Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 21: Taming Writer's Block, the Exaggerated Importance of a Digital Presence, and the Miseries of Digital Living | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: August 23, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions on taming writer's block, the exaggerated importance of digital presence, and the miseries of digital living, among many other topics. I also play some question roulette and give an update on the current status and ambitious future plans for my Deep Work HQ.I 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. You can submit audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportPlease 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:WORK QUESTIONS* Using music to help focus [1:58]* Limits on deep work quantities [3:07]* Teaching a team to value depth [7:36]* Taming writer's block [16:14]* Deciding whether to pursue an MBA [18:58]* Measuring success in academia [21:37]* Taking breaks from time blocking [25:03]QUESTION ROULETTE [28:47]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS* Thoughts on iPads + Apple pencil as productivity booster [35:52]* Overcoming the paradox of choice with productivity apps [38:17]* YouTube detoxing [43:12]* Organizing academic research [44:59]* The false necessity of building a digital presence [47:19]WHAT I'M UP TO * A closer look at Deep Work HQ [53:08]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS* Instilling focus in kids [1:02:22]* On the value of my hyper-focused fitness [1:05:55]* Conversing with distracted people [1:12:50]* Managing multiple projects [1:15:44]* Unsolicited Sermon: The miseries of a life lived on screens [1:19:53]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. Now, in addition to our, as always, excellent batch of questions, we will today play a round of question roulette, and by popular demand, we will do a segment later in the show where I give you an update on some of the things going on in my life at the moment. Now, if you have suggestions like this, feedback for the show, you're an advertiser that's interested in advertising in the show. The right way to get in touch with me is interesting at calnewport.com. I read all those emails. I will warn you in advance. I can't answer most of them, but I do read them all. So please, I do appreciate the feedback. I do appreciate the suggestions.

I do appreciate the advertiser interest. Now, of course, if you have a question that you hope to be answered on the podcast itself. There, the right thing to do is to sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. That's where I send out my survey every one of the two months that collects the questions that I answer on this podcast. There's just too many questions that come in for me to use email for that purpose. I think we've collected something like 1,200 questions since May. So if you want to submit a question, just sign up for the mailing list.

You will see a survey sent out on a semi-regular basis. but if you want to send me some notes, interesting at Caldenuport.com, gets that done. All right, so I'm excited about these questions. I'm excited about those segments. As always, please subscribe, rate, or review. That does matter. And with that, let us get started with work questions.

We'll start with an easy one. Gene asks, can music help me focus at my desk? Gene elaborates that she works in an open office. and uses earphones play music to help drown out distractions. Yeah, music can help you focus because it can block out other less predictable sounds, like conversation or sudden loud noises, that will break your concentration and could potentially cause some network switching and reduce your cognitive capacity.

So music can help well. The warning that I always give, Gene, is that you have to practice with the specific type of music you plan to use. So almost any type of music can be used to block out distractions once your mind is used to that type of music as background noise. When you first put on a certain type of music in your headphones, you might find yourself distracted by the music, wanting to listen to the music, wanting to listen to the lyrics. That's okay.

Practice. Keep working with that music on again and again, and you will get used to it. So with a little bit of practice, I think that is a good strategy. Ellis asks, is there a maximum amount of deep work that people can do in a week? Well, Ellis, first of all, I would not focus on the week as the relevant unit of time here. In essence, each day you reset and your mind is ready to do the work of that day, especially if you got a sufficient amount of sleep. We have plenty of examples of people in jobs that traditionally require lots of concentration that do it day after day after day after day. So trying to add up a total amount of deep work for the week and say, was that too much, is probably not the right scale at which to be measuring this quantity.

I would focus on the day. Is there a maximum amount of deep work you can do in a given day? And there the answer is clearly yes. But it's hard to get a specific number because it depends on the intensity of the depth. and the type of activity that you're focusing on. Now, I often talk about this well-known study looking at violin players in Germany, cited by Malcolm Gladwell and outliers,

that had a lot of insights about deliberate practice and expert skill acquisition. And one of the things that they found from this study is that the really good elite-level violin players practiced about four hours a day. And they tended to do it in two chunks. Two intense hours break, two intense hours. So you can think about four hours as perhaps a natural upper limit

if you're doing full out intense deep work. Because you have to remember, professional musicians practicing achieve a level of focus, an intensity of focus that's well beyond what most people are used to. If you go back to my 2012 books so good they can't ignore you, I spend some time in my chapter on deliberate practice with a professional guitar player, and I catalog and gruesome detail the intensity with which this guitar player, his name was Jordan, the intensity with which this guitar player focused,

the intensity with which he had to concentrate to actually improve his skills at the guitar. I talk about famously in that book, and when I say famously here, I mean famous to me. I'm not quite sure for what audience this is famous, but okay. And in the lore of my own mind, I famously talk about how he would forget to breathe. That's how intensely he was focusing when he was practicing. So yes, if you are completely locked in, probably about four hours a day, what most people do, let's say in an office setting, most knowledge workers, what they count as deep work is probably, I don't know, 40% of that intensity level, which means there's probably no real practical limit.

for most people doing concentrated work in the office setting, you could probably spend most of your day doing it and would be fine. Practically speaking, you can't because there's other things you have to do. There's shallow tasks you have to do to keep the lights on. The coordination, the administration, you have to answer your boss. There's timesheets that have to be submitted. Practically, you can't do deep work all day. Cognitively, you probably could.

I mean, unless you're really dialed in and really focusing intensely, like that guitar player, like those professional violin players in the German study. Unless you're doing that, your concern is probably not over deep working in a day. Your concern is probably getting enough deep work and getting those sessions sufficiently deep. That being said, you know, Ellis,

there's going to be days where you might have a much smaller limit for deep work. You might be tired. The project might be, for whatever reason, particularly exhausting. You might just have so much going on, so urgent that there is no way to avoid persistent self-initiated cognitive context, which is you find it really hard to get depth done. You are, and I'm just saying this hypothetically, maybe you're at home in a small office and there's multiple young kids running around and yelling.

It might not be the best setting. Might not be the best setting for doing depth. So there's a lot of reasons why you might have a lower limit for deep work in a given day, but basically I would say doing too much deep work is probably the least of your worries. That's not exactly what I would be thinking about unless you're a professional musician in which place four hours is going to be your limit.

Henry asks, how can you encourage deep work in your team at work? He then provided an elaboration on his particular setting. I'm going to read this elaboration because I think context helps. So Henry explains, I'm a teacher and head of department managing a small team. I've noticed a lot of email back and forth late at night and at weekends. Colleagues spend a lot of time communicating on WhatsApp and holding conversations via email. There is not as much space for deep work as I feel would benefit the departments and the students,

but colleagues are not inclined to change their habits. So Henry, I have a couple suggestions. Number one, vocabulary really matters. I honestly believe that the biggest contribution of my book Deep Work was actually just introducing the term deep work. When you don't have this ontology of different types of work efforts, then just work is work. And you're either hustling or you're not, you're either getting after it or you're lazy. And that can easily lead to a place where, again, you're up all night doing emails, you're doing WhatsApp all the time because work is work and there's a lot going on and I'm bouncing back and forth.

What about this? Checking on this. Let's jump on a call. Let's zoom. What's going on over here? And you just feel busy and you feel like you're doing what you should be doing because there's a lot of activity going on. But once you have the term, deep work is this, shallow work is that. Both are important, but they're different. Now you can suddenly say, well, how much of the deep work am I doing? And if you look around and say very little, our team is doing very little, now you can understand that there's a problem. Again, you don't recognize there's a problem if you don't have this vocabulary

because you say, what's wrong? My team is, they're busy. They're working hard. They're getting after it. What's the issue? But when you say, well, what are they doing? You say, well, this is almost all shallow. Suddenly you say, okay, I think there's an issue.

We probably should not be doing just all shallow work. And now you have a foundation for change. So how do you make that change? Tracking and reacting is one thing I often recommend. So once you know the difference between deep work and shallow work, measure. How much deep work are we doing? How much shallow work are we doing?

And if you don't like the numbers you see, now you have something to actually nudge. So you can say, okay, how do we react to what we tracked? Well, maybe we need to change something about our culture. Maybe everyone needs a deep work session in the team that's on the calendar. Everyone knows about it. It's three hours long. Half the team does it in the morning. Half the afternoon.

We all do it in the morning. We alternate days. However, you do it. Or perhaps we need deep work days. Monday and Fridays we have like a check-in meeting at three or something, but we're completely locked in until three, no communication allowed, whatever you want to try. But once you're actually tracking, now you have something to react to. Let's move these numbers.

Now, again, you can't track until you have the vocabulary, so this is all hooks together. You have the vocabulary, then you track, then you react, you can make culture changes. And Henry, I'll tell you, I hear this time and again examples of people saying, the culture of constant communication and distraction in my company is entrenched and it will never change. No one wants to change. They say things like you just said in your question, my colleagues are not inclined to change their habits. But you give the term and you track, suddenly massive changes happen. It completely catches people off guard.

I hear this story time and again. Like, well, people were very much willing to make changes to their habits. It's just you need some structure in which to make those changes. It's just not enough to say, I don't know, I think we're on WhatsApp too much. Let's do that less. People say, well, what's going to happen to all that work? But again, if you have more structure, here's what deep work is, here's what shallow work is. Deep work's important.

Let's measure it. My God, we're doing almost none of it. Huh. Maybe we should try to get at least this much going on. How would we do that? Oh. Let's not do meetings until after 11. Let's shut down and say no one answer an email after 5 or whatever it is.

Once you're tracking, you can react. Finally, I would say email specific. Every time you have an email, you have to answer. Ask yourself this question. What's the underlying process that this email represents? What's the underlying process going on here that this email is helping to move along? Is this a brainstorming process? Is this a recurring type of report that we have to get out?

Is this a decision-making process? Is this answering questions from student process? What is it? If you had to generalize, this is the process that this email is helping to move along, you can then answer the key follow-up question, which is, well, what's the best way to tackle this process? Now, sometimes the answer will be just shooting off an email because some of these processes are things that have,

happen rarely and are easily dispatched with a single message. But on the other hand, a lot of these processes, once you actually step back and say what is represented by this email, what's the best way to do it, it becomes clear that, well, just ad hoc back and forth communication digitally is pretty inefficient. And there's probably better ways to do this. You know, maybe we want to use another tool. Maybe we want to track this in a spreadsheet. Maybe we have a Google forum that goes into a spreadsheet that we have a standing meeting

it's just on Fridays and it's 20 minutes long and we go through the whole thing and we make assignments. Or we use a ticketing system. Or something with a Trello board where we assign this work or whatever it is. The point is, once you actually start switching to process-oriented thinking, a lot of the back-and-forth communication that is taking up your email and therefore taking up your cognitive resources can be moved into a more structured systems. It takes a little bit of time up front. literally in the moment it's always quicker to try to play email obligation ping pong

how do I get this email out of my inbox and therefore off of my list of responsibilities as quickly as possible let me just send the follow-up question back to the person let me forward it to this peer and write thoughts question mark right just we're playing obligation ping pong but it doesn't scale because everyone else is playing it to and all those balls get hit back to us again and then it's hitting the balls all day long so yeah it's it's quickest in the moment just to dispatch the message, get it off of your radar as quickly as possible, but it's going to come back and it's going to come back with a vengeance. So if you instead say no, let me take two minutes and really think, what is the process that this email is a part of?

Is there a way to do this process that is better? And by better, I mean more consolidated and therefore induces less cognitive switches. I mean, I think the absolute key metric for a knowledge work process, if you somehow could put EG monitors on the brains of everyone in your team, and you could correlate what you were measuring with what was going on in their computers or something like this, right? In the ideal world, if you could actually measure how many times of this person's cognitive context have to shift to deal with this process. And if it's, you know, there's 15 emails were involved that arrived haphazardly

and had to be responded to pretty quickly. That cognitive shift counts can be very, very high. If on the other hand you have a process where it all goes into a spreadsheet and you have this 20-minute meeting at the end of the week and you deal with it, that 20 minutes might seem like a pain, but you maybe do one context shift, right? Like you don't even have to think about it except for those 20 minutes. You're probably ending up way on top.

So just to summarize, start with vocabulary. That's the foundation. If you don't know that deep work is different from shallow work, then there is nothing to do except be busy and you're not going to have success. Two, once you know the difference, track and react. You think your colleagues aren't inclined to change their habits, but that's because they don't know why to change their habits or why there'd be a benefit. Once you have something clear, a number,

we're tracking this. It should be higher. You'd be surprised by the amount of changes that you might be able to induce. And three, for email in particular, keep asking, what's the process, what's the process? Could we do it better? repeat that for a few weeks, repeat that a few dozen times. You can have an order of magnitude reduction in both the number of messages and the stress induced by your inboxes.

Carol asks, do you ever or have you ever suffered from Riders Block? What tips do you have for overcoming it? Well, Carol, the way I deal with Riders Block is that I basically think about my normal state as a writer as being what other writers might call writer's block. Right? So I think the issue is not writer's block. The issue is this binary opposite, this notion that there's a normal state in which things are flowing, this idea that there's a muse.

And the muse gets you excited and inspired and you fall into a Mihaly, Chiksykentmihai style flow state, and it's just you're rock and rolling and the words are rolling, and that this is the normal state. And if you're not in that state, you're blocked. and it's a problem. I just got rid of that normal state as some sort of goal. I got rid of that normal state as something that I ever expect to experience. And that made all the difference. To me, writing is work. What makes writing hard work? It's actually the generation of the things you want to write down. And so when I think about writing, I think of it as just fighting ideas,

thinking it through. This idea is not right. Let me polish this idea. Let me try it in this form. I don't quite like it in this form. Writing it poorly saying this isn't really clicking. That's just as important as polishing something that does click. Stumbling through ideas that don't work is just as important as having the ideas that do. It all leads you to the same place. It's all part of the efforts you have to do. It's all the time in the wait room that's necessary to compete in the NBA. We're going to mix the metaphors here. So that's my advice, Carol.

Don't think about writer's block as a problem. And a period when you have no blocks at all is being the steady state you hope for. You know, a lot of artists talk about the Chuck Close quote, inspiration is for amateurs. And he's absolutely right. Flow states are great, but they're really,

that's really consistent flow states are really the domain of athletes and musicians. Right? Flow states are really consistently show up in places where it's much more physical. The activity is much more physical and structured and well defined. You don't get them as often in creative work. even though we think you would. Muses are overrated. You occasionally get insights from muses about an idea,

but then it's still hard work to develop it. So that's what I would say. Make writer's block be the normal state and say, great. Feeling writer's block trying to overcome writers block is not a problem. It's what it means to be a writer. So it's not going to make your life easier, but you're going to fret less about the realities of your profession.

Thomas asks, what criteria would you consider when does, deciding to do an MBA or not. Thomas, I'll give you the same advice that I often give on this podcast about going to graduate school for a master's or PhD program, which is my recommendation is that you should get a graduate degree like an MBA if and only if there is a specific position that you want to try to get that resonates with you, that you have strong evidence for that in order to get that position, you will need an MBA from a school of the caliber in which you're able to get into

and get an MBA from. That is, a degree like an MBA, just like a master's degree, should be something that you deploy because you're trying to unlock a specific goal and you know you have evidence that this is the right way to unlock that goal. The thing you want to avoid is going to get a degree like an MBA because you just generically feel like it will be useful, that it will generically open up options. You can't really pin down what particular options, but just seems like you'd be someone who's more hireable. That's just using school as a stalling tactic. That's just using school because professional life is hard. Figuring out careers is hard. In school, all due respect to students, is much easier than actual work. Not going to help you. So here's the job I want to get

for where I am here to that job. Requires an MBA from the caliber of school I can get the NBA from. The caliber of school caveat is really important as well. I think it's tempting to say, okay, I know like an MBA is important if I want to move up whatever to this next level and this type of job. And hey, look, here's like an online only MBA. That looks really convenient. I really want that to, I really want to do that because it seems tractable. So let me do this online only MBA. But you have to make sure get the hard evidence.

Will this job you're looking for treat the online only MBA the same as if you actually are at Stanford Business School. You don't get the evidence. Don't ignore the stuff you don't want to hear. Graduate degrees are very useful, but they have to be deployed incredibly pragmatically. This degree from this type of program will get me this job. If you don't have those answers, don't rush off to spend the money involved, if it's an MS or MBA program, or the years of your productive professional life involved, if it's a science-based PhD program, which of course doesn't cost you money, but it does cost you time. Before you rush off to do that, spend the time to gather the evidence.

This is what I want to do. This degree from here is going to unlock it. I like that. Let's get after it. Sindri asks, In a recent episode, you present a simple formula for how to succeed in academia, publish good papers on topics that people care about. What is the good algorithm for understanding what projects people care about?

Well, Sindri, in the academic context, The right algorithm is citations. If people are excited about a paper, if people are citing a paper, if people are extending your work, then it is a good paper. If they're not, it's not. Secondary to citations would be publication quality,

a venue quality, I should say. So like in computer science, we don't use journals. We actually use competitive peer-reviewed conferences, which then publish their proceedings. proceedings like a journal. Same idea is just we have a quicker turnaround time because it's a fast-moving field. Some conferences and some fields are very competitive and some aren't. So being in the more competitive conferences is a signal that the work is good because it's very hard to get the papers into that conference. But all of that is subordinated to the importance of citations. If people

are following up on your work, it's good. And if they're not, it's not. As I talked about in that past episode, that was the results of that research study, not very rigorous, but the research study I ran where I took groups of young academics who had the same advisors, the same PhD advisors, so their training was the same. I split them into two groups, those that had a very fast trajectory in their career and those that did not, and then I looked at every quantitative value I could find to assess their careers and tried to figure out what was the difference between the rising stars who moved very quickly and those who struggled that either did not get tenure or got it later. And the number one differentiating factor in this sort of informal analysis was number of citations

of their top five most cited papers. Right. So that's the algorithm. It's work that people want to build on. Almost nothing else matters. More generally, regardless of what your field is, you should try to figure out what is the equivalent algorithm. What is the number that maybe you don't want this to be true, but the number that actually measures how valuable the thing you're producing really is. It's worth learning what that value is, measuring what that value is, and fighting to improve that value. Sometimes it's not obvious. Sometimes it's very obvious. Sometimes it's as simple as, well, how many people are buying the product you're selling. Other times it could be a lot more subtle. But having that no-nonsense answer of this is what really matters, and therefore this is how

well I'm actually doing is critical. As I talk about all the time, when you're not measuring the hard truth about how valuable your work is or how well you are doing in your profession, when you don't measure the hard but real truth, you're going to default to measuring things that you want to matter. You're going to default to activities that you want to be important. And then you're just rolling the dice as to whether or not you're going to make progress. So if you're an academic, cindry, citations, who's building on your work, who's extending your work, who's citing your work. And if you're in another field, figure out your equivalent of citations. Tracking the right thing, you can really accelerate the trajectory of your professional

progress. All right, let's do one more work question. Voker asks, do you ever let go of structuring your time deliberately? He's referring to time block planning, my sort of preferred way to control your time. It is the last of the three-step productivity process, I suggest, the last step where you have capture, configure, control. The control is time block planning, and this is where you give every minute of your workday a job. Voker is right to note out that this is exhausting.

Running a day on a time block schedule requires a lot more concentration than using the list reactive method, where you just react to emails and slack and occasionally try to make progress on to-do list. It also can be stressful, right? I was talking to my wife about this last night. There's a stress to time block planning because, as I often say, stress and work does not come from having hard things to do. Stress and work comes from having things to do on a timeline

and realizing that you're probably not going to hit your timeline. Stress is not having something that's too hard. Stress is having too many things for the time allotted. And time block scheduling can induce these many moments of stress because you have these self-imposed deadlines that you're trying to hit. And as it gets more and more difficult for you to hit it, or as it becomes more and more clear that you might not hit it, it can induce stress.

So it's really hard. So Vokerts all to say it's really hard. Now, all those things that make time block planning hard is also why you get two to three X more work done in a given day versus someone who's using the LIS reactive method. So there is real advantages to this difficulty, but it is difficult. So do I ever let go? Do I ever take breaks from it?

All the time. First of all, as I emphasize, do not time block plan your personal life. It's just too much. Keep this reserved for your working day. Don't time block plan your weekends. That is a good time to recharge. And then occasionally, yes, take breaks from it. You know, look, I have a day that maybe there's just a bunch of meetings,

and I just am going to give into it, do the meetings, and not try to do anything else. Or I'm tired today or feeling under the weather. I'm not going to time block plan. I'm going to go back to a simpler method, like the MIT method, the most important things of, most important thing method, where you write down, these are the three or two things that I really have to get done today. And if you can get those two or three things done, then you consider the day a success. You know, that's a much more simpler method.

It's far inferior to time block planning in terms of your ability to keep in control over complicated and urgent streams of obligations to get a lot done. But hey, it's better than nothing. So maybe some days you say that's what I'm going to do. The key has been very clear. This is a binary. It's a time block planning day or it's not. Don't do sort of halfway time blog planning.

Don't kind of do time block planning but not really stick to your schedule. That's worse than doing none at all. So I would say keep a very clear binary. Either you're locked in the time blocking or you're taking a definitive break from time blocking and reaping all of the recharging or relaxation benefits that can give. Just don't go in between. Don't go in between.

Halfway time block planning. It's going to dilute your practice. It's going to confuse your practice. It's going to be frustrating. Don't do it. Either be all in or be all out. So take breaks, fucker, but make those breaks clear.

All right, so let's leave it there for now with work questions. And before moving on the technology, let's play a quick round of questions. The idea here is simple. I select a question at random from the submitted question, something I have never seen before, and I do my best to answer it on the fly. So let's switch over here.

All right, so today's randomly selected question roulette question comes from Dan. And here it is. Many top athletes have psychological coaching to help them perform at their peak through techniques such as mindfulness or visualization. Do you have any thoughts on how psychological training could translate into knowledge workers.

Well, Dan, you might not be aware, but actually this type of coaching is incredibly common in knowledge work, especially for high-performing entrepreneurs and high-performing executives at large organizations. So people where they really have to perform, where it's not just, hey, if I'm on, maybe I'll get some promotions. For people where it's like, if I'm not on, my billion-dollar company is going to have its stock price fall. For people who say if I'm not on, the company that supports my entrepreneurial venture which supports my family could fall off the razor's edge and we could be out of luck, right?

So for people where performance really matters, they use coaches all the time. They're called executive coaches typically. Sometimes they're called leadership coaches. I know a lot of these coaches because a lot of them also for obvious reasons right about these topics because they do it all day long. And I think it should be way more common. So what do they do? Well, they help people with psychology. They help people with tactics. How are you organizing your day? They help them with leadership. Are you really reaching your potential as a leader? They help them as being a source of accountability. Hey, you said this thing's important. You doing it? Why not? I know it's hard. Everything's hard. Get after it, right? So they help in that way as well. And they help people

clarify, which again is complicated. What matters, what doesn't? For you, for your career, for your business. Are you doing the things that really matter? This industry sector is really taking off because I think it really is important. And I think there's a broader point here lurking. One of the reasons why coaching is so important in knowledge work and it's becoming more important

is because so much about this sector is so haphazard. So much of the sector is, hey, welcome to the job. We have an email address. for you here, associated with your name. Here's your shared calendar. So we'll send invites for meetings and let's rock and roll. And people just roll with it and they don't know what to do. And so they just try to be busy and they answer a lot of emails.

And they jump in a lot of meetings and they're all over the place and they stay up till two in the morning or four in the morning because there just seems to be a lot of stuff coming in and they can't really keep up with it. And it's just chaos. There's very little structure. There's very little best practices. there's very little focus on here's what you should do as a knowledge worker to be better at being a knowledge worker.

And so it's chaos and it's haphazard. And so some people bring in their own coaches to say, let's make sense of that chaos, let's get rid of this haphazardness, and they have huge advantages. So Dan, look into it. There's coaches at all sorts of different levels and all sorts of different price points.

I think it's a fantastic investment. And one I would recommend, I think it's a trend that is growing within the knowledge sector. And I think, as I emphasize, that it also points out a much larger problem about the haphazardness of this sector that we need to solve. All right, another successful round of question roulette. Again, you've made this. My readers have made this roulette board, one of the least interesting roulette boards in our metaphorical concedo because there really are very few losing squares on this roulette board. almost every question we randomly pull up is good

because almost every question that you submit me is good. So as always, I tip my cap. All right, let's do some technology questions. Vlad asks, what do you think about iPad and the iPad and Apple Pencil combination in a pure productivity sense? So for those who don't know, an Apple Pencil is a rubber-tipped stylus that you can use with your iPad to write on your iPad. I don't know exactly how it works,

but what you get from it is two things. It separates what's happening with that stylus from just your normal touch with your hand. So even if your hand is like resting on the iPad, if you're using the Apple Pencil, it doesn't register your hand as clicking or selecting. It just registers the pencil. And it's really good at variable force.

So like if you're drawing with it, you can do thin lines to thicker lines. It really does sort of behave like a real pencil. Now, Vlad, it's funny that you ask this question. I literally just set up an iPad and Apple Pencil earlier this week. So it's something that is on my mind. Now, there's two reasons why I did it. The first, I think, is specialized and not that relevant to most people,

which is the fact that I'm a college professor. Georgetown is starting their classes online in the fall. I'm teaching algorithms. Algorithms is something that I typically teach at the whiteboard. So without a real whiteboard, I'm going to use my iPad and Apple Pencil. I can share it. I screen share the iPad on which I'm taking notes, and then I can use it as a shared screen in Zoom.

So my students who are attending my lecture during Zoom will see my Apple iPad whiteboard. Taking up their full Zoom screen with just me in the corner with the video stream and then I can actually draw on my pad like it would on the whiteboard. That's the proximate reason for why I got it, But I've also seen in a more general productivity sense, I have seen people do cool things with it.

And that is also why I was excited about this solution. So one example is I have a colleague, real brilliant theoretician with which we've been working on a very cool research project. It's sort of a mathematical question that's very interesting. Has it been looked at much before? A little bit of results on it before, but we've sort of blown those away. But we've been having these Zoom meetings. And what's really cool is we have these Zoom meetings.

as we have these Zoom meetings, he shares screens of his iPad. He uses great notes, which is like a note-taking program where you write with your Apple pencil on the iPad. It gives you grid paper, but you have a notebook. You have notebooks. So when you fill a page, so like a screen of your iPad, you can just swipe over and you have a fresh page in that same notebook. And if you want to go back to what you're looking at before, you just swipe back. And so as we have these meetings, we're just filling in. He's just filling in this virtual notebook. Okay, let me show you my idea and you'll sketch it and, you know, this is, this work we're doing, it involves communication complexity. So there's a lot of, I don't know if, I don't know if you know anything. Most people probably don't know a lot

about communication complexity. But there's a lot of drawing of arrows and some sketching and, you know, it's whatever. It's well suited for pin and paper. I think draws through, let me explain to you this proof. But if we have to go back, oh, what do we talk about last week? It's in the same notebook. We just scroll back. Oh, there's, the notes for that. So like we have, it's like a whiteboard that we've been working at in which every whiteboard page has been saved. And that seemed like that could boost productivity. So I'm interested in that. And then also I have classically seen like when I'm at conferences or workshops. There's several of my colleagues. One of the things we do a lot of is review papers.

And several of my colleagues really use this combination of tools to do that. So I mean, just a quick insider look into academic computer science. As you get more known, you join what are known as program committees for conferences. As I mentioned earlier in the podcast, competitive peer reviewed conference proceedings replace journals in computer science. If you're on the program committee, you're reviewing papers. Do they get into our conference and therefore get published in these proceedings? So it's a really important job.

But anyways, you get a lot of papers to review. I have seen a lot of colleagues. They'll load the PDFs of the papers into a program like Notability on their iPad, and then they'll mark it up as they go along. So they'll read the paper. They can highlight sections and add notes. Interesting. I don't understand this, et cetera, et cetera. And they can do this wherever, right? So like we're in a conference and the current session's boring or you're at lunch or whatever because you just have it with you all the time on the plane wherever. And then when it comes time

to write the review, they sort of have these marked up versions of the paper all saved in the same place. I thought that was an interesting productivity use as well. So I guess my answer is Vlad. Like, it's not a magic bullet, but I have seen in the academic fields where I am, I've seen a lot of interesting deployments of tablets with pencils that capture my attention. Basically, it simulates what you can do with regular paper, but it saves it and you can share it and you can share it in a remote sense and you can share it between machines. So I'm optimistic or I guess I would say maybe cautiously curious about the various ways that things like an iPad plus an Apple pencil might give interesting productivity boost.

Now then again, this just could be I'm excited like a kid with a new toy. But whatever's going on here, it does seem like it's at the very least, interesting. So let's do a related question here. Whale asks, what is your solution to the feeling of paradox of choice that pops up when it comes to selecting productivity applications? So Whale is talking about in his elaboration that, wow, there's so many different applications. Or I should add tools like an iPod and an Apple Pencil that seem like they could make a difference. And then he talks about in his elaboration how he sometimes gets paralyzed.

Well, am I using the right tool? Maybe I should use this tool. Maybe I should switch to this app. Maybe I shouldn't be using an app at all. Maybe I should be using a paper notebook. And that he can actually become paralyzed by all the options and actually not get any systems. up and running or equally as bad find himself constantly tinkering with his productivity solution. Well, well, I think the obvious answer is that the only tool you need is Calduport's time block planner

available everywhere, November 10th. All right, maybe you need more than that planner. It'll help. I think it would be funny if I just answered every question with hard-classes. with hardcore selling my books and tools and refusing to give any possibility that anything else could be useful. And also, Whale, I should mention,

the time block planner will help you lose up to 20 pounds in one week. Okay, enough of that. Serious answer? I think, well, you might be putting too much, too much emphasis on the tools. Your mind is probably thinking this common issue

with people interested in productivity that if I can get my system just right, work is going to be easy. If I can get my system just right, it will all just work. It'll tell me what to do. I'll just do it. No stress, no grinding,

and success will just pile up. Unfortunately, no productivity system is going to make work easy, just like there's no workout equipment that's going to make it not be really hard to build muscles. Because in the end, you know, all this workout equipment does is help you lift heavy things and push your muscles past where they are comfortable. They might make it easier to do. It might structure it more. But you still have to do that really hard work of tiring out your muscles.

Well, same thing. You know, producing value with your brain is hard work. And it has to be hard work. Otherwise, what you're doing would not be rare and valuable. And all the productivity tools in the world can do is just maybe give you some structure for that, take some obstacles out of the way, you to get a higher return from the hard energy invested, but it does not alleviate the need to actually do the hard work. So once you figure, okay, my productivity tools are not going to save me from hard work. At the core, still just doing hard things with your mind if you're knowledge work. Then that lowers the pressure. So then what should you care about your productivity tools? Well, they can get in the way. So you want to make sure you don't have a lot of extra friction.

if a tool requires you to do a lot of extra steps, if you have to have a software interface where you're doing drop downs and selecting and assigning and it just takes a really long time to try to organize your work and that actually slows down the work you do, then that's a problem. So you want to eliminate friction. And on the flip side,

if a tool reduces cognitive shifts and reduces open loops, if it helps you stick with one thing at a time, if it frees you from the stress of trying to keep track of things in your head, if it frees you from the need to participate in constant ongoing conversations, which are going to drain away your ability to focus, then that's good. You want tools that don't create a lot of friction. You want tools, all things being equal, that help you do one thing at a time and reduce cognitive switches. Within that context, there's any number of tools that can help you get there.

So just like there's any number of brands or types of barbells versus kettlebells versus dumbbells that you can buy, there's not one that's going to necessarily be significantly better than the other. In the end, you have to just buy one and start lifting the heavy thing. Same thing with work. So just get something that doesn't have too much friction that you can stick with. And it seems to help reduce cognitive switches, seems to help close open loops, and just roll with it. And I think what I recommend that in a recent podcast episode is tune it for a month,

use it for six months, then check back in. Stick with that format. There is no magic productivity. elixir. There is no way to get the muscles without the sweat. So get something that's good enough, rock and roll for a while, check back into the market occasionally to see if there's something better. And I think you will do quite well, with the obvious exception, of course, being that the time block planner coming out, November 10th will solve all your problems. And David asked, how can I convince my subconscious mind that spending time with family or

reading books is a better source of leisure than YouTube. Well, David, let me just give you a simple answer. Don't use YouTube for a month. The way you convince your subconscious mind is by actually exposing it to the value that comes from undistracted time with your family and undistracted time with high-quality intellectual pursuits like reading, interesting, or hard books. Just do it and get reacquainted with that value. And now your subconscious mind will be working from experience and not working from some abstract

story that you're telling it. It's not working from the story that if we do this, I think good things will come. It will be, remember all the good things that happened last month. We want those to keep happening. That's why we don't use YouTube. Or that's why we use it only on our computer with a plugin that blocks the auto recommendations and only for certain occasions for certain purposes of certain times. And this is the core idea in my book, Digital Minimalism.

You should not just start by, I want to reduce this thing because I think it is bad. You actually have to focus on the positive. And then come back and say, this is how I want to use technology because I want to support the positive. That is way more sustainable. And so that's what you should do for YouTube. Stop using it for a month. You'll live. Focus really hard, experimentation, reflection on the things that matter instead.

Then when the month is over, say, how, if at all, do I want to reintroduce YouTube? back into my life. What rules do I want to put in place so that I don't dilute these activities that I find really meaningful? Start with the positive. It's much easier to then sustainably reduce the negative. Naniel asks, how do you organize your research? Well, when it comes to my academic research, the theoretical computer science papers I write, as I've talked about before, I have these these really nice spiral-bound grid notebooks from Japan that have a very good paper quality that I use along with the 0.5 millimeter

Unibol micro pins to capture notes and ideas on the fly. You know, if I have a proof idea, I might work with it just using these notebooks. The steady-state storage for these ideas, however, is always in essentially a paper draft. So I start writing drafts of papers early on, even well before we know what's going to be in the paper. And that, until I have something captured in a paper draft, I don't consider it really captured.

Now, we use a type setting software called latex in mathematics, and I use a web-based latex editor called Overleaf for actually storing and editing those documents. It makes it easier to collaborate. But that's basically what I do. So, you know, if there's a paper I'm working on, an idea I'm working on, I create. create a paper draft. If I'm out and about, I'm in the woods, I'm walking, I'm thinking, I'll capture notes and proof ideas in that paper grid notebook, but I don't consider that stable. It becomes a key step in my research process to transfer those ideas into the paper draft. There's something about typing it up and typesetting it that forces you to add a increased level of scrutiny.

You kind of polish the results more when you write it up into the draft, and then that's when you can see, does this really work? Am I missing an obvious flaw? And that's my rhythm. Talk to collaborators, go for a walk, work on my notebook, take the best ideas from the notebook and do the paper draft. Some of those survive. Some of those don't when I formalize it. Over time, you fill this paper draft with tons and tons of results, and then you can step back and say, how do we organize this into a paper? I've used a lot of different things over time, Daniel. This is the chain of tools that minimizes the friction, the most and maximizes the amount of hard thinking about problems, and it seems to work, at least for me, seems to work quite well.

All right, let's do one more technology question. Joy asks, in the quest of making my digital presence in the form of a blogger, or YouTube, or podcast, or etc., social media does play a role, at least in the beginning phase. Having said that, how should one commit to the deep life without getting too distracted by social media. Well, Joy, I'm a crumagine on this topic, but I do not think just having a digital presence for the sake of having a digital presence is something that actually alchemizes into a value or meaning producing professional position. The idea that just, look, if I'm online,

if I'm on there, if I'm visible, if I'm on all the socials, you know, and I have a podcast, and I'm blogging, and I'm doing all those things, then that will somehow alchemize into value on which you can build a meaningful and remunerative professional career. But it doesn't. Just being on Instagram doesn't give you value. Just being on Twitter doesn't give you value. Now, if you have an established presence

as someone who does something already valuable, then yes, all of these types of tools can then help you find and grow an audience. Now, I often recommend use the tools that you control, use the tools that are more distributed, use the tools where you don't have a very small number of attention conglomerates that are trying to exploit your brain, to addict you, to capture and monetize all your data, use the tools that don't require you to use these companies that are trying to build private versions of the internet that they completely control, these dystopian digital panopticons within their walled garden server farms.

I'm talking about, of course, the major social media companies. Ignore them and if possible use things like blogs, use things like podcast. Things where you can own the server, things where you own the content, things that actually capture the spirit, the original spirit of the internet, which was this democratized platform where anyone can be heard and anyone connect to anyone. So staying with this in this original spirit of the internet, I recommend that and being very wary of these large social media conglomerates, which I think go completely contrary to the original spirit of the internet.

But before any of that matters, you have to do something valuable and you have to do something that people care about. And that requires hard work and it requires focus and it's a little bit hit or miss and it's frustrating, but I think that's just a foundation. And so, look, Joy, I'm not, I don't mean to pick on you. I don't know. look, I think I'm going to look in this elaboration and turns out that, you know, Joy here is like Joy Bayhart, like a really well-known, established, you know,

personality who has done a lot already. But I'm just using your question. I'm adding a context of my own just to try to make this broader point, which is we, for too much, we believe that the social internet behavior itself is what creates the value. We put the cart before the horse. So if you do something really successful, if you do something really valuable, if you do something that's worth hearing about, something that an audience wants to know about that wants to be a part of it,

then yeah, you can cautiously use the internet to help spread the word. But I think we're exposed to too many TikTok celebrities and Instagram influencers. We're exposed to too much of that. Too many Twitch streamers and supposed YouTube millionaires. We're exposed to too much of that, especially young people. And we think, okay, this is what matters. you are a brand that people care about in the broader public. You need to be out there.

You need to be exposed. And just because you're interesting and just because you're quirky, you'll have an audience. And then you can figure out later, okay, what do I do with this audience? How do I then Kardashian this into a billion-dollar company or something like this? But that's just not the way it works for most people. So I think the internet is great for spreading the word.

I think the internet is great for cultivating a tribe and an audience. It's what I've been doing here for, what, since 2000? But let that come later and let your focus right now be on how do I become so good I can't be ignored? How do I build a professional skill that's useful for people to hear about? How do I build a lifestyle that actually sharing of will be inspiring or useful to other people? You put your energy there and then the question of how can the internet help me becomes kind of easy. You put your energy there and people will be talking about you before you even get around the talking about yourself. You put your energy there, then when you do this side, okay, now I am

going to start a podcast, people are lined up to listen to it. So again, Joy, I don't know that this is your situation. I'm just using you as a springboard into a pool of crumudgeonly chastisement. But that's a point I like to make a lot. You cannot take an activity that a 12-year-old can do, like posting all the time on social media, and alchemize that into value. Value requires hard work, value requires you identifying something that people need and it's not easy to do and then learning how to do it and doing it well. If you can do that, the internet will help you.

If you go to the internet though before you start doing that, it's just going to slow you down. All right, Joy, thank you as always for enabling a sort of non-sequitorious rant. You've got to get a couple of those out of my system each week or I bounce off the walls. And let's leave technology questions there.

and let's check in briefly on what I'm up to. In this segment, I give you a glimpse into my own efforts to cultivate and maintain a deep life. Based on popular demand, let me talk a little bit today about what's going on with the Deep Work HQ. It's my second week of recording from the Deep Work HQ, and I thought I would elaborate a little bit more on what my visions are

for this kind of superfluous on the other hand, very necessary addition to my deep life. So the HQ, it's in downtown Tacoma Park where I live, a few blocks from my house, so easy to get to, right above a restaurant I like. They have not yet approved my plans

to build a fireman's pole that comes from the offices here straight down to the bar that's below it, but we're working on it. And I think that would be good for all of us. If I could jump down the pole, yelling out, bear me, you know, as I descend to the bar below. So the HQ has three offices, roughly speaking, in it. So the one office, the smaller office, the office that's the farthest from the back patio and therefore noise of the restaurant I'm above, I've turned into the recording studio.

That's where I am right now. I have basically done what I would call bare minimum sound dampening in here, just enough to prevent it from sounding like a weird echoing hell, but not really enough for it to sound completely professional. So I'm working on it. You know, it's just time consuming. I don't have a lot of time.

I would say the thing that has slowed me down the most is that I'm also in the process of outfitting my studio for filming. So considering how much, having filmed versions of my entire podcast. You can actually see me do the podcast or at the very least filming some of occasional questions, like the questions that generate the biggest rant so that I can have clips available if you actually want to see me talking about it. And then there's also just any number of events and appearances and segments I have to do in my capacity as a writer, as part of publicity, etc. So I figured having a good film set up in my studio would be important.

So one of the reasons why I've stopped my soundproofing, and this is just boring and technical, but I was putting these sound dampening hexagonal tiles on the wall behind me. I thought they would make a good backdrop. When I view myself through my webcam, the color of these tiles is dark enough that it blends in with the color of my hair. And that's not good. But the question is, okay, but that's just in my webcam. So I have a nicer camera on route through which I'm actually. going to do my filming, you know, a camera with a nice lens, and we can actually control the shutter

speed and the ISO, et cetera, but still stream it directly into my computer. So I need to see on that camera, maybe I do get enough separation from the background with the right lights on the background, and once I get the hair light set up right, then maybe it's not a problem. And then I'll continue adding these hexagonal tiles. But if it is a problem, I need to take down what's already up there and put up another solution, probably lighter colored rectangular panels. So I basically stopped the soundproofing efforts until I could get the good camera, and then I could really see if I need to change what's going on. So that's where I am. So basically, I've made the sound not terrible here. The plan is to make the sound very good. This is all complicated,

guys. I mean, I have an audio consultant. He's in New York. We have, we're going to work over FaceTime just to help figure out how to get this right. And I'm a geek, so it's kind of interesting, but I don't have a lot of time. So that's the issue. But so that's what's going on. So the hope here is that once the studio here is completely up and running, not only will you continue to be able to hear me on these podcasts, but you'll also be able to see me tackling some of these deep questions.

And there's other types of events that I would then be able to do. All right. So there's two other rooms in this office. Another one of these rooms, I'm transforming essentially to a Maker Lab. So my two older boys are real big fans of Adam Savage. As I, I think he's just an incredibly talented broadcaster, by the way. So anyone who's on YouTube, they're trying to build their own media brand.

You want to see how an old pro is interesting on camera. You should watch Adam Savage. He's a natural. But he has this giant cave where he builds things and it's awesome. We watch those videos. And so we're building out our own Maker Lab here. is this going to be part of the homeschooling curriculum? So we're homeschooling our two oldest boys.

Our youngest is too young for school. But we're homeschooling our two oldest boys because the schools are closed here. And I'm the guy who argues against the world of work being email and Zoom all day. I feel kind of hypocritical if I allowed my 8-year-old and my 5-year-old to spend all day on Zoom. So we're going to homeschool them. And I think being able to manipulate things in the physical world, to build things. And more importantly,

they go through the typical maker process, which is your fifth iteration is usually when you get it right. So to try to build something, it doesn't quite work, but you learn, and then you build a better version. It's not quite right.

So you learn, you build a better version than a better version. And then you get it right, and people are impressed, and you can look back and say, yeah, but I didn't get it right at first. It took persistence. It took adaptation,

took diligence. I think there's just great lessons. And also, we like Adam Savage. I think it'll be fun. So we're kind of, quote unquote, building out a maker lab in one of those offices for homeschooling. And then we have the sort of common area.

And I really want to try to transform that. I want to experiment there with using aesthetics of a physical space to help induce concentration. I talk a lot about that in my study at my house. Put a lot of effort to kind of build a library in there just for exactly that purpose of helping to induce deeper levels of deep work. And I'm losing that study because that's where our number. main homeschooling space is going to be. So I'm going to try to replicate something in that space.

And I want to be over the top somehow. And I don't really know what to do yet. And look, if you have suggestions, if you're an interior decorating type and have some suggestions for how I can take, it's like a conference room. But with a big open, it's not with the door, it's a big opening. A way to take a conference room and make it into a place where Cal Newport can think really hard. Well, yeah, let me know.

Some of your suggestions to interesting at Cal Newport.com. But I kind of want to go over the top there. And I'm very serious now about. enforcing this rule. In that deep work cave aspect of the HQ, no email. No email. That's where I want to try this experiment. To have a place where, look, I only go there when I'm trying to solve a proof or write something hard.

And I have no association with logistics, no associating with email. And more importantly, my mind knows when I walk into that room, this is when I'm going to be doing. Will that work? That's my question. Will that work? Will that allow me to like a light ball being switched on? Like I walk into that room and it's like, bam, I'm locked in and I'm able to make more

progress. I can prove more, solve more proofs. Write more chapters, write more articles. I don't know. That might happen. Or maybe I'll feel like it's no different. And five minutes later, I'm going down the fireman pole, yelling out, beer me. I don't know.

But I think that'll be a fun experiment. But the hard point is you have to actually, it's not trivial to take an empty room and make it into something that's like aesthetically awe-inspiring. It's a pain. But it's something to do and I'm working on it. And then the final piece is I'm trying to figure out where I can put the largest possible whiteboards in here. So I'm going to solve proofs. I need to do it out of a giant whiteboard. I look forward to having a giant whiteboard.

I did not have a giant whiteboard in my house. I had in my office. But I haven't been at my office recently. So I am excited about that. So that's the vision for the Deep Work HQ. Again, it is simultaneously superfluous and absolutely critical. And I think the dividing line between those two things is thin and porous. I think that's certainly the case for me as well.

So it's an exciting thing to be working on. Certainly the podcast studio, film studio is the pragmatic piece. I absolutely have to have that. You know, I have a planner launch in November, a major book launch in March. I'm teaching remotely. I have three kids stuck at home. I have to have a separate place to do this recording from like a noise perspective. This is why I'm adding advertising to the podcasting.

It should more or less cover the cost of the HQ. So I think that's fine. But the experimentation of the other rooms, that's where I'm really interested. I'll keep you posted, keep you posted on how it goes. But that's a look inside my own sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful attempts to cultivate the deep life. And speaking of that topic, it is to that we will turn our attention next. Singh asks, I have an 8-year-old boy and a 12-year-old daughter.

I want to instill the value in focus in them. What should I do? Well, Singh, I think the most important thing is that you yourself need to live a life of focus. You need to demonstrate to your kids what it looks like. to live the deep life. To live a life where you focus on what is important, you sidestep distractions, and you give what you are doing in the moment your full attention.

So getting your own house in order is going to be by far the most important thing you can do. Kids pick up what you do way more persuasively than they pick up what you tell them to do. So be the change you want to be. to see in the world. What does that mean? Well, you know, like the phone foyer method, don't have your phone with you in the house unless you're, you know, listening to a podcast while doing chores. Focus on high quality, analog leisure activities. Be present with whatever you do. Have in your life many activities that are deep and undistracted. You know, be the change. Let them see it. And then you can you can tell them about it, you know, occasionally. Like this is, this is what I value. This is,

you've observed the way I live, this is why I live it. That's going to be incredibly powerful. Those messages will be picked up. Kids pick up what their kids are doing. If they admire what their parents are doing, they really do integrate that into their self-identity. The second thing you can do is make it easier, structurally speaking, make it easier for your kids to live lives that are less distracted. Right. So I think not giving your 12-year-old a smartphone is important.

You need to hold off on that as long as possible. possible. And when they do get a phone, having a phone foyer method culture, like, look, you don't get to just walk around with your phone. I mean, you want certain times, you can go ahead and text or do what you need to do. That's fine, but it's not a default activity in the house. It's not a default activity when we're out and about. If we're going out to dinner, we're keeping the phones in the glove compartment. You know, you don't get to just sit here and have it as a default activity. There's some rules in place to make that difficult. And then activities that do induce focus, you encourage, you sign them up for you, make them a part of your family life. There's hiking,

there's reading time, or whatever, right? So you want to put a structure in place that makes it easier to avoid distraction and that supports exposure again and again with focus. Sports and music, these are other activities that really help people learn to value a focus, because you have to focus intensely to get better at your instrument. You have to focus intensely to get better at your sport. You see over time focus, focus. Focus. Focus. effort generating rewards that also instills a value in focus. I think those three things matter. So number one, live the way you want them to live so they can see you do it. Number two, set things up with your rules, but also experiences that you do in your family so that

distraction is harder and they're getting exposed a lot to focus type activities. And three, things like sports, things like music will help train your kids to appreciate what it's like to diligently concentrate on something and see this persistence pay off with rewards over time. You do those three things. I think they'll be fine. But if you really want results, of course, buy them my book, Digital Minimalism, solves all problems. Genevieve asks, is your 30 push-up, 30 pull-up routine keeping you physically strong? Is it just keeping you content mentally, as in don't bring the chain satisfaction,

or do you really feel more physically fit because of it? Well, it's a good question. I mean, what Genevieve is referencing is I have this baseline fitness habit that I track. It's part of my metric track and I track it. Did I do my baseline fitness? And there's two pieces to it. One is walking 10,000 steps or more. And the other is this highly concentrated, highly intense calisthenics routine where I do 30 pushups,

30 pull-ups and it's about 50 dips of various types. I have the steel contraption I built in my cobweb infested garage and that's where I do it. And it takes five minutes. I can do it in five minutes, right? So Genevieve, partially you're right. The mental satisfaction is a big piece of this. I do it every day. Five minutes means I can get it done.

A lot of days that means everyone's in bed and I'm doing it. but it's short enough that I can still do it even in that context. Whereas if my baseline physical fitness thing I was tracking was a workout that takes a half hour, then on those days where I just didn't have time, I just want to do it. I'm not going to be able to fit in a 30-minute workout when everyone else is already in bed, but a five-minute thing, you can always do it. So there is a mental satisfaction, as I talked about in, I think, the habit tune-up episode from last week, a way of signaling to yourself that you take fitness seriously.

So there is a mental piece to it. But the physical piece I also think is non-trivial. There's two things going on here. And again, I'm no expert on this. So this is just folk wisdom. One, I truly believe, based on just my in-of-one anecdotal experience, that pushing your muscles every day to an extreme point, even if just very brief, makes a huge difference.

Because it tells your body, okay, we're in normal operating procedure. The thing that is unusual, the thing that is unnatural from an evolutionary perspective is going whole days where you never lift something heavy, where you never feel a muscle burn, where you never take your full body weight and pick it up and try to move it over something. Clearly, in our Paleolithic past, of course you were just doing this all the time. Clearly, in our industrial past, you were doing this all the time. You're on a farm.

You were moving the plow. You were lifting the hay bales or you're in a factory and you had to lift pallets and moved it. I mean, it's just the normal operating conditions for the human body is one in which it's not like you're working out all the time, but your muscles get used. And I think if you get away from that, if you get it to the common but highly artificial state in which you just sit all day, no muscle gets moved heavily where you're not even used to. It's just the idea of the discomfort of trying to put serious strain on a muscle scares you. I think it puts your body into some type of mode that can't be good. And so just getting that hit, even if brief every day, keeps your body in normal operating procedure. And I think you're just, you're fitter and healthier because of that.

Muscle building aside, it's just the right chemicals are being released, the right hormones are cascading. I don't know the physiology. But I think just doing something intense every day and then moving a lot every day. So the 10,000 step thing I do. It just puts your body in the right mode and it's just doing the right things and it's just healthier. Can it actually make you stronger? Right? Can highly intense but very short interval training make you stronger?

I think so. Makes me stronger. The key I found is you can't just go through the motions. You have to find. find a way to really be challenging your muscles. If you're only going to do five minutes, those five minutes have to be brutal. And so I keep ratcheting up the intensity

of the exercises I do during those five minutes. So what maybe started as normal push-ups, now I have my feet up on one of those big exercise balls. So you have the elevation going, so you're putting more weight on the front of your body, when you're doing the push-ups, but you also are now having to recruit all of these stabilization muscles in your core to prevent you from falling off the ball, because you balance on your toes on this big exercise ball while you're trying to go up and down. Then I fell off a lot, and now I

don't fall off as much anymore because you're recruiting and using many more muscles. My pull-ups were similar. At some point during the pandemic, I up the intensity by a toe tap rule. rule. So I have my pull-up bar high enough that basically fully extended, I can sort of just barely touch the ground. So it's like, well, you have to go down far enough that your toes can tap the ground without taking any weight off. And that was really hard at first. You have to go basically all the way down before coming back up again, but it ratcheted up. Then I got used to that. So now I'm doing these full

hangs where kind of tucking my legs up, like bending my knees. And I go all the way all the way fully extended down, you know, my arms fully extended at the bottom of each of the pull-up types. I also change up the grips, you know, throw in different types,

harder grips to make that, to make that more challenging, et cetera, right? So look, I don't want to go too much down a fitness rabbit hole, but five minutes very intense, you know,

I think I'm getting stronger. I seem stronger. I seem fit. So that's good. But the key point is, it's not all of my activity. This is just a keystone habit. It's something you do every day. It's hard enough to actually make a difference. A signal to yourself, you take that general area of your life seriously. It's tractable enough that you can actually do it every day.

That signals to myself that I take my fitness seriously, and I think that signal then cascades to other aspects of my life. It cascades when I'm making decisions about what I eat. It cascades when I have extra time and I do a longer workout or a long row on my concept two rower, et cetera. And there's where I think you get the real value, Genevieve, is the Keystone habit is not everything you need to do for that area of your life. It's that advanced guard that tells yourself, I for sure take this area of my life seriously, and that's going to lead to lots more on the spot good decisions. Karen asks, how do you converse with people who live in a state of constant distraction? Well, Karen, I would say with sympathy.

not with frustration. And I know you probably have some frustration because I did see that you asked a similar question a few different times. And the elaboration suggests some agitation. And I understand the agitation. When you've tasted the benefits of the deep life, it could be frustrating to deal with people that can't get their eyes away from their phone. You can feel bad for them. You can say, don't you realize what you're missing? You can be annoyed with them.

you know once once you see the matrix it is difficult to just go back to neo's office and be happy with whatever the birthday party going on in the break room okay this is becoming a weird metaphor but you know what i mean but you don't want to get annoyed and you don't want to try to change people you don't want to try to convert people you want to just live your life as deeply as possible and if someone asks you about it you can tell them Let me tell you about this Guy Cal Newport. Let me tell you about this book, Digital Minimalism. Let me tell you about how I live and why and the benefits I get. And when people ask and they're ready to hear about it,

you will have a compelling testimony to offer. But if you try to force it on to someone before they're ready for it, it's not going to go well. And this is true for just about any type of positive change in your life. This is generic advice for how, once you've made a positive change, how you deal with people around you who have it. Now, there's exceptions like we talked about earlier in the podcast. You know, if it's your kids, there's some active interventions you want to do there

in addition to just demonstrating the deep life. If it's your spouse, you got to tread kind of carefully, but you could actually at some point have some conversations. This is important to me. It's important to our family. Let me tell you about what I'm doing and why. But if it's your friends, if it's your colleagues, if it's family members that are outside of your immediate family.

Live deeply yourself. Tell people about it if they ask. Have sympathy when you see them lost in that world of screens. I think changes are coming. I think people are changing. I think people are burnt out by this life fixated on their screens. I think being home for the past six months because workplaces have been closed at exactly the same time you had the attention economy really ratcheting up its efforts to draw you down these digital. rabbit holes. I think people are just tired of it. I think change is coming, but you can't force

to change yourself. So be proud of what you're doing. Be a great, be a great, what's a say, exemplar of this deep life we're talking about, but otherwise be sympathetic with those who aren't quite there yet. Joshua asks, what's the best way to prioritize and divide time between multiple projects? Joshua, I find quarterly planning to be very useful here. So quarterly plan is where you look at the current season. It's like right now you'd probably be making a quarterly plan for the fall. September, October, November, up to like the Christmas holidays. And at the quarterly plan, you can say, okay, I have these different only semi or unrelated

pursuits. So for me, I might have like some writing related pursuits and some research related pursuits, et cetera. At the quarterly level, you can really see what progress do I want to make on each of these pursuits. You know, so maybe for my research, it's like, there's this deadline for papers. And what I really want to do is take this idea that I've been percolating over the summer, and I want to push that through to a really good submission to this deadline in November.

And then maybe in the writing world, I'm saying, well, I really want to do one other, like, big, long form article, but I want a new book proposal idea ready for feedback by December, or something like that, right? So you can see at the high level, at this quarterly level, what does progress look like? What do I want to try to do? And you can see if it's reasonable, right? Because you're at this scale. If you come with too many ideas, you're going to say there's no way I can make progress in all this. You're coming up with a reasonable mixture of milestones that you could plausibly get to during the upcoming quarter. Then you let your quarterly plan influence your weekly plans. Now, some weeks it might be, look, this week is all about just trying to make progress.

on this milestone and maybe one week it's all about making progress on another milestone or some weeks you're making progress on both like well Thursday I want to put aside some time to work on this but on Monday Tuesday Wednesday each morning I want to work on this problem whatever it is that's where you put in the action what's the best way to make progress on these milestones this week now that one two punch a quarterly weekly planning it tends to work it can't magically create more time for you it can't magically make it possible for you to make extensive project or progress rather on multiple projects in a short amount of time. But it does allow you to face that productivity drag it and say, okay, what is reasonable?

What's the most I can do with the reality of the time available to me in the near future? When you're trying to optimize what you have, you're going to make progress. And if you repeat that quarter after quarter after quarter, you'll find, all right, I can handle a non-trivial number of projects. I can handle more than one major initiative. Progress gets made. Things actually get done. So trust that quarterly, weekly planning discipline.

Stick with that discipline. Remain realistic, but remain driven to actually make the most of what is available. Even if for some periods, what's available is very small. Joshua, you will make progress. Things will get done. The thing to avoid, there is no way to really make meaningful progress on multiple things simultaneously if you're just mired in the list-based reactive productivity method. If you're answering emails and trying to make progress on a to-do list as your primary way of

organizing your work, you're hosed. There's no way that you're going to get a lot of non-urgent, self-initiated, only semi-related projects moving forward. All of my success in doing that comes from my rejection of the list-based reactive, productive. approach and my quarterly weekly planning discipline. You know, you got to move the chess pieces around at a higher scale and then you actually have a chance of earning checkmate. So I have a weird chess metaphor in here and I have a weird matrix metaphor. So I'm doing great.

This is good, Joshua. Thanks for, as you know, the matrix metaphor was the last question. That's good. So I'm sticking with one tortured metaphor per answer. That's a great rate. But it is a good question, Joshua. So that's my answer. It works.

Trust it. Things will happen. Pamela asks, what life experiences or skills do you think young people are missing out on due to their heavy use of social media and related technologies? All right, that's a dangerous question, Pamela. As you know, there's a lot of things I think people lose when they shift substantial portions of their lives into this digital realm. So it's dangerous because I could go on for a long time. I could give a sermon slash rant of sort of biblical proportions here, and I won't. But let me just try to hit a few examples.

This is not comprehensive, but just to give you a sense of the type of things I worry about, especially when I look at a generation, or I should say members of this generation, that have migrated most of their life into the digital world. Well, first there's social skills. I talk about this in detail in my book, Digital Minimalism. Most of socializing is non-linguistic. So we are social creatures. Our brains are evolved to be social computers.

It's one of the primary functions and distinguishing factors of the brain of homo sapiens is its ability to do and navigate subtle social dynamics. The bulk of the information that's involved in social interaction is non-linguistic. That is non-textual. It has to do with body language. It has to do with the tone of your voice. It has to do with the pacing, the pacing of your words. It has to do with eye contact

and what's happening with the other people around you as you speak. These are very complicated information channels that we master through practice. None of them are present when you reduce interaction down to text. We like to think that the linguistic content of communication is the primary content. So what does it matter if I'm sitting across from you versus seeing a text message from you? It's the same words. That's what we like to think,

but these are completely different experiences. And so I think this is certainly a fear. You know, a lot of young people move a lot of their interaction purely into this linguistic-based text realms through text messages, through social media apps because it's easier. It's really hard, especially if you're a teenager, which means that your brain is really attuned to these social dynamics and is very anxious, very anxious about getting something wrong,

about people paying attention to you when you don't want them to pay attention to you, to being embarrassed. We're very attuned to it. And you can sidestep all that difficulty with text-based communications. It's very safe. You can control it.

But that period, and I get into this in digital minimalism, that teenage period where it's very difficult but you're forced time and again to interact with adults, to go to the parties, and you have to navigate the social dynamics. Should I be at this party? Am I not cool enough?

Am I too cool? Who else is here? What's going on? All of that complexity is just training. It's your time in the social psychological weight room. It's what allows you when you're 23 and you're new to your job to be able with confidence to navigate the client meeting, to navigate the conference room conversation,

to navigate the interaction with your boss about, something you think needs to be fixed or you don't understand. That's where you get that training. You skip that training because you do linguistic conversation. Yeah, it's easier when you're 16, but your life is harder when you're 26. So that's one thing I'm worried about. Nuanced empathy is another thing I'm worried about. Social media, either by intention or as an accidental side effect,

creates this weird, distorted caricature of the crucial the crucial human instinct towards empathy. Now, I say it's a highly distorted caricature because it pushes things to two extremes. If it's the appropriate in-group, you can have an almost excessive or exaggerated empathy because, again, when you lose the non-linguistic channels, you have to demonstrate or signal through text and emojis,

your inner state. And so if it's someone that's within one of your favorite, groups, there's just like huge, almost over-the-top exaggerated empathy. And if it's someone that's not in the right group, there's zero empathy. And there's hatred. Right. So it's like this over-the-top, I just, I feel every ounce of your pain. And then you shift over there and say, man, I hate you.

You know, and you're just like a source. It's this weird distorted caricature of empathy. when you're in a purely linguistic medium, this very subtle, very crucial human instinct, an instinct that's at the bottom of many philosophies and many theologies, it gets completely disrupted. You cannot develop an appropriate empathy sense just through linguistic text, especially in a world like social media, in a realm like Twitter, for example,

where there's all these other dynamics that are going on, dynamics of reward and punishment. You put this all together, and you get a weird distorting. a caricature of empathy, and it doesn't function in the real world. And it makes people miserable, because that's something that empathy has to be developed in the real world with real people. People agree with, people you disagree with, but they're in front of you, and you see them, and there's all this non-linguistic communication, and you see the context, and it's complicated, and you become a much richer person because of it.

Your soul is enriched because of it. You become a more sophisticated, nuanced sort of member of the human tribe when you're in the real world dealing with real people and actually harnessing this crucial instinct of empathy. What you develop, if you do this all online, again, is weird, it's distorted, it's a caricature. And then what happens when you only have this weird distorted caricature version of empathy that's either over the top or completely missing is that, well, when you do venture out into the real world, not great things happen.

Not great things happen. You get in, you know, a fist fight over masks or you're spitting on reports. borders at a political rally, right? I mean, it's crazy stuff happens because that's not how the human brain works. Identity construction. I think this is crucial. Okay. Your identity, your sense of self, which is developed when you're young, requires an excessive amount of self-reflection. Time alone with your own thoughts, where you take in all the information and experiences that you've had recently and all the ideas or theories that you've consumed through whatever, listening to people or books or whatever and you sit there and you think about it and you try to make

sense of it and you throw out some stuff and you integrate other stuff and you nuance other things and you build up the scaffolding on which your sense of self is built and you do a lot of this when you're a teenager and you do a lot of this in the 20s and the older people make fun of you and so you're navel gazing and you're self-focused or whatever but you have to be self-focused you have to reflect on information experiences to make sense of who you are your sense of your sense of self is constructed. And it's constructed through self-reflection, and self-reflection requires time alone with your own thoughts. You take that out of someone's life.

No time alone with your own thoughts, because you have the screen here. And on the other end of this screen is a high-speed modulated radio connection that's going to connect to fiber optic cables that's going to connect to a data center that has 100,000 processors in it, and hundreds of thousands of man hours and the algorithms made to pull from those processors, just the exact information to give you a hit of something in that moment. That's more interesting than self-reflection. So why would I do that? Here's a meme.

Now, the problem is, if you don't do the self-reflection, you don't really have a good sense of self. If you don't have a sense of self, you are all over the place. You will just latch on to whatever. Because you still feel these underlying moral intimations. You feel these underlying impulses for meaning to do things that are useful, to do things that are good for bravery, for courage. But you don't know what to do with this. because you don't know who you are.

So you get caught up in some sort of Twitter meme or conspiracy theory or whatever it is. Or self-destructive behaviors. The drinking goes out of control. You know, the drugs go out of control. Relationships get exploded because you don't even know how to make sense of the difficulties of a relationship because you don't know who you are.

So many problems come out of not having a clear sense of who you are, what matters to you and why, and that requires self-reflection. So I think this is an issue. I think this is an issue when, again, you take every down moment and you convert it to consuming information through a screen. And so what you see is people that just get so emotionally involved and so committed to things to which they know basically nothing about. It's just fragments that they've seen on cable news or on social media or whatever, and they're kind of assembling these fragments into a simulacrum of a life philosophy.

into a simulacrum of a commitment to a cause. And they get momentary emotional pushes, and then maybe they steer hard to the other way and get disillusioned. Look, if you want an eye-opening, if you want an eye-opening tail, what happens when you don't have a sense of self, and how much you get pushed around, and listen to this rabbit hole podcast series

that kind of sits atop the most listened-to boards on Apple iTunes for the technology charts. Not that I'm checking those. My podcast is on those charts, but it's not that I'm checking those. Listen to this rabbit hole podcast, right? And it deals with a couple different topics, but one of the primary storylines is of someone, again, young,

their whole life is on these screens. Have not done the work of let me sit and think and reflect. Try to make sense of who I am, what I'm about, and why I'm about. He doesn't do this work, and you just see this guy just get pushed around all over the place. He goes down like a right-wing conspiracy rabbit hole, and then he goes down like this sort of left-wing conspiracy rabbit holes, and it's just all over the place and doesn't know what to make of it.

Now, it is an exaggerated case, but I think that there's a lot of people that are basically living out a deluded version of that reality. Phone can't give you meaning. Twitter can't give you meaning. It can give you emotions. It can give you distractions. It can give you a sense in the moment that you're involved in something important,

even though you don't quite understand it. You're unraveling the secrets. that you found the conspiracy, that you're changing the society. But if you're not doing this from a place of knowing who you are, what you're about, and why you're about, there's only so far you can ever get in any of those efforts. Another problem. Mental health.

It's just not healthy. These environments online are just not healthy. It's any manner of psychologically damaging activities happening in most of the popular online venues in which young people hang out. Things that would be fine if you're dipping in here off and on for various reasons, but when you spend your life on them become a real issue. You have the social comparison problem on Instagram, and it tears people apart. These carefully curated portrayals of people's lives, like, I'm not doing that.

Their life is better than me. You know, it just drives people to, that drives people into depressive syndromes. The amplified, the artificially amplified outrage that you get on services like Twitter, you know, you're on there, and it just creates a version of the world. Again, I've talked about this a lot. It creates a version of the world that from like a philosophical perspective is just primitive. And it's really just primitive. There's angels and their demons and you're the angels.

And you can't believe those demons even exist. And how could their mamas love them? They're that bad. We got dunk. We got a dunk. And man, oh, but the dunk didn't work. What do you mean it didn't work? I was so right.

Don't they know how right I am? Oh my God, I'm so mad. Okay, I got to get on here. I mean, that just rips apart your soul. There's no way that is productive or good. So you have that going on to makes people outraged. People are, that leads to anxiety. That leads to despair.

You know, I just read, someone said me like a very tragic case, you know, a tragic case of a young man suicide. And, you know, the mom of one of his friends was talking about that it was, the social media stuff he was seen and he was like caught online with this is someone who had mental health issues but like school was important to him and was caught up and all this this sort of really alarmist like fear mongering that was happening about kids and schools which was coming from like look everything comes from a good place like look there's risk with having kids in schools because of COVID but the way things work on social media is you don't just say like there's risk and we need to think it through and and this policy is

complicated here's what we're thinking no what you have have to do is take your point of view and then try to exaggerate it because you have to try to dunk on the other side because that's what it does. And here's this poor kid who's reading all this dunking and is just terrified about schools and he's going to die if he gets near the school. And tragedy happened. It's not good for your mental health. The underlying issues you might be discussing on here are useful and good, but social media perverts the way you talk about. It's not good for your mental health. Connecting with friends is good, but Instagram exaggerates it.

And it takes that one element of real old school interactions where you get a little bit jealous because your friend has a nice new car and it just makes that the core of the interaction. And then you're overcome with inadequacy feelings. You're overcome with jealousy, right? So it's just we know the services in which people are spending, young people spending their time, again, in moderation are fine. But if you're on it all the time, it's terrible for your mental health. And then finally, you just, you miss the real benefits of real community. We are a social tribe.

We need to be around people. We need to be part of a tribe. We need to see those people. We need the sacrifice on their behalf. We need them to sacrifice on our behalf. We need to be with them thick and thin. Some we really like being around and some are really a pain. But, you know, they're in our town.

They're in our family. They're in our friend circle. They're on our sports team. We're in it together. 100% critical. for psychological health. It's at the core of our species. Linguistic back and forth doesn't replicate it.

Having a group of people whose handles you know on Twitter and that you tweeted each other is not enough. Checking in on Facebook post and Instagram post, leaving exclamatory positive comments with emojis is not the same thing. So if you get removed from actual analog community life, it is very difficult. It is very difficult to feel engaged and resilient and healthy and psychologically well. And again, when you shift everything to the online world, that happens.

All right. So I did end up with a rant there, Pamela, as you might have suspected. I did end up giving a longish sermon. But I think it's an important point. So all I'm doing here is I'm just sampling. Some of the stuff I'm saying here is exaggerating. There's other stuff I'm not mentioning. But look, when you take something as fundamental as like human interactions with the world

and you extensively change it in a haphazard way, then it's going to cause side effects. And some might be positive. Typically unexpected side effects are negative. I think we have a lot of those here. So if you are young and if most of your life is mediated through a screen, I think it's a real problem. and you should really prioritize, how do I stop that? And yeah, it's difficult now because there's a pandemic going on,

but you could still, it doesn't make it impossible. Don't have to be on your screen. You can use your screens. Don't give into the straw man argument of, wait, the internet's not important, that's not true. Here's something important I did on the internet. Wait, you're saying social media is not at all useful at all, but guess what? I found the job in social media.

Don't give into that straw man argument, the binary argument that either it's completely bad or you should use it all the time. The secret here is that you do not want most of your life to be mediated through that screen. There is just a lot of negative that comes from it. You have to get out there in the real world. Do hard things with real people. Interact with real people.

Be around real people. Be alone with your own thoughts. These things we used to take for granted cause great problems when they are removed. All right. endeth my sermon. Let's wrap it up here for this week. If you want to submit your questions for future episodes, sign up from my mailing list at calnewport.com.

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or subscribe to the podcast that makes a difference. And I read every one of those reviews and I appreciate every one of them. All right. So until next time, as always, stay deep.