Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 289: The Email Catastrophe

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

How did we end up tyrannized by our inboxes? How is this related to Tyrannosaurus? What was it like working at a high-tech company at the exact moment email was introduced? In this episode, Cal weaves together all these questions into a story about the unexpected ways technology impacts our lives and what we can do after the fact to make things better.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: The Email Catastrophe [3:47]- How do I deal with email overload in a government job? [45:34]- How do I deal with an employer who demands constant responsiveness?[55:36]- How can I concentrate when coding when I need to use my web browser? [58:27]- How do I overcome my fear of missing important emails? [1:02:35]- CALL: Can slow productivity work for an academic? [1:06:38]CAL REACTS: Reader Comments on his NYT Op-Ed [1:17:47]Links:newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-diedpnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1817407116newyorker.com/magazine/1994/01/10/e-mail-from-bill-gatesblog.rescuetime.com/communication-multitasking-switches/nytimes.com/2024/02/16/opinion/creative-work-productivity-seasonality.htmlUse this link to preorder a signed copy of “Slow Productivity”: peoplesbooktakoma.com/preorder-slow-productivity/ FREE download excerpt and 2 Bonuses for “Slow Productivity”: calnewport.com/slow  Thanks to our Sponsors: zocdoc.com/deeppolicygenius.com/deepquestionsblinkist.com/deepmoshlife.com/deepshopify.com/deepThanks 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 Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a world drowning in digital distraction. So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I'd say the exciting thing about this week is officially the book launch for slow productivity has begun because the first publicity has gone live. Tim Ferriss? Tim Ferriss was our first podcast. interview to go live. A great episode. Tim and I always see eye to eye on a lot of issues and also think about a lot of the same issues and sometimes have different takes on it. So I think it's a great interview. I mean, we get into slow productivity, a lot of the details of slow productivity,

but also talk about some other things like YouTube, video, the future of podcasting to independent media. It was a fun discussion. So definitely check that out. That is the first, officially the first podcast we interview I did on the book. Also, we had the first print publicity. I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times. That was in the newspaper a couple Sundays ago. We're going to, this is probably a bad idea, Jesse, but in the third segment of the show today, God forbid, I'm going to read and react to comments on my New York Times op-ed. But it's a cool op-ed. It's about seasonality. It comes straight from the book. So if you're a New York Times subscriber, check that out. There's a lot more to come.

But that's the starting gun, is the way I see it, for this book launch. Meanwhile, you have about a book, a week left, rather, before the book comes out on March 5th here in the U.S. and March, I believe, 7th in the U.K. If you're thinking about buying the book, please consider pre-ordering it. This is our last chance to make a push for a bestseller list and get some attention for the book right out the gate. If you do pre-order it, I want to thank you with some really cool bonuses I put together. The whole procedure is on calnewport.com slash slow, but basically buy the, the book, wherever you want to buy your books from, wherever you normally buy your books from,

and then you can just email your receipt to Slow at pre-order bonuses.com, and we'll verify the receipt and then immediately get back to you with, okay, here's the bonuses, here's the bonuses to come. All those details are on calnewport.com slash slow. Those numbers are very strong. We have a really nice first printing coming off the presses right now. So again, thank you everyone who's been helping with that. I'll be joining you next week, actually, on the road, on book tour, probably either from L.A. or Austin. So we'll have a sort of special book launch week edition of deep questions coming up. But before then, we got today's episode.

We got some interesting topics. Basically, I have an intellectual story I want to tell that I get to in the end some practical understandings about communication overload and making our workday more resistant to digital distractions. but the intellectual story itself is one I've just been rabbit-hulling on recently, so I've been excited to tell it. So we'll get into that. We have a bunch of good questions. And then again, God forbid, in the third segment, I will look at comments from actual readers of the New York Times.

A quick logistical note, if you want to see what I am talking about, so if you're listening and want to see it, this is episode 289, go to the deeplife.com slash listen. Go to episode 289. Within a day or so of these episodes going live, we post the videos. right there on the bottom. I think that's it. So let's get started with our deep dive. So today I want to talk about one of the most controversial and complicated topics in our broader discussion of cultivating depth in a world of digital distractions,

and that is our good friend and longtime foe email. I want to do something a little bit different today. Instead of looking at our current relationship with this tool, I want to instead look into its distant past to help identify some creative new ideas for how we might fix our relationship with email in the future. This is a fascinating journey. I've been rabbit-holing on the story of the history of email. This is a story that's going to bring us back to a time when the word Internet was not even in wide circulation yet and when electronic communication was still a novelty. All right, but to set up this whole discussion, the sort of looking back at the history of

email to get new ideas about how to be more focused in the future. I want to go back much farther than the introduction of digital networks. Believe it or not, Jesse, I want to go all the way back to the time of the dinosaurs. So I don't know. You're probably not a dinosaur guy, Jesse, but if you are, we'll find out soon. Have you ever heard of the KT boundary? No. All right.

This is sort of dinosaur geekdom. I think it's cool, though. The KT boundary, and I believe this represents the boundary, between the Cretaceous and the tertiary geological periods was this dividing line in the fossil record. You can look as you dig down deeper through the surface of the earth, you see these different geological eras,

the deeper you go. There's this dividing line between the Cretaceous and the tertiary period. And please, I know we don't use the word tertiary anymore. They call it the Pileogene, and they now call this the K-PG layer. But I'm going to call it the KT boundary, just like I insist on calling X Twitter.

There's this dividing line, below it, dinosaurs. Above it, no dinosaurs. So we have all these fossils of dinosaurs, 100 million years, and then suddenly no fossils of dinosaurs. And that boundary, they call the KT boundary. So this is what led paleontologists to suspect maybe something happened to the dinosaurs, right? Like they're here and then they're gone.

They got a lot more evidence for what that was when we got better tools and realized, hey, wait a second, between these two parts of the fossil record, at this KT boundary, we can find wherever we dig around the world this really thin, like the thickness of a pencil layer of ash that's full of aridium, which is the stuff that gets blown into the atmosphere when a giant asteroid would hit the earth. And then we looked around and said, hey, guess what? Over by the Yucatan Peninsula, there's a giant asteroid crater. We sort of figured out like, oh, probably an asteroid fell and killed.

the dinosaurs. The thing is we didn't know much about that actual event. We see dinosaurs before it. We see no dinosaurs after it. It's an age of small mammals that evolve with the humans. We didn't know much about the actual event until this really interesting find happened around 2013. And this whole story, I mean, look, I'm not a dinosaur guy, but this whole story caught my attention. I'm even going to bring this article that told the story up on the screen here. It's a 2019 Douglas Preston article from the New Yorker. Douglas Preston is a novelist, a thriller writer, who also is a scientist, and he writes about science sometimes with the New Yorker. It's just like out of his books what happened here.

And I mean that literally, because Preston wrote this book called Tyrannosaur Canyon, which I read and enjoyed years ago. And it was about finding a fossil of a Tyrannosaur from the asteroid impact. at the KT boundary. So a Tyrannosaur dying from the asteroid impact got fossilized. The whole book was about that. So anyways, Douglas Preston, 2013, gets a call. It's from a, well, I guess an email, but it sounds better if it's a call. From a graduate student named Robert De Palma,

De Palma said, basically, I read Tyrannosaur Canyon. We found that. Like, over in the Hell Creek formation, I think we just found fossilized dinosaurs from the day the asteroid hit. this became the seismic, if you'll excuse the double use of the term here, a seismic discovery. Here's the actual paper. I'll load that on the screen here that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Its name was slightly less catchy than Tyrannosaur Canyon.

It was instead a seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPG boundary, comma, North Dakota. Not that exciting, but a fantastically important paper. and they talked about finding fossils from the day the asteroid hit. And by studying these fossils, they actually came up with some really interesting insights into what this transition was like, this abrupt transition from dinosaurs to no dinosaurs. One of the things they figured out, for example, by looking at the spherical ejecta in the stomach and lungs of fossilized fish from this day that they found on this site, is that the asteroid created something called,

I'm going to pronounce this wrong, S-E-I-C-H-E-S-E-I-C-H-E. So if you think about a tsunami as being bad, a sys or sish is where a giant body of water, like in a bathtub, just keeps going up and down, right? So the asteroid hits, and the ocean basically must have been going, hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm,

so just tsunami after tsunami after tsunami. So they learned a lot about this event, like what actually happened at the K-T boundary. All right, so what does this have to do with email? Well, I feel like I recently came across an artifact in the technological history of the office. That is not unlike that discovery of the Hellkeek formation that captured that sort of moment when the dinosaurs went extinct and a new type of life emerged. Right?

So we know there's this boundary. In technological history, we have a KT boundary. There's no email, there's no email, there's no email. Oh, my God, everyone has email, right? So we have this boundary in our digital artifact record. But what about that moment where this change happened? What can we learn by looking at the very first moments of which email actually entered life? And I found a really cool technological equivalent of a Tyrannosaur that was fossilized at the day the asteroid hit.

And that is an article from the New Yorker. I'm going to bring this on the page here. remarkable article from the New Yorker. It's sort of famous among New Yorker people from John Seabrook from 1993 and it's called email from Bill, Bill Gates'

vision for the future. A classic profile from 1993 that's going to be our look into this digital equivalent of the asteroid hitting the office. So here's a point about this article. It's long. This is essentially the New Yorker's

introduction of Bill to its readership. Bill Gates was certainly known in 1993, but young enough, he was 38 then, that the New Yorker hadn't yet done its sort of big profile that gets into, here's where he was born, and here's where he came from, and here was his first company, and here's what Microsoft is doing, and here's Microsoft's plans. This wasn't yet something everyone knew. The New Yorker was introducing him to the world.

Interesting side note, Jesse, I've actually, I don't think he knows this. I've been to John C. Brooks loft. Really? Yeah. Somewhere in lower Manhattan. My uncle, he was throwing a book launch party for my uncle when I was in high school. My uncle invited my dad and I was really in the writing. So my dad said, oh, you should come along just to be cool to see.

So I don't think John knows it. The writing loft or where he lives? No, just where he lives. Yeah. So there we go. I've been to his apartment. Around this time, well, a little bit after this time. But kind of around this time.

All right. So it's a fantastic, amazing look. through this period where like the New Yorker was introducing the world, here is Bill Gates. So Bill Gates had just hit number one the year before on Forbes most wealthy American list and then dropped the number two this year to Buffett. His fortune was about $6.1 billion. He's 38 years old. Here is the description of Gates and Microsoft from early in this article.

I'm just setting the context of what was going on in the world at the time. Gates controls the computer industry to an extent matched by no other person in any other major industry. The Justice Department is currently trying to determine whether his control constitutes a monopoly. Microsoft now supplies 80% of all the personal computer operating system software in the world and 50% of all of the application software. Can you believe that?

80% of the operating systems, 50% of all the software running on computers, this 138-year-old's company supplied it. Yeah. Yeah. He ruled the world, right? So this was the company. This was the tech company. A couple of the things I noticed before we get into the key observation from this article.

No internet. So John Seabrook makes the editorial decision throughout this article to keep referring to the quote, information superhighway. The word internet is never used, right? So this is this time. The internet was not yet something that the public was very aware of. I looked up the timeline, actually. The mosaic web browser had been in.

introduced that year. So this was the first web browser coming out of the University of Illinois Supercomputing Center, worked on by a young graduate student at Illinois, University Illinois, worked in the Supercomputer Center, named Markington. Yeah. The next year, Netscape would come out, which was the first version of this. It was like aimed for the average person to use. So we didn't really have the web used yet.

The Internet was around, but it was mainly being used by academic and research. research institution. So we don't even use that word yet. You'll notice Seabrook will use the same term information superhighway for referring to what we would now think of internet communications. He also uses it for thinking about internal digital communications within an organization. All of this was sort of mysterious back then. It was, I don't know, there's just these roads that are made of information and messages drive on them. So clearly it wasn't something we really understood. emphasizing this. So all the things we take for granted about digital communication and how that works.

None of this was known back then. That's what I'm talking about. We're really trying to hone in at exactly this period where email emerges. Another interesting vision of the future from this article. I mean, I love rabbit-hulling back to these past periods. The vision, Seabrook documents, the vision Gates had for the internet was clearly this is going to be controlled through TVs. That was the vision in 1993. Let me read from the article here. The new machine that they're working on will be a communication device that connects people

to the information highway. It will penetrate far beyond the 15% of American households that now own a computer and it will control or absorb other communication machines now in people's homes, the phone, the fax, the television. It will sit in the living room, not in the study. the problem of getting people to feel comfortable with such a powerful machine will be partly solved by putting it inside of one of the most unobtrusive objects in the house, the set-top converter, which is a featureless black box on top of a cable-connected TV set. They could not imagine a world in which yet, just most people had computers, laptops, regular computers, or smartphones, and connected to the internet through those machines, they were still thinking, we're going to have a cable box that can send faxes. And again, I'm trying to set the scene in 93. If we're going to use our analogy to paleontology, dinosaurs were still everywhere, right? No one was thinking about mammals.

Think about mammals yet. All right. So why is this interesting? Because what is the core behavior that Seabrook uses to try to capture what's so new and interesting and different about Bill Gates in Microsoft? Like, what's his, they say in like editorial circles out to New York or your acute way in, to the subject, right? I just learned this from my editor the other day.

The word profile, which was probably coined by Harold Ross the founding editor of the New Yorker, it's actually referring to when you look at someone of someone, you're looking at them

from the sides. You're kind of getting at someone from the side. What was the thing, the weird eccentric attention-catching thing about Bill Gates that John Seabrook uses as entrance into this article?

The fact that he used email. So email had just arrived at Microsoft at the time that John Seabrook was writing this really epic profile of Bill Gates. So the article opens with John Seabrook emailing Bill Gates on a whim, Bill G at Microsoft.com. Gates answers. Seabrook and Gates begin sending emails back and forth about three or four times a week. Here are some quotes John Seabrook describing using email, which was clearly pretty new to them. you can do a little sleuthing in this article because he actually shows for some reason,

because this was also novel, Seabrook actually shows the headers of one of these email messages, the routing headers. You can find out that Seabrook was using CompuServe at the time. Here's some quotes from the article about email at this early period. We were intimate in a curious way in the sense of being wired into each other's minds, but our contact was elaborately stylized like ballroom dancing. In some ways my email relationship with Bill was like an ongoing month-long conversation, except for there was a pause after each response to think.

Here's another quote from the article. Another advantage Bill Gates has is that he already lives on the information highway. I love this use of information highway. The thing, and I have empathy for John Seabrook about this, he was probably like six months away, just in our cultural timeline, from the internet just becoming like a really common term. So probably like as this article was being fact checked, he was like, oh no, there's another term, internet. Oh, God. Anyways. New employees at Microsoft are likely to encounter Bill Gates

electronically long before they meet him in person. Some get to thinking of him by his email handle, which is Bill G, rather than by his real name. You'll be chatting with a Microsoft employee in the employee's office. The computer will make a little belch or squeak indicating an incoming piece of electronic mail, and it will be an email from Bill. It's not unusual to hear a young employee say, hey, that's a good idea. I'm going to email Bill about that. Here's another observation about email at Microsoft. Gates spends at least two hours a day at his desk, staring into his monitor, reading and writing email.

Email allows Gates to run the company in his head, in a sense. All right, so I want to pause there for a moment. This is really important. It's really important. This is this Hell Creek formation analogy in the digital world. Email arrives in this super fast-moving, super high-tech, king of the tech companies, tech just emerging in the 90s as the sector. They get email, and how is it deployed? Well, it's a reflection of Bill Gates, hyper-smart, rocking, keeping 100 things in his head all at one point.

It's a reflection, almost an immediate reflection of his cognitive reality. Email becomes, let's just rock and roll. It's an intimate relationship. I'm running the company in my head. Anyone can talk to me at any time. I get a sense of what's going on. This became a well-known idea for a few years, this idea that you could just email Bill Gates and he would write you back. So this tool is introduced into this company, and immediately its usage becomes a reflection of the personality of the most important person in the tech industry, which is Bill Gates.

Now what's important to emphasize is this is very specific to what's happening at Microsoft. So there's this key passage where Seabrook says, look, most companies aren't like this. This is what I'm talking about. We're at that boundary, no email email boundary. Seabrook looks to another company just as a comparison that is in Seattle. It's Macaw-Sailer Communications, another high-tech company nearby. Here's how Seabrook describes it. over at Macaugh's cellular communications, another prominent high-tech company whose headquarters is a few miles from Microsoft's phones ring all the time and everyone wears a beeper.

So Seabrook is capturing. Microsoft is ground zero right now of this email revolution. And immediately we get this sort of hyperactive hive mind. We're all connected to each other. Let's just send messages back and forth. Here's Seabrook giving a number. as in all the Microsoft offices, one rarely hears the sound of a ringing phone.

The employees send a total of 200 million email messages to each other every month. Now, I will point out there's no way that number is correct. Because I'm a nerd, Jesse, I went and did some research on this. I looked up from SEC filings, the total employees at Microsoft in 1993, and if you divide 200 million emails

by the total number of employees, it works out to about 13,000 emails per employee per month. I think he has an extra zero. In fact, he... That's so good. Yeah, I think he meant 20 million. But, look, I know a lot about email usage statistics.

That would be great if 13,000 a month. I mean, if you do the math, I mean, it's like hundreds and hundreds of emails a day. I mean, it's possible. But whatever. They were using a lot of it. Other high-tech companies weren't. So this is ground zero of this happening.

I want to give one more quote before we, analyze this deeper. So I'm arguing that in part, this hyperactive, let's all just get this ongoing conversation going usage of emails, in part a reflection of Bill Gates. Seabrook argues it's also in part a reflection of the industry itself, right? So he says, the platonic nature of software, it is invisible, weightless, and odorless, it doesn't exist in the physical world, determines much of the culture that surrounds it. At Microsoft, workers often describe each other as smart or super smart or one of the smartest

people you'll meet around here. All right. So you have this culture where it's all abstraction. It's digital bits that exist somewhere. And what matters is cognition, manipulating bits with your mind and how good are you doing that. So it's just natural if that's the environment in which this otherwise pretty bland tool, it's a protocol for sending Askey text characters through some sort of common mime formatting scheme back and forth between computers and storing it asynchronously. If that's the environment in which this bland tool emerges, we're going to be like, yeah, it's a hive mind. Let's go.

Everyone connect to everyone. Let's move information around as fast as we can. It's going to make us smarter. It's all about smarts and speed, and it's all abstract and digital anyways. And now our communication exists in this digital weightless, odorless, ether, just like the bits of which we're programming. Let's just meld it all together. And Bill Gates wants to be at the center of this hive mind. almost just intuitively knowing everything that's going on and pushing it.

He was a control, you know, a control addict. He wanted to have his hands in all parts of Microsoft. He was a leader, a completely hands-on leader. So it really makes sense that this would be the way in Microsoft that email spread. So here's what happened. This became how everyone else started using email too. So we get these early adopters in the tech industry like Microsoft. and we have this remarkable snapshot of what it was like when it comes there.

And they immediately start using this as an extension of their brilliant brains and the hive mind everyone together. And they love speed and moving quick. And this is a big part of that metaphorical approach to business. So then when this tool spreads, it's not just the technology spreading. It's the culture that spreads as well. Hey, here's this cool tool being used at places like Microsoft. Here's how they use it.

We want to be like Microsoft. We're going to do this too. just like how Silicon Valley companies in the 2010s begin shifting over to open office formats for reasons that were very specific to Silicon Valley they were signaling disruption to investors and potential employees and later in the 2010s

you get companies that had no business having open offices doing the same thing it's the culture and the culture and the physical change would spread I remember doing a talk right before the pandemic at a big I think a healthcare company. There's no reason for them to have these big open offices

and all the people I talked to really hated it, but it's just the culture spreads with the tool. And that's how we ended up where we are now and where we ended up almost immediately by the end of the 90s, email is about supporting a digital hive mind. Quick, low friction communication. More is better than less because more information is better than less information.

It lets us move faster. Faster is good. It makes us smarter, smart is good. Sin, sin, sin, sin, sin. And so that was the evolution of this tool after we got past our digital KT boundary. Now, of course, the problem with this is it doesn't scale. Yes, in 1993, Bill Gates was emailing all of his employees. You could email him, get an answer.

You're a reporter. You could email them. He would answer back. Spoiler alert, what would happen if I emailed Bill G at Microsoft.com right now? Of course, he's not going to answer. Of course, when he was the CEO later in the 90s and into the early 2000s, you can couldn't just easily email Bill Gates. It doesn't scale. It's too much communication. He was already spending two hours a day just trying to manage it when the tool was new and most people

weren't still using it. And of course, by today, that's just way too many messages. And what ends up happening, and this is a core argument I've made many times on the show, I've written a whole book about this called The World Without Email. What ends up happening is, if you're going to have a hive mind, you're going to have a lot of ongoing communication threads. Those communication threads are going to require back and forth information, and it's asynchronous, so you don't know when the next message in this thread's going to arrive, but when it does, you have to answer pretty quickly because you have to keep this back and forth going if you're going to reach any sort of conclusion in a reasonable amount of time. So what does this require? Constantly

checking your inboxes. We could probably capture that best. I always go back to the same chart. I'm going to load it on the screen here for people who are watching. This chart on the screen shows exactly where we end up. When you start scanning up the hive mine, this is a is the histogram from the rescue time data set of the average time between checking email or instant messaging services, that medium average gap between checking email among the tens of thousands of people studied here with six minutes. The most common, if we look at this histogram, the most common gap between checking email of the tens of thousand people studied, one minute. That's what happens when you want to maintain a constant ongoing conversation with a lot

different people is you have to service those conversations. If you don't, things get bottled necked and slow down and there's problems. And so now we have to be constantly checking these things. Unfortunately, our brain cannot constantly check email or chat channels where every single message is from a completely different context in the message before and also suspect to write good computer code or also expect to make good management decisions or also expect to be making research breakthroughs or to write a report in a way that's cynical and smart. Our brain can't do both. So we're overloaded. We're burnt out and we're miserable. All of that goes back to this moment when this tool was introduced and Bill Gates said,

this is great. I want to talk to people as fast as possible. So there's alternative timelines here, right? Like, I mean, let's imagine. Just like people say, let's rewind the clock to the asteroid hitting at the Cretaceous tertiary boundary. The first time it happened, mammals made their move, but you know, if we reround the clock, we might have seen different outcomes. I think the same is true. with email. Imagine, for example, if for some reason Macraw Communications, the place with all the beepers, what if they were the first to get email and not this super darling of the high-tech industry like Microsoft led by such an iconoclass like Bill Gates? It might have been different.

Here are different ways that email might have been integrated as a tool in an alternative timeline of this transition. It might have first emerged, for example, as a digital fax machine. Yeah, your email addresses are like fax machine numbers. Each team in the office has it. You use it to deliver documents and files. This is great. We don't have to fax it. We can just email the memo to the fax machine address for the marketing department.

That is a completely sensical use of this asynchronous messaging format. It just happens not to be the one that first emerged. Here's another one. Digital mailboxes. So another way that email could have been integrated into work cultures is it could have been a digital equivalent of the mail. room. Like, yeah, we have a digital mailbox and maybe you check once a day like a real email box, like a real actual physical mailbox. Maybe there's like a special machine you go to. Like, let me see what's in my mailbox. And it's digital. So like it saves having to have people transfer papers around.

Right. So you could have had a whole culture emerge around this that says this is a digital version of our mailbox. We expect you to check that you check your physical mailbox once a day anyways in the office. It'll be about the same. In fact, maybe you could imagine alternative. timeline where there is a computer in the mailroom. Let me check my physical mailbox and let me see if anyone sent me any digital mail and, hey, there's a printer here and I can print anything I think I need to print. A completely cynical application of these underlying protocols, but it's not how it happened. Another timeline could have been imagine instead, email first emerged in a place that was more

hierarchical. So not the sort of, hey, Bill Gates, I, everyone knows me, I'm talking to every, everyone. It's all about smarts, but let's say a rose in an old conservative blue chip firm that was very hierarchical. You could have easily imagined there that these protocols say, great, this is a tool for assistance. Assistance can use this as part in the background as part of how they help execute whatever it is the support they're trying to provide. So now they have another tool, just like they might have, for example, at this period, the variable speed dictation machines. I mean, kids don't know about these, but before there was computers, people would,

most people couldn't type. You had dedicated typers. You would write things by hand or record it, and then other people would type it for you, professional typers, who are much faster. And if you recorded it, so a lot of people were recording memos and reports talking into a microphone. You would, the typers would play back these recordings and type along, and they had a foot pedal. and you could use the foot pedal to control the speed of the playback. So you could kind of slow it down and then speed it up and slow it down, slow it down when you're saying something really precise. So you could have imagined an alternative timeline,

the email arising in one of these hierarchical places that really depends on support staff. They're like, great, this is like the foot pedal for dictation. Another tool the support staff has, but the person like doing the financials or writing the report or coming up with the marketing campaigns, why would they need to know about that? all sorts of different alternative timelines. We fixate on the one that happened, but it doesn't mean it was inevitable. All right, so what's the general theory at play here?

We need to separate the peer functionality of a new technology from how that functionality is applied. It's an important nuance in how we look at technology. We can get pretty deterministic about this. Yes, email means checking every five minutes, and we talk about everything, it's all back and forth. That must just be somehow inevitable in the tool. So this is sort of a peer, what's called techno-determinist perspective.

There was no other choice. That was what's going to happen when you introduce this tool. But often, no, it's more complicated than that. The tool has an abstract functionality, like email can deliver messages asynchronously over network and store them until someone's ready to read them. And then you have the culture surrounding the tool. all right how do we actually use that tool that's not set in stone now here is where and i don't want to get to tech theory here uh there's a an even more nuanced way to slice this so the techno

determinists say the tool just dictates exactly how it's going to be used you have another group no scott the social construction of technology crowd that says no no it's all the uh the culture surrounding the tool, the people in which the environment in which the tool is deployed, they determine how it's used. But the Scott folks tend to give a lot of agency to those people. So if email is used this way, there's these alternative timelines, but if it's used this way, it's because the people involved in controlling how email was first deployed wanted it to be used that way.

I think the reality is in between those two things. So the usage of a tool like email is not built into its digital DNA. There's a lot of alternative timelines. The culture around the tool itself does dictate how that tool is deployed. But I often think that cultural impact is often unintentional and dynamical. So it comes into Microsoft. Bill Gates doesn't make a decision. This is how I want email to use.

It just sort of emerges from other realities of that culture and how this tool interacts with it. So it's sort of pseudo-determinism. Often in these cases, these new tools come around and how they impact us as hard to predict and not intentional, but it's also not ingrained into the tool itself. There are alternatives. And so what does this mean for us? This means we should not take as an unavoidable given how a tool is affecting our lives or organizations or communities. It might be hard to steer this at first. These tools show up and have unpredictable interactions with where they arrive and they shoot off in some direction. And now Microsoft, according to John Seabrook, is everyone sending 13,000 emails a month or whatever.

But we can still change that. It's hard to predict and it's hard to control where technology first takes us because of the pseudeterminism. But we can still change it because the tool itself is not deterministic. We can look back, see the impact and say, okay, let's push this on another timeline. Now that we've seen which way this went, now we can come back and more systematically say, is there a better way to deploy this tool? Now that we've seen the good and the bad that it reeks when we let it just sort of rock and roll. This is this philosophy that I call techno-selectionism, where you can't predict in advance what things are going to do,

but you can, after the fact, come back and try to re-steer them. I think we can do that with email. So this hyperactive hive mind Bill Gates approach does not have to be how we use this underlying tool. We can look at and say, given 30 years of experience, what's useful, what's not useful, how do we want to redirect it? The dinosaurs can't do this. Mammals can't do this. We can't rewind the clock and say, let's try evolution all over again after the asteroid hit. We can do this with technology, which is what's exciting.

So, for example, as we're looking now at email, we might say, hmm, Bill Gates was wrong about this hive mind approach. It made sense in the moment. It was exciting, but you know what? It fries our brain. It doesn't scale. We can't get anything else done. We're all burning out. All right, let's stop doing that.

What if we said instead, email should be for delivering information that doesn't require a reply, so like an old-fashioned mailbox, and for non-time sensitive questions that could be answered with a single message? Like that is a really efficient way to use email. Here's a memo. I don't want to print it. Great. I'm glad it's in my email inbox. I'll read it when I get a chance.

Here's a question. What time are you leaving tomorrow? I don't need the know right away. When you get around to it, you can come back and answer it. That one message, it's done. But we could say, okay, for back and forth communication, we should not have a hive mind over digital because it's the asynchronous. It just means we have to check these things all the time.

And this leads us to the type of things that I've pitched before. like in my book, a world without email, have protocols for particular styles of work. Here's how we collaborate on this, so it's not just messages going back and forth, have office hours. You have a one-off question that's going to require a discussion. Come to my next office hours, we'll do it real time. Have things like docket clearing meetings. Here's something our team needs to work on you just thought of.

Don't email it to us. Put it on our docket, a shared document that at our two or three time a week docket clearing meetings, we will see as we go through everything together. and deal with them one by one. We can rewind the clock and rerun digital evolution. That's what's cool about this particular subject versus other types of evolutions that we face. So email, it's a cool story, right?

I mean, it emerged in this unique company, like unique in the world with this unique person leading it. And he set the stage for this is how email should be used. And the same thing happened in technology companies all across Silicon Valley. And it changed the whole way we thought. thought about this tool. But this way that we thought about the tool turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. It's making us miserable.

It's really almost melting down the knowledge sector in a way we don't quite acknowledge yet. So let's just rewind the clock. We can do that. We can't predict when the asteroid is going to come, but we can keep going back and changing based on our own values in humanity what happens after the impact occurs. So that's a broad point, but email gives us a specific example of that point in action. So there we go. 1993.

Internet. I like that story. That was great. Information Highway. I'm going to use that. Also, email capitalized. Yeah. They still hyphenated.

I don't know if they still capitalize email. Yeah. But in that article, it was email. Cool point. Didn't know like the web was around? Like people didn't know what the internet was. And then suddenly they knew what the internet was. It was interesting.

The guy who invented the internet, not the web. which is the part of the internet. Most people are familiar with Tim Berners-Lee. He worked on the same floor that I did at MIT, so I'd often take the elevator with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It's been through the internet. And you know what the name of that building was? The William H. Gates, it was the Bill Gates Research Tower.

So see, it all connects, Jesse. It all connects. Oh, my. All right. So anyways, we got a bunch of questions about these type of things, how to use email better. But first, I want to mention some sponsors. I'll start with my friends at Mosh M-O-S-H, which has quickly emerged to be one of my favorite protein snack bars because of how they taste, because of what's in them, and because of the bigger mission behind the company that creates them.

So the Mosh bars have become one of my favorite go-to things when I don't have time or I'm not interested in eating a whole meal, but I don't want my energy to drop. I want a bunch of protein, and not a bunch of junk. Mosh bars have become my favorite. They have six delicious flavors. Each mosh bar has 12 grams of protein, is made with ingredients that support brain health like Ashwanda, Lyons main collagen, and omega-3s. They also have a whole line of plant-based protein bars

that come in three delicious flavors. What I like about the mash bars is they're soft bars, but they have a little bit of crunchy elements in them. it's almost like a nutty flavor and there's chocolate and they're just great I mean I tried a lot of different bars my wife brought some back from

Costco recently and I hope she's not listening but the bar she brought back from Costco it tasted as if you were saying okay here's what we want to do give me some Elmer's glue give me a lot of sand let's use that glue

to connect to sand into a bar form having one of those bars maybe say where's our mash bars we got a reorder because they taste so much better but they have all that good stuff. And the omega-3s and the Lions Made and the collagen, so it's the energy you need to think hard.

As I mentioned, though, there's also a social cause behind this. Mosh is a company founded by Maria Shriver and her son, Patrick Schwarzenegger, has a simple mission to create a conversation about brain health through food, education, and research. The thing is, Maria's father, Sergeant Shriver, suffered from Alzheimer's, and since then she and Patrick have done,

dedicated themselves to finding ways to help other families dealing with this debilitating disease. So Mosh donates a portion of all proceeds from your order to a fund for gender-based brain health research through the women's Alzheimer's movement. So their pushes not only to let's research Alzheimer's, but it affects men and women differently, and they want to say, let's focus specifically on women afflicted by Alzheimer's. It's a great cause and a great tasting bar that's good for you and gives you. the energy you need. I love them.

It's much better than the Elmer's glue and sand that you get in a typical protein bar. So if you want to find ways to give back to others and fuel your body

and your brain, mosh bars are the perfect choice for you. Head to moshlife.com slash deep to save 20% off plus get free shipping on either the best sellers trial pack or their new

plant-based trial pack. That's 20% off plus free shipping on either the best sellers or plant-based trial pack at M-O-S-A-H-A-S-A-A- H-L-I-F-E dot com slash deep. Thank you, Mosh, for sponsoring this protocol.

Let's also talk about our friends at Shopify, selling a little or a lot. Shopify helps you do your thing. However, you, chaching, it's a type of phrase I say all the time naturally as Jesse knows. I'm constantly rhyming like that. Shopify is what you should use if you sell things. It is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from a small online shop to a million order a million order a week type business. They handle the whole thing.

They handle online orders. They handle in-person point-of-service orders. It doesn't matter if it's scented soap or outdoor outfits. They are the easiest way to sell things. They also have now a AI-powered tool called Shopify Magic to really. help you convert more. In fact, they're one of the Internet's best converting checkout platforms. Their checkout for e-commerce has 36% better on average conversion compared to other

leading e-commerce platforms. 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. is powered by Shopify. They also have award-winning support. You're selling things. Shopify is who you use. It's a shorthand. Like when Jess and I talk about all of our ideas for what we want to sell, and we have,

I don't think we have our killer idea yet. we've had a lot of ideas. It's like the generic verb we use. Like, yeah, so we could just Shopify that. Yeah. Clearly that's what we're going to. In fact, don't we even have waiting to go a Shopify account? We set it up for the thing we were thinking about.

So we even have it waiting for us just to get the right product. Yes, we do. That is how obvious it is to us that if and when we have our great product to sell, of course we're going to use Shopify. It just makes everything easier. So sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopping. Shopify.com slash deep. And make sure you spell that all lowercase.

Go to Shopify.com slash deep now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. That's Shopify.com slash deep. All right, Jesse. Let's do some questions. Sounds good. All right. So we got a bunch of email, hyperactive hive mine kind of core. Yeah.

Key questions, nerd questions. I love it. And related to your Mosh read, whenever I hear at Costco now, I think, of that Acquired episode on Costco. And then you wrote that piece on Acquired and Reviewletter last week. Yes. And then I heard from one of my students that I taught the summer at Dartmouth when I was teaching that writing class, grad student who took my writing about technology class.

And he was like, you know, I'm great friends with those guys. They met at my apartment. Very small world. Wow. Yeah. Everyone knows everyone. It's a small world. Tech people of roughly a similar age who podcast or write.

I mean, how many of us are there? All right. All right. First question is from Rachel. How can I manage a hyperactive hive mind inside a big government agency? I've attempted to employ your strategies, but it's not working. Should I give up and move back to the private sector? Well, I hope you don't think that's hyperbole, Rachel, but I think the right answer here is coup d'etat.

Let's overthrow the government. And then you can determine how, should be your number one. Mussolini made the trains run on time. you are going to cut down on unscheduled email messages that have to be responded to. Honestly, you probably could overthrow a country on that, a country to government on that particular platform. You know, Rachel, in my book, World Without Email, I open it, the intro, as an interesting case study that you will appreciate about the world of government and email. And what it profiled was someone, his name was Niche, and he was hired by the Obama administration. This was like in 2000, I think second term.

Second term Obama. And I forgot exactly what he was hired to do. It was under one of the cabinet secretaries, some sort of business innovation. It's probably under commerce or something like this. But like a typical, here's your build up, here's your team, here's your office, you're in charge of like innovation strategy for the department of the treasury or something. And there's this natural experiment that happened where Nisha arrives in D.C. to take this job. And some virus, like a digital virus, hits the computers. And it feels like it's compromised and the security forces come in and say, we got to take all your computers, basically.

Because we don't know, like, how far this virus is spread and there's security stuff going on. So we're going to take these. And so you have no way of emailing people. And not for like a day. This was six weeks. So he shows up and almost immediately, as a natural experiment, they turn off their email and say, do your jobs. You can't have email. And the cool thing about this is he said, yeah, there was like some, a bunch of annoying stuff.

Like the main annoying thing was the Obama White House had this sort of daily email list about like what was going on. And they felt out of the loop. But without the ability to send emails, Nisha's like, well, what am I going to do instead? Well, I'm going to go visit these various stakeholders relevant to our program. I'll just go to their offices and we'll have these like long meetings and just talk and think. And so he just met people, learned and thought. Like the way that a government task force like this would have been run at any point up until 1995. And it was super productive.

Like in those six weeks, he came up with all of the insights that they executed. All the project ideas they executed for the rest of his time in government service. So I feel your pain. This constant emailing and back and forth, it makes the small things convenient but makes the large things that matter very hard. hard. So what can you do in this cliche of an organization that, of course, you can't change. You can't change government bureaucracy. Change the metric you're focusing on. Be more specific. You're going to have more success. So what you're looking at is not really email reduction. What you're working at is not, I want less emails in my inbox. What you're looking at is not,

I want better habits around my inbox. I want, people to be okay with me checking once every three hours. That's not it either. None of these are what you're looking for. What you're actually looking for, the thing that if you counted would give you the number you want to make as small as possible is a number of unscheduled messages that you have to reply to in a given day. That is the actual killer, not email, not norms.

It is messages that arrive unscheduled. So it's not like you're anticipating, like at this point this message is coming. that requires a reply from you. When that number is high, you have to constantly check your inbox because you're probably never far from a message that may have just arrived that you probably need to respond to

because, again, this is part of a back and forth chain, and if you don't keep that chain polling, you're not going to get to a decision before the end of the day, and it's a problem. Unscheduled messages that require replies. That's the killer. So now you start thinking, how do I reduce those? And it's not just reducing email

and it's not just changing your habits. Now it is collaboration systems. Oh, I'm collaborating with this person on this. The way we're implicitly collaborating now is she just sends things as she thinks of them, and we have these conversations in email. That's raising my unscheduled messages that require a reply metric. That number is going up because of this collaboration. Why don't I think about this particular collaboration?

How do we reduce the unscheduled messages? I don't need to talk to the other person about that like this. I don't need to tell them about Cal and the hyperactive hive mind and Bill Gates and the KT boundary. I'm just going to put in place an alternative that brings that down. And it's like, okay, hey, here's what we're going to do. I'll stop by your office every Thursday. In the meantime, as like questions come up, just throw them in here. And that way we won't forget them, whatever it is, without making a big deal about it,

you've moved this collaboration approach away from unscheduled messages towards something else. and then just repeat for all of the different collaborations that are going on. Think, how do I reduce unscheduled messages? Now here's an advanced tip here. Sometimes the answer is not in what the other person does. We love the idea of everyone else is wrong. And so, like, hey, instead of emailing me, like, come to my office hours, all that type of stuff. Sometimes it comes down to what you're doing.

And now we're talking about things that are really in your control. Buried in my book Deep Work is a really powerful idea. called process-oriented emailing. And it says, think about an email before you press sin. Right? Our instinct is usually, what's the quickest path between right now and having the thing I'm emailing about off of my plate so I don't have to stress about it? And so we're just hammering on that keyboard.

Project no good, me want you do, fire, bad, send, right? I mean, it's like, let's just get this thing out of here. But the right way to think about that is not how quickly can I get this my plate, but how many unscheduled messages and replies that's going to create? And actually, I would rather spend more time right now crafting this message if it reduced multiple replies in the future. So process-centric email is where you say, instead of just me, good, project, do fire, badge, you say, all right, so we have this project we need to work on.

It's like, what needs to happen here. Well, here's what I'm thinking. And you kind of spell out, like how, not just what's going to happen, but how you guys are going to collaborate about it. Why don't you take a first look at this? Put any thoughts you have into the Google Drive folder we already have for this project. I have just put on my calendar a block of time Thursday afternoon to take a look at that. So just whenever you get to it, get to it.

I'll take a look at it then. We already have this meeting scheduled for Friday. Let's just make sure we take the last 15 minutes then to coordinate on this. I'll have already seen your thoughts. You'll have written them down. I'll have looked at them. The final 15 minutes of that meeting, we can then coordinate on where we're a little unclear

how we want to go forward. That's a long email, yes. That takes longer than just hitting your keyboards as fast as you can and slamming sins, you know, with your mutton leg like a caveman. Yes, it takes longer. But you have just saved any unscheduled messages

in this particular collaboration that you have to sit there and wait for and reply to. You spell out in the message. here is how we're going to collaborate on this, and the way you spell out does not involve a lot of unscheduled messages that have to be replied to. So there's a lot of different things you can do here, but it's collaboration by collaboration,

steering the implicit strategy for each collaboration towards things that aren't the fastest or the most convenient, but that reduce unscheduled messages that you have to reply to. I really wish we could just have like a big flashing number above everyone's computer in these type of jobs. It's like this is your average unscheduled messages you're replying to per day, And as that number goes down, people come in and congratulate you. Hey, way to go.

You got that down the half. That would make a huge difference. So we look at the wrong metrics. We want to blame people. We want to say norms are bad. We want to just try to reduce email. I mean, nothing, not that it frustrates me, but it kind of frustrates me. When people find out, like, oh, you've written a book about email and like reducing

the impact of email. You're like, yeah, I'm with you, man. I get so many of these newsletters in my inbox. Who cares? you don't have to respond to those, right? Does it matter that you have 20 newsletters? Just worst case scenario, you don't read them? That's not the problem.

The problem is not the newsletter. It's like message 7 of 17 from Steve that you're going to have to answer today because you guys are trying to figure out who's going to buy the cake for the birthday party tomorrow. And so now you're in your inbox all day waiting for the next message and bouncing it back and forth. It's not your newsletters.

on schedule messages that require a reply. So if you know what you're fixing, you can fix it more. All right. Who do we got next? The whole time you were doing your example of typing on the keyboard, I was thinking of your keyboard that you bought. Oh, yes. How's that doing? I love it.

Okay. Yeah. I love it. By the way, when I said, we did Crazy or Deep on my keyboard. So for people we don't know, Jess and I do this segment called Crazy or Deep or like, hey, it's this crazy that I like spent so much money on this. and he tells me if it's crazy or deep. So I bought this $150, $0.75 keyboard or whatever.

I heard from people that said, oh, you don't know how deep the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole goes. Like, that is nothing. You can spend real money in that world. So I feel better. All right. Next question is from a guy who hates scrum. How do I handle a hyperactive hive mind workplace situation when quitting my current job isn't an option for now? I'm a web developer at a company where I must stay connected to a group video meeting during business hours and reply to all email and slack messages within 10 minutes no matter what or I'll get yelled at for slacking off.

People don't realize this, but I make Jesse seven days a week always be logged into a Zoom room just in case I have something I want to ask them about. That's terrible. That's a terrible work environment. Right. So, yeah, short term, buy them a copy of my book So they can just see how terrible of a work environment that is I mean, this sounds like if I instead of Milton wrote Dante's Inferno This would be one of the circles of hell, I would add

You have to be in a video meeting all day long Just to make sure that people can just see you at all moments It interrupt you as soon as they need it Here's my bigger point I want to make And this is not what this guy wants to hear But I think it's important for other people to hear how your work environment deals with collaboration is a really big deal. It really matters.

And it's something you have to take as seriously as like the location of where the work is, like where you would have to live or what the commute is like, what the people are like. Do you like them or really hate them? And your sort of moral assessment of the work itself, this is just as important as that. And when evaluating a job, it's got to be one of the key things. How do you collaborate? Is it hyperactive hive mind? Or is it more structured?

And I would like to see a world in which people take that into account much more often. Oh, we're in a video all day? Yeah, that's not work. That's terrible. You know, you might as well told me we work next to the pork rendering plant. And, you know, it smells like awful all day, right? Like, that's a bad thing. I think the more people take that into account and ask about it and even make career decisions around that,

we get an interesting market signal that will push more of these companies towards more sinsical and psychologically sustainable ways of working. So I want to be so quick to say quitting my current job isn't an option. It might not be for now, but you need to think about this like you just discovered that, hey, wait a second, I'm at Enron, you know, in like 2000. I don't like what's going on here. I think I might want to get out of this ship. We should not take lightly collaboration style.

That should be one of our tier one concerns we have when evaluating companies. And we should be vocal about it. And if you do end up leaving this place, make it clear to them. That's a big reason why. They'll bluster and, you know, but the signal there is important. Like this is no way to take human brains and have them work together to produce value. It's a terrible way to run something. All right.

What we got next? Next question from Jack. How can I work deeply at writing code when this often necessitates having ready access to a web browser for stack overfall reference or other users without getting distracted? I have the unhooked YouTube extension, and that does a lot of good, but I still find myself checking email. I have three suggestions that are going to go in order of you disliking most to disliking least. All right. So my first suggestion, which you'll dislike most, is to grow up, right? It's your job.

Don't look at other stuff on your web browser when you're coding. Don't check email. Don't go on YouTube. You know, just you have to grow up a little bit. This is my job. When I code, I code. I don't do these other things. If I need to go to Stack Overflow to look up an algorithm analysis or a library, whatever,

I will just go there and just make the rule really clear. And don't break that rule because you're grown up in a job that they're paying you to do. Don't fall completely into this victim mindset of like, what can I do? The Internet is so compelling and I can't control myself. Look, I'm on board with that argument for a lot of ways the Internet is in our life. but when you're at your job and working and working on something very specific like coding, just have a rule and follow the rule because that's, you know, work in general is corraling your attention on one thing despite other things your mind would rather do.

All right. So that's the answer you're not going to like. The answer you'll maybe kind of like. Time blocking helps what I just said. So you time block. Here's what I'm doing for this 90 minutes. Here's what I'm doing for this 30 minutes. It's much easier to follow that advice to grow up.

do your work when you're working and don't get distracted by other things because now you can say I'm in a programming block it's on my time block planner it's 90 minutes long and then I have an email check block I'm still in the middle of that programming block I don't check email during the program block I check it it's coming up that's actually a lot easier than when you don't time block because when you don't time block here's what your mind says we're going to have to check email at some point why not now you know well I'm coding and then it's like well why not now why not now why not now Why not now? Why not now?

Like you're constantly having to have this debate with your mind about, hey, we're going to have to take a break at some point. Why not look at YouTube now? So time blocking is going to make that first thing much easier. Because you're saying, yeah, this is when we're taking a break. This is when we're checking email. This is a good plan. I'm a grown up.

I can follow a plan. Come on. All right. The one you'll probably like best as a coder is a high-tech solution. Consider using GitHub's AI powered co-pilot feature. So the GitHub copilot is based off of. I think GPT4, it's integrated straight into your IDE, so the integrated development environment in which you code.

It replaces a lot of Stack Overflow Googling. This is in the weeds, so like other people can kind of glaze over here. But it's basically a tool where if you're a programmer, it uses a genera of AI model to help you do things like, what's the name of this library? I don't know how this call goes. It figures out what you're, oh, I know what you're looking for. Here's it. Here's how this goes.

Or you can say, could you write out. out some quick sample code that uses these functions. And it gives you the code and then you can modify it. If you're not a programmer, what you need to know is like, these are things right now that people solve by Googling. There's a couple websites, like he mentioned, Stack Overflow, which is like a Reddit-style bulletin board. And right now, a lot of programmers, what you do is you Google Stack Overflow for examples,

and its humans have posted examples. this integration of AI into the IDE can handle about 50% of that Google searching. But you don't actually have to go. All right, so that, there you go. So I gave you an array of answers here from, we'll make you mad to like, okay, to like, yes, because tech people Jesse love the like, here's a tool. Here's the secret is like you got to harness a large language model with a trillion parameters.

That's more sexy than, come on, man, grow up. All right. Let's do one more question and then a call. Then we'll jump on to the third. Okay. Next question is from Michael. Cal, I recently began doing morning work sessions without my phone to produce my productivity.

I own my own business and have employees and clients. A couple hours into my work, however, I begin getting stressed that I could be missing important emails. How can I solve this? Right. So, you know, Michael in his elaboration, was talking about he spends a couple hours every morning just locked in before he checks his email and he's stressed. Try it.

Try it for two weeks. And your goal here is not, does anyone ever get mad at me? Your goal is, is the amount that the magnitude of the issues tolerable? And I think you'll find it is. Yes, there are a lot of emails waiting in the morning. But often the emails waiting in the morning are people who are clearing out their email inboxes the night before or who are waking up early to try to try to. to get ahead of their email before meetings start,

they don't even want you to respond right away. They just went through a huge push to clear out their inbox. They want a little bit of peace before these replies start coming back in. So I think you'll find, if you just test it, okay, I wait until 10 a.m. before I see my email inbox,

that your clients and stuff are fine. They're getting emails at 10 versus 9. They're going to be fine. And if it's a problem, then you can come up with an alternative for those clients, that if they definitely need to hear for you in that hour. There's a story about this

in a world without email of a company that was just dying in email. They were just drowning in email. It was a U.X design company internally and externally. And so they switched over to this completely email-free, when I say essentially email through, they still used email to deliver files and, you know, invoices and stuff. But they essentially moved away from digital communication as a way of structuring their work. Instead, they had these two check-ins at the beginning of the morning

at the beginning of the afternoon and hey, what are you working on? What are the obstacles? What do you need? And it was great, right? They got away from just being on Slack and email all day. They did the same with their clients.

And the way they decided to do this was when you sign a contract with us as a client, there is going to be an addendum to that contract called our communication policy. And you are going to sign off on this is how we are going to communicate, how you're going to ask questions, when we're going to talk to you. And they had a really good system.

It was like weekly conference call. where at the end of the conference call, a written record of every question or obligation or commitment made during the call was then sent to the client so they have a written record and whatever. They had a whole system. Two partners in this company. One of the partners was the client facing guy. One of the partners was the tech guy. The client facing guy was terrified. Right.

So, Michael, this is much worse than what you're doing. This was like, you're going to have to sign a contract that says you can't email us. He was like, we are going to lose all of our clients. And guess what? no one cared. Because it turns out people don't necessarily, it's not the accessibility that people really care about, that you answer me all the time. It is clarity.

If I have an issue that you are required to resolve, I want it to be crystal clear to me how that gets resolved. I do not want to keep track of this in my head because that's a source of stress. If you have no alternative way or clarity system to do this, then yes, they're going to want you to answer right away because they can't take this. out of their head until you answer it. But if there is alternative ways to do this that also lets them take it out of their head, they're just as happy. And that's what this company did in a world without email. You could just write down, you knew this call was coming up, and the clients had

their list of things to talk about, and they got the written record so they knew nothing was going to be dropped, and it was fine. And they didn't have to worry about these things in between the calls. Michael, if there's a couple of clients that are upset that you don't do email in the morning, they'll be a very similar system. In fact, you can even have an office hour, 30 minutes at 10 a.m. You know, this is my beginning the day, open doors, right? Or here's a shared document. Just throw all of your issues into here.

Or you know you're going to hear from me at between 10 and 11. Just that clarity is what's going to matter, not the accessibility. All right, do we have a call? Yes, we do. All right, let's get a call in here. Hey, Kyle. My name is Jose. I'm my doctoral student with ambitions to land.

a tenure-track faculty position in the next four years. If I remember correctly, in a recent episode, you mentioned that in your 30s, you were quite busy with your professional life, and that you've now shifted to a more human lifestyle. With this in mind, my question is, would you still recommend slow productivity practices to someone in the beginning of their career, particularly to those with academic ambitions? It seems to me that there's a tension between the publisher-perish culture and slow productivity. I would also very much appreciate any wisdom or tips you can share

on landing an academic position. Thanks. Well, it's a good question. The intersection of slow productivity and academia, which I got to say, I won't name names, but I've been doing a lot of podcasts.

And there's been two podcasters who I did their show, who unsolicited said, hey, this is like my favorite thing of yours you've ever. Slow productivity is my favorite thing if you've ever written, it's like either this or deep work, and it might be this. Both of those people are academics.

So I think there's something in this book that, you know, clearly because I'm an academic, I'm sort of implicitly even without realizing it, kind of preaching to the choir a little bit. Is slow productivity incompatible with publisher parish? I don't think so. I don't think so. There's a lot of academics that are profiled in this book. Publisher Parish, we think of it colloquially as a fast activity. But my God, it is so much slower than the type of fast productivity that I'm really pushing back on.

Publisher Parish is, you know, I'm writing three papers this year, right? So actually, slow productivity is really well fitted for an academic lifestyle because what it tells you is, okay, what matters is your papers and just like focus on beautiful papers like really smart papers give that time give it a lot of your time keep coming back to it take your time produce great stuff like that's how you get tenure right it's all based on letters how good is this person's scholarship how influential is it in the world there is no games there is no politics and people who don't understand academia think like it's all just you know these weird subtle things and no it's confidential letters how influential and smart is this person's work that's it

That's a slow productivity game. But slow productivity also tells you make sure you don't have a lot of other stuff on your plate at the same time. The most research institutions try to help with this pre-tenure. They want to keep your obligations low. Your teaching load, easy, your administrative obligations light. Now, I understand before I get the letters, this is, I'm talking here like Tier 1, Carnegie 1R1 research institutions. I know most professors, because there's a lot of colleges, most professors don't care that much about, they're not given that last. attitude, right? If you're not at a tier one research institution, I get it. They're like,

we care about research. Here's your six courses. Teach. And I also recognize it's very different for adjunct or non-tenure line faculty. But the person asking a question here is interested. It sounds like sort of tier one research academia. That's a slow productivity game. Coming back to again and again, great research, making progress, publishing things, not getting caught up into small, not getting caught up into busy, not having too many things going on at the same time, just this like relentless return to thinking. So why was my 30s difficult? And again, it's all relative, right?

I mean, I still largely worked nine to five and et cetera, because I was doing multiple jobs. All right. So maybe don't write books, you know, unrelated to your academic career at the same time you're trying to get tenure. Don't do that. And I think it'll be okay. See, I was running two jobs as an author and an academic and had all,

all of our kids were had during that my 30s as well. There's a lot going on. So just pick two out of those three, and you don't have to, you'll be okay. Embrace slow productivity, pick two out of those three things, and I think you'll be okay. All right. So we're coming up to our third and final segment. This is where we are going to talk about my New York Times op-ed. I'm going to read comments, which, again, is either a great or terrible idea.

But first, let's take another quick break to talk about some sponsors. Start with our longtime friends at Blinkist, an app that gives you 6,500 book summaries, and expert-led audio guides to read and listen to in just 15 minutes per title. You can access best in class actionable knowledge from 27 categories such as productivity. He would read about that. Psychology and more on the go and get entertained at the same time. We're really having a good, by the way, presence right now on the time management category. Yeah.

On Amazon. We got deep work is representing, slow productivity is representing. We're having a good day up there. All right. So why should you use Blinkist? Well, the way Jesse and I use Blinkist is actually to triage books. We hear about a book we're interested in. We put it on our cue, a list somewhere.

And what we do is we first listen to the blink. That's the name for the 15-minute summary. Jesse likes to read them. I like to listen to them. You can do both with the Blinkist app. getting the 15-minute summary of a book gives you a really accurate sense of do I really want to buy this book and read the whole thing

or do I get the gist and that's enough. It's a fantastic way to help run triage on the reading life. People use it for a lot of different reasons, but that's the way I like to use it. I also want to mention they have a special promotion right now called Blinkist Connect. With Blinkist, you can give another person unlimited access for free.

It's basically 2-4-1. All right. That's cool. So you can now share your Blinkist account and let other people get into it. All right. So right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Got to blinkus.com slash deep to start your seven day free trial and get 25% off a Blinkis premium membership.

That's Blinkis spelled a B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkis.com slash deep. They get 25% off in a seven-day free trial, Blinkis.com slash deep. And remember, now for a limited time, you can use Blinkis Connect to share your premium account, you will get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. All right. We also got to talk about life insurance. We talk about this a lot on the show because we talk about procrastination a lot on this show.

There's certain things you know you need to do, like get more life insurance to help take care of those who depend on you, but we don't do it. And why don't we do it? Not because we're bad. Not because we're lazy. But because our mind doesn't trust that we have a good plan on how. how to take action. That is why we procrastinate.

So stop procrastinate on getting life insurance. What you need is an easy way that you completely understand that you know you can get that insurance without there being any ambiguity or difficulty. And I'm talking about our friends at PolicyGenius. PolicyGenius technology makes it easy to compare life insurance quotes from America's top insurers. In just a few clicks, you'll find your lowest price. even if you already have a life insurance through work, it may not be enough, and it may not

follow you if you leave your job. You need your own protection. With Policy Genius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage. Some options even offer same-day approval and will help you avoid unnecessary medical exams. So we have just simplified this task. I need more life insurance, go to policygenius.com slash deep questions. Now your brain trust.

I know exactly what to do and exactly what to expect, and that urge to procrastinate will go away. So save time and money and provide your family with a financial safety net using policy genius. Head to policygenius.com slash deep questions or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's policy genius.com slash deep questions. As long as we're talking about health, let's also talk about our good friends at Zock Dock. All right. Zock Dock is the place where you can find a book doctor's who will make you feel comfortable and actually listen to you. We're not just talking about a few.

We're talking about tens of thousands of doctors, all with verified patient reviews. So you can make sure the vibes are vibing before you ever meet NIRL. All those are terms I use often, as Jesse knows, vibe and I. Well, with Zock Doc, you've got more options than you know. Zock is one of these things that I think just makes a lot of sense, right? All those sorts of things in our life, movies we want to see, clothing we want to buy, a car we want to buy. We go online. Hey, what do people recommend?

Where is there a car I want to buy? Is there one available? What's the price going to be? Zock Doc does the same sort of thing for medical care. It is a free app and website that helps you search and compare highly rated in-network doctors near you and instantly book appointments with them online. I need a doctor. Here's one nearby.

Do they take my insurance? Yes, they do. When are they available? Let's just do this right here. Done. Ten minutes, you have that podiatrist appointment that before you were thinking, how am I ever going to do this? I don't even know where to start finding a doctor. Do I call them?

Do I ask a friend? Zoc Doc takes this thing we do all the time. Getting health care appointments. and it makes it so much easier. The reviews is the icing on the cake here. Real patient verified reviews, so you can find out before you make that appointment, does this doctor use terms like vibes and IRL all the time

because then maybe I want to go to another one? So you can even find out do people like this doctor. Man, this is such a crapshoot otherwise. Zoc Doc makes this all easier. Ooh, they even have now, here's a cool stat. The typical wait time to see a doctor booked on Zock dock is between 24 and 72 hours. That's it.

So not only can you find a doctor that takes your insurance that people like, you can probably find one who can see you soon. So not only is Zock Doc a good idea, it's actually a service I use as well. I now have two different medical care providers who use Zockdoc. They use it not just for setting up appointments, but they use it for getting the paperwork done ahead of appointment, so it's made my life a lot easier. If I was to be looking for a new doctor anytime in the near future for any type of specialty issue, I would know exactly where to go to ZocDoc. So go to Zocdoc.com slash deep and download the Zocdoc app for free. Then find a book a top rated doctor today.

That's ZOC, doc.com slash deep. Zocdoc.com slash deep. All right, Jesse. Time for our final segment. I want to talk about this op-ed I wrote for the New York Times as part of the publicity for my new book, Slow Productivity. I'll bring it up here on the screen for people who are watching. The op-ed was called To Cure Burnout, Embrace Seasonality. So seasonality was one of the big ideas that was in my book, Slow Productivity, in particular in the chapter on working at a natural pace.

I won't go through the whole article. I'll just give you this short summary so you can understand what's going to come next in this segment. The short summary here is that working at full intensity all day long, every day, all year round is something that is not natural. So I argue that when knowledge work arose as a major economic sector, we took on this idea because we saw factories doing it. and that's what was big in the economy at the time, but it doesn't necessarily make sense as a way to do cognitive work. So let me read a little bit from my own article here. Office buildings became virtual factories,

with members of this growing class of workers, metaphorically clocking in for eight-hour shifts, week after week, month after month, attempting to transform their mental capacities into valuable output with the same regularity as an assembly line worker churning out automobiles. In recent years, I've come to believe that the decision to treat the pacing of cognitive jobs like manufacturing jobs was a mistake.

We seem to have forgotten that life in the mills and factories was miserable. The unrelenting pace of those jobs eventually required the formation of labor unions and regulatory innovations, like the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which introduced a mandated workweek and overtime pay, all of which emphasized the artificiality of forcing our efforts into such an unvarying and demanding rhythm, and yet as more of us shifted into the comparable comfort of office buildings, we carried over the same flawed model forged onto factory floor. I go on to argue that when it comes to doing cognitive work, much more variation intensity is better.

Having a refractory period after intense thinking helps you reset and reflect. Over time, you produce more results. I give a lot of examples from my book of people like Georgia O'Keefe or Lynn Manuel Miranda, Marie Curie. all whom had much more wildly varying intensities and that led to better work than just trying to do work hard all day long. And then I gave a bunch of advice about,

okay, how might you actually implement something like seasonality in your company or if you work for someone else who doesn't want you to do it? You know, what are ideas for making this practical? That's the article, right? It's a kind of classic, adapted essay

from a book op-ed. So I thought it would be either a good idea or a terrible idea, Jesse. to read some of the comments from New York Times readers to this audience, I mean, to this piece.

Why I think this is useful to do is it gives us a sense about at least how a certain segment of society is grappling with these issues. So how is the typical New York Times reader grapple with these type of issues? And what I'm going to do here is I'm going to start with

a critical comment, because I would say it's the most common critical comment I am hearing from this sector. And then before I respond to, it, I'm going to read the reply of another New York Times reader to this comment because I think the reply gets this exactly right. Then I'm going to read a positive comment and then another one that just introduces an interesting extra idea I didn't even think about. All right.

The negative comment, this came from a user, a New York Times reader named WTS. I'll do this in my best sarcastic voice, okay, because I think this is supposed to be sarcastic. Great idea. cure burnout by spending summers at your country farm like Georgia O'Keefe. I'm going to share this suggestion with my friends who are baristas, farm techs, and nurse assistants. All right. That's an accurate rendering of the voice of WTS. I get this similar comments I've heard multiple times in my publicity tour so far.

I call it the what about the what about comment. What about so and so? What about so and so? All right, I'm not going to respond to this directly. I want to read the response of a user named Jay, a New York Times reader named Jay at WTS.

This is not a barista or nurse assistant issue. You'll find that in other articles. The article is about knowledge workers who cannot produce creative focus thought on demand on a uniform schedule day in and day out like a cog and a factory machine because creative focus thought doesn't work that way.

All right, Jay, I think you got that exactly right. The whole premise of the book is this particular sector had a very specific dynamic. It was very autonomous, this type of creative knowledge or it had very autonomous organizational dictates. You figure out how you want to organize your own work, but it was also coupled with this implicit heuristic called pseudo-productivity, which meant visible activity will be our proxy for useful effort. And then these two things very specifically combined with the digital front office revolution, which is specific to the sector with email and portable computing,

laptops, etc. All these things mixed together to create a very specific but very intense problem that affects probably 20 or 30% of the U.S. economy. And this book is about how to fix it. So yes, it's not a book about other sectors of the economy, but I do get asked this a lot of times. I always think about this as, you know, you write the book about running, like how do you train for running, you know, etc.

And then you get the response. yeah, but how is this going to help someone with no legs or something, right? Like, well, they probably aren't interested in that book because it's about runners. Or what about people who hate running? How is your book about running going to help them? It's like, well, the book is not written for people who hate running. So, all right, there you go, Jay. So there's my answer.

This book is about knowledge workers. It's a large, but certainly not entire economy. All right, let's go to a positive comment here. This one came from Robin. I had been saying this for years that I would thrive it my job, which is leadership at a tech company, if it operated more like college semesters. I often think sometimes I just need a week to stare at the ceiling after an intense period of work. Instead, we use our limited time off to travel, which is its own kind of stress.

And there's a couple good responses to this as well. One reader wrote in in response to Robin and said, in my experience, tech work used to follow such an ebb and flow. In the 1980s and 90s, release OS releases were every 18 or 24 months. Work was intense just before release and then slacked off after release. Then the pace picked up considerably. Someone else said, responding particularly to Robin's comment about traveling for vacation, just fills your only time off with more stress and said, this is why I've learned to love staycations and not just because there's a great deal of satisfaction and finally having

a stretch of time I can dedicate to all those things to pile up in the house and need to be done without feeling like I'm wasting my weekend. It's more Zen where you can just stretch out. That's interesting. This is a cool comment because there's a couple extra bits of information in there that's new. So here's someone saying, hey, in the 80s and 90s, the tech industry used to be more cyclical. You'd have intense periods and non-intense periods, and now it all seems to be intense. What's the difference between the 80s and 90s?

Well, it rhymes with shmimel. I hope that helps you. It's a big argument of my book is portable computing and digital networks and digital communication tools got rid of any sort of natural cyclicality and created this. There's always work to be done. There's always back pressure. So you always need to be pulling things in and you're always being watched. It's really an issue. I do like that point.

If we only get two weeks off a year and we do stressful travel during those two weeks, we really get no time off each year. So that's a good comment. Here's another negative comment. I like to go back and forth. here's the other type of comment I get, which is just less interesting. So there's a whole revival right now of sort of like traditional left-wing anti-capitalist labor politics. And again, we've talked about it's kind of weird because the traditional left-wing

anti-capitalist labor politics are actually at odds with identity-based postmodern critical theory left-wing progressive politics. These are two different visions of left-wing philosophy that don't actually play well together. So it's sort of interesting that the anti-capitalist crowd is gaining ground again online because they're actually in opposition to the more of, and you would use like the label woke for this, but more of the identity-based postmodern. These are in oppositions. Like the hardcore socialist at like the Jacobin magazine don't like the hardcore critical theorist because these are different visions of left-wing, left-wing worlds, but whatever.

There's a big anti-capitalist strain, so I wanted to give that its representation here in these comments. This is from Josh. In the modern economy, we don't get a feel like ourselves. There's never enough time to just be. Two weeks vacation to the U.S. is a miserably 10 days off or 261 days at the job. On weekends, it's about how to keep the household running, complete chores, run errands, and support children or manage other things to fall by the wayside while trying to squeeze in some enjoyment. Europeans have 20 more days off a year. That would be a good start.

Actually, this is not a super anti-capitalist one, really. This is just a European one. Some of the comments were much more just like, we have to overthrow capitalism, which, you know, makes for a good comment, but doesn't really help the person who's overloaded with their inbox

because they're probably not overthrowing capitalism this week, and they have all these projects this week. This is more of a European response, which I appreciate, which is just, you guys care too much about work, take more time off. This is what Quiet Quitting got wrong.

Quiet quitting went too far. And we're like, we'll always do this. the bare minimum and we're going to declare it and we're going to put it up the Europeans have this more dialed in. Like we're all kind of implicitly on the same page here. It's like we're going to work, but like, you know, we're also going to drink a little wine at lunch if you know what I mean. And it's a little bit more wink wink implicit, more culture, more cultural. All right, one more comment here. This one came from Jimerson. Our minds and bodies run on cycles from circadian to the

seasonal. When I was a northern adolescent, I habitually retreated to my attic room for long periods in the winter, prompting my father to express his disapproval. Oh, he's hibernating again. I now embraced seasonal hibernation in my adulthood. I lived in Los Angeles for nearly a decade, and the lack of vivid seasonal variation. It could be 86 degrees and sunny on any given day of the year and often was, made me feel, time feel unreal to me like progress itself had stalled. So I thought that was a cool point, this idea that maybe we're just cyclical beings, just as humans, we're used to in our what cycles

and we should have the same in our work as well. When you were talking Ferris in the interview, you explained to him the quiet quitting concept as well. I got to kick out of that. Yeah. Ferris' crowd is probably not a big quiet quitting crowd. Yeah.

Well, you were saying most of them are probably self-employed. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Like, I mean, and that is a big difference in reaction of slow productivity. People who are from that more

entrepreneurial self-employed crowd, like see these concepts differently because they're in control of what they do. So it's all about ideas for how they might reshape their work where people who work in big organizations have a completely different feel. You feel a lot less control and it's about how can I change this without, you know, my boss really getting mad at me. There's a lot of interesting dynamics. Workplace dynamics are interesting.

I also really liked how you explained to him your two-word concepts for a lot of the things that you write about. It's my whole career. Yeah. I love that. Come up with two words to describe something everyone already knows. Deep work, digital minimalism, slow productivity. The whole thing about my books is I know it's successful if people do and they've done

this for all these books, confidently been like I'm a big fan of this idea and then just give a completely unrelated description. Because it's a, that means you've built a term that people feel like I know exactly what that means, even if they don't. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, yeah, man, I am on board with slow productivity. we need to move at a slower pace in the office because we're wearing out our shoes.

You know, like it'll be completely different, but they're like, I'm just so on board. That's how you know you have a good title is that people are like, yeah, I'm on board with that. All right,

well, anyways, speaking of being on board, that's all the time I have. I'm actually, interestingly enough, about to head over to people's book, the bookstore here in Tacoma Park that is given,

or through which you can order signed pre-orders of my book slow productivity. I have about 300 books to sign here in my near future. wish me luck on that. Otherwise, we'll be back next week from the road. Special book launch edition of the Deep Questions podcast celebrating the launch of slow productivity. I'll join you from the road. Probably L.A., maybe Austin. We'll see where I am when I get around the recording. So I'll see you soon. But 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, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you've got to sign up for my newsletter at calduport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.