So I basically have one week for finishing the last article, like the copy aid and et cetera, and doing the research for the next. And then one week for writing that article. And I tend to start early in the week.

I call it a happy hour session just because of the timing of it. So it's sort of end of the workday afternoon type period where I really begin trying to pull together the threads for the article. Okay. What's the general argument going to be? Do I have all the right material? What's my thread here? At this point, I'll probably set up some sort of outline in Scrivener, which is what I use to write. Then I have one or two morning sessions.

I call these coffee sessions because I'm leveraging the full power of the first cup of coffee, which is my intellectual peak. Thursday morning or Friday mornings when I normally do this. Sometimes I'll break it up into two sessions Thursday and Friday morning, depending on what else I have those days. But that's where I really take a swing at writing the article and I get about halfway through. then there's a Sunday morning session. Sunday morning session is where I finish the article.

And then I come back at it fresh, either Monday or Tuesday morning, to tighten it. And then I submit. I usually submit on a Tuesday. So I just have it figured out. And it's automatic. And I blocked that time on my calendar, you know, every other week. I know it's there. And what this allows me to do is not defret too much about how this repeated cognitive

cognitive demanding task gets executed. I can just execute this plan. It took some trial and error to figure out how many sessions I needed, what type of sessions they should be, how much should get done in each session. But this works out well, and now I can slot that work into an otherwise busy life. I just have to protect those slots, just like if I had a sports hobby, you know, that required me twice a week we were training with my ultimate frisbee team. I would just put that time aside and I want to think like, oh, I can't have any other job

because I play an ultimate frisbee team. I know when this time occurs, and it's optimally spread out so that I don't exhaust myself. Each of these sessions pushes until I'm no longer super effective, and then I go off and do something else. I'm coming at it fresh again and again. So it probably minimizes the total amount of hours required to get out a reasonable output. So that's what I would recommend for you. You probably want a three-day, three-session process for writing these sermons. Maybe four of memorization should be a standalone thing.

It's an hour. or maybe you have a afternoon session where you pull together what you want to say, and then you have two writing sessions, and then you have a separate memorization session. Figure out what needs to be done the right way to break it up and do it the same way every week. A plan you can execute without fretting, a plan that takes into account how much your mind can actually handle before it gets exhausted. If it's a lot of sessions, it's a lot of sessions. Face the productivity drag and you can't change the reality, this is what you need to do.

It's what you need to do, but you might as well face it in the face and say, here's the right way to actually organize that work. This show is sponsored by Optimize, an online network dedicated to helping you live a deeper life. When you sign up for Optimize, you get access to over 600 philosophers' notes. These are best in the business summaries of some of the most important nonfiction books ever written. You also get access to over 50 101. video masterclasses on some of these big ideas, including one that I taught called Digital Minimalism 101, and you get a daily plus one email that takes one big idea from this corpus, presents it to you in a

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That's 20% off at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash deep. All right, let's keep rolling. I said we were done talking about social media. This call is about social media, but don't blame me. It's a caller that brought it up. Hi, Cal, love the show. My name is Elia. I'm a PhD student calling from New South Wales, Australia.

My question is about building and maintaining professional networks without social media. As an early career researcher, I know that it's really important to build a network within academia and also in the industry related to my field. But I often find my request for advice on this, so met with recommendations. to use LinkedIn or to use Twitter, particularly, to network with overseas academics. I really struggle with this response, as I personally don't like social media and I'm quite lost when it comes to using it well. For example, though I have a LinkedIn, I only have a login and give it a quick update before applying for a job. I don't use it to engage

with my network, and I haven't opened my Twitter account since I first created it in a panic after realizing how important it apparently is in academia. What advice would you give to people earlier in their careers who need to build and maintain networks, but we'd prefer to do this without relying on social media like LinkedIn and Twitter? Thanks. I think you're fine to delete that Twitter account. I don't buy the argument that some sort of network developed over Twitter is in any way going to be significant to the early stages of your academic career. Let's think about this from a timeline perspective.

Research academia in the way that we know today in which you have doctoral students training under professors that then take professorships themselves and move up through the ranks. This has been around for a while. It's been around for well over 100 years. The Germans really helped innovate this system. And for all of this time, we had developed ways for researchers to build reputations and grow networks and establish scholarly careers. and we've been doing this for a very long time. Widespread social media usage is about nine years old. I will submit that in those last nine years,

we did not completely rewire from scratch entirely how this world works. I will submit in those last nine years we didn't say, forget everything we've done over the last 150 years. This is now how academic careers grow. That did not happen. Yes, social media is emerging to have some role in academia for sure, but did not completely get rid of all of the old ways by which academic careers grow.

What is at the cornerstone of these old ways? Where are you publishing how many citations does it get? Are you doing important work? That is what matters. You cannot bypass that with a lot of Twitter followers. You cannot bypass that because you made the right connection on LinkedIn. What did you write? Where did you publish it?

How many citations is it gathering? It is exciting work good. If it's not, not. And no, the places that academic papers are discovered by other academics is not Twitter, no matter how many times people tell me that there is, again, 150 years of mechanisms for this. People publish in journals that other people read, people give colloquia talks and conference talks. We have these mechanisms in place.

What I'm trying to do here is relieve your anxiety. Forget Twitter, forget LinkedIn. Publish the best papers possible. Give talks about the papers, present the papers. Read other people's papers. If there's other people working in your space and they're doing great work, introduce yourself to them. You don't need to DM them on Twitter. Just send them a letter, send them an email or whatever, meet them at a conference and say, I really liked your work. I've been expanding on this. Can I ask you some questions about it? Literally the old-fashioned way is you meet other people doing your work. You impress them with your work. You get to know them. Maybe you say, let's write a paper together. You write a paper together. Now you know them. You have to travel a lot. You know, I definitely did a ton of this as a young academic. A lot of traveling to go spend time with other professors to get to know them, to get to know what they were working on. I remember going, I mean, there's a lot of traveling for conferences, but even outside of conferences, I remember going to Lausanne, Switzerland, just to spend a few days with a professor out there at EPFL, and we were working on a particular problem.

Going to Iceland not long ago, just a professor out there that I was working with, and, hey, let's make some progress on this. I just want to spend some time of Reykivik and work on those problems with them. going out to the middle of nowhere in Germany where there is this castle and they have this seminar series called Dagstool where you just gather a bunch of people studying the same topic to just drink beer and coffee and try to come up with new papers works pretty well at five different peer review papers come out of discussions

from that particular meeting. So this is just the old-fashioned way. Like literally we were meeting in a castle is the definition of old-fashioned. Now again, I'm not saying social media is irrelevant to academia. me, I'm just saying it's not primary. And if it stresses you out and it sounds like it does, that's fine. Don't use it.

You will be okay. Publish good papers. Talk about those papers. Talk to other people doing good work. Be around other people in person as much as possible to introduce yourself and meet other people. Find other collaborators who are impressed by our work to work on things with. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

And you will grow a network of collaborators. You'll grow a network of people who know and trust you. You'll grow an awareness within your field, people who have seen your papers, who have cited your papers, who have seen you give talks. None of this is new. We've been doing this decade after decade. All of these type of mechanisms are still very important. If you like Facebook, if you like LinkedIn, that can be fine. It could be fun.

And there's researchers, for example, that like to do public-facing stuff on Twitter or LinkedIn. You know, choose your poison. That's fine. But none of that has replaced the existing mechanisms. None of that is going to allow you to shortcut the existing mechanism. So if that stresses you out, trust that stress and say enough of that screen, I want to put pin to paper and keep producing work that really matters. All right. Let's keep rolling.

Next call. Hey, Cal, this is Sean. Thank you for answering my last voice question about tracking ideas that you can't currently implement. Speaking of using notebooks, how is the Rome experiment going? I have been using Obsidian and enjoying it. It also emphasizes connecting notes. These tools seem to be influenced by a linked note paradigm, heavily influenced by Zettlcasten. Having looked into it, I want to believe in, but I'm not convinced of the superiority of taking notes by linking smaller notes together.

The optimistic part of me compares it to improving mobility in the torso and spine by differentiation, breaking up the single torso into discrete segments individually capable of functional motion that are subsequently connected. Each segment can then simultaneously articulate on its own, as well as optimally contribute to broader kinetic chains for force transmission, resulting in far more complexity and efficiency of movements. While it would be great if the metaphor applies, reality is that metaphors don't always represent things accurately. When I look at the actual work produced as a consequent of the length note paradigm, the current outcome is a little underwhelming. Well, I'm not yet ready to give a final analysis of these Zetlcastin-type methods where you take these small atomic notes and link them together and these webs of knowledge emerge. But I share some of your skepticism here. I am still using Rome for the note-taking in particular for a book I'm working on, but I'm not yet using it in that emergent, linked structure method that.

that is recommended or is at the core of these Zettelcastin style systems. I mean, honestly, what I've put in there so far is still pretty hierarchical. Here is the sample chapters. I've broken the sample chapters into sections, which are their own pages. I could be doing this in any sort of hierarchical, you know, note-taking tool. I could be doing this in a notebook. So I don't know. I'm still trying to reserve judgment.

There's a Georgetown student who's also a listener stopped by my office hours recently and brought me the book. what it's called something like the art of note taking, but it's like the definitive book on the Zettelkeston method. So I'm going to read it. So shout out to that student. I appreciated the gift. And I am going to read that book. And so I'm reserving some judgment.

But I will say, you know, for now I'm not fully immersed in a Zetelkeston, full Zetelkastin style implementation of my notes. My skepticism comes from my general skepticism of productivity prong, this idea that whenever, we think that a system is going to free us from significant complexity when it comes to producing good work, I get suspicious. I always argue the 20% rule. The very best tools and systems and organizations will make hard work 20% better, easier, but that's about it. The 80% of hardness of I still have to write the book, I still have to come with the ideas, that can't be

offloaded into a note-taking system. And I fear friction and overhead. When does the overhead and friction of keeping track of all these atomic notes and trying to link them. When does that cause more harm than just, let me just have a bunch of notes here, loosely organized, but I can pretty much find where things are, and I want to just write or I want to think. So I don't know. So my official stance is I'm intrigued. I remain intrigued by Zettl Kasten-inspired note-taking systems and tools. I am not yet implementing anything like a fully deployed Zetel-Castin-inspired system.

I have some skepticism, but I could still be convinced. For now I'm reserving judgment. But if you're someone out there that is more or less happy with how you're taking notes and wondering, should I really change this? Would my life as a writer or an academic or a thinker be way easier if I had a better note-taking system? Probably not. Again, we're talking about, in the best case, getting rid of some annoyances, making things 20% easier, which is nothing to sneeze at.

But this idea that one day I'll just look up. and emerging from my web of links and connected notes, I just have a book or an essay. I just don't think it's ever going to do that cognitive work for you. No system can. Well, speaking about notes, I always like to try to throw in at least one student-oriented call into each episode. Hey, Cal. My name is Kail, and I'm a university student in Australia. During the last exam season, we were in lockdown, and during that time, I decided to use a bit of social accountability to

motivate my studying. I went on YouTube and found some live study streams, but one thing that I noticed is that these students study for around 10 to 12 hours a day. I know there must be a big selection mechanism here of students who are willing to set up a study live stream, but I just want to get your thoughts on this kind of culture of studying and grinding extremely hard You got to stop watching those live studying YouTube streams. They're a cultural curiosity, but when it comes to actually being an effective student, they're nonsense. Let me give you an analogy here. Let's say that you're training for, I don't know, a marathon or something like this.

Or a triathlon, some sort of athletic event that you're training for. And like, I want inspiration. Let me go on the YouTube. And let's say you went to a YouTube stream where there's people who are saying, look, I'm going to have this camera on me for Twitter. 12 hours and I'm going to run for 12 hours straight and, you know, six hours in, they're, they're dragging their lame leg at this point and, you know, people have to throw ice water on them so that they don't pass out. But like, I'm going to just do this for 12 hours.

You would be like, okay, that's an interesting, that's an interesting exercise and endurance, but this can't possibly be the right way to train for a triathlon. I mean, this is not what the professionals do. It's just weird. And that's the way I feel about these streams where people sit there for 12 hours to study. They're just bad at studying. That's just a bad way of preparing for things. It's a weird David Blaine experiment in endurance,

but it's also embarrassingly amateur. So how do you actually study? Excuse the self-promotion, but go read my 2006 book, How to Become a Straight A Student. There's a book that was written before YouTube and all this whole weird cultures. It was actually a book written before students really had even smartphones or cell phones.

for any matter. There's a book that was written before people even knew what Google was. So it's an old book, but go back for exactly that reason and read it. And what you'll learn in that book, which was based on me studying 50 students from a variety of schools who got very good grades without seeming burnt out. I studied how they did it. And one of the clear signals that comes out is they work less than most other students. The students who are in the top, you know, 5% of their classes tend to study quite a bit

less in the students in, let's say, the top five to 10%, like the students right below them. The very top students study a lot less. In fact, this was the motivating event that got me to write how to become a straight-A student. I was a very good student at Dartmouth largely because I really cared about my study systems, and I didn't really study that much. I got very good grades. And so when I got to, I don't know when this was, the end of my junior year, the beginning of my senior year, I was a early inductee in the first.

Phi Beta Kappa. So this is where your GPA is so high that we know you're going to be in Phi Beta Kappa, we're going to induct you early. And it was the top like 2% of the class or something like that. The top 2% of the class, my class at Dartmouth, so the top whatever it was, 20 or 30 students out of the thousand or so in the class, we got to go to the president's house and have a dinner, etc. And I remember being so surprised. I write about this in the book. Looking around and seeing the other people. people who were in this group of the 20 kids out of the thousand had the highest grades. It wasn't the grinds. It wasn't the kids that today would be on a YouTube channel showing how they can study for 12 hours. It wasn't the kids who back then had the hooded sweatshirt pulled over their head at Barry Library at 3 a.m. Shout out the Dartmouth studying all night for their midterm. As people I knew and had no idea that they had good grades, they never thought about them as super studiers because they weren't. What explained this phenomenon?

This phenomenon that I used to refer to as the paradox of the relaxed road scholar, what explained this phenomenon is because what enabled them to have the very top grades, what enabled me to have the top 20 grades of 1,000 people, or the other people in this room, is they cared about process. When you care about process, because you have to care about how to studying work, what works, what doesn't. When we focus my time on things that matter and not waste time on things that don't, you have to care about that if you're going to get four-os again and again and again.

You can't just grind your way to four-hots. You can grind your way to a good GPA, and you can grind your way in the med school, but you can't grind your way into the top 20 out of 1,000. There you actually have to care about the mechanics of how you study. And once you start caring about the mechanics of how you study, you realize that 90% of the time that people spend is wasted and the time required to get those grades plummets. You get that paradoxical situation where you walk into the president's house for that reception and say, none of you guys are grinds. So this is what you have to care about and it's what that whole book How to Become a Straight A Student is about.

How do you actually study in a way that matters? You start to experiment. You're like what type of note taking matters for this class? I don't want to waste my time. This matters, this doesn't. What's the right best, most efficient way to study for math? Forget that. Forget the textbook.

It's going to create these problem sets. I'm going to test myself. What's the right way to study for a blue book exam and a humanities course? Well, what I need to do is take these question evidence, conclusion clusters, etc. Care about the actual mechanics of how you study. You want to study how you study like a scientist would examine a bacterial colony of novel

organisms. What works, what doesn't? Why did I spend time on that? What a waste? This matters. Can I get rid of the friction and just do this? How early should I do it? When should I study?

What's the right time to do it? Let me get this all in the calendar. In fact, I have an exam in three weeks. Let me put every study session on my calendar now. So I just get there, I execute. All this type of thinking is what you need to get the very highest grades. none of it leads to you studying 12 hours in a row. That is a performative David Blaine endurance experiment.

Godspeed, you get some good views on it. It has nothing to do with being a professional student. So go read how to become a straight-A student or go read the first two years of my blog, which was all student-focused, and get professional about how you actually approach your studies. And this is going to be the side effect that you're really going to enjoy, and this is the really good news. If you get professional about how you study,

yes, your grades will go up, but perhaps unexpectedly or counterintuitively, your time spent working will go down. Your stress will go down. Your confidence will go up. Only good things happen once you start taking your job as a student seriously. Not as something you blow off or not as a performance like these YouTubers, but a job that you're trying to do well,

so you better start thinking about what's the right way to actually do the things I need to do. All right. I think we have time here. Let's do one more quick question. Hey Cal, my name is Daniel. I'm from the island of Jamaica. I'm currently studying electrical engineering in Finland. I'm in Europe currently. And I recently discovered your podcast. I didn't even know that you did podcasts. And I have been watching many videos on YouTube regarding your opinion on the use of social media on how it impacts our ability to be productive and live meaningful lives. And I've taking your advice, I no longer use it, and my life is more meaningful now, so thank you. My question is, is it still possible to do time blocking if I am not able to get that time blocking book you created?

Well, first, as a quick preamble, my hat's off to you for your intentional rejection of social media. There's nothing I like better than hearing a digital minimalist approach to tech where you figure out what you really need in your life and feel comfortable about skipping the tech that you don't need. So hats off there. Ask your question about whether you need my time block planner product to actually time block plan. The answer is no. You don't. Time blocking is not too complicated to learn. You can do it in any notebook. The original blog post where I talked about time block planning was published in 2013. So if you Google the importance of planning every minute of your workday, you'll find that original article. It has over 260 comments on it. I take a picture of my

time block plans. My book deep work that also gets in the detail about time block planning. If you go to the website for my planner, timeblock planner.com. There's a video there where I walk through how time blocking works and I show time block examples in my planner. So you can actually watch that video to see a tutorial on how to time block. And there's a hundred other websites now in the aftermath and be popularizing this idea. If you Google planning every minute of your day or time block planning, you're going to see page after page, article after article, about people talking about their time blocking habit. Sometimes people call it time boxing, same idea. So there's no shortage of information about how to do this.

And the only tool you need is a notebook. I just use regular notebooks for, what, six or seven years before I finally produce my own. so you will be fine. Why do I have a separate planner? There's really two reasons for it. One is convenience. So it preformats the pages but also brings together metric tracking, capturing, capturing weekly planning in one notebook.

So you don't have to bring others. But honestly, the main value I think people get out of it is the psychological motivation boost. Because the planner is dedicated to that type of planning. When you see you have the planner with you, you're much more likely to actually do the time block planning and follow of the plans. But look, we're hacking psychology here. The nuts and bolts of it is get a good spiral-bound notebook and rock and roll. I did it for a while. If you're motivated to take control your time and it sounds like you are, you'll be just fine. With that, I should probably wrap up this week's episode. Hey, I need more calls. Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast for instructions on how to call in

and leave your own questions so we can answer them on these listener calls mini episode. I'll be back on Monday with a full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.