Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 279: Confronting Overload

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

We talk a lot on this show about getting more done, but what’s the best way to handle the inevitable situation in which you have too much to do? Cal walks through a sensible response to the crazy-making reality of overload.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  https://youtube.com/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: Controlling Overload [4:48]- Is building a “second brain” important? [37:53]- How can I bill 40 hours a week without getting overloaded? [43:30]- What book should I buy my department to best increase their work quality? [46:31]- How do I make progress on projects that have lots of overhead? [51:53]- How can my wife deal with her new position and the overload that comes with it? [57:35]- CALL: What is Cal excited to gif this holiday season? [1:06:14]CASE STUDY: Quitting Twitter to build a better life [1:09:55] CAL REACTS: Why did students get dumber starting in 2012? [1:17:31]Links:https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1734436486727254218Thanks to our Sponsors: https://www.ladderlife.com/deephttps://www.blinkist.com/deephttps://www.hensonshaving.com/calThis show is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at https://www.betterhelp.com/deepquestionsThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for slow productivity 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 Kyle Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world. So if you're new here, I'm a computer science professor and digital theorist who writes about the way that technology impacts how we live, how we work, how we relate to each other. Here on this show, I give concrete advice for taking action on the types of big ideas I write about. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer Jesse, Jesse, who today is keeping an extra close eye on the time because immediately following this recording. And I'm talking about this is like one hour and 25 minutes from the current point. I have to administer online a final exam to the graduate distributed algorithms elective that I'm teaching this semester at Georgetown. Jesse, I resisted my initial plan of using today's episode as a final review for the graduate students in this course, reviewing the intricacies of advanced distributed algorithm theory, and I figured maybe we should do a normal show. I asked earlier if the exam is going to be hard.

Yeah, well, and I said no, and then I realized actually many of the questions are on papers I wrote, so maybe I have a biased answer. I started laughing. You know what this got me thinking about, though, Jesse, is our sort of running challenge. to figure out what could we do on this show that would lose the maximum number of listeners as quickly as possible. I think lecturing about distributed algorithm theory would do pretty well, but I was thinking about it coming in here today. What could we change this format of the show to that would do even worse than lecturing

on distributed algorithm theory? I have three ideas I wrote down. Yeah, I see. I don't even know what the second one means. Yeah, you will know in a second. All right. And then you can tell me if you have anything to add. Here are my three ideas.

One, we could change the title of the show to the cold truth and make it mainly about cold plunges and why cold plunges are useful. Perhaps with the twist that I do all the podcasting, as you suggested before, from inside a cold plunge. So it would just be about 45 seconds of me yelling about how cold it is, and then that would be the show. All right. Idea number two. again, ideas that what would lose the most listeners as quickly as possible. FIPP Corner, by which I mean the acronym for fielding independent pitching. This would be a show in which we go deep on the analytics of the Washington Nationals minor league pitching system

to try to understand what type of righty lefty matchups, who's looking good from the analytic perspective as opposed to just what's happening in the on-game performance, really get deep into the deep. of pitching performance for the Washington Nationals. That as a bonus for that, we could throw in the Tani contract and how it's all deferred money. We can really look at the finances of the taxes and stuff. Really, the AAV hit is really actually $47 million. There's some complexity here. Yeah, so we could definitely do insider baseball talk.

People want to hear that from me. All right, my final idea for an episode format that might lose most listeners. Me and you just do an extended Dungeons and Dragon session. Yeah, I wouldn't be very good at that. Just rolling dice. The Elf King is shooting his arrow. I've never played. Yeah.

And then you would say, like, I'm going to use the spell of the fence. And then I would say, this cold pludge is so cold. Get me out of the cold plunge. Why did people do this? This is my idea. All right, what am I missing, Jesse? What would be even worse? You know, we could do a deep dive into Mad Dog Radio.

We do. Jesse and I talk a lot about Mad Dog Radio. So yeah, that could be our whole episode could just be a giant reaction video to whatever the most recent Mad Dog episode was. Yeah. Yeah. He went crazy the other day about the performances of Miami and the Packers on Monday night. I can already, see, I have a counter right here. I can see the listeners just dropping.

It's just spinning. Just spinning really fast. All right. Enough of that nonsense. We actually do have a real show today, standard topic. I've got deep dive. Got some great questions. and a cool final segment that is coming later.

All right, so let's get our sound effect buttons loaded, Jesse, because I think it is time for the deep dive. So it is the holiday season. And even though on the show, we often talk about productivity and age of distractions, one of the things that this particular season is known for is overload. This is a topic that I think is as worth talking about as how to get more done.

So what should your immediate next steps be when you get hit by that sinking feeling that you have taken on more than you could possibly reasonably accomplish? That's what I want to discuss today. I have three concrete ideas each follows one after the other, one, two, three that I should suggest that you deploy in response to overload, whether this is overload in your professional life or your personal life, something that can deliver relief right away and help make sure that this type of overload, becomes less common in the future. So I have three concrete steps to offer to you about how to get through overload. But first, we should take a moment to understand why overload in the first place is so hard to avoid. Why is it something that even when we're conscientious and we use Cal Newport-style systems for organization and planning, why do we still find ourselves at times like the holiday season with too much to do?

I want to do a brief bit of theory here. I'm going to, for those who are watching instead of listing, I'm going to draw this beautifully on the screen. This is a chart, right, because I'm a scientist here. So I'm going to draw a chart here. We have a y-axis and an x-axis. I'm actually going to label this chart. So let's label the y-axis, the vertical axis here. I'm going to put, let's see here, obligations.

It's pretty small. Then I'm going to put on the x-axis time. All right. So what am I going to do with this chart? Well, what most people have, whether they know about it or not, is a limit. Now, I'm drawing this as a dashed line going across the chart here. They have a limit for how much obligations they can be dealing with at the same time without feeling overloaded. So we'll even label that here.

We'll call this max. obligations. This is crude, but gives us the general idea. If a maximum of obligations we can handle before we begin to naturally feel kind of overloaded, the actual position of this line on the y-axis, so the number of obligations you can handle before feeling overloaded, this has to do in part with what type of work we're talking about. It also has in part to do with your particular personality. Some people like me are very attuned to overload. It really stresses is out. Other people feed off it a little bit more, but that line exists for most people. Now, here's the problem. We have a broken mental model for how overload actually operates. Most people

think, here's what you do. You select a workload, and you want it to be close to but below the max obligation. So maybe I'm putting a red line here across. You say, yeah, I'll just make my workload here, keep it steady over time right below that max obligation's dotted line threshold. So I'll be getting a lot done without feeling overloaded. The reason why this doesn't work is that in reality, your obligation count is like an giant super tanker on the ocean. When you get it moving in a given direction, you can't just stop it on dime.

You can't just stop where you are and make a quick turn. If you want to start turning, you're going to slide for a long time in one direction until you can finally turn the directions. If you want to stop because you don't want to hit an iceberg in front of you, it could take you, and I've seen these numbers before, miles before that big mass comes to a complete stop. So you get moved in a direction. It takes a lot of time even after you want to change it for you to move back in the other direction.

As a result, when you try to keep your obligations around a certain level, what you're going to get is oscillations above and below. So I'm going to draw this. I'll draw this here. I'm going to select another color. I'll use black. All right. So I'm going to draw this here. I guess I'll use orange.

It becomes something more like this. So if you're watching this instead of just listening, you'll see I have an oscillating sort of sign curve that is going above where you're trying to keep it, then it falls below. So what's really happening here is that when you realize you have too many obligations, you start to try to pull back, but it takes a while and more stuff comes in and you get much higher than you want to be. And then finally you go too far in the other direction.

You fall lower than you need to be. So you start bringing stuff on and you go higher than you want to be. And if we look at this here, we see there are these points above our max obligation line periods of overload. That's difficult to deal with. Now, one thing you could do is say, okay, I'll recognize this reality, and I will build my wave, I'll start it lower, all my target lower, so that my peaks stay below my max obligation line. So I drew another curve here that's trying to indicate that. You could do that, but here's the problem. In order to keep your peaks below your max obligation line, look at these valleys now.

These are really low. So if you're trying to make sure that you never have too much to do, you're going to have, at a frequent point, way too little to do. This might be so little to do that is very notable. Your boss is like what's going on here. Your clients aren't getting serviced. You're not making enough money. The stuff in your household that just has to get done, not all of it is getting done. So in order to average ourselves around a reasonable area, it feels like overload can be somewhat inevitable.

So I think that's what's going on from a theoretical perspective. That's why it's difficult to avoid overload while still feeling like you're being reasonably productive. So what do we do about it? Well, I have three steps to recommend. And these feed off each other. You one after another, you do them in this order. Step number one, reduce what you can right away. So you have that moment of, oh my God, I have too much on my plate.

I'm stressed out. Typically, this comes after you're confronting some reality of your calendar. You're like, my God, how am I going to get this all done? I feel so busy. To get some relief right away, say, what can I take off my plate? And it doesn't have to be related to the final thing that pushed you over the edge. You say, where can I simplify here? Well, look, I agreed to volunteer at this thing.

They have a lot of volunteers. It's going to take up a lot of time. this is eating up a whole afternoon. I'm going to step out of that. I have some social plans that, you know, on paper, sounded good because I want to see these people, but it means it's going to be five nights in a row where I'm going out and doing things.

So I'm going to actually cancel this social plan. I'm going to cancel that social plan. I agreed to help with this on work, among other things. I'm going to say I have to step back from that. I'm sorry. I apologize. I just have too much on my plate. I just agreed to give a talk yesterday.

Let me pull back and say actually never, you know, I know we just talked about that, but I wasn't looking at my schedule, right. I'm going to try to push a meeting. I have a meeting with someone that's required me to travel halfway across the city. It's really not that urgent. It made sense at the time when I scheduled it because the calendar was empty, but now that I'm there, I have much more intractable things. So you begin to reduce what you can reduce.

Move, cancel, defer. Just to earn yourself a little bit more breathing room. A lot of people skip this step because there's an almost a morality to being the person that's always there and always doing things. and can handle the busyness. So we have this sense of pulling back is somehow a failure or a moral mark upon us. But it really isn't. It's just a reality of this sine wave up and down nature of work that sometimes when a sine wave pops above, we have to start pulling it back down right away to keep things

reasonable. So if you're doing this with care and in response to overload and not laziness, not procrastination, but in terms of I need to pull down my workload, it is the right first step. All right, step number two, systematize the workload that remains. So, okay, here's what I have to do. After I've simplified what I can, I now need a plan for how this work is going to get done. Having a plan for how the work is going to get done does not reduce the amount of work you have to do. It does not even reduce the total number of hours when you add it up, you spend on the work, but it can make the psychological experience of facing and executing this work

much improved. So instead of just randomly throwing a lot of hours of what remains, here are some ideas here. Look ahead on your calendar for however long this period of overload is lasting and start blocking out the work. When is this going to get done? I'm going to start putting aside time. This is what I'm going to be working on this conference. This is what I'm going to do the gift shopping that is starting to stress me out. Maybe there's an administrative load you have because you agreed to help organize an event and it's just generating more and more back and forth emails and crises and you autopilot schedule 35 minutes every morning nothing but work on that like really thinking through process-centric emails not just shooting things off to

come of your inbox but really thinking through here's what I think we should do here's the steps here's the next thing you should do don't just respond to me an email you know working on it every single day autopilot it so you have some autopilot scheduling going on for the things that happen. Add big blocks into your calendar that you might not normally have. I think we talked about this in, this might have been the episode we did with Laura Vandercam, where she talked about, it was an assistant professor who was feeling overloaded because of her schedule, working towards tenure. And one of the things she realized is like, oh, I could hire childcare for work coverage that would enable me on a regular basis, at least during this period,

to get in a really large block of work that I otherwise would not be able to do. So in this particular example, the issue was it was a day in which this professor, it was her turn, not her husbands that pick up her kids from elementary school at three, but it was a day in which she was done with her teaching by 12. And she realized a babysitter that picks up the kids and takes them till six means six unbroken hours on those days, so she could really make progress on something. So think about how you can add new blocks, large blocks to your schedule by doing a little bit extra, putting in a little bit of extra effort to protect time. And this is hiring child care or making a deal with your partner.

Sunday mornings, I need a four-hour block on Sunday mornings. Let's figure out something you do with the kids. So you add in the time you need. So you're proactively making a plan for how is this work going to get done. And by blocking time in advance, generating more time and putting in autopilot for the ongoing work, More and more of this gets executed without you just in a stressful manner trying to find hours late at night or early in the morning and getting feeling worse about it. It really is there's an immediate stress reduction impact once you have this plan in place. Even before you've done any of the work, because your mind says we have a plan.

This makes sense. I can go back to thinking about whatever. I don't have to have this as a background hum of anxiety that's added on top of the actual stress of doing. the work. So step one, just reduce what you can from your schedule right away to get some breathing room. Step two, have a systematic plan for how the heavy work that remains is going to be executed in this

period of overload. And then step three, and this is one that is often missed, and it surprises some people, but it works really well. Plan to prevent similar overload in the future. So right now, as you're facing an end up, overload period. Before you even make significant progress into that overload, you spend some time thinking through, how do I make sure this doesn't happen so frequently in the future?

It seems like at first, isn't this a waste of time? Shouldn't you just be working on the stuff you need to do? Why would you waste time thinking through new systems and plans for the more distant future to prevent overload in the future? And the answer is it's a huge psychological. boost. I face this hardship, but you know what? I have some ideas now about how to prevent this type of overload from happening so often in the future makes you feel better about the overload you face right now. It makes it feel like you have efficacy. I'm in charge of the situation.

I can make progress. Yeah, this is going to maybe suck a little bit for the next three weeks, but I feel better about it knowing that it's probably not going to happen again after that for a while because I have learned from it. How did I get in the situation? What can I put in place to help minimize similar overloads in the future? Now, before we get into the specifics of how do you prevent overloads in the future, let's return briefly to my diagram from before because you might be saying, Kyle, you said, look, work oscillates. You can't keep it.

You can't keep your workload easily as just a straight line. It oscillates up and down. So how are we going to have any success trying to reduce overload in the future? Well, the things I'm going to explain to you now, it's not about stopping the oscillation. What it is is going to be about squeezing the space between the top and the bottom. So what you can do, and this is a great time to do it when you feel overload in the moment, is figure out how do I get those oscillations tighter? So the overload is not as bad, or perhaps I can actually fit underneath the limit

without my troughs being too low. So how do we squeeze the amplification? how do we squeeze the amplitude of this workload sinuous curve? Well, here's a few ideas. One, quote us, certain type of work that you need to do as part of your position, but that you have an unlimited supply of this work coming in. So at some point you're going to have to say no, you decide in advance what your limit is. This is very common with college professors with, for example, peer review.

Something you need to do. You can't just say I don't do peer review as a common. college professor, at a certain level, you will have more request to do peer review than you have time to do, so you might as well set the quota on your own terms. Four papers per semester, when I hit that quota, I tell people I've hit my quota for the semester, so I can't do this review right now. You're still doing the thing that's important, but you are controlling the appropriate level given what's going on.

So you might think about quotas on regular work you have, events you agree to help organize, client lunches you agree to go do. This is a very good excuse to surround. a no because you're explaining, I like doing this work, I know it's important, I have a limit for how much I do per unit of time per semester per quarter, whatever you, whatever is relevant to where you work. I'm past that already. It's a very hard thing for people to push back against because they would have to say your

quota's wrong. You should be doing more of this. And often quotas are very reasonable. So it's a very reasonable way to say no. Another thing you can consider doing, especially when you feel like there's a lot of incoming that's novel. This is not work I normally do. I don't have a great instinct for how much time it's going to take, but I feel pressured to say yes, is future time blocking.

This is something I talk about a little bit, I believe, in the introduction to my time block planner, or I talk about the discipline, but it's a very powerful tool. Or what you do is for when new things are coming in, you say, I'm going to go and block in advance on my calendar. So it's like I'm time blocking days that are still way in the future when this work is going to get done. I could be crude. You don't have to be super precise, but you're like, I don't know. I figure I'm going to need five or six long sessions to actually write this report I'm about to agree to do. Let me go find and block those two to three hours sessions, five or six of them in the next three weeks.

I'm going to put them on my calendar. You can mess around with that schedule when you actually get to the week. But what you're doing is saying, I need to actually find and identify enough time in my future to actually do this. Now, the advantage of future time blocking is that pretty soon you see when you don't have, enough time to get something done. It makes the unreasonability of your workload obvious because you're starting to have a hard time finding the time in the weeks ahead to block off to actually accomplish what needs to be accomplished. And it gives you a really clear indicator of, okay, I should say no. I don't have the time. I'm looking at my calendar. I keep very careful track of

my time. I can actually easily find the time for this. So something has to go or I have to say no to this. A future time blocking is not something you want to do for everything all the time, right? You don't want to be building a time-specific schedule in advance for every obligation, but if you do this for a while, especially during times where you fear overload, it protects you during that period, but more importantly, it trains you. You gain a better understanding of how long things take and how much time you actually have free once you factor in one of these standing meetings.

I usually have to do this and that. And after a while, when you get to these potentially busy or overloaded periods, you don't actually have to do the future time blocking because you just have a good instinct. I know how much this type of thing takes. I have a good feel for what the month ahead looks like. I know I don't have time now. You become a sort of time allocation scheduling ninja in the sense of I just have this really good instinct for what's going on in my calendar. You can also have automatic no list.

definitely people in the public eye like myself have this. These are things I just automatically say no to. I don't even have to think about it. You could also practice hard no. If you are going to say no, just say no. You can be apologetic, but don't give wiggle room. Don't say, I don't think I can do this, but I mean, you know, I mean, unless we could find a way to work it around

or maybe there's somewhere else, some other way it can be helpful in organizing this, then people just go right back around and throw a bunch of work on your plate anyways. If you're going to say no, give people the courtesy of a hard no. so they know to move on. Consider having a default of deferred yeses. So even if you think you are going to say yes to something or you're not sure, but you have to get back to someone, say, look, that sounds interesting. Let me get back to you on Monday.

That's when I go over my schedule and plan. And I'll see what's going on. I'll get back to you. That's an easy response to have because you're not saying no to someone in the moment. it also shows and signals to the other person that you are a conscientious scheduler. You know what's going on with your time, that you're responsible and reliable. So you've planted that seed that you've bought yourself some breathing room. Now, this breathing room gives you a few different things.

One, it just allows you to escape the social pressure of the moment which says people want some sort of positive response. I don't want to disappoint people. You've given a non-disappointing response, and now you can get some space away from that acute feeling of social pressure and more clinically say, do I really have time to do this? At a time where you don't feel like in the moment, I just want to make this person feel good. That sounds silly, but it's a really strong effect. We mind read.

We mind simulate. When that email is there in your inbox, it says, hey, can you come give this talk? You're simulating the mind in that moment of the person who sent you that email. When you consider writing no, you imagine that mind being disappointed and upset in you. That's a very powerful force. So if you have to respond to that email, it's going to bias you towards a lot of positive response. So if you instead say, oh, this sounds great, but let me get back to Monday after my planning, you do not simulate in their mind being disappointed. They're like, great,

we'll hear from them on Monday. Then later, when you're away from that inbox and that simulation of the mind of the cinder has completed, you're now able to analyze this much more clinically. Oh, I don't really have time for that. That's not a good time. Second, because you have planted the seed that I am a conscientious scheduler, when you do get back to them on Monday, if the decision is, I don't have time for it, they take that seriously. It does not seem knee-jerk. This seems like someone who knows about their schedule and don't have time for this. So it's much harder for them to say, well, can't you just do it?

Because that's a repudiation of your demonstrated ability to actually control your schedule. So deferred yeses is a great way to – you can have a whole, by the way, just calm of this in your Trello board for the relevant roles. Deferred yeses, get back to people next planning meeting. It's a great way to just sort of break free of the social pressures, give yourself some space, signal your conscientiousness. and make much more intelligent decisions. The final thing you can think about when you're in this mode of how can I prevent this type of overload from happening again is bigger shifts. We don't enough think about work positions in terms of the controllability of workload. There's a lot of things we use to measure the desirability of work positions.

the two most obvious ones being content of the work. This is probably in the American context the most dominant way we judge work. Does this match my quote unquote passion? Do I like the sound of this job or working in this position or the eliteness of this position? So we put a lot on the content of the work. Like what is the job itself? What field is it in? We put a lot of emphasis on that.

We also put a lot of emphasis in location too. All right. So where is this? as a part of the country that I want to live. But there's other things you should care about too, things that have a huge impact on your day-to-day subjective well-being, and workload control ability could be that. So maybe it's the case that this job, it's hard to subdue the sign waves,

the up and down movement of workloads. So I'm constantly above my workload max, and it's just the way this job works. Take that seriously. As a signal for, maybe I need to shift my position within this company or within this field or into another field. Take the pain of overload seriously. So doing this planning in the moment for the future

makes you feel better about the present because the present becomes attractable. I'm going to get through this. I have my plan, I reduce things, and I've made steps to prevent this from happening again. If you don't make those steps to help prevent it from happening as often again, you can feel, to use motivational psychological terms,

that the locus of control is shifted towards the extrinsic. that you have no control over this negative thing. It's not doing hard things that bothers us. It's the sense of I can't control this hard thing from happening, and it's going to keep happening. That bothers us. That's what leads us to burnout. That's what leads us to just giving up.

This notion of this is hard and it's arbitrary, and it's just going to keep happening again and again. That breaks our spirit. They're like, this is hard. I've fixed it so this won't happen as much. So let's just get through this now. That we can do. You give me weights in the gym and an exercise plan I've created.

Yeah, it's hard to lift weights, but I know why I'm doing it and I feel motivated. Instead, just put a lot of heavy stuff, you know, on the path from my parking space to the building, and I'm just always having to move this stuff. I'm just going to get really frustrated about it. I mean, that's a secret way to get people stronger, Jesse. Like, you have to do Olympic lifts to get into the building. So those are my three ways. Those are my three responses.

Overload is hard to avoid because of the reality of work. But if you have a good response, it could be better. So let's just summarize. Reduce everything you can right away. So just find a breathing room where you can get it so you can take deeper breaths. Two, build a systematic plan for the overload work that remains. It doesn't reduce the hours, but it does reduce the footprint of it. And three, even before you get started, help making a plan to prevent the scale of overload from happening again.

Compress the highs and lows of that workload count sine wave that we drew before. You do those three things. It's a pretty strong response to overload. You know, I mean, sometimes it's about how do I get more done. Sometimes it's about how do I get through the period when I have too much that I have to do. This seemed like the right time of year to talk about that second piece. So dealing with the negative, I think, can be just as important as trying to seek out more positives. What's an example of a plan that you put in place to prevent overload during the holiday season, like in years prior?

Well, I know, for example, in personal life, I have a pretty early set schedule in which we're dealing with gifts because we have not just the standard holiday gifts, but birthdays, two kids birthdays that fall right around the beginning of the holiday period as well. It's a lot of stuff. And so we start very early. I figured this out a long time ago is like you're way. early you're buying, here's the birthday gifts, here's Christmas gifts, you know, by the time you get to December, you're done. So I kind of figured out how to not have that just be something that was hanging overhead. It was going to cause a lot of stress. I often try to be careful about the two weeks or so I have after Georgetown's academic schedule ends and, you know, the end

break, being really careful about not scheduling talks or trips or things that require me to go somewhere or do something professionally. We do a lot of social things. I see a lot of friends. I see a lot of movie. Like that type of stuff, yeah. Like that's the emphasis. But like I'm not going to, let's not do, I'm going to come to your office or like let's have,

like get to know you meetings. I try to keep that period because I've learned keeping that period light on those appointments as psychologically easier as I'm finishing up other things. So those things work well. Definitely the deferred yes strategy has been very helpful. And again, everyone should just have, and if they're using Trello, just have a column in each context. If you have one for, you know, waiting to discuss for different meetings, just have one waiting to get back to people after next planning. And just on Mondays, you just go through those and get back to people.

That space is so important, especially if people corner you. Hey, Jesse, like grab you in the hallway. Can you do this for me? You're like, oh, tell me about it. That sounds great. we get back shall Monday. That's what I do my planning. I'll see if I have time. That one has been a new addition to my playbook. That really makes a difference. Something I have to do, this is more unique, I think, to my, the part of my professional life that's more public-facing

at a certain level. And this is very common. It's something that people have to do at some point after a certain level because of the volume of incoming is the notion of an automatic no list includes an automatic no reply. Like, you just, at some point, there's a lot of communication that comes to you that gets around the filters that really the best thing to do is not the reply. You know, and it, I had a hard time with this

when I first got to that level of sort of public notoriety, but you get to a point eventually where there's certain things where people are just asking you for things and what about this and can't we talk about this, where really the right thing to do for them and you is just not the reply. They actually are sort of just throwing a dart out there, hey, maybe this will work. They're like to start a conversation kind of gives them false hope and it takes up your time. But that's a place where you have to build pretty clear filters.

What falls under this threshold of like is probably best I just don't reply to this versus, you know, let me get into it. Most people don't have that, but if you're public facing it all, or you're, I learned this originally from prominent MIT professors had to do this, where you just, you have to figure out where this threshold is of, public incoming that you respond to and public incoming where it's better for everyone just not to reply. So I've been learning. Yeah. It's funny. Every time I have a new book come out, so like right now, the book coming out in March, we're starting to do publicity preparation. And I'm reaching out the people I know who have like big podcasts and stuff like that.

But it's interesting to see because I've known a lot of these people, these are like big names now, but I've known them for a long time. And their shows are just getting bigger and they're getting bigger. So it's interesting to observe book by book how just the experience of talking to them and trying to see if we can set something up. How it changes is they just get bigger and the incoming gets really more and more. And you really notice it in what it comes down to and trying to just, you know, where three years ago, it might have just been like a text. Like, hey, when can I come on your show? And like, yeah, whenever you want to do it. Now it's like a whole thing.

Like eventually, you know, the publicists are involved. There's teams and it's, you know, it's interesting to observe people I know get famouser. Yeah. It's just the motes get wider and the passages in get narrower, which it's just completely unavoidable. Mm-hmm. Oh, well, all right. So we, as we usually do, we have some questions coming up from real listeners that deal with people that have these concrete issues. But before we get to those questions, let us first hear from our sponsors.

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First questions from Arjan. What do you think of the book in underlying methodology building a second brain? In earlier episodes, you mentioned that systems don't make. make a huge difference in your productivity? Well, I think it is important that you have a good, stable, trusted place to store information that is relevant to your life or your professional endeavors. Your primary brain, your first brain, if we're going to use this terminology, is not great at storing large amounts of complicated information, often information that you don't yet

have a use for, but you might in the future. It's very difficult for it to keep track of all of that and to remember where it comes from. you know, oh yeah, I read at some point this article about the developers for Mario, having a new technique, and what was that, and where was that? You can remember some of that stuff, but a lot of it you're going to forget. So the idea of a second brain in the sense of having some sort of external system to keep track of stuff, ideas and information that might be useful, completely makes sense if you work in the knowledge industry, if you work in the industry where the keeping track of an application of ideas and not

is important. The thing is, the system doesn't have to be super complicated for you to get most of its benefits. I, for example, right now, make a lot of use out of my remarkable notebook. It's a digital notebook that inside it I right now have like 20 or 30 different notebooks all in the same physical package. I have notebooks for all sorts of different things, book ideas, article ideas, things that are happening within my media business. So I always have a place to take notes on something. And I know they're all in there. And I have to remember that those digital notebooks exist in there, but I usually do.

So it's like, okay, what's going on with the video on our podcast? I know there's a notebook digitally, am I remarkable somewhere where I've been keeping thoughts on that. And I can go there and see what's going on. When I'm working on an article or a book, I'm typically going to have a Scrivener project for that book or article. And I'll just collect relevant files, papers, articles into the research folders in that Scrivener.

So they're just right there. So as I'm just sort of thinking about the background, collecting, collecting, and when it comes time to write, that information is right there. There are better ways I could do all of this from a strictly technical standpoint. I could have a system that had all of this, that tagged it and cross-connected it,

where I could do searches or explore connections. But in my experience, that extra element of complexity in the storage and connection of information doesn't pay off much. And in the end, if you work in the creative production, thinking is thinking. The idea that a system is going to do thinking for you or make that thinking more simple, it's not usually how it works.

Typically for those of us who think for a living, the ideas that are important emerge in our brain and sort of festered and begin working on it. And then you want to be able to look up, you know, oh, yeah, I read this article could be useful here. But it's just old-fashioned grinding intellectual work of the type we talked about in last week's episode where I talked about what goes into being a serious thinker. It's just your brain doing stuff. Now, does that mean have any more complicated systems, something built in Notion in which everything is a database entry that could be cross-listed?

Is this bad? No. I mean, for a lot of people, it's actually quite enjoyable. I think building custom information systems, if you're of a certain type of developer CSC mindset, can be an actual really rewarding and fun activity. I like doing that type of stuff. I don't have a lot of time to do it right now, but it fits with my personality. Ooh, I built this notion system that connects this. I like that stuff.

Like Jesse and I have in our connection with our advertising agency, right, Jesse. It's they built out a whole notion-based system where the episodes have their own notion elements and we have different views where all the information. It's a really cool system actually. Yeah. I like that type of thing. But it's just not necessary. So that's the way I think about second brains is you do need a way to collect stuff that's not just in your head. the complexity of that system is more about what you enjoy than it is about having a big impact on the value you get back from the brain. And what you don't want to do, and this happens in online culture and extreme examples of online culture,

is you don't want to put too much faith into the brain itself. You don't want to downplay the importance of just good old-fashioned, hard thinking. I'm walking and thinking. What idea do I keep coming back to you? Let me develop. Let me polish that idea. Just coming back to that. And I got to tell you, as a professional writer, I can't tell you how often I've collected articles forever and books and papers when I'm working on a book chapter or New Yorker piece.

And in the end when you get the writing, you still end up just in the moment using Google. Like, I don't have exactly what I, now that I'm writing, this is what I really need. And you end up just going and finding it in the moment anyways, right? Like I've never had, I've never been able to collect enough information that it's all just there because you don't know where the idea is going to go once you start actually pulling that. thread out. You don't know what particular example or where it's going to wander once you actually start recording and structuring it. So even for all that work, writing still ends up being a lot of writing, stopping, thinking, looking something up, writing some more. It's tedious. It's hard. You're not going to have these associative connections that make brilliant ideas

just fall out. You're not going to be able to just click buttons. You have all the information you need. I mean, intellectual work is hard and the second brain can't make it less hard. But you've got to have something. Beyond that, you know, it just varies on what you as a user find enjoyable. All right, what do we got next? Next question's from Brandon. I'm supposed to work 40 hours of billable time each week. I usually do deep work sessions of 90 or 60 to 90 minutes, then take a 20 to 30 minute break.

I do personal admin tasks in these breaks. So to bill 40 hours, I'd have to work over 50 hours each week. Should I take longer to do tasks during my deep work sessions to bill more? I'm afraid if I ask for more work, I'll get overloaded. Yeah, I hear this a lot. I'm assuming Brandon's a lawyer. I hear this a lot from lawyers. It always seems very reasonable to the outside when the lawyers of the big firm say I have to bill 40 hours a week.

But they don't realize this often can take them 60 hours of work to actually get to the 40 billable hours. Brandon, I would say, do not ask for more work. I think you will get overloaded. I would reduce these non-billable breaks. I mean, it makes sense on paper after, 60 to 90 minutes of deep work on a client, let me spend 30 minutes doing a personal thing so my mind can recharge and then go back to 60 more minutes working on a client. I would find a way to introduce more billable deep breaks. So deep breaks is something we talked about and I got an

essay I wrote years ago, but it comes up occasionally on the show. And what it says is in deep work, there's ways to throttle back the cognitive intensity of what you're doing without having to stop all together what you're doing. So you're not changing your context completely to something unrelated, but maybe you're working on a hard piece of a client brief. And then you pull back to just, I'm gathering and organizing notes for the next section I'm going to write. It's less of a lift. Or I'm doing communication now. I batch together a lot of communication related to this client. Or I'm going to write these more careful process-oriented emails. We don't just shoot things out, but say, okay, here's what we're working on. I'm going to suggest

here's what the next three steps are. Let me outline, you know, get me those responses, put them in this folder, et cetera, like take time. So I have these deep breaks where it's still billable, but it's less cognitively intense, where you're organizing what you're doing, you're carefully but slowly maybe take filing away what you just did and communicating what you're doing. Because what I want for you here, Brandon, is to have less total hours of work. I would like your total work count to get closer to the 40 hours that you're billing.

And then when you're done work, be done with work. and very efficiently work on personal stuff. It's going to be much more relaxing to just be done with work and then tackle the personal stuff. So I often tell lawyers that you have to be kind of careful about making more things billable, not in a false way, but just being able to ride the ups and downs of cognitive intensity so you can go longer and billable work. And if you're careful about what you do in the down periods, you can actually make your work higher quality and more useful. I'm organizing stuff better. I'm communicating better.

And so that's what I'd recommend. All right. Who do we got next? Another B? Yep. Next question is from Bob. As part of a big organization, I don't have much control over IT systems,

but in my role, I do have a reasonable say in how multiple teams spend their time. Short of buying them all deep work and making them watch your capture, configure, control videos, what do you think? That's a good question. That's the wrong book. You should have them all buy how to be a high school. school superstar. And don't explain it, Bob.

It just insists that they all read it. For those who don't know, that was a book I wrote years ago. That would be a high school superstar. Actually, a really cool book. I like that book a lot. All right, I know you were joking some about like, look, I'm not just going to buy them all a copy of a book. But maybe you should. The book I would have people read, the people in the team you can control.

If you're going to have them read a book of mind, I would have them read a world without email. So World Without Email, what this book does is shifts the way you understand your world when you're in one of these big knowledge work organizations. It comes in and it's the fish that doesn't even know what water is and explains what water is, so you know better how to deal with it. I increasingly think in big organizations, a World Without Email is how you change the vocabulary with which people even understand their work. Now changes to behavior will be possible.

So what are they going to learn if they read a World Without Email? Well, first is going to come in and say, wait a second, work is not just work. In knowledge work, you have a bunch of brains that have to collaborate and share information with each other to add value to existing information. How do you do this is specific and has an impact and how you're doing it right now. You don't realize this, but in your workplace where it's constant emails and slack and people throwing media invites back and forth is you're using a very specific collaboration strategy that the book names. It calls it the hyperactive hive mind. Everything gets worked out on the fly unscheduled back and forth messages. And for a lot of people, that's just synonymous with work.

That's what work is. And the reason why they think that's synonymous with work is because when they try to imagine life without the hyperactive hive mind, what they imagine is just shutting all those services down with no response in return. Just, well, if we didn't use, if I didn't have email and Slack in these meetings, all this work I'm doing using email Slack in these meetings just would stop. So it just seems like a fantastical fairy tale. But when they understand, like, this is one way among others you could be collaborating. There's other ways to collaborate that don't require unscheduled messages. Yes, you would have to actually define these new ways of collaborating.

It's not just turning off slack. It's putting in its place. Here's our process for this type of work. Here's our process for that type of work. It's doing proactive work, not just turning things off. But when they understand there's different options, they begin to say, well, should we be using those other options? And when they read the whole first part of the book that lays out with clinical precision, why the hyperactive hive mind just beats us down and exhaust us and burns us all out,

they'll become increasingly motivated for if there are other options, well, sure, we should go after them. Then they're going to get principles in that book about how do you design options that are better than the hyperactive hive mind. And you learn about what makes a good process or not, how you create these things in the organization. It's an important book for any organization that feels overloaded. The members feel overloaded and they feel like there's no way to actually change it.

Now, if you're in a smaller organization or you're a freelance organization or you're a answer, or you're just wondering what you can do as an individual. Deep work is an important book. It says concentration is important. But at the organizational level, the question is how do we free up this time for concentration and that's what it gets into. So I am, and this is self-serving, of course. I can say you read that book, you buy that book for everyone else.

So everyone's speaking the same vocabulary and has the same toolkit. Then I think you're ready to start talking about making some systemic changes. Not just individuals getting better happening. habits, but how as the systems we use as an organization, how do we improve those so that work is not so draining and doesn't generate so much overload? It's an important book, Jesse. It's harder to, you know, it doesn't, though it does give a lot of advice to individuals, it's not so just clear cut to individuals.

There's more management theory in it. So I have to sell it a little harder, but I really think the ideas and they're important. So that's where Bob should start. I remember when I was reading it back in 2020? When did it come out? 21. 21. Yeah.

I had the hard copying at various coffee shops. People would ask about it. Are they to see the cover? Yeah. Yeah. Remember I was in Miami once and had it. Yeah. Yeah.

So keep your cover on if you're going to read it. Ooh. Okay. So, Jesse, I have labeled our next question here. This is potentially a slow productivity corner question. This is the one quarter question per episode that relates to the philosophy of slow productivity. So in celebration of my book on slow productivity that

comes out in March, those available for pre-order right now, anywhere books are sold, we like to have one question per episode that touches on slow productivity. We like to mark this with some theme music. Jesse, let's hear the slow productivity corner theme music, if you would. Here we go. I'm excited about this. All right, what's our slow productivity corner of the day, Jesse?

This question is from Patrick. When I'm collaborating with other researchers, projects often grind to a halt due to uncontrollable factors. For this reason, I adapted a barbell strategy after Nassim Taleb. For example, I have a pool of potential projects from which I hope that at least one will be where every collaborator is available. I'm a bit annoyed about the overhead it requires to rekindle the fire for each halted project, not to mention that since I am working in machine learning, time is often a critical factor.

What should I do? Well, I'm calling this a slow productivity quarter question because there is a principle of slow productivity that I think could be relevant here. That is principle number two, work at a natural pace. So some of what might be happening here is that there is an impatience with not being able to just get after it with one of these projects. Let's just all work on this 10 hours a day, let's give it a week, and have this cool thing to show.

often things that are of very high quality and very intellectually demanded or complicated field. So in this case, research on machine learning takes time to get right. And that pacing then as you work on it goes up and down. There's periods where you're working on it pretty intensely and periods where it's fallow and then you're back to it again. Things take time. Now in my book on Slow Productivity, I have a real example of this principle where I follow the playwright, Lynn Manuel Miranda through the seven-year Odyssey

it took him from his initial performance of Inda Heights a college performance of Inda Heights to that show debuting on Broadway seven years later and I go through like look during this period I reconstructed a TikTok

of how that play came together there was periods where they were working intensely on it periods where he was it just took a long time so some things that are good just take a lot of time so this is a slow productivity principle increase the scale at which you're measuring your productivity.

So don't be frustrated you didn't work on this project this month. What you want to be happy about is over the last two years, I had three really impressive projects come through. So we just get better with not just slowing down, but varying our pace. There's also a pragmatic answer here. This is just one academic to another. You might just need better collaborators or a better style of collaborating. This happens as well.

Sometimes you have a group of collaborators you're used to working with because maybe you went to grad school with them, or you met them at a conference, and they're overloaded, and they're busy, and they just stall on things, and it's very frustrating for you in the project. This could just mean they're disorganized, or it could mean they are prioritizing your work with them lower than other things they're working on. Find better collaborators. So that means in particular, maybe collaborators who you can work with more regularly,

they're at your university, so you could just work regularly without having to wait to try to organize meetings that are going to happen. So it's just one of the great advantages of MIT. I noticed when I was there is there were so many great people there that you could just be working with people. They were all there in person. Two, find collaborators for whom the work you're doing with them is their tier one project.

Once you're working with someone and they see this as their second or third tier project, they're going to ignore it more. So you want to work with people who see at the same level of you in terms of how they're seeing that work, that could help. as well, and maybe do more work that's solo, or at least have something going on where it's just you and your insight and you can control your own time. So we have the slow productivity answer, which is slow down. You have ups and downs. That's fine. That's actually how really good creative stuff typically is produced, not in a big frenzied push. And we have the pragmatic academic

answer, which is find better collaborators, find a better collaboration style. And that is our slow productivity corner. Should we do the music again, Jesse? Yeah. Yes. Do you have any slow productivity projects that you work on, say, two hours a week? Or is that too little? That's possible.

It's possible, right? I think it's possible to have something that you're really back-burnering, that you just kind of return to. I mean, I've had this before where it's a big thought about a major change or major new idea, where I might just, for a long period, just come back to it, maybe one walk per week and just think about it. Like, I'm okay if, like, this whole year, I'm just sort of mulling this with no pressure. When I feel inspired, it's a first cup of coffee, I have a clear morning. That can actually aggregate sometimes into a really good insight because you're exploring the

space and over time things stick and especially for really big ideas or projects or changes to your life. You can't force it. You can't sit down. Like, I'm going to figure out how to overhaul my life this weekend. So I think even, yeah, one session a week over a year, that's not an unreasonable pace for certain types of slow projects. I should also say relating to the book, Slow Productivity, someone emailed and said, hey, is there going to be incentives for pre-ordering? Like, hey, do we get something? And I'll say, yes, we have really cool stuff we're developing.

We're going to announce it all in January in the new year. But if you ended up, if you've already pre-order the book or pre-order it now, it's fine. You'll have your Amazon receipt or whatever digital receipt you have from wherever you bought it. You will be able to submit that when we announce. the pre-order incentives in January, but we've got some really cool stuff that is bubbling. So buy the book whenever cool stuff is coming. All right, let's do another question. What do we have?

Next question is from Matt, but it's actually for his wife. My wife was promoted last year is now an HR executive at a large company. Her new position is all the trappings of the hyperactive hive mind. She's got email overload, frequent teams messages, never-ending business hours, context switching, asynchronous communication, the whole night. yards. Not to mention an insane number of meetings. I think she's making herself sick from overwork and stress and I'm worried. I've suggested office hours and time blocking, but she says it's not feasible or else she'll just fall behind. She's a rising executive, but not quite senior enough to set the

tone and the culture of her company. Any recommendations? Well, first of all, I'm shocked to hear that you go into your wife and saying, let me give you advice for how to do this based on what this guy, Cal Newport, told me. I'm shocked. That didn't work. There are so many partners out there who have had their husbands tell them at some point. Let me tell you what Cal Newport says you should be doing. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It can't come from you.

So what can we do here? So in these situations, here's the problem. There is stuff you can do to make your life somewhat better. This is where deep work and in particular a world without email, those books would be relevant at a high-level HR position like this, a high-level executive position. Probably a world without email would be the better book for someone like your wife to read because you need a very complicated, precise understanding of exactly what these workflows are, how they came from, how to sidestep or replace them in a way that's going to be even more

productive. You can't handle this ad hoc. You can't just throw random heuristics and tactics at it. So your wife could improve her situation somewhat and maybe get into a copy of a world without email or something and somehow be like, look, I don't know, just maybe you'll find something useful in here. Maybe I say, I'm too dumb to understand this, but I think you're smart enough to understand it. Just don't make it seem like it's you giving advice. She might find some useful things there. The other problem here is that this life of extreme hyperactive hive mind is fundamental

to a lot of executive positions. It's just the way these organizations run. If you're a new executive, it's very difficult to massively change this. I don't have any good examples of a very large company yet moving away from the hyperactive hive mind. I've seen this. I've seen this. I've seen successful at smaller-sized companies where there's still some agility. There could still be a leader, a fact where a leader can say we're changing things, but at a huge company, it's really hard to change this. There's an interesting source for why this is. There's a book I was reading recently.

It's by Alfred Chandler. It's from the 70s. It's called The Visible Hand. I think it won the National Book Award. It might have even won the Pulitzer Prize. It's an economic history book, and he looked at the rise. of large organizations in the wake in particular of the railroad boom, late 19th, early 20th century America, where we get like really big office buildings, you know, full of people. One of the things he argues in this book, it was very influential, is that we shifted into the rise of the large organizational era.

We shifted into a new type of capitalism that he calls managerial capitalism. No longer like it would have been in the time of Dickens, where you have small firms run by a person and it's their company and they're in charge of the company. You had these massive organizations where no one person can run it. So you had to bring in a class of managers because there's just too many people and too much going on. The railroads created this because to run a railroad profitably, you have to consolidate and it's very complicated. And you can't just have a guy like what the monopoly hat on. It's just I know everything that's happening on my railroad. So you had to have classes of managers.

And Chandler argues the way that managers operate internally is free for, direct market pressures. Like, in other words, it's not, we have a direct pressure on is the way we're running this internally the best way to run it. And if it's not, another company is going to take over and we're going to have to, we're going to go out of business. You're in really large organizations, you're buffered from those type of market forces. This allows managers in a managerial capitalist economy to actually prioritize other factors

than just what's most productive or what's most efficient. and producing value. They can prioritize instead things like stability. What's going to keep this me in my position and the organizations functioning most stable? What's going to keep me most secure in my position? What's going to require substantial increases of energy? What's going to reduce risk? Risk is very dangerous.

So you can actually have these forces on how organizations run that are disconnected from the market pressure to just run better. This is why I'm more and more convinced at large organizations, the hyperactive hive mind gets entrenched because in managerial capitalism, to move away from the flexible accessibility and easiness of just everyone can talk to everyone, my worth is indicated as much as anything else by me just replying to things really quickly. It is risky to move away from that. It is complicated to move away from that. It's the opposite of stability to try to build new systems from scratch. These type of things cannot come from the managerial class. just like no number of floor managers and Henry Ford's Red River automobile manufacturing plant in the early 1900s, no number of those managers, no matter how smart they are, we're ever going to spontaneously change that factory over to an assembly line.

That required Ford saying, I don't care that this is a pain. Trust me, this is going to be better. That's where we are right now. So these executives, it's sort of like the managerial class. There is no internal pressure to change. Actually, a system in which grinding out bigger hours is rewarded is good. I know this. It's also stable.

It's easy. There's less risk if everyone just has to respond to me all the time. So it's somewhat fundamental to these organizations. Now, ultimately, the solution has to be the leaders of the organizations, the business owners themselves have to come in and say, we're building our equivalent of the assembly line. We're changing things. I don't care if it's risky. I don't care if it's unstable. That's what ultimately has to happen.

But until that happens, Matt, your wife's position is going to have this element to it that is not pleasant. And I think people need to properly assess the negative cost of an extreme hyperactive hive mine association. It is the psychological equivalent of working in a coal mine with bad ventilation. It's bad for you. Bad for your health. It's not pleasant. And so you have to keep that in mind. So what can you do about that?

Well, you have to be willing to say, is this tradeoff worth? whatever benefits I'm getting. And you better be pretty clear about that tradeoff. You know, sometimes what happens is people say, I don't know what else to do, but moving up the ladder seems prestigious. And I like the momentary feeling of prestige, so I'm going to move up into this position,

and now my life is terrible. That happens a lot. So it's important that you and your wife have clarity, a lifestyle-centric career planning style clarity of what you want your life to be like in all aspects. Does this job support that? Is there something you could do with this job to better support that? Maybe it's giving you much more money and it allows you to, you know, move to the place you want to move and you have some vision for it.

Great. But I would have some clarity here and make sure that she hasn't just stumbled into this because it's the next thing to do because it's not going to be changeable by her to a massive degree. And it can be really negative. The life of an extreme hyperactive hiveman organization can be really negative, have a heavy toll. So we just got to face those tolls as a family and figure out what actually is our goals here. And it might be, this is fine. You know, this is the, it's a fair trade. We're getting this money for this.

Maybe it fits your personality. Some people like that, the strong and drung of all of the activity. Or maybe it's, you know, you're right. I'm thinking about this. Why are we doing this? This makes me miserable. And to what end, other than like I'm impressing the three people who promoted me and they forgot about it already. So there's a lot going on here, Matt.

I don't mean to throw too much at you. It's an excuse for me to preach about managerial capitalism. But, you know, your wife could read a roll without email. There's changes she can make that it'll help some. You have to confront that this may be, in a lot of ways, a really tough job. All right. Let's do a phone call. Yeah, we do.

Let's do before, let's do a phone call. Then I have a case study loaded for after that phone call is over. Hey, Cal, hey, Jesse. Now it's the holiday season. I wonder what you're gifting. What do you want to give? get and do you have any holiday traditions or rituals that you'd like to share? Well, it's a good question.

I'll say what, I don't think he listens to this podcast. I think it's okay. I could share what I did for my brother from a gift perspective. He doesn't listen? I don't know. It hasn't mentioned it. If he's listening to him about to spoil his present, because what we do in our family is we draw names in my extended family so that, like, you have,

one person you're buying a gift for, so you could buy a nicer gift as opposed to, because I have a bunch of siblings and they have a, they're all, they're all married. So it's a lot of people. Yeah. So we draw names. So I drew my brother's name. So I won't give the details of exactly what title this is, but something I've gotten into more recently. There's a book he really likes, an author he likes and a books he likes. He talks about him a lot. So I tracked down at a rare book dealer first edition, the first English language edition is a Russian writer.

They claim it's also a first printing of the first edition, but first, it's a stated first edition, which means it says in the book first edition, printing is more complicated, so they claim it's a first printing as well. So from the 60s, this was like the very first, you know,

copies of this book available in English language. I think first edition stuff is cool because if you, you know, books are so influential, when you have a first edition of an influential book, it's like a historical artifact. This was, you know, in 1968, this was like one of a certain number of copies

that, like, people were reading. It was changing the newest sphere, right? It was changing our, like, collective understanding of this part of the world. So I think it mixes ideas and respect for ideas with historical artifacts and you can display them

or it's just cool to have for your collection. I don't know if he's going to like it or not, but I thought it was a cool idea. I like, I'm increasingly interested in doing this myself. So that was my, I don't know, that was my new gift strategy. It was something I was trying new this year. That's cool. In terms of rituals, I like, you know, I like lighting and decorations or whatever.

So we switched up, we have a winter wonderland theme this year. In your home office? Outside my house. Oh, nice. Yeah. So not Christmas, because I wanted to be relevant in the January, winter wonderland. So it's icicles. I'm using spots.

I've been using more spotlight in my lighting display. I think you can paint with color with spotlights and change the objects already in your yard. Do you guys code them like you talked about?

I coded my Halloween lights. I didn't code my holiday lights because I'm going for more of a tasteful aesthetic. The coded stuff is usually like crazy, more crazy stuff. So no animatronics,

no program lights. Though I did buy a chip controlled lighting, like a lighting controller. I had been using a relatively somewhat complicated system. I had two circuits that both ran through light sensors where you then had a timer. When it gets dark, turn on for this much time,

and then turn off. And I've now moved that past. I have a single circuit where everything is controlled off a programmable chip. So I can say exactly on each day, exactly when they turn on the lights, exactly when they turn them off. That I've really appreciated. I really like to be able to fine tune that

and not just depend on these light sensors. coming and going. That's so good. Yeah. So there we go. Good question. All right. Let me do a case study.

Then we'll get to our third segment here. Case studies where I just read a story that one of you, my listeners, have sent in about applying the type of things we talk about to the specific circumstances in your life. I thought this one was interesting. It's from Austin. So here's what he said. I'm a longtime listener of your podcast and reader of your work, and I have finally quit the Twitter habit. so I can build a better life. The straw that finally broke the camel's back after seven years a heavy Twitter use

was a disturbing experience here in my city of Houston. My partner and I went to a restaurant a few weeks ago, a nice place in a nice neighborhood near a top-tier university. At the table next to ours, an older, well-dressed, well-groomed gentleman was dining with a friend of his. I could not help but overhear their conversation. The older man spent almost the entire time loudly regurgitating conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory. From the 2020 presidential vote tabulation to the efficacy of COVID vaccines,

while his friend tried to gently steer him back to the present. The older man was so anxious and agitated that it was uncomfortable to sit near him. The experience seemed a little less surreal, though, when the older man asked his friend for some technical support for an app on his smartphone. He wanted help with Twitter. I felt like a young smoker watching an old smoker who was pulling on a lit cigarette in his stoma while dying of lung cancer. That older man was probably well educated, well respected, and financially well off, but with the help of Twitter, he had turned his mind into mashed potatoes. When I left that restaurant, I knew I'd thrown away my digital marlboroughs. While I still Jones for a smoke every day, I remind myself every time

of that older man at the restaurant and refuse to light up. Of course, not smoking by itself is not enough, and now I have to build a digital life that doesn't need that drug. I think your recent podcast episode about becoming a serious thinker will help with that. Well, Austin, I appreciate I appreciate that. I appreciate that story. I mean, I think we're at a time now in our culture where we've moved past where I was, let's say, when I recorded my 2017 quit social media talk, where I said at that point, hey, this should be an acceptable option. That's where we were in 2017. I gave a talk where I said, more people should feel comfortable doing this. Not using social media. It should not be weird. It should be like a standard thing to some people do. That's where we were in 2017. In 2020, I think for tools in particular, Twitter and TikTok, it should be just no one should use these. They've proven themselves to be a digital fentanyl, as some people are calling TikTok. The highs are absolutely not worth it. The lows are worse than we thought.

The negative impact on individual people's lives, like that older person you saw in the restaurant or the way our entire civic cultures execute. It's so negative and so terrible. and the crisis is so big, find another high. So I think we've shifted from 2017 to 2023. We're beyond just normalizing not using social media to say some of these tools, just say no. We need, you know, McGruff to Crime Dog. Just say no. More people need to just say, I am done.

I think they've proven themselves bankrupt. I think these tools are just not worth use. Find another way to connect to interesting people or find a different. hear about the news. They hear even baseball rumors. I now will just MLB trade rumors.com. That's fine. And actually like reading the articles posted by Nats bloggers and beat writers, that's

fine. So even me, I'm not using Twitter for baseball news. I think it's time to move on. It's just like smoking in the 80s. At some point we're like, all right, it's not just kids and pregnant women shouldn't do this.

Maybe really we just like shouldn't smoke. I think that's where we're getting with some of these tools. All right. Well, we got a third segment coming up where we have. to the news, but first I want to take a brief moment to talk about another set of sponsors. In particular, this show, today, our show is sponsored by Better Help. So the holidays is one of these times where a lot of people really enjoy it, but for a lot of people,

it can be, from a mental perspective, very difficult. It helps brings out or emphasize things that aren't going well in your life. It can supercharge the negative ruminations or self-recriminations that really can help you live the life you want to live. This is where therapy enters the scene. Now, of course, the issue with therapy, even if you recognize, yes, my brain is the most important organ on my body. If it's not working right, I want to get fixed.

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That's BetterHelp, help.com slash deep questions. You also do not want to go into your holiday season with a bad looking shave. This is where Hinson shaving enters the scene. this is the razor that I use. So what I like about the Hinson razor is that it's this beautifully manufactured aluminum artifact. Precision milled. So that you can take a 10-cent safety razor blade,

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It is what I use. It is also a great gift idea. It's a great gift idea. You give someone a hinson razor. What you're giving them is not only a better shade, but you're freeing them from the expense of having to go to the drugstore every month and buy those super expensive disposable blades. You're freeing them from the expense of having to have a subscription service. that every month is charging them again and again to send them these plastic-coated blades that are milled wherever. You're giving them a beautiful artifact that's actually over time going to save them money as well.

So it's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime. Visit Hinsonshaving.com slash cowl to pick the razor for you and use code Cal and you'll get two years worth of blades for free with your razor. Just make sure you add the blades to your cart and then later when you enter the code the price will go to zero. That's 100 free blades when you head to H-E-N-S-O-N-S-H-A-V-I-N-G.com slash Cal and use that code Cal. All right, Jesse. Time for the third segment. All right, a third segment is where I like to bring up something that's happening in the world around us and react to it.

The thing I want to react to today, it's a chart that was tweeted by Derek Thompson. I actually did his show not too long ago. I think over the summer, maybe it was. I think it was over the summer. There was a good episode. He's a really good podcast on the Ringer Network. And so you could check that out. So I did Derek Thompson's show in the summer.

Anyways, writer for the Atlantic covers technology workplace trends. He tweeted, and I have the tweet up here on the screen for those who are watching instead of just listening, he tweeted recently a chart that is showing standardized scores in, you know, mathematics, reading, and science. This is not just for the U.S. These are trends across the entire developed world. What do we see? They're going down in each of these areas.

You see some stability or growth and then a quick fall in a lot of these areas. Now, let's look at the timing here. This charts start 2003. And we begin to see these drops, depending on where you're looking, in all these cases, like right around 2012. So predating COVID-related learning losses, we begin to see these sharp drops. Here's what Derek says.

Between 2012 and 2023, it appears that average OECD reading math and science scores have declined consistently. This is not just about pandemic learning loss. It's not just about one U.S. city. It's not even just about the U.S. This is the entire developed world. So what is going on here?

Well, a couple people had some answers. In particular, both Matt Iglesias and John Haidt chimed in response to Derek's post and said, well, hmm, what happened around 2012? Smartphones. That is the big transition that happened around 2012. It was the point where we had more than 50% of the U.S. population owning a smartphone, those who work with students and children will say that's roughly right around the point where it became much more common to see adolescents, starting at 12, 13 years old, having their own smartphones. It was a tipping point.

There's all sorts of trends that got worse around 2012 that could be conceivably linked to smartphones, especially trends around mental health. We see those trends start to go down. we see trends around loneliness. That starts to explode right around the time the smartphones come out. There's a lot of different things that happen right around 2012. So here's the thing about these 2012 trends. Yes, it's complicated. Yes, there's other factors, but sometimes the obvious thing is just the obvious thing.

There's a lot of this going around more elite intellectual circles right now. There's a knee-jerk skepticism surrounding this idea that smartphones are causing issues. In this case, the hypothesis would be they distract the hell out of kids. It's harder for them to concentrate. So they do worse on hard academic subjects that require them to concentrate. We like to have, if you're an elite intellectual type, you like to have more complicated answers that show that you understand more than other people. If you're an elite academic, maybe you like to have some contrarianism. This seems too common. This seems like something that's just like an average parent who's not a writer for a fancy public.

publication or not a professor just noticed and like my kids are using phones are getting dumber you want to signal that you're smarter and more sophisticated than that so there's this knee-jerk skepticism well you know there's other factors going on but that's just about signaling to other people that you're smart and maybe it's time that people doing that signaling can just you know wear a Harvard shirt and not have to screw around with what's happening to smartphones because I think sometimes the obvious trends are actually just right there's a reason why they're obvious I think this is one on a mountain of other trends to show similar inflection points. It has been a big deal to give a generation of kids at a very young age,

unrestricted access to the Internet through a device they have with them at all times. We could even use the term it has been a disaster. So I think we're ready to move past the knee-jerk skepticism while acknowledging complexity surrounds the issue and get more serious as I'm getting more and more reports, by the way. In my inbox, readers are sending it to me of more and more countries and school systems. and states they're starting to take much bigger stances. You can't have these in this school.

We don't want you to use these phones. Like getting away from this, you know, it's complicated. And here's an example of someone who, you know, by using their phones, like help to overcome some sort of circumstance and we don't want them to feel bad. It's cigarettes. You know, the 14-year-old shouldn't smoke. And I think we're increasingly seeing this about smartphones. So this is just the latest impact of we don't have to look too hard. come up with a hypothesis here because of course something that makes you terrible at concentrating

is going to immediately hurt your performance on things to require concentration and that's exactly what we're seeing in those numbers so this evidence continues to come in jesse i think again i was quoted in gq back in 2019 maybe this is where they put the they took the marlborough box then changed into an iPhone and it was uh the headline was you know calum report says one day we will look back on teenage phone use or social media use like we look back now on teenage smoking. I think that's bearing out. Give us another five, ten years. And we're going to say, why in the world were we letting 13-year-olds just be on these phones all day

and just shrugging our shoulders and saying kids these days are more tech savvy, what can we do? Yeah. So more evidence piles up. I also saw there's a chart in response to this about average GPA. I think it was at Harvard. Average GPA at Harvard. wow, these things have really, it's an interesting chart.

The average GPA went up? Oh, yeah. Yeah, so it's like a perhaps a grade inflation, in part in response to people getting worse. As people get worse at the primary intellectual skills, you kind of get away from being able to do competitive grading, and so you just maybe grade inflate. So, of course, I immediately looked up, like, where was the average GPA?

I didn't go to Harvard, but I was like, where was the average GPA when I graduated? Because I had a very high GPA, and I want to take credit for that. So I looked it up. It was like, okay, back in 2004, the average Harvard GPA was like 3-2. So my 395 feels better.

Now it's like 38. Man, it was hard to get a 3-8, you know, back in the day. So I don't know. I think it's impossible that we're not inflating grades because we don't see GPAs going down, but certainly deep-sixth in your ability to concentrate has to have a huge impact on academic work. Are you going to have any social media questions?

questions on your exam today? No, but now I'm in a mean mood, so now I'm just going to make the questions even harder. This is your own fault for using too many smartphones. We really mean about it. Speak about that exam, I have to upload it in four minutes. So we should probably wrap up this episode. Thank you, everyone who sent in your questions or calls.

If you're listening and you want to see everything you just heard, go to the deep dive or the deeplife.com slash list in this episode 279. There'll be links to the videos at the bottom of that page. There's also links there for submitting stuff. We'll be back next week with another episode. Maybe it'll even be a holiday-themed episode. We are getting close to the holidays. And until then, as always, stay deep.

Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions Podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007,

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