Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 219: The Deep Reset

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Link to submit questions: bit.ly/3U3sTvoDEEP DIVE: The Deep Reset [8:58]- Should I use Seinfeld’s “Don’t Break the Chain” method? [37:48]- Does Cal have a separate task board and weekly plan for his personal life? [42:07]- How do I track my metrics over the long term? [47:18]- Are Facebook and Instagram doomed? [52:25]- CALL: Children and video games [58:47]- When do I add a task to my list versus straight into my weekly plan? [1:07:50]CASE STUDY: Implementing Deep Work advice [1:13:18]MAILBAG: [1:19:40]- Cal’s vision of the AR future as it grows closerhttps://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1580917421757587456?s=20&t=-deRWeIvOuCdPhhnAOFm9Q- Andrew Huberman on the “Cathedral Effect”https://hubermanlab.com/5-science-based-steps-to-improve-your-workspace/- Obligatory Focus Porn: Writing in an isolated huthttps://alastairhumphreys.com/important-or-urgent/Thanks to our Sponsors:rhone.com/Calladderlife.com/Deepeightsleep.com/Deepstamps.com/DeepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 219. If you're new to this program is to show where I answer questions from my audience about the theory and practice of living and working deeply in an increasingly distracted world, I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I have a long list of news items relevant to the show that I want to share, which makes me excited because this tells me we're actually doing things, that change is afoot. It's nice to have several different things to share with our audience here that they can be excited about. Yeah, for sure. Number one, we've long talked about doing a live event, some sort of live recording of the Deep Questions podcast, and now we actually have an opportunity to do a live. more or less that. On Monday, November 14th, at 7 p.m. at the East City Bookshop, down by capital here in

Washington, D.C., I will be doing an event with my friend, the author David Sacks. You might know David because of his book, The Revenge of Analog. That's something I talked about in depth in my book, Digital Minimalism. David has a new book out called The Future is Analog. He's doing a book event at East City Bookshop. He asked if I would moderate the event. So if I would interview him essentially at the bookshop. And I said yes. So this will be essentially a live episode of the Deep Questions podcast. It'll be me. Jesse will be there. I'll be interviewing David Sacks on stage. So it would be great to see people who are in the DC area, who only know our voice or have only seen our videos, come to the East City Bookshop Monday, November,

November 14th at 7 p.m. That should be fun. I also want to talk about our new weekly update videos. So as we mentioned last week, we're trying an experiment with recording each week. An episode that looks a little bit closer inside my life as a writer, professor, and podcaster. Talks about what I'm up to, my struggles, have a few sort of show and tells in there along the way. So last week we posted the first weekly update video where I gave a tour of the Deep Work HQ. So if you've been wondering what the HQ looks like, that long promise tour is now available. YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. You'll find that weekly update number one.

By the time this episode airs, our second weekly update video will be available on our YouTube page. I'm going to get into some more details about my writing schedule, some of the struggles I'm having to keep that writing schedule and there's also a special surprise I have in store that I think deep questions listeners will appreciate. So go check out those videos. Finally, live calls. These are continuing to progress on track. Last week, Jesse predicted that by the end of October, we would have at least one live caller

in these episodes where a listener actually calls and I can talk to them back and forth and we can get into it with their issue or hear their case study. We're still on track. Right, Jesse, would you say? Yeah, we're good. By the end of October, we should start hearing live calls. So I'm excited about that. We also have some interviews lined up.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly how I want to integrate interviews into this show. I don't know if I want full episodes dedicated to long interviews. I don't know if I want guests to essentially call in and just talk about one topic for a little bit of time. I don't know if I want interview episodes to replace the normal cue. and A episodes or being separate episodes released each week. All this is up in the air. So for now, I'm just lining up a bunch of stuff, talking to a bunch of people. We'll see what works and what doesn't. A couple of expert interviews on the books I'm pretty excited about. So just to give you a preview, a friend of mine who is a New York Times bestselling thriller writer,

she's going to come on the show and talk to us about the reality of being a professional genre writer, how you do that, what's it like, how she got there. I think that should be fun. a psychologist from Brown University lined up who is an expert on work with family, the impact of having a family being a parent on your ability to do work and how to balance out that issue. The fact that having a family reduces notably the time available to actually work on things is something that not only do I struggle a lot with is actually one of the key motivators for my book, slow productivity, slow productivity, in part is a philosophy that will be very applicable for parents to help us sort of make sense of this reality that we don't have as much time as we

used to and not feel bad about it. It's something I hear about a lot from listeners. I get a lot of notes from this. People who are also struggling with parenting, how that drags on their time, women talk about how they have this much worse than the men, how that drags on their psyche. So we have this Brown psychologist going to come on in a few weeks and she's going to help straighten this all out. I also have Ginny Blake, friend of the show. She sent me a note a little while ago about her Zetl Kasten set up for capturing notes. She heard me talk about me needing a better note capturing system.

She's going to call in in an upcoming episode and walk me through setting up a more sophisticated setup. So a lot's coming up. A lot of this is fun. And the means is all good news. You know, I mean, Jesse, I like that we're experimenting. The way I see it is we have breathing. this fall because I'm not teaching. I'm on teaching leave. When we get to the winter and spring, my schedule's locking in. The podcast has got to be, we do it when we do it. It's going to be very

locked in, get kind of getting out of the way of Georgetown. So I want to be at a new steady state by the winter where we have the new segments really rock and rolling, our structure really rock and rolling. I think things are only going to get better from here. Yeah. You know what? And one other quick thing, you sent out the Dracula article to your newsletter about Aberdeen. Oh, I did. Yes. I golfed there over the summer in Aberde. Oh, interesting. So I sent it to my golfing buddies, and they thought it was really cool.

Because it's right on the water, so I knew exactly what the walk that he was doing. So did it feel Transylvania Gothic, sort of spooky? Well, it kind of did because I was playing from the Bactese, and I was getting beat up that day. So, yeah. You felt as if your golf playing ability was getting sucked out like a mammary. pyrosucker blood. I love that. I think this gives me a new goal. I want to be perched on a rock like a bat near the golf course in Aberdeen. Oh, there are so many cool places over there. You could like thank and get inspiration. All the courses are pretty much on the, they're all like Pemble Beach.

This is great. So if you didn't, did I talk about that on the show? Yeah, I did, right? Yeah. Okay. So if you don't know what we're talking about, go back to the mailbag segment of episode 218, where I talked about an article from The Guardian about how Bram Stoker retreated with his family up to the remote coast of Scotland in Aberdeen to be motivated or inspired to write Dracula. I also wrote in more detail about this in my newsletter. Hey, that's another plug. If you don't subscribe to my newsletter, you should.

Just do so at Calnewport.com. And roughly once a week, I send out essays on these type of topics. So I went deep on the Stoker story recently in my newsletter. All right. I think we're out of things to update or promote at this point, Jesse. So let's look ahead at the show that we have today. It's a good one. Here's the plan three segments.

Segment number one, a deep dive. I'm going to revisit a topic that is from the very early days of this show. And I have a more pragmatic thought through take on it. Segment number two, questions. We have a good collection of questions. and including at least one voicemail call from listeners, some nuts and bolts topics, some deep life topics, at least one technology topic.

Segment number three, the mailbag returns. I open up my interesting at calnewport.com inbox and go through a selection of some of the more interesting things people have sent me, articles, videos, thoughts, pointers, etc. over the past week. So that's our plan. So let's get started.

with the deep dive. So the topic of the deep dive today is the deep reset. Now, the deep reset is a term I introduced in my email newsletter and talked about briefly on this podcast back in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. I want to revisit it today and make it more structured, make it more pragmatic. So to understand the deep reset, I want to talk about three different four that exist in the world today that I think are going to converge together to create this new phenomenon. So if you're watching instead of listing, so if you're watching the video of this segment at YouTube.com

slash CalNewport Media, you'll see I have the tablet up here where I've listed three different forces, and I'm going to write right in the middle here, deep reset. These all, and it's beautiful, these all are feeding into the deep reset. All right. So what are the forces that I think are going to feed into this thing? I'm going to call the deep reset. First, the fact that millennials are approaching middle age. So let's be precise about demographics here. People use these generation descriptions, I believe, too vaguely. We're in the bad habit, for example, of using the word millennial to mean young person. But let's be very demographically specific here. The millennials by most accounts are more or less people born between 1981. in 1996. So that puts Jesse and I at the older end of the millennials. We're 40. The youngest millennials are in the late 20s.

The bulk of this generation is in their 30s right now. These are more or less the children of the baby boomers. All right. So the millennials are approaching middle age. Jesse and I are older, but the rest of them are going through their 30s. This is a very important cultural shift because the millennials is a very important cultural shift.

because the millennials is a very large population boom. The baby boomers was a very large population boom. So their children is itself going to be a very large boom. That's why our demographic was originally called the echo boom, because it was an echo of the baby boom. So we have this very large group population demographic that are now approaching middle age, which means those that are going to end up, let's say, getting married or starting a family. They're doing that right now. All right, number two, second of three forces relevant in the world right now,

is the philosophy of work as a means to an end that the millennials have developed over the past, let's say, 20 years. So we got into this briefly in my deep thigh from episode 218. Just to give you the short summary here, when the millennials were growing up, so this was the 1990s into the early 2000s, when the first millennials were growing up, their parents, the baby boomers, wanted to offer them advice about what to do with their career. Now, the baby boomers had these two extreme experiences. When they were little, they had seen their parents had this sort of corporate conformist experience. This was the era of the organization man. This was the 1950s in which

you moved to the suburbs and you dedicated your life to IBM and they would give you lifetime employment in return as people left this urban cores of cities and small villages. These corporate loyalties became a substitute for civic engagement. So it was a time of conformity. But it also sort of made sense. These are the same people who had subordinated themselves to the larger cause of fighting fascism during World War II. So they were used to this idea, subordinate yourself to the larger cause as a source of

meaning. The baby boomers didn't buy that because by the time you get to the 60s, you have all these social disruptions happening. You have the civil rights movement. you have Vietnam, you have the women's liberation movement, all of these social forces, these social disruptions are happening. And suddenly their parents' ethos seemed stifely conformist.

And so the baby boomers created the countercultural movement, which went hard the other way. So now we had, let's get rid of work altogether. It's an obstacle to self-actualization. Let's go back to land. Let's move the communes. You know, you're going to find your. yourself outside of work. That fell apart two. So by the time the baby boomers were having kids,

like how do we balance these two forces? And they came up with, I think, at the time, a clever innovation. We'll tell our kids to follow their passion. See, this is a tightrope act right here. The idea, the counterculture idea of forget work, you know, just go move to a commune and self-actualize. that didn't work, but they also still distrusted pure corporate conformity so that they had this compromise. All right, you still need to get a job and pay your mortgage payments and make a living, but make it a job you love. So now the job itself can be a source of meaning and fulfillment. So this is what we saw as millennials. We were taught this idea of follow your passion.

That then fell apart. And again, I talked about this last week, but that then fell apart in the early 2000s. 9-11, the financial crash after 9-11. We barely got back on our feet before the 2008 financial crash happened. This was the period when the bulk of the millennial generation was leaving college and entering the workforce, this idea that you should just follow your passion. That idea began to lose steam. Employment seemed much more precarious. The instrumental value of money to stay of hardship and support things that are meaningful became much more clear when people were going through hard times. And so the millennials in general moved past the follow your passion notion and

begin to work on an alternative philosophy of work as a means to an end. This is the hack work culture. This is what's captured in the minimalism movement. This is what's captured in Tim Ferriss's lifestyle design. This is what's captured in the fire movement. This is what's captured in early influencer videos on Instagram and YouTube where you see millennials focusing on lifestyle. It's the moms and the white linen dresses walking through the fields with their kids. It's the sort of impossibly ripped dads doing feats of endurance and YouTube videos. The lifestyles being pushed to the millennials by millennials, it was not about work. It was meaning in life. Work was a funding source for running endurance races and having,

you know, only white dishes on white shelves and your walls at your house. So that's this big shifts. The millennials are very attuned to this idea that follow your passion, forget that. Work supports other things that are important. Source of money, we can take it. Maybe you'll get some mean out of it. Maybe you don't like your job, but it's a

financial backing for the systematic construction of a life that's meaningful. So we've adopted that. And this is very generational. Gen Z, for example, the generation born after 1996, who's just now entering the workforce, as we talked about last week, they have their own

ideas. They're right now, they're stuck on this notion of quiet quitting. They're just taking the first basic steps of saying what is work going to mean to us. But for the millennials, we've been through this. Work as a means to an end. All right. So millennials approaching middle age, millennials adopting a work as a means to the end philosophy. And then we add the third element, the catalyst to this particular metaphorical, biochemical mixture. And that is pandemic disruptions. So the pandemic comes along, disrupts work, everything goes remote, the pain points that people feel with their jobs are amplified. At the same time, the idea that you have more freedom and flexibility in configuring your work and your life was also amplified. People were moving. They were doing different schooling configurations with their kids. They were, they were

pushing back on things, people were leaving jobs. There's this spirit of, hey, anything can go. Things are so bad that there's really nothing off the table now. And it inculcated this idea of change as possible. So I think those three things are going to come together for this particular generation to lead to a lot of people to engage in what I call a deep reset. So I have a definition for this. I'm scrolling up if you're watching this online. Here's a definition of a deep reset. It's an intentional reconfiguration of your life to amplify the small number of things you've learned through experience that you value and minimize those things that get in their way.

So deep reset is saying, wait a second, let's step back and reconfigure our whole life. And I think at this moment, the millennials in particular, because of those three forces coming together, have begun doing these deep resets, and this is going to be a very important work trend in the next handful of years that are coming up ahead. And I want to point out, this is different than a midlife crisis, which is a phenomenon that afflicted our parents. The midlife crisis came at a similar point in people's lives, so as their 30s went into their 40s, but it was much more haphazard, self-focused, and less intentional. The midlife crisis was famously characterized by people realizing, oh my God, my

life is halfway done, what am I doing? Let me respond haphazardly. I'll buy a sports car. I'll get divorce and married a 25-year-old. I'll do a dramatic, sort of visible, narcissistic lifestyle changes to try to distract or stave off or avoid the inevitable conclusion that I'm getting older. That's very different than the deep reset, which is much more intentional, much more focused on your whole life, your whole family, much more focused on amplifying. meaning, not avoiding things that are distressing. So what might go into a deep reset? Well, here are some things I've seen. Work simplification is a big part of that. So people really rethinking the role of work.

So we get a lot of, for example, lead stepping. That's the term for where you've been going up the ladder at your organization. And you say, you know what, I'm fine where I am right now for a while. Let me step off the ladder onto a ledge where I can just hang out. So without the need to strive to get to the next level, it reduces the pressure and the amount of work on your plate. So as you approach middle age as a millennial, you may already have a lot of career capital, have a really a job that's at that right balance. You have a lot of leverage, a lot of autonomy. It's probably a reasonable place where you could ledge step for a while without it being boring or as it would be if you tried when you're 22 and you're still in an entry-level position.

So we definitely see work simplification. People also going all remote could be a work simplification move, reduced hours as a work simplification move. Freelancers are people running small businesses, eliminating streams of income. The focus on just a smaller number of things is work simplification. So it's all about reducing that work volume that's coming at you from your job. That's common in deep resets. a term that I just made up, but I'm trying to popularize candle fire, capital F-I-R-E, goes along with this.

So fire is this millennial movement, financial independence retire early that we've talked about on the show before. And it was a movement that came out of the tech world about super aggressively saving while living aggressively cheaply so that you could achieve financial independence at a relatively young age. what I think we're seeing a lot more of now is what I call candle fire, the candle being referenced to a small flame, in which the idea is not, oh, I need to be financially independent. That is, I can live entirely off of my saved assets, but instead, let's bring down our cost of living substantially so that with a simplified work portfolio, we can still support ourselves. So it's not leaving work and living entirely off your investments. It's moving to the cheaper location. Getting rid of one of the cars, moving to the cheaper location. We're homeschooling

instead of private school. Our expenses are lower. So now I don't have to work as much. But I'm going to leverage the fact that I have a lot of career capital. I'm 35. I know what I'm doing. I'm in demand. It's not that hard for me to negotiate a part-time contractor position. It's half the money. we live on half the expenses. And there we go. We have a nice life with a lot less work. So candle fire. We're going to see a lot of that that's going to go alongside work simplification. Relocation is big. We saw a lot of this during the pandemic. I call it intentional relocation because it's moving for intentional value-based reasons. Two examples for my own life. We have friends who were kind of overwhelmed by the crowdedness and the stress.

of the Washington D.C. suburbs. Both their jobs were remote for the most part. They really like outdoor activities. They really like skiing. God help them. They were trying to get their skiing in each year in West Virginia. There's only so many mountains around here. They're not that great. And so they moved to Colorado, right outside Boulder, half hour from a great ski slope, mount the bike all the time, intentional relocation. Another friend of mine worked for the government, a lawyer for the government. They were enjoying life here, but his family was from Santa Fe, and they're like a long-running Santa Fe family, sort of like his family runs the town. They've been there since you were fighting off Indian raid type things. And they were all there.

So he negotiated like, hey, in the height of the pandemic, when anything went, he negotiated a permanent remote work, and they moved to Santa Fe. He sends me photos. He has a cool Adobe-style house with a hill in the backyard. There's a gazebo at the top of it. He goes up there to watch the sunset, all of his family's there. It's all thickly connected connections, intentional relocation. We'll see a lot more of that. We will also see deep community involvement. This is something else that happens in deep resets where people get deeply involved in communities that are meaningful for them. This could be family communities. Like my friend who moved back to Santa Fe is now deeply connected to all sorts of different relatives. They're in each other's

lives. There's pluses and minuses, but generally we're a familial tribal species, so that's usually positive. Sometimes it'll be, let's say, like a faith-based community. I'm going to get really seriously involved in my temple, right? In my, whatever, my mosque. Maybe it's more like an activist community. This is a cause that's important to me, and I'm going to get deeply involved in it. So we'll see more of investment of amplifying time spent and things like that. They're useful. And then finally, play and self-development, people dedicating serious time to, it might be leisure activities. I mean, I think my brother is an example of this. Outdoor activities, in particular, mountain-based activities are really important to them. And they've really built a lifestyle that involves

lots of trips to the mountains, hiking, alpine mike, skiing, mountain biking, trail running. And he's built the way his life works, his schedule to do a lot of that. But you might see this with other types of self-development as well. Someone, you know, I'm really going to invest in philosophy. I want to become an expert on this type of philosophy, health and fitness. I'm going to spend a lot of time outside. I'll give you one more example. There's a writer who wrote the book. His name's Christopher McDougal. He wrote the book, Born to Run, which was a surprise bestseller that started the barefoot or vibram shoe running craze. And it's a cool book about a New York-based reporter

who runs a lot and just was trashing his knees. And he goes and spends time with this native tribe in Mexico that do these long endurance runs as a tradition. And they do it barefoot. And he goes down this rabbit hole and finds out that, okay, actually barefoot movements, what we're meant to do. And you put in these big cushion shoes, you get hurt,

etc. Anyways, he writes this book, New York-based reporter, ends up really getting into this type of stuff, relocates to a farm. I believe he's in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, so in Amish country. It's this farm with his barn, and there's these videos of him that outside magazine did, you can find, where he's out there now barefoot doing these Rocky Four-style physical training activities, climbing ropes in his barn and throwing hay bales around. Then he built this life that has a huge amount of physical activity in it.

Outside, interesting physical activity. All these are examples of the same point. Investment, almost radical investment, in this case, in deep play or self-development. These are the type of things that you're going to see when people conduct a deep reset. Simplification, amplification, usually with a couple of these changes made more radical. You can have some radical moves in here typically as part of a deep reset. Now, how does this connect to our discussion of the deep life and the systematic pursuit of the deep life? The pursuit of a deep life will probably lead you to something like a deep reset.

A lot of people are coming to this more haphazardly. It's Christopher McDougal moving to that bar and my friends moving to the Colorado. People are coming at this a little bit more haphazardly. We try to be more systematic about it here on the show. But my point is, regardless of what we talk about here, I think deep resets are something we're going to see as a defining characteristic of the millennials in their 30s and early 40s. And I for one think it's a positive trend. I think it's a nuanced and sophisticated approach to thinking about life, the relationship

between work and other elements of life. I think our parents' generation struggled more with this. We got more of this. Oh my God, what happened to the first half of my life? Let's buy a Corvette type reaction. Because this new generation had this long period of developing a work as a means to an end ethic. They were ready for the disruptions of the pandemic. They were ready for the distress and wake up call of middle age. So we have a bit of perfect storm of forces coming together to create

a phenomenon that I think it's going to be quite positive, actually, when we look back at it for my particular cohort. There you go, Jesse. I wrote an essay on the Deep Reset in my newsletter. You can find it at calmnewport.com real early on in the pandemic. But it was way more sort of poetic and emotional. So it was just feeling, it's an interesting document to go back and read because it was projecting this feeling that was in the air of, I think, changes are coming. People are going to make big changes. But it was clearly not really worked out yet. And I think two years, or whatever's been now since then two and a half years, starting to see this shake out into something that's a little bit more clear, a little bit more systematic. So, yeah, I'm a big fan

of the Deep Reset. I think a lot of people want to do this. So hopefully having some terminology helps. This will probably be a chapter in the next book, right? Yeah. I mean, the deep life book is all kind of about this. Yeah. In fact, the deep reset was one of the early titles for the book. So it was going to be more prescriptive. Like, here's how to do a deep reset. And then we change the deep life. I'm not quite sure exactly how I'm going to tackle that book. And I like that. Like, I'm not, I'm just letting ideas flow as I work on slow productivity. And then a slow productivity. And then a slow productivity finishes, I'm going to laser lock and see like, what do I really want to do here. So with the definition, an intentional reconfiguration of one's life to amplify the small number of things that you've learned, is that to benefit your work? So when I say, okay, I have it up here. Amplify the small number of things you've learned through experience that you value. So what I'm trying to emphasize there is that the millennials are old enough now to have a experience-based answer to the question of what's important to me.

Outside of work. Outside of work, in work, in life in general. Whereas I think if you're 23 and you're trying to say what's important to me, you're basically making some guesses, you don't really know. You haven't gone through the ups and downs. You haven't gone through the various challenges. So really, by the time you get to, let's say, 35, you're probably pretty well equipped to make a good deep reset

because you have a pretty stable understanding at this point. You're far enough along in your career that you know what works what doesn't, what you like about work, what you don't, you have leverage, you have career capital.

So it's a, it is kind of a critical age. You'll have to get your friend, Mr. Money Mustache, and tell him about your new term, candle fire. Yes, we should have Pete on.

I like him. Yeah. Let's do that. I'll talk to him. Yeah. Yeah, it'd be cool to see what he's, So from what I understand, I was just talking to someone yesterday who's friends with him and some of the other fire characters.

A lot of them live in Longmont, Colorado. It's probably building. They're building. Yeah. They have that co-working space there. We should, yeah, we should get an update on what's going on. And then tell them about your new term. Candle fire.

Yep. I don't know if that's going to stick. There's a lot of fire terms, by the way, fat fire, light fire, thin fire. Oh, man. Okay. Anyways, moving on. a great block of questions coming up. I'm looking at them now.

Got some nuts and bolts about tasks. We've got some stuff about metrics. We've got something about Facebook, kids and video games. We got something about, a case study I'm particularly exciting about because it involves the melding of knitting and time blocking.

You thought there was no connection? There is. Before we get to all that, I want to talk briefly about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. And that is 8Sleep. Now, the 8Sleep pod is a cover. It's like a mattress pad cover.

You put it under your sheets and it hooks up to the 8Sleep machine. And it allows you to control the temperature of your mattress. I am a big believer of 8Sleep. I use 8Sleep. I want to give you an endorsement now that comes from my actual use of this product. I am a big believer now. And here's how I know I'm a big believer and not just a user. Is a true story.

This was probably two weeks ago now. I'm in bed. You know, I'm trying to sleep. And it doesn't feel right. Like, man, I'm kind of uncomfortable. I don't know about this. And so I asked my wife. I was like, what's going on with my eight sleep setup?

Because it's, you can set each side differently. So she gets the app out. It's on the phone. You can control it. I had accidentally had my side turned off. And I know I'm an eight sleep zealot now because when that side of my mattress was actually turned off, I was unhappy. I immediately noticed it. I was immediately uncomfortable.

So I'm a big believer that this really is helping me sleep. And so what is it like? Well, I'm a minus oneer. If you're an eight sleeper, you'll know there's a minus five, the plus five scale. I'm a minus oneer on the scale. So it's slightly cool. It feels slightly cool when you lay down, which is nice, but not cold. But the real magic of the eight sleep is not.

not that, oh, I'm sleeping on something cold, is that all of these capillaries with all this liquid going through it, pull the heat out of you that you're generating and get it out of your bed. So it's less about it's making you cold than it is as preventing you from getting hot. This is why I sleep better with this thing. And I become a big fan is because you never get hot throughout the whole night. You feel like you feel when you first get into bed. You know, it's like a little bit cold. You haven't generated the body yet. You get that all night long. So I'm a big believer of it. I mean, they gave me a lot of notes here, but I'm just giving you my anecdote here, which is I 100% use this eight sleep pod.

I'm a fan of it. So if you want some details, there's clinical data. All right, 19% increase in recovery, 32% improved in sleep quality, 34% more deep sleep. I believe all of that. They have a new generation of this, the pod three. It tracks stuff. I don't really know how this works. My wife shows me.

It'll tell you like how much you slept. I guess there's sensors in the pad. I don't know. The future's now. But let me just tell you this. If you're hot sleeper, get the 8th sleep pod. You will sleep better. I use it every night. So go to 8Sleep.com slash deep to save $150 on the pod.

So remember, 8Sleep.com slash deep. Don't forget the slash deep if you want to get that $150 savings. Eight Sleep currently ships within the U.S., Canada, the U.K., select countries in the EU and Australia. another product I want to quickly mention because it is one that I use every single week, and that is our friends at Rhone, R-H-O-N-E. As I've mentioned before, I've long been a fan of the Rone moisture-wicking exercise t-shirts. A very nice-looking, high-quality, but do a really good job of keeping you cool. This is why I was so excited to find that they now produce a dress shirt.

The commuter shirt from Roan is a very nice looking button-up shirt, but made with the same magic material as the other shirts I like from them. It's cool. It's flexible. It's moisture wicking. And key, it does not wrinkle. I have a white Roan commuter shirt, which I can wear with jeans that looks really nice. I can wear with nicer pants and a jacket and it looks really nice.

I use this when I have to speak in front of people because it's lightweight and it's flexible and you generate a lot of heat when you're up there speaking and you're not going to feel hot and you're not going to have sweat build up on your shirt. So it looks great. You can wear it all day. And with that magic fabric, it Rohn does so. Well, a couple other things they've told me here. They call their odor-free technology gold fusion. So there's something in this magic fabric to make sure even if you're at it all day long, the shirt is not going to smell bad. Also, let me just mention this. It's 100% machine washable. You throw this thing in the washing machine, put it on a hanger to dry. You don't have to go to the dry cleaner. Very convenient.

So I've long been a fan of Rhone, and I am now a fan of the Rhone commuter shirt. So the commuter shirt can get you through any workday and straight into whatever comes next. Head to Rhone.com slash cow and use the promo code Cal to save 20% off of your entire order. That's 20% off your entire order when you head to RH. O-N-E dot com slash cow and then use the code Cal. It's time to find your corner office comfort. It's a good tagline. Corner office comfort.

Maybe one day we'll get a replacement for the famous blue shirt made by Rome. Yeah. It's a good idea. It'd be a great shirt for podcasting. I mean, it's hard. We do like an hour and a half of just like rock and rolling in here. You know, like it's not a get hot. Maybe I need a Rhone podcasting shirt.

Maybe we should get logos. You already have a log, TDL. No, I mean like sponsored logos. Like NASCAR drivers all over my shirts. Yeah, eat sleep. Could go across here. I'm going to wear a visor that says Rhone. Yeah.

Across it. And then for enough money, I'll also eat. What's it? Magic spoon. I'll tell you, if I've learned anything about audio and audio production, him. Nothing pleases a listener more than a carefully mic sound of someone eating cereal. We would just be a wash in new listeners. All right. Let's do some questions. We've got a good block here.

Jesse, what is our first question of the episode? Okay. From Maria. She says, I'm about to start a professorship, and I'm thinking of implying the don't break the chain method to my research. For example, resolving to always do two or three hours every day. Do you think this is a good solution? So for those who don't know, don't break the chain is a piece of productivity advice that's often attributed to Jerry Seinfeld, who is his advice about joke writing. Do it every day. Have a calendar.

Every day that you do it, mark that day with a big X. And he says, this is effective because you don't want to break the chain of day after day, marked with the X's, which means even when it's hard or you don't feel like doing the work, you'll do the work because you don't want a blank spot on your calendar, a break in that chain of X's. So does that apply for something like doing research as a professor? But we can think of other similar obligations for non-academic positions, writing a book. Maybe you're writing a book on the side while you have another job. Maybe you need to do business strategy thinking even as you move into, I don't know, another type of more managerial role in your company, some sort of

important demanding work that requires the aggregation of a lot of time. Well, my advice for Maria would be actually don't use that method. I don't think you have enough control, enough of the year as a professor to succeed with the don't break the chain method, and that's going to be frustrating. I think this is true with a lot of higher-in professional positions. positions, there's just going to be unavoidably periods, and within those periods days where your two-hour or three-hour research block or writing block or business strategy block can't occur. I mean, I can look at my calendar right now and find these type of days pretty easily.

I think about this Friday. It's Wednesday today. So two days from now. I have to go to campus relatively early. I'm helping start up this new technology ethics major. and there's a fair, and I'm actually going to be at the fair talking about this major, and then I have a phone call, and then I've got to get back in time to pick up my kids. I'm looking at that day, my normal writing is not going to happen.

My normal two to three hours of writing the morning is not going to happen. These type of days just happen. We had another day like this coming up where there was a reporter was going to come at the same day that we were recording a podcast and the prep had to happen. You do the math and the time disappears for writing. This happens a lot. So what I recommend for these type of jobs, when you have a lot of these uncertain demands on your time,

much more so than a comedian has, is instead rely on a season-specific autopilot schedule. So autopilot scheduling is a strategy we talk about often on this show. It's where work you know has to happen on a regular basis. You schedule to happen at the same times on the same days every week. So you get in the habit. Wednesday morning, this is one. when I go do whatever work.

So when I say season-specific autopilot schedule, you look at what you're, in this case, semester, and if you don't have an academic job, quarter season looks like, and you figure out an autopilot schedule that makes sense for that particular period of time. So Maria, you probably want to factor in your teaching schedule. If on Monday and Wednesday,

you're teaching multiple classes, you might just say, look, I don't do research on those days, but on Tuesday and Thursday, I protect up the noon and I do a really big block. And on Friday, I move my child care later and do from two to the five or five 30 is another research block. You're building a autopilot schedule. This is when I do the work that is attuned to when the demands fall or don't fall in the particular upcoming season.

So that's what I would do. Build an autopilot schedule for your research that makes sense for your semester. finding the times that are much less likely to get disrupted than others. And then that's the chain you don't want to break, is sticking to your autopilot schedule, not working every day. I mean, in some sense, just think about that as one possible autopilot schedule that probably isn't going to work for your schedule.

All right. What do we have as question number two? Okay. Next question is from Kyle. Do you have a task board and a weekly plan for your personal life? Yes and no. So task board, yes. So I keep my tasks, as I've talked about, on Trello boards.

I have different boards for different roles. I like the column paradigm because I can have task under different categories or different columns, you know, waiting to do Backburner, waiting to hear back, specific, specific. And I like the ability to attach file and information to the cards. So one of my multiple Trello boards is labeled literally personal. And so, yes, I keep track of stuff that's non-worked, related. I don't want in my head. So I have a task board for that. If you're a taskless person, you can have a taskless for it. I do not, however, have a distinct weekly plan for my personal life.

I have one weekly plan for my week. In that weekly plan, I talk about professional things I need to do. In that weekly plan, I talk about relevant things to my personal life as well. So I have one weekly plan. And then when I time block each day, I'm usually time blocking the working hours in detail, and then in that time block plan, have a less structured plan or a strategy for the time after work. So like, remember tonight we got to do this. I want to get a workout in. You need to catch up on this reading. So I'm not going to structure every minute of my evening, but my daily time block plan is going to have notes for what's going to happen in the evening ahead. So I have a weekly plan that covers everything. My time block schedule I make each day

is going to have time blocks for the professional part of my day and notes for the personal part of my day. So that gets handled. I'm not winging it in my personal life. The only thing that's different, and it's what we've talked about before on the show, is again, I don't time block every minute of my personal life because then every minute of your life would be time blocked, and that's too much. And so I'm a little bit more informal, a little bit looser with my personal scheduling, but it's the same ideas for applying to both parts of my life. So then when you go to the task board, you just pull out some things and stick them in your weekly plan every week? Yeah, or daily. So, you know, when I look at my task boards when I'm doing my daily plan each day,

I'll say, okay, what can I knock off from my personal list today? Now, the nuance here is if there's a personal task I'm going to do during the workday, then it will be included in my time block schedule because I time block my work day, right? So I might say, hey, after lunch and before this phone call. I can do a 30 minute task block. Because that's a good time. I can't really do anything else not 30 minutes. And then I might list a few things there, you know, go mail this, go refill, fill the car with gas. So then personal things can make it into a time block plan if they're happening during the workday. But if it's the evening, if it's like, okay, I need to remember to go, you know, talk to, talk to Julie about this and go pick some things up from the office. I'll just

list them for the evening on my plan. I won't necessarily say, oh, at 645, I'm going to go do this. And then if you exercise, it's usually before or after work, right? Yeah. Yeah, I usually do what I usually for me is like right after work or maybe like right before, right after I pick up like my kids from the bus stop. And like that'll, that'll mark. I mean, often like my plan will kind of go through there. Like in by here to go get the kids from the bus stop, work out, and then evening notes. And we'll see. Tonight however, I'm trying to, and you have to do a late night workout. What time? Not late night, but after seven.

Because I'm going from here, my oldest has a makeup baseball game. It's going to start at five. And by the time that's done, those things last two hours, because it's kid pitch. And so, you know, it's the first season of kid pitch.

So there's a lot of walks. So they usually takes up the full two hours that they allot to it. So that's seven. It'll be like 7.30 plus when I get home. But I don't, want to break the chain on that. So I'll do a light workout. You could just do like jump rope the whole time on the sideline.

I could. Or just run around the field. I'm going to bring weights. Yeah. Okay. That's what I'll do. I'll be the dad who's doing concentration curls. I always thought about that.

Like, I mean, there's a lot of tracks behind us. I'm surprised more parents don't do that. I coach all the time. I should. I'm just not a bad idea. Yeah. Not a bad idea. You'd jump a ton of rope.

You'd jump a ton of rope. Yeah, I probably should. I probably should. I just kind of like chill with the other dads I know. And we watch. Yeah. I'm a baseball fan. Even though it's nine-year-olds playing baseball, you get kind of into it.

Yeah. Well, you can still do that. I mean, jump rope doesn't take no much space. Yeah, me all bring the jump rope. But you're saying not the, not the dumbbells, not the concentration curls. Well, you could too. I mean, you could still talk to them and do curls and they'd probably join in. Yeah.

Definitely went out weird people out. I don't mind me. If you don't polish the guns, you don't know if they're going to fire. A lot of that. A lot of kissing on my biceps. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Cam. How do you track your metrics over the long term? Do you record them in a digital spreadsheet you can review throughout the year? I don't, Cam, I don't track my metrics long term. So I track them daily. You know, I use my own time block planner. Timeblock planner.com. That has a metric tracking space. I do daily tracking of my metrics. When I do my weekly plan, I tend to sort of

look over how things went and that kind of influences what goes into the week ahead. So, for example, if I notice, hey, I'm not doing this that often. Like I'm supposed to be doing this every day. I'm looking at my metrics. I didn't. Then I might in my weekly plan for the next week have an extra reminder. Like, hey, look, we're falling behind on this discipline. You got to focus on that. And then I'll see that every day when I look at my weekly plan. It'll help keep me on track. I don't really look at the metrics at any larger scale than that. And it's not that I am ignoring that information or that I think that information is not important. It's instead that I don't need to review it because humans are pretty good at integrating observations about their life,

if they're accurate observations, if they're observations on relevant things. We're pretty good at integrating that into a narrative about how things are going. So when I get to, for example, my next semester plan, I have a pretty nuanced understanding of how things were going, that this aggressive metric I had for exercise was rarely being met, that this was going really well. I remember that. I know that. I've lived it every day. I've written those metrics down every night. I reviewed them every week. The information is there. I have a gestalt of how my life is unfolding that I can then use to make future decisions. I don't have to look at a spreadsheet and do some sort of analysis over the last. 95 days and then to learn how my life went. And I found this with a lot of self-improvement or self-tracking is that more tech-focused people have this big data paradigm that says insights are hidden in data until analysis extracts them. This is the defining idea of the big data revolution is that there is additional intelligence to be gained beyond what you have

through your own experience through data analysis. And this is true in many domains. I don't find it to be that useful for the domain of self-improvement. Now, if you're not tracking anything, this information is essentially hidden to your brain. But if you're tracking things every day and you're writing it down every day and maybe reviewing every week, those data points are being integrated by your brain. It is adding them into a relatively sophisticated model of how things are going. So I don't bother, Cam.

I think it's too fiddly to try to do tracking beyond. that level. So that's my advice. Track every day. Metrics. That matters. Look at them when you're doing a weekly plan. That matters. Beyond that, I think you're good. I think you're good. I don't think you need additional tools to really gain bigger insights. And this was big, Jesse, when we were, Godwin was like the first decade of the 2000s, like when we're in our 20s. The whole quantified self was like an offshoot of the productivity prong movement where it was we're going to quantify every element of our life and algorithmically, we will gain all these insights and, you know, become superhuman. In the end, it was like a fun hobby to do all these tools

and do all these tracking, but it didn't necessarily make a huge difference. Like, surfacing realities of your life and the numbers of metrics in the moment is very useful. You know, how much weight did I lift? How much do I wait today? Like, that is very useful. but finding higher order trends, I feel like our brains are really good at analyze it ourselves. Well, a lot of people have those tracking, you know, instruments with the weather. Yeah, but if you have like a Fitbit, for example, like say step tracking, what's really important there is that you know it's being tracked and you see each day how many steps you took. Like, that's the important information. You don't necessarily need to see a graph of how these steps move, you know, over time.

You kind of know, like, am I hitting my goal? I haven't been. now I am, usually, you know. And I don't really need the graph over time. It's just the seeing that number every day, knowing that number is coming, changes your relationship to movement. I mean, obviously there's places where data is important

if you're weight training, you know, okay, here's where my numbers are and I want to try to push those up. I mean, that could be important. But also, even there, people typically know. Like, I know where my bench has been. And I think I'm ready to go for higher. Like you don't necessarily have to see some chart of how things move over time. So that's always been my compromised position.

As long as you know the trends. Yeah, like quantification is important in the moment. Complicated analysis of what was quantified is less important. Mm-hmm. I'm sure there's exceptions, though. All right. Let us keep rolling. Who do we have next?

All right. Next question is from Allison, a 30-year-old lawyer. This year, Facebook and Instagram have started flooding their users' feeds with suggested posts from accounts they don't follow. Many users are frustrated and angry about these changes. What impact do you think these changes are going to have on the future of Facebook and Instagram? All right. Well, Allison, I've talked about this before. So I'll be short, but add a new twist to it. The source document to look at here is the article I wrote for The New Yorker on TikTok.

this probably came out this was in the summer, early fall. I don't know when that was, Jesse. I'll look it up. You look it up. Okay. Anyways, and I talked about it on the show, I believe, at some point. In fact, it was an article that came out of ideas we first introduced on the show.

And basically, my premise was Facebook and Instagram following TikTok's lead to having more and more information selected algorithmically and having no connection to people that you follow or to the things that people you follow. I said, ultimately this is going to be the doom of those services. So I'll briefly recapitulate my argument. Why? The way I think about TikTok now, my shorthand for TikTok right now, is that it's Blues Clues for adults.

So Blue's Clues is a children's program that became really popular in the 1990s. And I know about it because Malcolm Gladwell wrote a chapter about Blue's Clues in his seminal book, The Tipping Point. And what he argued in the tipping point is compare Blue's Clues to Sesame Street. And you see something very different. I mean, Sesame Street is legible to adults. You see what they're trying to do. It's educational content.

It has these interesting puppets. There's some injokes for the adults. It's funny. There's some good writing in it. And so they're trying to help children. learn, but it's a kind of an interestingly crafted thing. You can have it on as a grown up and not hate it.

And it's a well done show. Blues clues, if you've ever seen this, baffles adults. It's repetitive. It makes no sense. The characters will just look to camera and repeat themselves four or five times. They'll just pause for a while. It seems

insipid. It seems arbitrary. It seems almost nihilistic and it's incoherence. And it was incredibly popular. And what Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in the tipping point is what they did for that show was they basically studied kids and worked entirely off the metric of what grabs their attention and what does it. And so they built the whole TV show around just the simple goal of how do I keep kids' attention on here. And the result was this incoherent to adults' audio, visual assault mishmash.

And there was actually a lot of this that arose in the 90s. Barneys gave way to Telitubbies. These shows that were so weird to adults. Sesame Street was funny. You'd be like, hey, here comes, you know, stalker Channing is going to come on and do a skit with garbage, whatever's name was, Oscar the Grouch. And it's about letters, and it's also kind of funny,

and there's some good writing, and it's kind of winking at the audience. And then it's Telatubbies, your eyes are melting. It's blues, clues, like, what's going on? Why is it just staring at the screen waiting for the kids to repeat a word or whatever. And it's because it was engineered to a simple metric, what's going to keep kids looking. In the world of social media, Facebook and Instagram is Sesame Street. TikTok is Blues Clues. They got rid of any of the potentially good stuff, the connection to other people, the seeing what people you know are up to, the expression, the discovery of interesting things, and made it just what gets your eyes affixed to this as long as possible. And the result is this format that, again, to a non-Tick-Tick-Tac user is incoherent.

It's mind-meltiness. These weird, short videos with cuts and movements. And all it is is blues clues. It is what happens when you push a content to its logical extreme in the context of attention maximization. And so just like adults look at blues clues are like, this feels just, ugh. I think a lot of adults look at TikTok are like this, we're not even pretending anymore. that this is unlocking the power of the web.

It's just the logical terminal space of when you're saying, let's just maximize eyes, eyes, eyes. Okay, so TikTok is blues, clues for adult. If Facebook and Instagram follow that path, they're getting rid of all the stuff that's quality, they're getting rid of all the potential value proposition of connecting the people you know,

discovering things from people like you, and it just becomes what's going to keep my toddler slackjot at the screen while I'm trying to get something done. Once they move into that arena, they have lost their main competitive advantage, which is their social graphs. As I argued in that New Yorker piece, it is too hard at this point to build a social graph of the same size and of the same value as a Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. So any service that's mainly based on one of those social graphs is not going to be able to compete with those. But as soon as they move away from their social graph, here's friends and links, and just to algorithmically select a content, they're just in the competitive mosh pit with everything else is. trying to grab your attention.

And Blue's Clues isn't on TV anymore because there's other cartoons that came along or even more in Sipid and even more attention capturing. So that's why I think, Allison, the move of Facebook and Instagram towards a Blue's Clues TikTok model maybe is trying to stave off some user loss in the short term, but is going to expose them to competition that they can't hope to win at long term. When they left the advantage of their social graph, they left their protection. and I think that's going to be the end of them, ultimately, of them as some sort of giant culture-shaping, monopolistic platform that everyone uses.

Your article came out July 28th. July 28th. Okay, so that's the TikTok. What's it called? Let me pull it up one more time. July 28th. TikTok and the fall of social media giants. TikTok and the fall of social media giants.

All right. So you'll hear more about it there. All right, let's do a call. Sounds good. Hi, Cal. My name is John, and my job for this question is being a father. I have four kids, ages nine, seven, four, and ten months old. The question I have is regarding the productivity of children.

We are an unschooling family, a form of homeschooling, and therefore video games do not interfere with school hours or homework. I know you are against social media, but I am curious what your thoughts are on video game benefits and problems in general. My wife and I had originally decided to keep screens from our kids. Our oldest didn't use screens until she was five. Strangely enough, after allowing screen use, her emotional expression, previously very cool, suddenly warmed up. She began to dance and sing and talk about her feelings more than she had in the last five years.

After reading several articles in books, including several by Jane McGonigal and multiple articles by Dr. Peter Gray, we decided to let our children use screens. We've gone back and forth over the last few years, sometimes letting them use screens. as much as they wish, and other times limiting their use or banning them completely. They are not using social media and we are not planning to let them anytime soon. Though each child is different, what are your general thoughts on video games for children? Are they a useful learning tool as Dr. Gray would argue? Do they teach skills quickly, as Jane McGonigal has stated? Are there benefits that are difficult to comprehend, or do they interfere with children's development

as well as depleting the dopamine in children's brains? Or I could restate that in a less negative. of weight and ask if they simply take up time that would be better spent elsewhere. Many gamers are successful in many different industries and many gamers are seemingly addicted and cannot function in a healthy way in the real world. There are surely hidden benefits and hidden dangers we are still learning about. There are definitely too strong opposing views when it comes to gaming, especially in children, and I would love to hear your views.

Well, all right, John, there's a lot going on in that question. We're talking about video games. We're talking about social media. we're talking about screens and trying to navigate all of that with kids. My three kids are the same age of your three older kids. So all this is familiar. All this is relevant. There's a narrow path, a complicated path to try to navigate here.

I'll tell you where I currently stand based on what I've seen and read that this is a tentative proposal. This can change over time. All right. So video games, there I believe the danger is multiplayer online games. massively multiplayer online games. This could be things like Roblox. This could be things like Fortnite.

This could be things like World of Warcraft. Those I would steer clear of. These massively online games are the primary vectors of addictive behavior. They're massively time consuming, especially with things like World of Warcraft. They play with your brain in a way that can be very discouraging. In fact, some of the strongest examples

of digital addictions that exist over all digital technologies come from massively online video games. So no multiplayer. Single player video games. Playing Minecraft. I'm playing the new legends of Zelda

on a switch. I'm playing Mario Party or whatever. I don't think that's inherently bad. And I think it's fine for kids that have video games, have access to play them. The time should be controlled. This is when you get a play them. It's not a default. It's not every day.

You can do an hour here, hour there. It's a completely fine activity. I think modern video games are beautiful. They're fun. And as long as it's not a default activity, something the kids can just do whenever they want in their room. Why not? Now, the final thing I'll say about video games is,

no, I don't fully buy McGonagall's, I'm saying McGarnigal, like, from Harry Potter. I know exactly who you're talking about the gamification. McGonigal, I believe. It's different than Harry Potter. That'd be interesting if... It's the, she does research with the chimpanzees and stuff, right? Yeah, yeah.

So she did the, she does like the gamification of life work. Are we thinking about the? I'm thinking of Jane Goodall. You're thinking of Goodall. Yeah. Yeah, Jane Goodall wrote a book about video games. It would be interesting. If Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter wrote a book on video games, that I would read.

I don't fully buy McGonagall's view of this being beneficial. Stephen Johnson wrote a book like this in the early 2000s. everything bad is good for you. It was trying to make the argument of you're going to get great hand-eye coordination. Okay. I mean, sure. So, no, I'm not like, oh, this is, these games are giving you these secret life skills.

I also don't think single-playing video game, single-player video game playing or in-person multiplayer, so three, two people in the same room. I have no problem with that. I think of it as like TV. It's like how much do you want your kids to watch TV? Some, not all the time. So you meter out that.

time. What about other types of screens? YouTube, I would treat like television. So YouTube is another danger. If YouTube is just something that the kids, especially a nine-year-old or a seven-year-old, or even like an 11- or 12-year-old, if it's something that kids just have unrestricted access to. So it's like their video game time, they can just be on YouTube. That's hard for their developing brain. That can bring them into weird places via the recommendation algorithm. Also, the the content, it can get kind of weird there, right? This sort of just playing at what the algorithm likes can bring you to sort of weird places. So I think YouTube should be thought of as like a TV channel.

Oh, we're going to watch TV now. There are certain channels that we know about as parents that we say, yeah, let's go watch. You can watch some videos of that or we'll put some of those videos on. I mean, that's how we handle it in our household. There's certain channels we know about that we're like, okay, if you want to put on one of those videos instead of watching a show during TV time, that's fine. So if you want to play like a Mark Rober video, fine, go ahead.

If you want to watch like Adam Savage, we'll allow Mr. Beast. They're like, well, I'm like a Mr. Beast or so. Those are kind of, they're fine, right? Yeah. So YouTube, though, think about it like TV. You don't let the kids of that age have a TV in their room and you say, hey, just rock and roll. We don't know what you're up to.

You're like, yeah, you can have TV time, but we want to know what you're watching. So treat YouTube like TV where you have a say, and complete visibility on what they're watching. Do not let YouTube rabbit hole falling be something that you allow your kids to do at a young age. Social media, at least 16, at least, I mean, no earlier than that, especially if you have girls. The data there, I just believe, is very, very worrisome.

Unrestricted Internet access on a phone, so like a smartphone with unrestricted Internet access. I think that needs to be late high school at the earliest. people think that's wildly unrealistic. I think people are wildly wrong about that. It's just not good. Half of the kids you're going to give a smartphone to at 14 are going to have problems with it. And so I'm just a believer.

You can have a dumb phone. You can text your friends and text you and need to get picked up. If that's taking you out of some social stuff, and let's make sure that you're involved in at least one or two groups or activities, be it a sport or theater or a robotics team that's a team with people you really like

and you're really involved in and you have ways to connect to people that don't require you to be involved in like TikTok or something like this, but I am just a believer. Smartphones in a 15-year-old, smartphones and a 14-year-old. It's no way no.

It doesn't leave anywhere good. So that's where I fall now. No massively online video games. YouTube is treated like a TV channel. It's only done where you're around and you control what they're watching. Single-player video games are fine. Just control the time like you would TV watching.

Social media or unrestrictive smartphone access really has to come as late as you can possibly push it, even if they say, you know, we won't have any friends and everyone else is doing it. Teenagers have been saying that ever since there were teenagers. Yeah, it works. Our video games are so primitive, Jesse. Yeah.

My kids were playing it the other day. Their friend has a Nintendo Switch and they got 64 classic 8-bit NES games on it. And they're not impressed. They're not impressed. I don't know if you've seen these modern video games. My son plays Legends of Zelda something, something. I don't know, some Switch game. it's a beautiful world that's done in like a it's not photorealistic it's almost like it's a hand drawn yeah

and it's a free you just explore this world and go on adventures and it looks better than like most tv shows look 10 years ago mm-hmm it sounds like all right you can do an hour of that but they have no yeah he's when they see the super Mario brother's like come on yeah there's this thing all right let's do uh a cool case out here let's do one more question and then I have a cool case study or whatever. Sounds good. This question is from Adam, a 40-year-old from New York. Can you describe your decision rule for entering a task either onto a trailboard versus directly

into a weekly pan? I'm finding it tempting, easier to put time-sensitive items and links directly into my weekly plan, but then it gets a little cluttered. Well, Adam, I'll tell you my best practice on this issue, which is not something I always follow, but I'm always happier when I do. And that best practice is the following. So you have a, you know, something pops up. A task and obligation.

You jot it down and you're whatever you use for capture in the moment. So for me, it'll probably be in my time block planner. On the daily pages, there's a section for capturing these things. And then you get to the end of the day, you need to process it. My best practice is there's two places where that new task can go. On to an appropriate task board or list or onto your calendar. All right, so task board a list onto your calendar. What would qualify it for going onto your calendar if it's connected to a specific day in which you've decided it needs to be executed?

So the calendar is for time-specific tasks. So let's say I need to do a book blurb as due on Thursday. I might put an all-day event on that calendar day, you know, book blurb is due for whatever. Oftentimes I'll actually find the specific time for one of these time-sensitive activities and put it on my calendar like a an appointment. Give you a real world example. Friday of this week, department merit reviews are due. It's an administrative task where you have to go through a spreadsheet and sort of fill in all the academic activities you did during the year and it helps generate your raise for the year. I have the specific time when I'm going to do that on my calendar for Friday. So if a task is associated

with a particular day, it can go on your calendar. It doesn't have to be on your task list. is your calendar is obviously a productivity tool that you trust when you get to each day, you see what your appointments are and you do those things. So I trust my calendar as a productivity tool. If it's not tied to a specific day, it goes to a task list. In my case, those lists are kept on trello boards. Now, I look at my trello boards each morning when I build my daily time block plan. So if you're actually following this system, if I actually am in the groove of looking at my task board every day when I do my weekly plan, I can trust that stuff that's important will get done because when I look at the relevant taskboard, I'll see those tasks, and I'm not

going to be dumber tomorrow than I am today. So if I know today this thing is important, when I see it tomorrow, I will remember, oh, this is important and see if I can fit it into my time block plan for the day. So that is my best practice. I sometimes don't follow it when I feel like my schedule is disrupted enough that I don't trust myself to look at my taskless every day, and that's when I begin adding an extra reminder to my weekly plan, emailing myself an email where it's a reminder in the subject line. But that is all a, that's all an artifact of lack of trust. I don't trust that I'm going to see this in my list and make sure it gets done. That makes me nervous. So I'm going to add these extra reminders. But when I am on my, on the,

on track, executing my system properly, that's how I like to do it. It needs to be done a particular day, put it on that day, otherwise put it on the list. Even if I am, on the, you know, know it needs to get done this week. I don't really need to write that down somewhere because when I see that task in my list every single morning, I will remember this is something that needs to get done this week. Like, I'm not going to forget tomorrow what I know today. So that's my best practice. Calendar or task list, check the task list every day. That moves smoothly. And that's how I know that I'm out of sorts, by the way, is when I start emailing myself reminders, that's when I step back and say, I'm off my system. I need to get back to my system. And I always feel better what I do.

Do you do that process in like the same spot every day or is it very? I do now. So in my study at home, which we'll have to in an upcoming weekly update video, just is going to bring the camera over to my study at home. I go to my study at home each morning and I have a desk, my custom built desk that's made to fit to kind of weird space of the study. And it has a one drawer. I had it built in this one drawer.

And I open up that drawer and there's my time block planner. I take that out. I put it on the desk. I turn on my, my laptop, and it's the first thing I do is I'll make that daily plan for the day. And I try to do this if I can before I walk my kids to the bus stop. If not, immediately after I get back from the bus stop, I'll do this. But I load up my computer. And so my weekly plan will be, and I was looking to see if I don't have my backpack in here.

My weekly plan will be printed and in my time block planner. So I open this thing. I read the weekly plan. I open my computer, I read my calendar, I read my task list in Trello, and sketch out that time block plan for the day. So when I'm on the ball, that's what I do. And so having the set location that I come to every morning at the same time to do this, that really has helped keep me in it. So during the period when we were renovating that study, I didn't have a set location. I might work outside.

I might work at the kitchen table. I might work upstairs. I fell off the system. So it's a good question. a great location where this is where I do, that's how I start my day, has really made a big difference to me. So we'll get that. We'll do a weekly update video. I'll show you that whole setup sometime soon. I want to do a quick case study here. One of the things I like when people send in in the question survey, which by the way, Jesse, make sure that link is in the show notes,

but to submit questions or case studies, you have to go to a survey monkey survey and enter it, and that link is right in the show notes. Here's a case study that someone sent in. This came from Anna, who was an anthropologist in her mid-40s. So here's what Anna says. In January 2021, I started to document my time for each day in a knitted scarf. I broke up each day into how much time I spent writing emails, grant proposals, teaching documents, social media, admin, and research-related writing, and I knitted a proportional number of rows in my scarf using different colors for each of these activities. My days used to be all over the place.

Then I started listening to your podcast in June of 2021 and really put some of your systems into place, time blocking, getting off Twitter and Instagram, working out, working on my values and priorities, et cetera. So she saw in her scarf. The social media stitches disappeared. There were fewer email stitches. and the research and proposal writing stiches lengthened as the scarf grew through the end of the year. The result of this shift was research papers got submitted, two books got completed,

and a grant of almost 5 million euros got submitted and went through to the final round. The scarf is both knitted data of the effects of your deep work interventions, as well as a relaxing way to unwind. So thanks for sharing with us all your systems and inspiring us to find more time for the things we enjoy about our work, keep it coming, and I will continue to listen to you as I knit. Oh, that was really cool. So she elaborated, especially at the end of the day is when she would do this. She would look at how she spent her time for the day, and that would be her pattern for the

knitting she did in the evening. And so the scarf is a colorful, like, data visualization of not only how she spent her time, but how that shifted after she got into the Deep Questions podcast. So I sent her a note and I said, we need a picture. So that's coming. She's going to send us a picture of the scarf. I'm kind of excited about that. So Jesse, we'll put that on the show.

Yeah. We'll put that on a show and get that. But I love that idea of knitting a record of your time and the idea of having a relaxing activity you do at the end of each day to help reset your mind as sort of a good shutdown ritual activity. So, Anna, thanks for that. I look forward to seeing a picture of the scarf and keep knitting. All right.

So coming up, we have the mailbag segment. Look at some stuff that people have sent to my interesting at Calnewport.com address recently that have caught my attention. First, I want to briefly mention our good friends at Ladder. Ladder is a place to get insurance. Now, if you're anything like me, you probably put off things like getting insurance until the last minute. But when it comes to something like life insurance, you can't really afford to delay.

If something happens to you, it is not going to be something you're expecting. If, God forbid, you leave this earth a little bit earlier than planned, those that you love, those that you care for, will be left in the lurch unless you have life insurance. So you need life insurance, but you probably, if you don't have it, it's because it's complicated.

How do I do this? I'm going to tell you how to do it. Go to ladder. Ladder is 100% digital. No doctors, no needles, no pants. paperwork. When you apply for three million, or no doctor's needles or paperwork when you apply for $3 million in coverage or less, I should say, you just answer a few questions about your health in an application. They then come back and give you quotes. You can evaluate right there.

No hidden fees. Cancel any time. Get a full refund if you change your mind in the first 30 days. All these policies are issued by insurers with long proven histories of paying claims. They're rated A and A plus by AM. B.S. So if you need life insurance, just do this right now. Go to ladderlife.com slash deep. And you can put in your information and instantly discover if you're approved and how much it's going to cost. That's L-A-D-D-R life.com slash deep,

ladderlife.com slash deep. If you have a family, you don't have enough life insurance, just go do that right now. Put that on your to-do list, do it, and then get on with the rest of your day. also want to talk about our friends at stamps.com. The holiday season is coming up. I'm already stressed even just imagining, waiting in the interminable lines at the Tacoma Park post office.

It's right down the street from us here at our Deep Work HQ. This is why I am happy that stamps.com exist. Stamps.com is your one-stop shop for all your shipping and mailing, needs. For more than 20 years, Stamps.com has been indispensable for over one million businesses. It allows you access to the USPS and UPS services you need right from your computer. No need to go to the post office. It also gives you major discounts on shipping rates. So you can use Stamps.com to print postage wherever you do your business. All you need is a computer and a printer.

You need a package pickup. You schedule it right there through the Stamps.com dashboard. You print the postage right on your home computer. You just tape it right on there. It's the way to do all of your mailing needs without having to go to the post office. This is useful, even if you're doing a small amount of mailing your company or running a big online business that sends a lot. Stamps.com is what you need. So this holiday season, trade late nights for silent nights and get started with Stamps.com today. If you sign up with promo code deep, you will get a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a free digital scale.

no long-term commitments, no contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page, and enter the code deep to get those special offers. All right, final segment of the show. This is the mail bag segment. So for over a decade now, I've maintained this email address, interesting at calnewport.com, where I've solicited my readers and listeners to send me interesting things they think I might like.

I feel bad that there's so much. much cool stuff that comes in so much more than I have time to actually write about or turn into articles or book chapters. So we introduced this segment so we could walk through a selection of some of the cooler things that have come into my interesting inbox in recent weeks. All right. Let's get started with item number one. Now again, if you're watching this on YouTube, YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media, you will see what I'm talking about. If you're listening to this, links to everything I'm talking about are in the show notes. And the first thing I want to talk about was sent to me by Chris, and it has to do with augmented reality.

So on this show, I made this prediction that the major upcoming technology revolution that not enough people are talking about is going to be the elimination of physical screens in our life. Augmented reality tools are going to put digital screens into our world. The computation behind what we're seeing on those screens is going to happen in the cloud. the entire consumer electronics industry as we know it is going to be drastically reduced. We don't need laptops, phones, televisions, desktops. When all of that can be done with a single augmented reality device, you're going to have a small number of companies become more valuable than anything in the history,

probably of the economy and huge companies go out of business. All right, so Chris sent me an example from Twitter. This is a screenshot from a video that was on Twitter of some of the next steps towards this reality coming true. So if you're looking at this online, watching the video, the picture you'll see on the screen is of a laptop, but surrounding the laptop is three very large monitor screens. And this is all in a sort of standard office environment with fluorescent lights or what have you. In this scene, those giant monitor screens do not exist in the real world. They're added there through augmented reality.

Now, what this is is a demo of the new Oculus product, the Quest 2 Pro. And this is an early form of augmented reality, which is not directly adding these screens into your field of vision in the way that a Microsoft HoloLens or a magic leap goggle would do. you, this is actually using the Quest 2's pass-through real-time pass-through camera feature. So actually, the user here has a full virtual reality helmet on. There's a camera in front of this virtual reality helmet. They are seeing what's in front of them filmed by this camera.

So there's a helmet that's blocking their view of what's in front of them, but the camera is showing what's in front of them virtually on the virtual reality screen. So it's as if they're not wearing the helmet itself. and then the quest is adding these virtual screens onto that real-time video feed. So, of course, it's not practical, right? We're not in the office or walking around going to put on a full virtual reality helmet when we want to add screens to the world around us.

But as Mark Zuckerberg has explained in recent interviews, there is a lot of logic behind what they're doing here. It is much, much easier to add virtual elements to a video stream than to actually literally add them using a wave guide. into what you're seeing right now through transparent glasses. So they're mastering this technology in this much easier context of their virtual reality helmets, but their goal, and he's very clear about this,

is to move from this into actual glasses where these elements are being added to what you see. So you're seeing the world, and these are being added to what you see. Facebook has a big collaboration with Rayban right now as they're working on the physical form of these glasses. So don't sleep on what Zuckerberg is up to over there. they talk a lot about the metaverse, but this is where the real money is going to be.

And he knows it, and I think the strategy of using virtual reality as a way to master augmented reality while waiting for the augmented reality hardware to get viably usable by most people is a smart strategy that will probably give them a link up. So as this picture captures, that future is coming.

All right. Item number two, let me switch over. This comes from Sten. So we talk a lot on the show, like with the Bram Stroker piece from a couple of weeks ago, about the impact of environment on cognition. Environment can affect your cognition. This is why we shouldn't be so casual, for example, about just saying,

hey, everyone, work from home now. You're like, great, my laptop technically has access to all the features I have at work, and so I can just sit in the laundry room or at my kitchen table and do my job. It's not so simple. Environment matters, setting matters. It's why my New Yorker piece from 2021 about work from near home, I talked about all of these writers who technically were working from home, but found really eccentric locations near their home to actually do their work because setting matters.

So Stinn showed me, or what he sent me here was an article by Andrew Huberman, Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who's often cited on this show. He wrote an article that included a short, paragraph on the cathedral effect, which is a scientific notion that captures some of what I'm talking about with setting affecting cognition. I'm going to read here part of this excerpt, which I have up on the screen. So here's from Andrew. There is an interesting effect, a workplace optimization called the cathedral effect in which thinking becomes smaller, more focused on analytic processing when we are in small visual fields. The opposite of

is also true. In short, working in high ceiling spaces elicits abstract thoughts and creativity, whereas working in low ceiling spaces promotes detailed work. Even relatively small differences like a two foot discrepancy in ceiling height have been shown to elicit such differences. The takeaway, consider using different rooms, are buildings, indoors, and outdoors to help access specific brain states in the types of work they favor. Cool effect. A couple takeaways. Maybe this is why when I brainstorm, I'm trying to find the new, angle of solve a proof or a new idea for an article or book, I tend to do it on foot outside. Now, I often attribute that to the motion, the locomotion, helps me clarify, reduce the noise

to get to original thought, to recognize the signal of original thought. Huberman would say, yeah, but also the sky is high. And so you're in a better physical environment for brainstorming. And when it comes time to write, you know, I write in my study, which is dark colored in books all around me. Maybe that's better for trying to get the details just right. A cathedral effect. I like that. All right. One more. We can't do an interesting mailbag feature without some obligatory focus porn. It's my term for finding examples of beautifully aesthetic, deeply aspirational examples of people going to radical means to find concentration in peace and quiet to actually focus and do work. So today's example of focus porn was sent

to me. Look, I have his name here. from Andrew and I feel bad I forgot the name of I think it's Alistair Humphreys is I think who these examples are from there's a link

there's a link in the description of where this comes from these are some stills I took from a video a beautifully shot video that this writer produced and the video starts with him in his home office overwhelmed and distracted

you know it's edited so he has phone calls coming in he's being real distracted. He's writing a book. And so he goes and retreats to this, I guess you would call it a shed. In the middle of nowhere mountains, the video follows him hiking. And the picture you see now on the screen is of a man leaning against a house. It's a rock fall on a deserted mountain.

And the rocks have been stacked to make a rock house or shed or whatever you would call it in the middle of nowhere with one window. And he's out there writing. And then the second picture I have is him inside this rock house. and it's dark except for the light from the one window illuminating him. He has a coffee mug and a notebook on which he's doing his writing. Anyways, I recommend watching the video because it's beautifully shot. I don't know what type of cameras he's using. It's beautifully shot, and it's going to make you want to go to Iceland

before you write that next report or try to write that next algorithm. So check out these pictures or that video if you want just a weekly burst of that nice, ah, feeling you get when you see people, at least for a little while escaping from all the noise to sit in the rocks with coffee and a notebook, as we all want to do from time to time. Jesse, if our studio was in a rock shed like that, I think that would be, that would be the big move right there. That'd be the big time move, is if we, we hiked up to a mountain like that, and that's where we recorded from. I think we, that's what would make this show, I think, really sink in for the audience. Like, these guys are for real. I mean, it'd be

inconvenient because we'd have to hike for hours every day. Yeah. Bring up firewood during the wintertime. There's a fire going. I have a fire in my study. Yeah, you've mentioned that. Yeah, I got a gas fireplace. I can like turn on flames when I want to when I want to be in winter mode. Yeah. But this guy is big time of me

with his rock. It is Alistar Humphreys. Allistar Humphreys. Okay, excellent. All right, everyone. Well, that's enough for today. That's the end of our episode. Thank you, everyone who sent me your questions. Go to the survey link in the show notes if you want to submit your questions for consideration on the show, YouTube.com slash Calnewport Media. To watch videos of full episodes and select segments like the mailbag we just did.

Be back next week with a new episode of the show. And until then, as always, stay deep.