Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 15: Deep Work in Groups, Social Media in Politics, and Confronting Common Arguments Against My Work | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions on deep work in groups, the double-edge sword of deploying social media in politics, and a discussion of the most common objection about my work, among many other topics.You can submit your audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportI will be sending out a new request for text questions to my mailing list soon. You can sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com.Please consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners decide to try the show).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:* Deep work in groups [1:42]* Rethinking the "Dorsey Exception" [3:52]* The wrong reason to pursue a PhD [9:04]* Background noise and distraction [10:10]* Managing tedious life admin [14:02]* Turning down a promotion to avoid shallow work [22:30]* Audio Question of the Day: Can attention residue ever be positive? [25:32]* Staying up on news in depressing times [30:57]* Thoughts on the Kindle [35:00]* Thoughts on the Pomodoro Technique [38:00]* Social media and politics [41:23]* Deep work versus social media [47:20]* Question Roulette: When will depth become mainstream? [50:31]* Habits to pick up in childhood [54:56]* How students can cultivate a deep life [57:02]* Recharging during deep work breaks [1:02]* Uncommon sources of high quality leisure [1:05]* Teaching the deep life to children [1:06]* The strongest arguments against my work [1:08]Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries for my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. So I'm doing pretty well still with the collection of questions that I gathered in early July when I sent a survey to my mailing list. So I'm going to stick with that batch of questions for another week or two because there's still a lot of good queries in there. I expect, however, that I will send out a survey. survey to my mailing list pretty soon after a week or two where I'll be requesting new questions

for the podcast. So if you want to participate in that survey, make sure that you are signed up for my mailing list. You can do so at calnewport.com. As always, feedback on what you like, don't like, or would like to hear can be sent to interesting at calnewport.com. And if you want to do your part to help grow our community of deep question askers. The two most important things you can do is subscribe and iTunes. That tells their algorithms to promote the podcast or leave a rating or review, which is what helps people who then find the podcast decide whether or not to listen. As always, I appreciate that support.

Okay, enough admin. Let's get started with this week's show. We got a great mix of questions, pretty evenly split, I would say, between a three categories. so this should be a good one. And let's get rolling with some work questions. Aaron asks, do you think it's possible to do deep work

in pairs or small groups? Well, Aaron, not only is that possible, it's often better. So in my book, Deep Work, I talk about what I call the whiteboard effect. And the basic idea behind a whiteboard effect is that when you get a small group of people together who are working collaboratively on a difficult problem, they tend to achieve greater intensity of focus

than if they were working by themselves. Now, I call it the whiteboard effect because I'm referencing the way that the theoreticians I'm around in my computer science career, the way that we actually work on problems collaboratively where we're literally looking at a whiteboard together, maybe trying to make progress on a proof. Now, the reality is if there's a couple people with you

while you're doing something cognitively demanding, There is now a social pressure that's going to keep your levels of concentration high. So if I'm working with you and I let my attention wander, I pull out my smartphone and maybe check some emails, there's now a real cost to it because I have to come back to the threaded hand and say, okay, hold on, I missed what you just said. We have to go back. And that's annoying.

So I'm more likely just not to check the email. Also, hey, you're trying to impress the people you're with. So you're going to push yourself. Just like if you're out running and you're running with a running partner that's going pretty fast, you're going to run faster than if you're just by yourself. So working together actually can help increase deep work versus working alone. And so I think I'm glad you asked this question, Aaron, because I don't want there to be a sense out there that somehow deep work is something that is solitary.

It's not at all something that has to be solitary. The two things that makes deep work deep is you're focusing on something that's cognitively demanding. And two, you're doing so without context switching. So you're not changing your cognitive. context, look at an inbox or to look at Slack or to look at social media. Whether or not there's other people with you pushing you to do that deep work doesn't change the definition. So good question. Work in groups if you can. It might help you achieve even deeper results. Okay, Rob asks,

is the Jack Dorsey exception to deep work actually real? So Rob, again, is talking about my book deep work. I give the example of the Twitter slash square CEO Jack Dorsey. I give him as an example in the book of someone where maybe deep work is not necessary. And the reason I talked about Jack Dorsey is because his schedule was unusually public. There's a lot of business reporters interested in how is he being the CEO of two companies at the same time. So we just happen to have for this one chief executive. A lot of news reports written about. what's his daily schedule like. And so we knew something about what his daily schedule is like. And it seemed to have lots and lots of meetings. And so I argued in deep work, you know, if you're a CEO,

long portions of unbroken concentration might not be that important. What you need to be doing is making consistent strategic decisions, but you could be sort of outsourcing the deep thinking and basically taking in the results of that outsource deep thinking to make consistent strategic decisions. And the broader point I was making there is not everyone does deep work all the time. So Rob is asking, is that true? He elaborates in the question. Is it true that people like CEOs? Is it true that they don't really need to be doing deep work?

Well, Rob, you might be on to something. So the Jack Dorsey exception, for example, might not even apply to Jack Dorsey. I believe I've mentioned in an earlier podcast episode. More recently, I actually had someone who's called a someone who's close to Dorsey, I think an investor in Twitter, someone who's known him well. He wrote me and said, Jack Dorsey does lots of deep work. This idea that he's not doing deep work because he has all of these meetings is flawed. If you actually spend time with him, when he's in those meetings, he's giving very intense

decision to what's going on and really trying to understand it and really trying to make hard decisions. And that takes steps. So the Jack Dorsey exception might not even apply to Jack Dorsey. Well, I've nuanced my view on this more recently. I basically now have a much kind of broader view of depth. And what I tend to emphasize now is that in basically every position, whether we're talking about CEO or we're talking about your administrative assistant,

sequentiality matters. So the ability to do things one at a time to finish what you're working on or thinking about, to finish that, get it to a stopping point before moving to the next thing to give it your full attention is by far the best way to make use of the human mind. So Jack Dorsey is not sitting, staring at a monitor, writing computer code in great concentration for four hours at a time. But when he's in a meeting, at least this is what I've heard from his long time friend, a collaborator who wrote me, you know, he's full sequential concentration on that meeting, what's going on, okay, let's make some decisions. And then he moves on to the next.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you're, let's say, an administrative assistant where you're being deluged with task request from the people you support, even there. Sequentiality is going to better make use of your brain than try and do a lot of things in parallel. So let me do this task until I can finish it. Now what's next? All right, let me do this task so I can finish it. Now what's next. So this is a broader concept in depth, which is sequentiality. And I think it's important for basically any job, from CEO, the computer programmer to administer. assistant. Give things to time they deserve. You're going to get a lot more out of your brain

than trying to juggle multiple cognitive context. So what would the opposite be? The opposite would be on the CEO in the meeting, but I'm also looking at my email at my phone, trying to do multiple things at once. Or I'm the administrative assistant that while I'm working on this task, I'm answering emails about this task and then anyone can drop by and bother me about that task. So you're not doing one thing at a time. You're trying to juggle multiple things. As long as you have that constant context switching, you are greatly impairing your cognitive capacity. Now, if you're in a role like computer programming, the things you're doing sequentially might last many hours at a time. And then you get that classic image of I'm in my cave

doing deep work for four hours. But I don't want that to be the model when people think about how do I maximize neuroproductivity, how do I take advantage of the reality of the human brain to get my work done as well as possible? I don't want people to get too trapped. in the image of maker positions in which sequentiality means long sessions at a time. The broader point here is one thing at a time before you switch your context, whether you're a CEO, whether you're a programmer, whether you're administrative assistant. So Rob, I think you're right. I don't think anymore if CEOs is being an exception.

It just looks different. One thing at a time. Give it concentration until you're ready to move on to the next thing. That is the way our brain actually operates. can either work with it or we can work against it, but if we work against it, we get less done and we're miserable. Joshua asks, does it make sense to pursue a PhD for personal reasons? Joshua, no, it does not. The reason to pursue a PhD is because there is a specific job that you're convinced would be really good for you, for what you have in mind for your career,

and getting a PhD of the type that you're going to try to get at the caliber of school that you can get into is what's going to make that job available. In that case, yes, you get the PhD because specifically it's going to give you this goal. That's the reason to do it. As longtime listeners of the podcast know, I really consistently push back on this idea that graduate school is somehow a way to sort of generically find yourself or expose yourself to new opportunities you don't know exist. or give you a holding pattern while you figure out what you want to do with life. It is a career tool that you deploy strategically.

There's a particular outcome you want to get, and you have confidence that going to this program and spending the money will get you that outcome. Okay, Ty asks, what is your opinion on background noise when doing deep and shallow work? For example, music podcast, white noise, or even working in an environment like a coffee shop. When does it help? And when does it hurt? Well, Ty, there's a big broad distinction which needs to be made, which is any type of noise, be it around you or in your earphones in which there's human conversation. That is a distraction.

So if you're listening to a podcast, you really can't be doing anything that requires any cognitive effort. You can do physical effort. You're cleaning the dishes. You're mowing the yard. You're driving. Okay, you can do that. But if you need to be thinking, you're writing something, you're working on email, etc. You can't do that while you're also listening to another voice because that requires a lot of

your brain and you're going to be context switching back and forth rapidly. You're essentially multitasking. Multitasking doesn't work. In a coffee shop, if the conversation is sort of not about you and you're not trying to pay attention to it and it's not too sharply loud, your mind can tune it out. That's okay. All right. So now if we're thinking about music or sort of background noise, what I've learned in my work

on deep work is that it's all about acclimatization. So like, can you listen to classical music while writing? Will it distract you or will it help you concentrate? It just depends if you're used to it. This is what I found time and again is that people basically through training can acclimatize themselves to different background sounds. And then it can become very useful to them. It helps them block out the rest of the world.

It becomes a sort of audio ritual in some cases that helps them slip in the deepboard mode, but it just takes exposure. So if you've never worked to a certain type of music, before, you might find it distracting at first. But if you do it a bunch, it'll probably become less distracting. A classic example of this is a novelist that I interviewed years ago. It's a guy, he's like a genre novelist who writes sort of Kindle ebook originals, right? So it's not, we're not talking about Jonathan Franzen here, but he has to write a lot. He turns out a ton of words. He also has a lot of kids. So his house was noisy.

And what he ended up doing is he got these NASCAR earphones. You worked for the NASCAR races so that you can listen to the play-by-play. So they have speakers in them. But they're also giant muffled earphones because I guess the cars are very loud at the speedways. So like you need to muffle out the sound of the cars and be able to hear the play-by-play. He used these giant NASCAR earphones and blasted Metallica. Now for most of us, if we tried this for the first time today, to blast Metallica through NASCAR headphones,

we would not be able to concentrate at all. It would be incredibly distracting. But he trained himself. And once he got used to it, it was very useful because that blocked out all other sounds in his household. And so the problem is when you hear your kids yelling or something like that, you're tuned to immediately switch context and pay attention to that. There's a good evolutionary reason why we pay attention to our kids.

So he really had to block out every ounce of that sound if he was going to get writing done. And so that's how I did it, Metallica and NASCAR earphones. So that just goes to show that with training, you can get used to almost any background sound. But again, the exception is what I said at the beginning. If you're actually trying to pay attention to spoken content, like, I want to hear what this person is saying. Or if you're really right in the middle of a appealing conversation, you're right next to a table in the coffee shop and they're having a really interesting conversation. Then your context switching, right? You're fighting, your concentration is fighting between the resources are being split between these two different targets of concentration.

It's going to be hard to get work done. All right, Ty, that's a good question. Gabriel, asked, how do you get yourself to do administrative tasks in your personal life that are tedious? Gabriel, I struggle with this as well. I think a lot of people do. It's very hard to get. things done, especially those things that fall outside of work, they're in your house, they're kind of non-urgent, but you kind of need to do it. Like getting your license renewed. This is

something that's on my plate right now. I don't want to deal with it, but I need to. Fixing something in your yard, cleaning your gutters, like I did the other day. There's paperwork that needs to be sent back in for God knows what. I mean, there's always these type of life admin tasks. and it's really hard to get the motivation to do them, especially after, you know, you have a hard day of work and you have your kids at home because of COVID and all this other things going on. So I think a lot about this, Gabriel,

because it's a problem I'm working on. I'm going to suggest two things here. And these are the same things I suggest for the world of work. I think we have to just remember to apply them for the world outside of work as well. Number one, you have to be organized. If you throw in the cognitive overhead of trying to keep track of what,

what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. If all of your household tasks exist in a chaotic ad hoc pile, the barrier to getting started, getting things done is much, much higher because you don't even want to deal with that stress. There's a pile of letters by the door, another pile of things you have to deal with on a counter. You have some emails inside your inbox that have tasks lurking in it and other things you just sort of notice as you walk through your house and see them.

It can be overwhelming. that overhead can be enough to prevent you from getting there. So you need to actually tackle what's happening in your household with that same philosophy of capture, configure, control that I talk about all the time for the world of work. Modified for the realities of life outside of work, but the same basic ideas. You need clear capture systems.

Here's the list where the things we have to do in our personal life are captured. Here's the physical box where the physical things we need to deal with go, like letters. There's a literal plastic box that this is the letters that have to be processed. Configure. You have to look at this stuff. You have to make a weekly plan. What's going on? What really needs to get done this week? If you don't make a weekly plan, things that require more than a non-trivial amount of time are not going to get done because you're not going to find yourself at a normal work week just saying, man, I have nothing to do and I'm kind of in the mood to do some chores.

Let's go see what's available. That's not going to happen. It's got to be, okay, you know, I got to get to the dump. I'm speaking from experience here. We went to the dump yesterday, clean out a garage. You're going to have to put that time aside. You have to figure it out. Like, this is part of Tuesday's plan that in the afternoon we're going to go to the dump. And you've got to work around it. Right. So you have to be doing configure, going over what you need to do, making a plan to put the big rocks in there, et cetera. And then control. Now, I don't think you need to be time block planning your hours outside of work. And in fact, I would say definitely don't do that. That's too much. It's going to stress you out.

You're going to burn out, and then you're going to stop doing it all together in work and your personal life. But you should have some sense. Hey, when am I going to work on tasks today? You know, maybe I have a big rock like this afternoon. I'm going to the dump. But what am I going to put aside? Let me just have a plan. Okay, maybe an hour before dinner, I'm going to try to get through as much as I can.

So you want to have a little bit of control. So that general philosophy of capture, configure control is going to really lower the barrier to entry to actually getting stuff done, it's also going to lower stress because you're not keeping track of urgent, overdue, whatever, just in your head. The other thing I'm going to recommend,

Gabriel, is a general personal culture of discipline. There's two modes our mind can be in. There's a mode of, you know, we are disciplined, that we take pride out of doing the hard things that are important. And if you're in that discipline mode, these sort of life admin tasks are wrapped up in this sort of general package of things that you tend to get after and you get pride in the fact you get after it. It's more likely to get done.

If you're in undisciplined mode, well, you know, it's just kind of chaotic, just trying to survive here, try to treat myself because life is stressful, then life admins can be one of the very first things that falls to the side. So this whole notion of, you know, if you're in a disciplined mode in general, so your work is very structured. You're careful about health and exercise. You're going, you're reading hard books. You're doing deep leisure. Like you just have a sense of structure and discipline where you've been very intentional about I'm trying to take control of my life and do what I can with the circumstances I'm given. If you're in that general mindset, then the life admin stuff gets done. If you're not in that mindset, it just seems hopelessly tedious. One last thing I'll briefly recommend last year for my

birthday. So in June of 2019, I launched an initiative where I closed all of the open loops in what we could call like household management. Little background. Every year at my birthday, I usually launch some sort of self-improvement initiative. So it's not like this was a gift. It's just that's the time of year where I do big self-improvement initiatives. So what do I mean by that? Well, I wanted there to be nothing that regularly has to happen. either to our house or to our cars or for our own personal health. I wanted there to be nothing that has to regularly happen that I didn't have a system for, where I didn't have all the information and a plan for how it gets scheduled.

I went through everything. Like our gutters, how often do we clean our gutters? Who do we do it? Is it on my calendar? Is there a reminder? Like, how do I know when it's time to do the gutters? Do I have my doctor in place, my dentist in place, my optometrist in place? How often do I set those appointments?

Is it automatic? Do I have to do it? Where do we do our oil changes? Is it automatic? What's the, what do I, do I wait to the light comes on? You know, how does that work? What about, you know, even down to the details of like power cleaning our front porch, which gets dirty through the year, how often do we do it?

When do we do it? Who does it? Is there an auto reminder on the calendar? How do I know when it's time to do it? I basically wanted there to be nothing in that sort of life admin sphere where it was just up to me to remember. Like, oh yeah, this is something we should do. And that was a big stress relief.

It took a while, but it's like, okay, everything. thing that needs to get done. I have all the information and if it needs to be regularly occurring, I have a reminder on my calendar. So I could take every last bit of these regularly occurring life admin task and I got them all out of my head. And that was a stress reliever as well. All right. So Gabriel, that's my summary. You can adapt business productivity techniques here, capture, configure control. A culture of personal discipline makes tedious life admin tasks easier to get done. And if you go through and close all the open loops on regularly occurring sort of life admin tasks, you really have this confidence that I won't forget anything that needs to be done.

I have all the information and the reminders are programmed into my system. That will also give you confidence. I want to give brief credit to Elizabeth Eman. So I've been using this term life admin to describe all of this. That actually comes from a book that Elizabeth Eman's, E M-E-N-S published last year called the Art of Life admin. I blurbed it. My blurbs on the cover. Actually, on the front cover. I'm looking at it now.

Timely and necessary. He must read, right? That comes from me. So that's where I got the term life admin. That's a good book that gets into the tactics and psychology of managing all the junk in your life. And I think Elizabeth's point is like, that's really crucial. It's crucial for happiness.

It's crucial for stress, but it's also crucial for professional. success as well. If you have a lot of life admin, that can slow down your progress in your career, especially if it's out of control or a source of distraction. So that's a great book, and that's where I got the term life admin. And Gabriela, thank you for that question because it gave me a chance to talk about all of this. John asks, is it bad to turn down a promotion because the new job requires more shallow work? So John, in my 2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, I have a chapter that is titled, Turned Down a Promotion. So that should give you some sense of where I stand on this issue.

So more broadly, no, I think that is a legitimate reason, potentially, to turn down a promotion. I think your goal of your career is some combination of financial stability for you and your family, plus cultivating the traits that makes great work great. And these are things like impact, autonomy, and connection. And so I give a lot of examples, and so good they can't ignore you about about people that turn down certain promotions because what they were trying to do is have financial stability, but also to cultivate traits they really cared about in their work because if you don't enjoy your work in the long run, it can be a drag. A lot of promotions can be a trap in that sense. They can transform your job into something that is worse with respect to the traits that make great work great for you and you end up much less happy. So is it really worth having the extra income if it makes you much less happy?

So I'm perfectly fine with that idea. I think a ton of extra shallow work is a really reasonable reason to question a particular shift in your position. It depends on your personality. But for a lot of people to shift, let's say, to this is classic, to a management style position when you had been in a maker style position can be misery making. Other people love the responsibility. They love the increased connection.

but a lot of people it can be misery making, so that matters. Just like shifting to a new job that pays more, but then introduces an hour-long commute, when your current job may be, you can walk to the office. That's a huge difference that's going to make your life much more negative. You'd really have to take that seriously, even if the salary was more in the new position. The other factor that I think really makes a difference

in considering a promotion is autonomy. This is really the one I hammered on in So Good They Can't Ignore You. If you control what you work, on when you work on and how you work on it. I call that the dream job elixir in that book because it's so tied to professional satisfaction. And so if a promotion is going to greatly reduce autonomy, now your schedule is going to be much more constrained, you have much more flexibility on your work hours, maybe you're going to be in meetings all the time. Maybe you're going to have to be much more responsive on digital communications. You're losing something very powerful and very positive

and you would really have to take that seriously. So, John, I think that's perfectly reasonable to keep shallow work modes in mind when trying to navigate what's going to keep your career something that is as sustainable and satisfying as possible. So let's leave it there for now for work questions. And before we move on to technology questions, I thought it would be interesting to do a quick audio question of the day. Hi, Cal, my name is Bo. I'm a big fan of your work.

you mentioned attention residue theory in your work as a negative phenomenon and obviously we don't want to be switching back and forth between emails and texts while we're trying to do deep work have you thought about the phenomenon of attention residue being used for a positive purpose for example during my morning contemplation I may be contemplating a book or a subject I find if I engage in a deep work act activity directly after, the spirit of the contemplation is behind what I'm doing and it can fuel it. Bo, I think there are a couple different relevant issues going on here. So what you describe, this notion of maybe you're doing a contemplative activity and then you shift over to deep work. And this spirit of contemplation then fuels, to use your term, the deep work session that follows.

I think what you're describing there is a deep work ritual, which is something I really recommend, which is this notion of you have some sort of activity you do before deep work, a sort of cognitive effacement that signals to your mind that, okay, it's time for us to be interior. It's time for us to shut down processing stimuli, shut down background social processing and really focus internally. on abstract thoughts or ideas. And there's lots of different rituals that can help you achieve this. And some of them are physical, like walking to a new place or brewing coffee in a certain way.

But I think a contemplative practice is often another really good ritual because it puts your mind into a state of interiority, at which point you are probably going to shift more easily into deep work. Now, sure, there'll be some residue from what you were thinking about during that contemplative session, but that residue will clear in 10 minutes or 15 minutes. and if it helped get you going, the benefits are worth it. There is, however, I think, another possible way of answering your question in the positive, where attention residue from one thing can actually help a new thing that you're working on. So I want to give an example from the research literature.

So my friend Adam Grant recently sent me a study. This came out in the Journal of Applied Psychology this year. So recent work. and the title of the study was more tasks, more ideas, the positive spillover effect of multitasking on subsequent creativity. And what they found in their field studies is that if you're doing brainstorming, if you're trying to come up with original ideas,

actually attention residue can help there, which sort of makes sense. So if you're exposing yourself to interesting, varied stimuli, right before you shift over to trying to have an original idea, they found in the lab that you maybe had some more subsequent creativity. You're almost able to extract from the clashing cognitive context that are trying to switch in your mind away from the thing you're working on to the new thing you're lorking on.

You have this moment of crossed neuronal wires. And in that moment of collision and unexpected serendipitous intersection, you might get some slightly more original ideas. So I think that's interesting as well, that if you're going to do highly creative work, that you might want to throw a lot of stimuli at yourself right before. And in that early phase, before those circuits have completely reset, you might get a little extra dose of creative burst.

So I think that's interesting as well. But again, remember, just for everyone, remember the long-term cost of cognitive switching is that cognitive capacity is reduced while your circuits are overlapping. So if you do need to do something hard, you really do want to avoid having a constant background drip of context switches. So that's the thing that's going to kill you, is if you're trying to do something that's cognitive demanding,

but you check your inbox every 20 minutes, it's a huge cognitive impairment. And it's going to take a lot longer to get the work done. You're not going to be able to think as deeply, so your results won't be as good. So I do think there are, to quote this paper, positive spillover effects from attention residue. I do think as Bo talks about positive effects from having a ritual before deep work that might be in a completely separate cognitive context than the deep work because it gets you going.

Just beware, however, of keeping context switching something that happens continually while you're doing deep work. Because whether it's something that's very rote or incredibly focused or even something very creative, at some point, you do need your brain to settle in and actually be able to concentrate its energies on. one thing at a time. So both thank you for that. Audio question of the day. If you want to contribute your own audio question of the day, go to speakpipe.com slash Calnewport. That's speakpipe.com slash Calnewport.

You can record directly from your browser. It's very easy. They come right to me. And I really appreciate getting those questions. All right. Let's move on now to technology questions. Mark asks, what is your approach to

staying up on the news. Well, first of all, Mark, I think in general, we over-emphasize the importance of being very up on the news. You know, if you're not a producer at a cable news network or an editor, you know, at a newspaper, it's probably not that vital that you really know everything that's going on at the world, and especially it's not that vital that you know breaking news. That, you know, through Twitter, you know what stories devoid.

and how it's unfolding. This idea that we all have to have our finger on the pulse of everything at all times is essentially like a marketing ploy from the social media companies. It's not the way that most people lived historically. And I don't think it's the way that we need to live right now. Now, to get more specific, I would say in the time of COVID, to be really up on the news, is not only unnecessary, but also greatly increasing your risks of negative psychological impacts. The news is very negative right now.

now because the world is very negative right now. And then you add on top of that, I think a real bias towards the negative in the coverage for various reasons that we can get into that makes the browsing of the news today a trying experience. You have to understand it, especially the standard major news outlets right now, as you can almost imagine what they're trying to do is our job is to support the narrative. that things are bad, and we are concerned that if we give any ground to the idea that there could be some hope here, this is going well, or here's something we could think about.

If we give any ground to that narrative, then maybe people will get the wrong idea, and then maybe they'll do the wrong things. Their behaviors will be wrong. They won't do the right mitigation factor. So we've really got to fight for the narrative that things are bad. We can argue about whether or not that's a good thing, but the reality of it is that a exposure to the news today can be a psychologically harroween experience. And if you are drowning yourself in news, if you have CNN on all day, or you are on Twitter all day, God forbid, looking at the breaking news, what people are saying, you really are running the risk of real psychological damage, a disordered psychological state.

So now more than ever, I think we want to be strategic about the news. We want to know what's going on and what we need to know, but we don't want to wallow in it because it's going to make things worse. in our day-to-day. So my recommendation, have a ritual. It should be in the morning. It should take no more than 15 minutes that make sure you know what you need to know. Hey, what's going on in the world? What's going on in my state and local community?

Are there their guidelines I need to know about? Is there interesting news? Is there an injustice over here that should not escape scrutiny? Have a 15-minute routine that make sure that you're exposed to that information. So you could listen to a news roundup podcast. You could look at a newspaper. You could get a news roundup email. If there's a paper you like,

pay the money to subscribe online. It's really not that much. Do not let Twitter be involved in your news coverage. Do not let Facebook be involved in your news coverage. They do not have your best interest in mind. Expose yourself to this information. Here's what's going on. I got it.

Deep breath. Check in again the next day. All right. So now more than ever, news consumption needs. to be strategic. You got to think about it. You can't be casual about it because you know, you still have a life to lead, a family support, a career to build, a soul to nourish. None of this stuff can happen if you wallow. Hard times are hard. You want to know what's going

on. You want to make sure that you're responding properly to the hard times. You want to make sure that you're doing what you can to help, but you do not want to wallow. That does not make things better. All right. So thanks for that question, Mark. On a lighter note, Mike asks, what are your thoughts on reading on an Amazon Kindle? Mike, I think it's fine. I read on Kindle and I read real books. I have a preference for physical books for three reasons. One, I just find the contrast of the ink on the white paper easier to read.

Two, my note-taking system, which I've talked about before, where I mark corners of pages and then bracket off the sections on that page that I want to remember. That requires physical pages. I find a very efficient way to capture information. And three, the codex is just a really efficient reference medium. I mean, next to me right now in my study is my bookshelf, and it has lots of books I've used when doing research for my own projects. And the ability to just grab a book and then quickly turn using both the table of contents and my page marks to a relevant section and grab that information. It's really, really fast. Faster than any digital. system that I have. And so as a reference medium, the physical codex is really efficient.

However, Amazon books are fine too. You can do underlines. You can download your underlines as a PDF, which I find to be really convenient. You know, so I use Kindle as well. Typically, for me, if I want something right away, I'll just buy it on the Kindle. And if I can wait a few days, I'll order it and get the physical copy. One quick little technological note about out the Kindle, unlike, let's say, an iPad, the screen on a Kindle is not projecting light. The E-ink technology that's used on something like a Kindle is actually an electromechanical technology. So the pixels, and it's possible to give caveat that things have changed.

I mean, the technology may have changed since it first came out, but I was really interested in it when it first came out. And the way it used to work, at least, is that you had pixels on the screen where there's a physical disk. You know, and one side is dark and one side is light. And there's a wire, and I'm simplifying here, but there's a wire that goes to that little disk. You put a little charge to that wire.

You flip it one way. Take the charge away. You can flip it back the other way. So your Kindle is actually constructing a physical page. That's why you can turn off your Kindle and there's still something on your screen because it's not like an LCD screen or an LED screen where you're actually projecting light at each of the pixels of different colors. And that's how you get a screen like you would see on your phone like you would see on your TV.

Here, you're actually using electricity to move physical things around to configure a screen. And then you can take electricity away. It doesn't matter. That's what your screen looks like. So you actually are on a Kindle. You're reading a physical page with its physical things you're looking at. You're not looking at light. So that's kind of interesting.

So it makes a little bit easier on your eyes. I think the light on a Kindle, like in a Kindle paper, paper white is literally a light being reflected onto a screen. It's like having a reading light on your book. So that's kind of cool. I like that technology. I just find it very cool. But anyways, good question. Mike. Kindle's fine. Slightly prefer books, but use both extensively. Ronnie asked, what are your thoughts on the Pomodoro technique? So for those who don't know, the Pomodora technique is essentially when you do your work, you have a timer. You set it for a set amount of time. I don't know what they use in Pomodoro now. maybe like 25 minutes or something.

You hit the timer, you work on something until a timer goes off. You take a break. Then you work on something else. You put on the timer. You work until a timer goes off and so on. I think it's fine. I think the Pomondore technique has a lot of sort of overhead built around it. Like this type of timer and the interval should be this long.

But it's to me a specific example of a more general concentration exercise. I talk and write about frequently, which I call cognitive interval training. In general, using a timer to train your ability to focus works very well. The basic idea here, which is what makes Pomodoro work or any type of cognitive interval training work, is that if you see a timer and it's counting down, you say, I have to keep concentrating without this traction until this timer runs down, seeing that, oh, there's 20 minutes left. It's much easier to actually maintain your focus. And if you instead just say, I'm going to do my best to concentrate as long as I can.

So we just tell yourself, hey, I want to focus hard on this. Deep work is important, but that's it. Your brain starts right away with, you know, we're going to have to take a break sometime. Why not now? Maybe we should do it now. You know, we have to check our email. Why don't just do it now? And you're in this constant struggle.

If you're doing a timer-based interval train, you say, no, we do it in 15 minutes. I don't want to interrupt the timer. It makes it black and white that I'm sort of failing out a goal. So I think it's very useful. What I more generally suggest, which is not captured in the Pomodoro is that you increase those intervals. You actually use it as a training tool. You maybe start at the Pomondoro recommended 25 minutes,

but once you're comfortable with that, make it 35. Once you're comfortable with that, make it 45. And I always tell people your goal with this timer-based training is to be able to hit 90-minute blocks without checking your email, without looking at your phone, without a massive diversion of your attention. Once you can do 90 minutes of hard focus,

you're basically set for most knowledge work type organizations. Now, at that point, what I've observed is a lot of people don't need the timer anymore. It's like if you need to run a five and a half minute mile for your work, you're probably going to do interval training at the track, try to get to that capacity. But once you're there, then you maybe can just go out and do it. And you don't need to have the carefully structured training anymore. So that's the one thing I've noticed is that this type of timer-based training is really good for increasing the amount of time with which you're comfortable,

concentrating. But most people once they get to where they want to get, find that they don't really need the timer. Now, if they slip, they go through a period where they get in some bad habits or what have you, then they can bring back out the timer to get back in shape. But you don't necessarily need the timer long term. It's how you get your mind to the cognitive fitness level that you want it to get to. Layla says, my question is about Alexandria Acosio Cortez and social media. How much a political success is possible without Twitter, Instagram, etc. Well, Leila, politics is not my specialty, but I live in Washington, D.C., so like everyone who lives here, we have a sort of amateur interest in the sport that does dominate our town.

And my semi-developed opinion on social media and politics is that it's emerged as a double-edged sword. So I think if you're running for office at most levels today, I think it's hard to do without leveraging social media. And if you're good at it, like AOC is good at it, it can actually be a real advantage in terms of getting elected. And I have some friends who've run for national office. I've had some friends who've run for state office. And so I've seen this close up. And social media is sort of a seems to be right now a really key part of the campaign. It's a way to try to engage with more of your voters without actually more so than you can actually meet in person.

It's useful for fundraising. And if you're really talented at it, like AOC on the right or like someone like Dan Crenshaw on the, oh, I'm going to set up, of course. AOC is on the left. And then on the right, someone like Dan Crenshaw, I think is pretty good with social media. You can actually use it to try to vault your prominence or name recognition. Why is it a double-edged sword? Well, this is something that we've also noticed here in D.C. is in a company town is that we are seeing that platforms like Twitter in particular can then have an outsized influence on your actual political activity.

There's a really important column about this. I wrote a blog post about it. This was before all of the recent turmoil with COVID. This would have been maybe earlier this year in 2019. there was a good column, I think it was a Jennifer Rubin column in the Washington Post that talked about this issue with Twitter in particular. And it was looking at some Pew research,

some Pew research which said that people who are active on Twitter talking about politics represents less than 1% of the U.S. population. But everyone who lives in D.C. knows that that less than 1% of the population has an incredibly outsized influence on the political activity of sitting politicians and those who are running for national office. You know, if you're running for office, you've got a young staff.

Your staff is on Twitter. It's easy to think about what you're seeing on Twitter. It's like, this is the country. And oh, man, they're upset about this or they're really excited about this. So we've got to react to this. We've got to shift our policies this way. Now you have this sort of tyranny of the minority where you have less than 1% of the population, having this huge influence on what's talked about, what's not talked about,

what policies are pushed, what policies are abandoned, etc. then you begin to get a separation between the wider populace and political activity. That causes obviously a lot of unrest and frustration, etc. So that's why I think it's a double-edged sword. It can really help you get elected. It can help you if you're very good at it, sort of jump ahead of the line in terms of national recognition. But it also seems to have probably way too much influence on the actual political activity that happens. I think as Jennifer Rubin talked about, the old model, like if you're

you're running for president was you just had to meet with a lot of people all over the country, just constantly. You would meet with people. So the conversations you heard with real people, an event after event, plus the local news coverage, which was way more decentralized and decoupled when you didn't have the unifying force of everyone's on the same Twitter feeds, this combination of the local news coverage and the people you were meeting would give you this much more distributed, decentralized wisdom of the crowds type understanding of what people cared about or didn't care about what issues are important,

what issues aren't. And you lose a lot of that when you plug instead into this universal medium that is much less representative of the wider public. And God knows what's going to happen with this election cycle because we've taken out because of COVID the ability to do any of the meeting with people. Like everything you're seeing is basically online. So we're not seeing a robust, let's say robust feedback channels into anyone running for office. The cycle did not have robust feedback channels from the populace. You're seeing a very narrow but powerful thread of thinking. So it's interesting.

You know, I think the Obama campaign showed a much more, back when that was going on, the first campaign at the national level that really leveraged the social internet. I think there was a more hopeful image back then. You know, back then, I think the strategy that the Obama campaign leveraged was one around using social internet tools to try to increase in-person engagement. Like, great, you can use Facebook to try to get more of your friends, not just to come to an event, but to get together. Like, form your own groups. Get together in someone's living room.

Let's, like, raise funds. Let's go knock on doors. It was this promise of using the social internet to actually amplify more real-world valuable behaviors. And then there is a shift at some point where the social internet said, well, you know, let's not do that. Let's just stay within the digital world. And then things got kind of weird as happens when you take something as fundamental as human sociality and try to replicate it with bits and emojis and new rules and weird, powerful technologies. And so we took a slightly dystopian turn there. So it will be interesting to see how this relationship between technology and politics evolves as our culture evolves.

is something I'm definitely trying to keep a close eye on. Let's do one more technology question. This one is from Hope. It's also about social media. She asked, with social media being a crucial part of our social lives, making friends, keeping up to date with events, sharing posts, how can one actively practice deep work without getting distracted? A few quick answers.

Hope, first of all, your working hours should have nothing to do with attention economy tools like social media. when you're working, I'm hoping you're doing time block planning. Your time block planning is probably not going to have blocks in it for social media checking. Those two worlds need not cross. Now, in terms of life outside of work, if you still find social media distracting, I think the question to, you know, how do I prevent myself from being distracted with social media being a crucial part of my social life is don't make social media

a crucial part of your social life. You know, get it off your phone. use it on your computer at certain times. So you have an appointment for when you go on your computer to check what's going on in the groups you're a part of or to get user information from sources that are important to you. You have set times where you do it. You do it on your computer. You have to type your password in from scratch each time.

So there's a little bit of friction. Like a TV show, you have to turn on and switch the channel over to. And that's when you use social media. and you get your value out of it without it being a background default activity that's constantly there as a default, always accessible escape from boredom or discomfort.

Turn it into a TV show. You watch three times a week and you enjoy it, but it doesn't dominate your life. Do not allow your social life to be entirely contained within social media, even in an age of COVID.

You've got to go do things with people. You got to sacrifice time and attention or the social connection is not going to be counted as your mind as being legitimate. There's only so far you can get with text messages, only so far you can get with emojis or comments under Instagram post. Go for walks, go for bike rides, go for hikes, you know, set up your six feet apart chairs, project a movie up on an outdoor screen. You know, whatever you've got to do.

You've got to spend time with real people. You have to join things that are useful. Find ways to be helpful to your community, for example. you know, do not retreat into the world of digital, even when the analog world seems a little bit scary. Social media, if you use it, again, should be like a TV show you really like and you watch it three times a week and it's on your computer

and you get a lot out of it. But it's not like water, something that you're always, like the fish, I meant to say. It's not like water to a fish that's always around you. It's not like air to us, something that you're always breathing. It's not a default activity that you are constantly going back to when you're bored. It's not the full structure of your social life.

It's not where you get your full understanding of the world. You have to downgrade its power in your life. Hope you can have hope for your future if you put social media into its proper place, which is not at the center of your existence, but one of just many things that is used in moderation to enhance your existence. Right, so I appreciate that question.

Why don't we play a quick round now of question roulette? The way this works is, that I randomly select a question I have not seen before and try to answer it on the fly with no preparation. So let me switch over to my browser here. Let me scroll down. This question is from Amir. And here it is. How long do you think Intel organizations embrace deep work? He then elaborates that he works for a large, I think, technology company. And oh, that's interesting. They recently had a session to talk about deep work and promoting it. Well, Amir, I've been thinking a lot about this.

I mean, this is my big new book coming out in March, a world without email. It basically not only makes the argument for a fundamental shift in how we do knowledge work, but lays out some ideas about what that might look like. And that has really pushed me, I think, deep into this world of who is already making shifts? Who's already rebuilding the very nature of office work? to be much more aligned with the ways our brains actually function. And it's starting to happen. I would predict within five years,

we'll see a lot more of it within 10 to 15 years, knowledge work is going to look completely different. And what do I mean by knowledge work is going to look completely different? Well, I think we're going to see what I talk about in the title of that book, a world without email. Not that the technology of email is going to go away. I mean, we're not going to go back to fax machines. we're not going to banish the SMTP email protocol.

But instead, this life of we have one undifferentiated inbox that has a constant incoming delusion messages. And all we do for most of our time is just try to keep up and answer these messages. That's going to be gone in 10 to 15 years for sure. And the reason why I think this is going to happen is it's going to be an S curve. It's going to really accelerate when it starts to accelerate because it's going to make more money for companies. We're just starting to see this happen now.

Like Amir, you're talking about your big for technology company. Microsoft has the word deep work now. It's part of the Microsoft Outlook Suite. They have tools to help with focus time, and they talk about in the tool, in the software, this is to help you get your deep work time together, right? It's in the air. I've talked to at least one well-known CEO

who thinks that remaking knowledge work to really take advantage of the way the mind works best is the moonshot of our generation. I've heard from multiple very well-known brand-name tech CEOs who are real fans of these ideas, and I've talked to them about it. So I think tech is probably going to lead the way. And then once you see a few tech companies figure out how to do this right, they get away from a world of constant communication

and get a lot more productivity out of their workers. And again, I mean that in the very technical economic sense, in the same number of hours of work, the amount of quality output is much higher, then it's just going to boom, right up that aggressive exponential curve. Once we figure out how to do it and see that it makes companies more profitable

and makes employees happier, they don't leave as much, employment's more sustainable, those benefits are so powerful that everyone is going to make the change. I mean, just look at how quickly the open office fad swept through so much of office culture.

It was, began, as like an avant-garde thing that some tech companies were doing to help recruit programmers by showing that they're really disruptive. And within years, you have insurance companies, you know, in the Midwest with open offices. You have biotech companies, pharmaceutical companies, with giant open office pins, right? I mean, trends can move fast when they actually move. So, Amir, five years from now, I think it's going to be common to have workplaces where all this constant unstructured communication and freneticness and meetings all the time. It's not going to be

there 10 to 15 years. It's going to be common. And all it's going to take, hopefully, is just my book. Now, I think my book is, to be honest, is just going to be putting a name and some structure to an inevitable evolution that's already happening. All right. Thanks, Amir. Good question, roulette question. Let's move on now to queries about the deep life. Annie asks, what are some habits you would recommend to pick up from an early age? I would focus on two things, Annie. Reading would be number one. Long-form reading, so sitting there with a book and following the book through to the end,

be it fiction or non-fiction, is basically cognitive calisthenics. That's how we take our Paleolithic brain, which wasn't really evolved for deep abstract thinking, and transform it into something that is. And it's not an easy transformation. I mean, when you learn to read and then do a lot of reading, you're really reconfiguring your Paleolithic brain.

You're basically borrowing segments of your brain that evolve for different purposes and basically pulling them into this world of abstract concepts and mental worlds and mental framework. So reading is our number one bit of training for being able to do powerful things with our brain. And if you can pick up the reading habit early, it has incredibly powerful, positive, academic, and down-the-line, professional advantages. So reading is huge. Second, I would say discipline-driven mastery. So any sort of exposure to, I discipline, with discipline, return to something that's maybe not my favorite thing in the moment.

And because of that, I build up some sort of mastery of something. And through that mastery, I get some pride or self-worth. Now, it could be an instrument. It could be sport. It could be, you know, chess. It could be something artistic. But just getting used to this notion of I get pride out of returning to something that's hard, even if it's not what I really want to do.

But in the long-term look, it led to results that I'm really happy about. That gives you this discipline mindset that's going to serve you through every single stage your life. So reading, discipline-driven mastery, if kids get exposed to that, by the time they get to college age, they're going to have a huge advantage. Alex asks, what tips would you give to a student attempting to develop or cultivate a deep life? Well, Alex, I wrote a lot about this way back when. So before I began writing about the world of work, I used to write exclusively for students. And my blog study hacks was exclusively focused on student life.

That's where the name comes from. And in 2010, I was a postdoc at MIT at the time. I wrote this series on my blog called The Romantic Scholar. This is basically a series of blog post about how to develop a deep life as a college student. Now, you can find this pretty easily just Google, you know, Cal Newport, Romantic Scholar, and you'll find these articles on my blog. But let me just read you, just to give you a sense. I pulled up some old quotes from these posts.

So here was from the introductory post, the Romantic Scholar, from 2010. Here's what I wrote. In a recent post, I outlined the dangers of seeing school as a trial to survive. When you adopt the mindset of suffering now for rewards later, I argued, you run the risk of wallowing in this suffering well beyond graduation, eventually losing sight of what originally motivated these sacrifices. So then, all right, stepping back here for a second, Alex, I then said I have a solution to this problem of students just being stressed and overwhelmed and feeling like they're just suffering because maybe they'll get some benefit later. All right.

Back to what I wrote. I call these strategies the Romantic Scholar approach to student life. This approach is inspired by the Romantic era scientist and their ability to experience the hard work of systematic science as a rewarding aesthetic experience. My goal is to transform your student life into one where you find deep satisfaction, your coursework, and experience frequent moments of wonder. I don't want school to be a grinding process of pre-professional dues pain. It should instead be the core of a life well-lived right now. All right, so stepping back out of the quote, Alex, that was my proclaimed goal for this romantic scholar series on my blog,

is how do you take your student life and make it into something that has moments of wonder, that's satisfying, that's something that you really enjoy. You can read these posts, but what are the big ideas? I went back through and reread these recently. The big ideas from the Romantic Scholar series is, one, how to find enjoyment in difficult work. So I talk a lot in this series about, if you want to enjoy hard work,

you have to make it not hard to do. So what saps our joy about difficult things is not that the work itself is hard, when we have too much of it. And we feel like we're scrambling to get things done. And we have colliding deadlines. We're pulling all-nighters to try to get things due. That will sap your joy from work.

So the Romantic Scholar argues, you know, do less things, start your work earlier, be much more organized about it. You want to get rid of this sort of stress of, I have too much to do and I'll have enough time to get it done. Give yourself more than enough time to get work done. I also was a big proponent in this series about doing work in more adventurous or interesting locations. It's like one of the blog post here

was something like Heidegger with Hefeweisen. And it talked about that classic British tradition of reading and discussing deep ideas over a pint. And I sort of recommended to my college readers, readers who were of age. You'll think about that. Like maybe you're having a ponderance,

while thinking deeply about some big thing. It changed the context. So it's not just this grueling thing. I also talk about working in the woods or going to certain libraries on campus that are particularly aesthetically pleasing. The other big idea from the Romantic Scholar series was finding awe in learning. And so, you know, I talked about, like one of the tactics I talked about along those lines was trying to interleave self-initiated investigations on similar topics into your schoolwork.

This is why you really, you know, at the core of this was you had to do. less. One major, not too many activities, be very organized, have more than enough time to get your work done. That's foundational. But if you have more than enough time to get your work done, then you can also be doing some of your own reading on the topic or going to see speakers in your department on the topic. And you're doing that self-initiated. And you interleave these two things. And then your brain just begins to think of like, well, I'm just interested in this type of stuff. And suddenly having to work on the paper is not like some trial to get through. It's just another time for you to think and get into this material. I talked about having like debate groups. Again,

I don't know why I was really into pubs back then, but I had a post about, you know, debating with friends over drinks. You think about the way again, if you were like a Cambridge student in the early 20th centuries, you would get together at the pub and argue about, you know, Nietzsche's critique of Kant. And it just gave you a sense of intellectual energy and awe about what you were doing. And so those are the two big ideas for a romantic scholar post. So Alex, go back and check those posts, read that series. And in general, you're asking the right question. Student life, especially at the college level, can be an incredibly intellectually rewarding period. It can also be a period that's very satisfying and meaningful just from personal

development. It is very easy to subvert that. It's very easy to fall into a sort of this is a trial to survive type mentality. And there's no reason. That is a self-imposed hardship that does not need to exist. So keep asking this question and keep struggling to find answers. Okay, Brock asks, how do you effectively recharge during breaks from deep work? Two quick things to keep in mind. First of all, if the break is short, so you're working on something hard all afternoon and you just want to take a break to give your brain a breather, the key there is not to change your cognitive context. And in particular, you're What you want to avoid during doing Brock is changing your cognitive context to something that is kind of in the same area as what you're working on, but different.

So what I mean by that is let's say you're working on something hard at work. Like you're trying to write a business strategy memo and you're like, okay, I got to take a breather. What you don't want to do is during that breather, switch your cognitive context over to another work-related thing, but a different work-related thing. So like read and answer and email about an unrelated project. now you're kind of switching to a context that's within the same world, but requires that you pull out different information, and it's going to really start to collide with what you were working on before, make it hard to go back to it.

On the other hand, if you're working on this hard business strategy memo, so I've got to take a break and go for a walk around the block, and you run into a neighbor, and they talk to you about the baseball game. It's such a different cognitive context that it's probably not going to have as much of a negative impact on your ability to return to what you're working on. The second related point here is if you're talking about recharging at a longer time scale, so you had a hard day at work and now you want to recharge this evening so that tomorrow your brain is more rested, or you want to recharge after a hard work week over the weekend.

What's the best way to give your brain a long-term breather? There the answer is high-quality leisure. So you don't need to veg. Vegging doesn't give you any particular advantage. Your brain does not need a rest from activity overall. It just needs variety in that activity. So I think high-quality leisure, intentional activities with your family, with your friends, with skills, with going out there in the world and seeing intention made concrete as you build

things or manipulate things with your hands, these are probably the most recharging types of activities. And so with that in mind, Riley has a related question. What are some less common activities for high-quality leisure? For example, things beyond just art, music, fitness, reading and meditation. So Riley, two things I would say to keep in mind when looking for other options for quality leisure is interaction with other people.

I think we sometimes underestimate the quality nature of a true deep interaction with another person. So that's a great leisure activity. Whether it be like a long phone call with someone or even better going for a walk with someone or a hike with someone and really spending time with someone, that is incredibly quality style activity, even if you're a very long call. you're not, you know, producing a painting or a poem. Deep interaction is deeply rewarding. The other less common idea or something we often overlook when thinking about high quality

leisure is service. So, you know, if you can go and help someone or help your community or do something of use to the greater world, that's incredibly rewarding. It's something we often overlook. We're often more self-focused, like, well, you know, I want to paint this painting or I want to read this thing or I want to learn this musical scale. But if you can volunteer for something that's useful to people you know to your community, incredibly high quality, so keep that in mind. So Q asks the question, how do you teach the deep life to your children? Well, it's a complicated query that has a lot of different elements to it, not all of which I can claim any mastery of, but I will give you my general answer, which is, by example, that has to be

the foundation. You living the deep life is by far the most important things you can do to inculcate that idea into your children. Now, you can then later add occasional exposition. Well, let me explain to you why I do this, why I don't have my phone with me in the house, why I go for these long walks. Why I was so weird about setting up this study in this ritualistic aesthetically pleasing way because, you know, I think the contemplative life is important. You can have the

occasional exposition, but the exposition is meaningless without the demonstration. So, if, for example, you keep your phone with you in the house, always checking it, looking at that text, looking at that news, it doesn't matter what you say. It doesn't matter if you nod

towards my books or make them listen to my podcast. They're going to see what you're doing, and that's what they're a model. On the other hand, if you consistently live the deep life yourself, whether or not you actually articulate to them the frameworks on which you built that life, you're still going to have a very large influence. So there's a lot of specific things we can get into. I'm still trying to figure this out. I have a bunch of kids, but they're not that old. So I'm just in the early stage of trying to figure this out about how you give kids examples and exposure and help them make sense of these different experiences and think about how to go forward in their life, especially as they get

older. But the foundation, the thing I'm most sure about is live by example. Nothing's going to be more influential. Okay, let's do one last question. Sankalp asks, what's the strongest arguments you've heard against your deep life philosophy? Well, first things first, I like this question in general Sankalp because it's within the general spirit of what we've been talking about recently on this podcast, which is if you want a philosophy, to be a foundational aspect of your life,

you have to consider critiques. You've got to consider alternatives. As we learn from Socrates, it is in these dialectical collisions that intellectual roots can actually begin to grow deep. If you have not yet faced critiques or analysis of a particular philosophy, it's not really a philosophy.

It's a preference for what you hope is true. And so good. I'm glad we can do this. exercise. I get a fair amount of critiques and I take them seriously and I think it does help strengthen my work. I mean, I will say the deep life philosophy in general is something that's relatively unobjectionable. I mean, if abstractly speaking, we talk about this idea that you should identify what aspects of your life are important to you and then make sure that you're intentionally doing activities in each of those buckets to help amplify that value. Everyone agrees that's

useful. You can debate about what the bucket should be or what the particular activities to help amplify each bucket should be. But that general idea of being structured and intentional about trying to live the best possible life is something I think we're all on board with. But I can talk more generally about the classes of critiques I hear most frequently for my work and the way that I process or think about those critiques. So I say the first major class of critiques I hear is what I like to call the caveat critique. Now this is not specific to me. This is well known by anyone who does professional advice writing. I've been getting the caveat critique ever since I published my first book 15 years ago. So what is the caveat critique? Well, it applies to advice and it goes something

like this. Okay, you gave this piece of advice right here, but I can think of a circumstance in which that advice would not apply. So I want to tell you about that. The implication, I guess is that you should have added that caveat to the book. Right. So let's say, you know, in my book, I'm talking about, I don't know, something about in one of my early books studying at college in your dorm room at night. You give a caveat critique of a wait a second. There are some students who do not live in the dorm and that advice would not be relevant for them. again, the implication being that maybe then you should say in the book, like, okay,

here are the circumstances where this advice would not apply, and here's how you should modify your advice for those circumstances. I get that critique all the time. I've gotten it through all of my books. I get it through my articles. Every professional advice writer I know gets caveat critiques all the time. So let me let you in on a little secret. Let me kind of pull back the curtain a little bit on professional advice writing.

If you do this for a living, what you learn is caveats make the writing worse. We purposefully do not put a lot of these caveats in our advice writing. We purposefully don't go through the long list of, okay, but this might not work here, and here's how you would modify it. And if you're in this situation, then actually the advice should be run this way. We purposefully don't put a lot of that into our writing because, A, it slows it down, it bogs it down. It makes it a less interesting read.

and B, it's unnecessary. Readers are smart. This is a foundational idea to successful advice writing is that your reader is smart. And your reader knows I'm not in the dorms at night. And so this particular piece of advice doesn't apply to me. So I can either move on or maybe I can take out a key idea from that advice and adapt it to my situation.

I don't need the rider to try to crudely approximate my situation and talk about it in order for me to get useful advice out of it. What you do as an advice writer, if you're good, is you're trying to pitch big ideas and really explain, here's the big idea and the dynamics behind it and why it's going to be useful and why we think it's going to be useful. And then you're giving this tool to your readers. We're very smart and we'll then take this tool and apply it to their life

to build something custom to their circumstances. They don't need the caveat. Caviot will slow them down. So the readers who are often giving the caveat critique, first of all, they're almost never thinking about their own situation. They're just pointing out for someone in this other situation. I would understand what to do here, but they might not. They might not be smart. If you should probably put in their caveat.

But part of the other issue of the caveat critique is that the person giving the critique is often monofocus on this particular caveat. So what they imagine is like it would be the same book except for you mentioned this one circumstance that I really care about. The problem is there's 20 other people giving caveat. critiques with different caveats. So it wouldn't just be the same book with your caveat, it'd be the book with 20 caveats, and then the whole thing would be unreadable, and it fundamentally disrespects the reader. Now, the reason why I think the caveat critique is common is because it's very natural, whereas the way that we write as professional advice writers is not natural.

And what I mean by that is we're very good at one-on-one interaction as a species. And when we do one-on-one interaction, if you're giving advice to someone, you were going to tailor that advice to their circumstance. It'd be very weird if I was talking to a friend of mine who was in college, but didn't live in the dorm rooms. Let me give you advice about how to study in your dorm room. They would say, Cal, that's weird. I mean, why are you talking to me about studying the dorm room?

I mean, I don't live in the dorms. That seems a little unusual, right? So the caveat critique comes from this place of this is how you would give advice to someone that you knew and you imagine, man, if I was talking to this person who's in the circumstance, it would be really uncomfortable if I wasn't giving advice that was better tailored to their circumstance. But advice writing to a large audience to hundreds of thousands of people is a different exercise. And it's very artificial. And there, it's not so personal.

So if my friend is reading a book from me, it's not a conversation with them. It's a collection of ideas that they can deploy as tools in their life. And they'll pull from those ideas what's useful and they'll build a structure in their own life, hopefully that offer some improvement and they don't need it to be custom fit and they don't expect it to be custom fit. So anyways, it's not a major thing. It's just an interesting thing that a lot of people don't know about, but advice writers talk about all the time. Putting in a lot of caveats about how advice adjusts to different particular situations makes the writing worse and as we largely see it as disrespecting the reader. Most readers don't want it. Most readers don't need it.

All right, another common but very unrelated type of critique I get from my work is what I think of as the split between personal and systemic improvement. So if you're considering improvement activities, roughly speaking, there's two big categories. There's personal improvement activities where you focus on changing things about your own life that make your life better. Systemic improvement activities, on the other hand, is about focusing on supporting large, scale change that could make life better for lots of people. So where this has come up in my work is, I would say, in the last two or three years, and in particular my work on techno-criticism. So let's think about social media in particular.

The personal approach to social media might include advice like take it off your phone, only access it on your computer, be careful about what services you use, this type of advice, where the systemic approach might be about legislate. you're trying to push through to control the social media platforms, like maybe antitrust legislation, or legislation about whether a social media platform should be considered a publisher or an aggregator, etc., like legislative public policy style solutions.

Now, a critique I got, you know, I would say commonly in the aftermath of publishing digital minimalism was this focuses, your book focuses on the personal, we are afraid that if you focus too much on the personal, you're going to take people's attention off of the systemic, or you will reduce their ardor for tackling the systemic. That if you're not emphasizing the systemic changes that we as journalists happen to really care about, then they're not going to be emphasized in people's minds.

They're not going to get done. I think this zero-sum mentality here is misguided. Focusing on the personal, saying, I want to get my life together. I want to take the things that in my day-to-day existence are causing harm, and I want to eliminate them, and I want to take the things that in my day-to-day existence are providing satisfaction or resilience or meaning, I want to amplify those things. Taking those steps, getting after it within your own life does not diminish your ardor for systemic change. It actually gives you

a much stronger foundation on which to participate in those activities. If you want to gather an army of foot soldiers that push for big change, you want the foot soldiers who also are inward looking and trying to get their own life together because they are going to be much more resilient, they're going to be much more effective

than just trying to grab someone whose life is in chaos. And just hoping that you can peak their emotions and get a temporary outpouring of outrage in which you'll get some support from them in the moment. Maybe they'll join in a Twitter pile on or something like that

in the moment before they get lost in the scrum of other types of despair and numbing difficulties going on in their life. That is not a resilient foot soldier. It's not a great strategy for gathering an army to make long-term change. You're almost always better with the people who have added some discipline and are in general in an improvement mindset. I mean, I think it's contagious. Once you're in an improvement mindset, even if you're starting on looking at really prosaic

aspects of your personal life. Once you're in an improvement mindset, you begin to think of improvement as something just possible. You become less cynical. You become more optimistic. You become more driven. Someone who is making positive changes is someone who wants to keep making positive changes. Someone who has completely overhauled their personal digital life is much more willing to get deeply involved with how do we have to overhaul large digital companies than someone who's completely drowning in screens. Now, if you'll excuse a little bit of cynicism on my own part, you know, I think partially where this comes from is that a lot of journalists

are completely overwhelmed by screens. They're completely overwhelmed and driven and made miserable by Twitter, but can't help it. They have to be on it for professional reasons. They have to be on it for personal reasons. They have to be on it because they can't help but be on it. And they don't want to really necessarily have to confront that. It'd just be better if they're like, no, no, no, I am the warrior for, you know, the, the muckraking journalist that's saying, we got to lead this charge to pass this legislation

that's going to to rein in these excesses of Facebook. And that's the key. And I'm playing a big part in that key and I'm comfortable doing that because that's much better perhaps than the key being, this isn't sustainable what I'm doing. I got to look in the mirror and say, man, all this tech I'm using is making my life miserable. And it's complicated and difficult to figure out how I could possibly disentangle myself from this. So I'd rather that not be what needs to be done. I'd rather what needs to be done is just that people like me need to write articles that rally people and I'm the hero. And that's a cynical take.

And I'm sure that's not true in most cases. But let's just throw those out there as long as we're as long as we're briefly indulging. briefly indulging that path. And I think another issue that sometimes amplifies this personal versus systemic split is that for those who do live their life on Twitter, there's very strong sort of consensus enforcement mechanisms

in that digital world. This is what matters on this issue. This is what the solution is on this issue. We will punish those who disagree. That has a murder. as the as the sort of Lord of the Flies discourse environment on tools like Twitter. So if you're a journalist, you're in that world. These consensuses are being enforced.

They've emerged and are being enforced about this is what matters for tech. This is what we have to do. You either need to show your support from this or you either join another team. If you're on the other team, then you're part of the war we're going to do between the teams. And so it can be disconcerting for someone to come along who is outside of that framework. and I say, no, I want to focus on this. It's just, it's like cognitive dissidents. Like, you're not allowed to do that.

I went and talked to the, you know, metaphorical digital chief in here. And controlling your personal social media habits is not, that's not part of our charter. I'm looking at the rulebook here. That's not what we're talking about. That's not one of our team's planks. And so that could be really disconcerted. I mean, honestly, there's some interviews I did where there was, I would, I would characterize it as honest confusion.

Why aren't you talking about these systemic issues in the book? It really came from a place of like, are you allowed to not talk about it? And yet, I mean, maybe you're allowed to not talk about if you're on the other team, the bad team that we fight. But like, are you allowed to just be a neutral observer who's just not talking about what we decided online we were supposed to? Now, again, this is a cynical diversion. obviously this is not fully explain this reality and it doesn't apply to most people. It's just what's the fun of having a podcast if you can't pull some of these threads to slightly exaggerated places just for the fun of doing it. So let me try to get this shit back onto a more well, I don't know, navigated route here.

So Sankalp, you asked about criticisms I commonly get. The first thing I mentioned was the caveat critique. This is not specific to me. All advice writers get it. Our instinct from personal interactions tells us you have to make sure that your advice applies to the specific circumstances of the person you're talking to. But when you write for a mass audience, that actually makes it worse. So you talk more in generalities. You give an idea.

You highlight that idea through assorted examples that are not comprehensive. You underline to key dynamics. You trust the reader. The reader is smart. The reader will apply that tool once learned to their life. in a way that makes sense for their life. The second critique I talked about is the systemic versus personal,

which is this notion of if you focus on a personal improvement in an area, you're going to distract from the systemic improvements that have to be made. And I argued that those are not zero sum. And if anything, actually, people who are in that mindset of improvement, which is best jump started in the personal sphere, are better and more efficacious in the world of systemic change.

So they help each other. as opposed to diminishing each other. And then finally I went down my semi-conspiratorial, cynical thread where I said also, I think some of the journalists who are upset about the personal approach, they just don't want to be confronted with the reality that they use Twitter too much. And also it's just honestly,

honestly confusing for them to see someone who's not on a well-defined team that is also not following the carefully, enforce Twitter consensus on what issues you're allowed or not allowed to talk about it. It literally is confusing to people. Don't know if that's true, but that's fun. All right. So that's my summary.

Good question, Sankalp. I appreciated this opportunity to run my own ideas through this sort of dialectic and try to show where my deep roots behind these philosophies or under these philosophies, what has helped them grow. And I hope that you continue to do this own exercise for yourself on my ideas or any other ideas that you're considering integrating into your approach to life. So that's all the time we have for today. Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. If you want to submit your own text-based questions, sign up for my mailing list at Calnewport.com.

I will send out a survey for new questions probably in the next two weeks. If you want to submit an audio question, go to speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. If you want to help the podcast, as always, subscribe, rate, or leave a review. view and until next time as always stay deep.