Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 298: Rethinking Attention

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

We think of information as something neutral; a spotlight that helps illuminate the reality of the outside world. Accordingly, more information is better than less. In this episode, Cal pushes back on this model, arguing that the form in which information arrives can strongly impact the understanding we extract. We must therefore be more intentional about what and how we pay attention. He then answers reader questions and surveys some unusual but entertaining stories about slowness.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: Rethinking attention [4:08]- What books should I read to help me develop a deep life? [34:35]- Does writing by hand have benefits for your brain? [38:40]- Should I get a brain scan to prove I have a low IQ? [43:46]- Should I use ChatGPT for book recommendations? [47:39]- How can I avoid wasting your gap year? [49:40]- CALL: Is “Slow Productivity” related to “The Burnout Society” by Buying-Chui Han? [55:32]CASE STUDY: Utilizing the phone foyer method [1:01:58]  FINAL SEGMENT: Slow news [1:10:58]Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/  Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?v=448bf8afad0740d18f6b109b4bd40d51 slow-watches.com/penguinrandomhouse.com/books/318747/help-wanted-one-rooster-by-julie-falatko-illustrated-by-andrea-stegmaier/rte.ie/brainstorm/2023/1108/1415296-why-handwriting-is-good-for-your-brain/ Thanks to our Sponsors: mintmobile.com/deepmauinuivenison.com/deepquestionsnotion.com/callistening.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 Kyle Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, you just got back from one of my favorite places. Boston, baby. Boston. What's going on up there? Is it spring? What was the report? I was thinking about you, actually, because yesterday when I was driving to a golf tournament with my two buddies for Tufts lacrosse, we were going along to Charles, and I was thinking about your walks and with your dog and stuff like that. We went by MIT.

We went by Harvard. Oh, yeah, we went by Harvard. Yeah. Well, if you're on the Charles, you're probably going by the business school.

Here was my routine. When I was a postdoc, man, I had so much, when I was a postdoc, I had a lot of time, right? And at this routine,

I would walk my dog from Beacon Hill across the Longfellow Bridge to the MIT campus. And he would be in my office. And by the way, That was like a whole chaos because my fellow postdoc had a dog. And then one of the professors there who I think has since one of genius grant, Dina Katabi, she had this little dog that was there. We were all on the same floor.

The dog, it was like chaos. We probably shouldn't have had the dogs. And then at lunch, I would change into running clothes because, you know, typically if this was anywhere near the winter, the temperature in Boston would be like conservatively, like, negative 100,000 degrees, you know, just like terrible. So I had all of this like gear you'd put on like these special gloves and hats and scarfs. And then I would run with my dog along to Charles on the Boston side, on the Cambridge side, rather, down to the Mass Ave bridge. Then we'd run across that bridge and then come back on the other side. I would stop on one of the floating do Boston side and we would do calisthenics. And then up the beacon hill to our apartment.

And then I would leave the dog there and I'd come walk back again for the second half of the day. I had a lot of time back in those days. Good routine. It was a good routine. Because my whole thing about Boston is like, you have to be outside and get sunlight in January or you just get really depressed. So it was like no matter how cold or windy it was, it was, we were going to be out there, we were going to run.

New Balance keeps the paths. I guess New Balance is Boston based. Yeah. They keep the running paths on the Charles plowed and clear throughout the winter. That's cool. Like that was like a key part of the routine. And then I would like watch a show and get like lunch and then I'd make my way back. And yeah, those were good times.

I remember that. I remember it was very cold. All right. Anyways, speaking of good times, today's show, excited about today's show, I invented another two-word acronym for the topic, not acronym, two-word summary, intentional information for what we're going to talk about today. So you know it's going to be good when I have an alliterative two-word description. To give you a little bit more detail about what to expect, there's really typically three big topics we cover on this show all about cultivating depth in a distracted world. We have our coverage of digital knowledge work, so how to sort of survive and understand the true. travails of digital knowledge work and do well in it. We have promise and perils of new technology.

And we have sort of engineering a deeper life among a bunch of distractions. I think we have, if I'm looking at this, a crossover topic. I think it crosses over those last two. So it's going to be some technocriticism, but it's also going to give you some concrete advice for making your life deeper right away and getting the quality of your life, the depth of your life deeper right away. So it's a fun topic. I'm experimenting with it, so it should be interesting. We've got some good questions. We've got a call. We got a case study.

And then the final segment I call Slow News, three interesting, I think, quirkier, entertaining stories about slowness that I found that you, my listener, sent in to me over the recent weeks. So I'm including, I'll preview this, a cartoon featuring me in a British publication. So we'll look at all that later in the show. So let's get started, Jesse. Let's do our deep dive. So today I'm going to argue that we.

misunderstand the impact of how we obtain information on the overall quality of our lives. So I'll start by explaining this current model and why it's broken. I'll then introduce a new philosophy that I call intentional information that I think promises to improve the quality and depth of your life almost right away. All right. So I want to start by explaining our current understanding of information and how we use. I'm going to try to draw this. For those who are watching instead of just listening, God help you, because I'm about to try to illustrate a very complicated topic with a pretty simple picture.

So what I'm drawing here, I'll narrate this for people who are listening. I'm drawing a representation of you or me, a person, right? So for those who are watching, you can see the picture. For those who are listening, Jesse, would we say that this picture reminds you sort of like a Caravaggio painting? Vango. Because I'm not familiar with Caravaggio. Well, I'm just talking about like that. I'm being pretty subtle in my use of Chara Skuro, which is the use of light and dark contrast to try to give volume and shape.

For those who are listening, they don't really realize what I've drawn here. All right, so here's us. I've drawn a picture of us. Over here, I'm drawing a picture of the world. Expertly drawn circle. Everyone agrees. So there's like land in the world. Okay, so here's the world.

And this picture of the world, I wanted to stand in for, um, an objective reality. This is our current model of this information. We have us and we have this objective reality, the world that has people and events and things and theories that explain what's going on. So there's sort of this like objective world that's out there. The way we like to think about information is that what it does is it just gives us samples. So I'm drawing like an arrow from this world over towards the person.

It gives us sort of a sampling of what's happening in this objective world. And this is a thought bubble I've just drawn here. And inside this thought bubble, we sort of have constructed our own sort of lower quality model of what's happening in the world. So like, you know, as we get sort of samples of information, as I'm representing by these arrows, we learn things about the world. We use that to make our internal model of the world, people places things and the theories that help explain how they all interact. it helps make that model fuller, right? And so then how does technology enter this picture? It is the medium by which this information gets to us.

So, like, maybe we have, like, a newspaper expertly drawn, right? So the newspaper is sort of mediating some samples about what's happening in the world. Our image of the world gets more detailed. When we move on to more modern technology, sort of the, the, standard techno optimist sort of perspective. I'm drawing here an expertly drawn smartphone. The idea is like, oh, this just gets more information available. So now that we have something like smartphones,

we can have social media and the internet behind this all, we can get a lot more samples of this world. And so our internal understanding of the world becomes even more detailed. This internal understanding of the world then shapes how we, not just how we understand the world, but how we feel. and we use as the foundation for our actions. So we act based on the conceptions in our mind.

The conceptions in our mind are built up by getting these samples of information about what's actually happening. This is the model we currently have. So in this model, the sort of the techno-optimist philosophy here is, well, more information is better than less. Because more information just gives you

a more realistic and detailed understanding of what's actually going on in the world, and the more detailed understanding you have, then sort of like the more your actions can be based in reality. Why would you ever want a lower fidelity understanding of the world? More information can only be strictly better. This is like a standard sort of techno-optimist or even like an enlightenment mindset. So in this idea, yeah, new technology that expose you to more information, great.

You get more detailed to understand the world can only help you make more nuanced or correct or appropriate decisions about how to understand, feel, and act. All right. So I'm going to argue that this model is quite broken. This is not actually the way information works. So it turns out that one of the most commonly occurring and deepest ideas in technocriticism is the notion that the tools we use to take in information impact the information itself, how we receive it, and how we understand what it means. The tools are not just a neutral gateway that allows more samples from some objective world to get to us. The tools themselves shape how we understand the information that the tools deliver. So I want to sort of sample the world of technocratics that have talked about this before, so you have a deeper sense of where this comes from. A really cool, very old example of this comes from a book I'm reading right now by Jonathan Sacks, the late Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom. He wrote this really cool book in 2012 called The Great Partnership, Science, Religion, and The Search for Meaning.

And in this book, he has a great example of exactly this idea that technology itself shapes the information, shapes the way you understand the information that it delivers. So he talks about in this book the very first alphabetic languages. So, of course, the first languages that written languages were ideogrammic. You have pictures that represent what they are. But we get the very first alphabetic languages where you have symbols standing in for sounds, right? That's what we think of as a modern language. The very first is proto-Syanic, which basically evolves pretty quickly into ancient Hebrew.

It's like sort of in the first phonic, alphabetic languages. The interesting thing about Hebrew, sex points out, is an ancient Hebrew, there's no vowels. Okay, so you have to use the context of. the writing to figure out a particular word, right? So it would be like if in English, if we think about like our alphabet without vowels, if you see HT, there's a lot of different words that could be depending on what vowels you fill in. It could be hat. It could be hut.

It could be hate. It could be hit. Right? Hot. So depending, H.T. by itself doesn't tell you what the word is. But if you look at the full sentence or the full context, you can figure out, oh, this must be the vowels meant for this word. Now, Sacks points out, at the same time, Hebrew is also read right the left, which engages your right hemisphere of your brain, which makes sense because you have to take in context of all the context of the writing to try to figure out what's being said.

It's very holistic, contextual way of taking an information. And Sacks points out, this is the mode of thought that's then captured in ancient Hebrew wisdom traditions, in particular in Torah, and then later, when you look at like Mishnah, the sort of commentary on the Torah. All of this writing is written in a way that's very much based on context. It's not breaking things down. Here's a six-part understanding of this. It's stories, multiple stories about the same thing. The meaning of a particular story doesn't necessarily make sense unless you understand the broader context to which that story is made.

So he's arguing that the mode of thought you get in the Abrahamic faith is dictated in part by the structure of the language technology. So then let's compare this to what happens is the Phoenicians bring this alphabet over to Greece. It goes to ancient Greece where it evolves. And when this alphabet gets to Greece, they do two things. First, they introduce vowels to it. So now there's no guessing. You know exactly what a word is because you have all the vowels, just like in English. And then they shift from left to right.

Now, this is going to be, as Sacks points out, engaging the left hemisphere of the brain, which is much more analytical. So in Greek writing, like, our modern languages, like you know exactly what each word is as you finish it. So you have this sort of like precise building up of understanding as you move left to right across the text. You don't need to sort of take in the whole context and then try to figure out what it means. Sachs argues this is exactly a technology that gave way to philosophy and abstract reasoning, logic, and eventually science. So the way the language works impacted the way that we understood, went about understanding the world. So putting in vowels and going left to right made things like philosophy and logic. very natural.

Reading right to left without vowels made a more sort of holistic narrative, contextual understanding of the world more natural. The technology through which you were getting the information dictated how you understood the world or made sense of the world.

It's a very ancient example of this. And more modern times, we have, you know, Neil Postman is a great proponent of this perspective. He basically took this idea from his mentor, Marshall McLuhan,

and he evolved it. His book from 1980s, Amusing Ourselves to Death, public discourse in the age of show business is sort of one of the classic publicly accessible guides to this idea that technology shapes the way that we actually understand information. The terminology he introduced was epistemic environment. So the information technology defines the epistemic environment, which in turns impacts how we understand the world. So in this book, he was talking a lot about television, since that was the major information technology of the night. 1980s, but here's a couple of quotes from Postman.

He says, each medium, so he's talking about communication information mediums, each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility. So mode of discourse is like how we actually think and engage with the world is affected by the medium. He goes on to say, we do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as it, as it is, but only as our languages are. And our languages are our media.

Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture, right? So he's directly pushing back against the picture I drew earlier. The picture that had this common understanding of there's an objective world, and we're just getting samples of that world, and the more samples we get, the more we understand the objective world. But Postman say, no, no, no. There is no it, and he puts it in quotation marks.

So we can't see things as it is. what we see is very much shaped by the media that we're using to actually get this information. So what it is actually changes depending on the media through which we're getting this information. You're writing about the world in ancient Hebrew is going to be a completely different conception of how to approach reality than if you're writing about the world using ancient Greeks.

Another interesting book is from 2009 that gives us sort of a neurological explanation for some of this. is Winifred Gallagher's book, Wrapped, attention, and the focused life. I write about wrapped in deep work, I believe. It's an interesting book. It was influential for me. A lot of people struggle with it because it's more essayistic,

not as Greek. Let's say it's more Hebrew than Greek, if we're going to have more Jerusalem than Athens, if we're going to use our previous metaphors here. So it's more essays and a little more flowery and literary than a lot of people are used to. there's some fantastic ideas, including some pretty serious neuroscience. So a big argument Gallagher is saying in here is that your brain constructs its internal understanding of the world based on what it's paying attention to.

So depending on what you pay attention to, your brain's actual internally constructed idea of what the world is like and how you should feel about it changes. So it's not like here's the objective world and we're just getting higher and higher fidelity pictures of it. we construct this specific world, neurologically speaking, based on what we pay attention to. So here's a quote from our book, all day long, you are selectively paying attention to something, and much more often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this process to good effect.

Indeed, your ability to focus on this and suppress this, that is the key to controlling your experience and ultimately your well-being. So now she's getting down to the mechanisms here, what you're paying attention to impacts how your mind understands what's happening to you in the world, and that directly impacts your well-being. Okay. So we put these ideas together.

We get a completely different understanding. I'm going to draw a new picture here again with great trepidation. So going back, I'm going to, you know, let's draw our person again over here. All right. There's our person. This is the reality is there's lots of different concerns. conceptual worlds that we potentially that exist out here. And the specific world, the specific world that you're building an internal representation of in your mind,

it depends on the technology you're using. So if we're using a particular technology down here, we get one world if we use a different technology that our understanding the world is different. There is no objective world. We sort of construct our understanding of the world and therefore our, our, subjective sense of self-beliefs and actions based on what information we're getting. And as we learned from Postman and SACs, the technology through which we're getting that information is what really matters in terms of the type of world that it constructs for us.

So that's the reality here. And so in this case, this person is looking at the world through like a smartphone. And perhaps, you know, this world is one, I'm putting like a nuclear explosion. And it's like a, and I'm putting devil ears on. It might be like a really bad world. You're like, oh, my God, right? So it affects. It kind of looks like the monster from Monsters, Inc.

The Billy Crystal says. Anyways, that's the reality. So that matters. All right. So if we take this all into consideration, the conclusion is if your goal is to build a deep life in this current distracted high tech world, you have to care a lot about the information you take in and through what tool you're taking in that information. Right? If our tools are not just these like neutral portals that just give us samples of the real world as it is. And so just the more samples to better.

So why not use as many tools as possible? We have to care. We have to care about how we take in information. I have a name for this philosophy, a tentative name. I call it intentional information. Intentional information is a philosophy that having intention about what information you take in and how you take it in is really important on the quality of your life. So I wrote down some potential principles here for intentional information. This is all just, this is tentative, right?

I'm just writing down a few ideas here. We can expand this as needed. But just to give you a sense of the type of ideas you might put in place if you adopt an intentional information philosophy. All right. Number one, get non-local news typographically as boring as possible and sparingly. All right. So if you want to know about the world, be very careful about how you do this. this. Don't just be on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok and see what comes through. You have no

control over the world that's going to create in your head. It's probably not going to be a world that's going to be beneficial to you. So typographically, that's a technology that's going to give you a much, I'm not going to say accurate, but it's going to give you a much less manipulated or charged understanding of the world. Boring news, just what's going on, bullet points of things that are happening. I just sort of want to know what's going on, but I don't want it to be appealing, trying to get me to click or follow or subscribe to something. and you don't probably need as much news about the world outside of your local environment as you might think. In your local environment, you do want to know what's going on,

but you can actually get this information largely from actual people. Spend much more, this goes with that idea too. Spend much more time paying attention to what's going on in the worlds in which you have agency. We're much more wired for this. The communities in which you're apart and actually have a say, your town, your school, your employer, your religious institutions, institution. That should be actually like the bulk of the information you're taking in about what's going on because these are the worlds in which you have agency.

Our mind is better able to deal with that information because that's what information was until what 300 years ago. It was just about the worlds in which we have agency, right? We have a really hard time hearing about the world beyond where we have agency because our mind is used to if something bad is happening that affects us, we need to be worried or we need to be a part of it. and when the information is coming in from the entire billion, many billion person world, like we can't actually do that, but our mind doesn't make that distinction.

So focus more on the notion of the world our brain is used to, which is the world in which you live, and the people are in it that you know, and you can make a difference, and you can be involved. And less time, not no time, but the bulkier consumption should not be, I just want to hear about things

that I have no agency or impact or control on. Prioritize real people, over characters. Right? So again, I think social media does this. YouTube does this. You have to be careful that you kind of get these characters, these avatars of people designed to be interesting.

And it messes with how we understand what people are like or what we should be like. So spend more time with real people that you actually talk to and know and can see and touch. Especially if you're young, this is important. Being around real people gives you a better grounding in the reality of the human experience it's than spending most of your time with these avatars online. Prioritize real action over watching action of others. So again, there's weird crazy stuff going on online of people doing these things on TikTok videos and it's sort of a simulacrum of interesting activity and it can play weird things with our minds.

Prioritize like, I want to go do something myself. I want to be a part of this trail maintenance club. I'm part of the running club. I'm volunteering at this thing here. I'm writing in this writing group where we get together in a real place. Prioritize real action over just let me get a thrill out of watching vicariously over watching the actions of others. Try to have, I think of this like medicine. When you get exposed, despite your best efforts, the material that is very emotionally engaging,

especially if the material gets you outraged about something, the medicine you want to try to take right away to dull the more insiduous effects of this emotion that can really creep in And I mean, nothing really shapes that world in our head stronger than the sense of injustice or outrage, which injustice is important. But you want to make sure that if you're getting this through a format that is meant to amplify those feelings, that you put a sort of dampener on it. And the best dampener is steel manning. Okay, I've encountered this thing that's really making me upset. Let me go seek out and encounter the best faith sort of presentation. of this from the other side of it.

And what you get here is not like, oh, it's going to trick you. Oh, it's going to trick you into not caring about what's important or it's going to dole your sense of needing to take action. That's not at all what's going to happen. What this actually ends up doing is when you put the best steel man, that's what they call instead of a straw man, like the best good faith argument from the other size is it sands off the really sharp edges that actually can make any reasonable action difficult. and allows you to actually work with what's going on

in this particular instance in a much more productive way. So take this dose of steel manning for everything that outrages you, everything that really gets you going. It just changes the temperature of your internal world and gives you more options, gives you more agency. That one scares people. Interestingly, though, when I talk about this, it doesn't scare individuals thinking about themselves.

Like, yeah, that's fine. I can see a good faith arguing about something, and it'll be good to know. It's not going to change what I think about, but they get worried about other people. They'll be tricked. It's important that they don't see the other side because they could be tricked

and believe in the wrong thing. Doesn't happen. You believe in something steel manning. It just gives you a more nuanced, less emotionally charged understanding of it. That is the foundation for real action. When you really just peek up the outrage, that's the foundation for sending more tweets

and doing more TikTok videos. You're basically serving the social media companies. You're not actually serving the world. Be wary about using you. social media for entertainment. You'll find instead what I call slow entertainment, consumption of information that's slower and builds more richer, more rewarding worlds, books, good movies, seeing music in person, being around artists or creatives or seeing something awe-inspiring in nature in person.

Slow entertainment is going to be much richer for the brain and give us probably a better construction of a world than using social media for entertainment. If you do use social media for entertainment, be very focused. Like this particular thing I get from social media. It's not just a, I'm bored, let me start scrolling. So it could be, I like to look at these baseball commentators during baseball game. They have like interesting comments about what's going on. That's fine.

But I'm going to scroll TikTok when I'm just waiting at a red light. That's a whole different type of thing. Finally, seek a regular drip of content that's optimistic. exciting or inspiring. So if the information we take in shapes our understanding of the world, and why don't we take an information that's going to shape an understanding of an immediate world that is a little bit more positive, inspiring, because we will feel better. So if this is what matters, then let's be careful about the information we choose. All right, so those are just some principles off the top of my head. But the bigger point here

with intentional information is this notion that information is not neutral, the tool shapes what the information means to you. And a lot of the tools that exist out there, now these internet-based attention economy tools tend to shape a version of the world that is not in our best interest. It's distracting. It's emotionally draining. It makes us feel bad. It cuts off our options for actually taking meaningful action. So a deep life is careful about its information, what information it takes in, and critically through what medium or tool it takes in that information. Intentional information is one where you're probably actually taking in a lot less digital information than you are now. You're putting more of that attention

towards slower or in-person type of information. This is an immediate positive change to your understanding of the world. Intentional information can have you, as one listener said to me, feel like you're going from black and white to technicolor. It changes the world that you live in. It changes what Postman would call your epistemic environment in a way that can be profound and almost immediately. So we have to care about the information we intake just as much as we care about the other aspects of our life. There you go, Jesse. Intentional information.

Not just two words now, but alliteration. So we're really rock and rolling. Reading right to left is like blowing my mind. I never even knew about that. Yeah, yeah. Well, if you ever picked up a book in Hebrew, you start from the other end. I've never picked up a book in Hebrew. I need to do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is really, it's a cool book. I like Sacks. I've been reading a lot of Sacks recently. He's one of these scholars who's very, broadly read, but it's very good at writing for popular audiences. He doesn't dumb it down, but he also doesn't like trip up over like his own complexity. Like he's not proud of like, look how smarty him. And somehow he's just able to pull all these different things together,

be really clear about it, summarize what matters, know that this is a simplification, make that clear and keep moving. A really good, really smart thinker. Mm-hmm. Rabbi Sacks. All right. Anyways, we got some good questions now vaguely about these topics, deep life topics, information, etc. But first, it's here from a sponsor. Speaking of information, I think it's a good time to talk about our friends at Notion.

So you should know about Notion already. It's a tool that combines your notes and documents in the one space that's simple and beautifully designed. It also allows you to create these sort of custom information spaces. We have used notion-based tools here at the DeepWork HQ for various reasons. We had, for example, I believe we were using it to keep track of, with our advertising agency, all the different advertisers and when the reads were. And notion makes, you can build these beautiful interfaces and view the data in different ways and zoom in here.

If you deal with a lot of information and what you do professionally, notion is a tool for building these fantastic custom interfaces into that information. All right. So we've talked about notion before on the show. One of the problems, of course, in general, is as information gets more voluminous, whatever operation you're running, it's more and more difficult to find what you need. So this is where I want to talk about this new tool

that Notion has built right into its product, an AI tool built right into the product that makes it very easy to find whatever you're looking for. It's really cool. We've been messing around with this. It's a fantastic idea. You can use the Notion's AI-powered workspace to ask, where is this document on whatever?

Where was it that we had the summary from the last meeting? It can also act on your behalf. Because notion these tools get you a place to interface with and mess with your information. So it can help you with this? Hey, can you summarize the notes from this meeting? I put in these meeting notes. Summarize those for me.

Can you generate action items based off this transcript of a chat that I just pasted right into our Notion interface. Asking questions, what did we say last week in the meeting about what we were going to do? The AI Power Tools and Notion can help you with all of these different things, right? So I love this idea that Notion has evolved from like the tool to build custom interfaces to deal with all the information you need to do what you or your organization does. And now with AI integrated deep in it, it's all the more easier to find what you need to create the information you need to summarize the stuff that you have in there.

So it's made this tool all the more powerful. So here's the good news. You can try Notion for free when you go to Notion.com slash Cal. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com slash cal, and start turning ideas into action. And when you use this link, you will be supporting our show. So go to notion.com slash cal. Another cool sponsor I want to talk about a relatively new sponsor to the show. show is listening. So listening is this fantastic tool that allows you to take, I use it with

academic articles, but basically written text. And listening is a tool that uses AI generated voices so that you can listen to written material. So now you can take in this material like you would a podcast or an audiobook. Here, for example, is an academic article I want to read about whatever, I'm busy, listen, can now read this article for me while I'm doing the dishes, while I'm mowing the yard. So it's a way to take things that weren't originally recorded to be audio and allow you to actually consume them in an audio format. So you can listen to papers, books, PDF, websites, email newsletters, etc. And the listing app does this really well. one of the cool things about this is it has the ability to it sounds like a real human but one

the things I like about it is a one-click note-taking function so like oh I need to jot something down about this that you're listening to you press one button boom and you can throw in a note and it will remember take the last things it read and put it copy it over into this sort of notepad type feature I don't know what they call it so these notes are there so like if I'm listening to an academic article or like a long form you know New York or piece while I'm doing the dishes. If there's something in that article like, ooh, that's a key part, hit the button. It grabs the last few sentences, throws it in my notepad. And then later I can go in, like, oh, here's the things I sort of audio highlighted from this thing I was listening to.

So they know, the listening app knows that, like, you want to actually take notes or keep information and remember good stuff about what you were listening to. It's also really good about skipping through sections. So it understands, like, if you've digested an academic paper, what the sections are. So you can jump ahead, jump ahead to conclusions, jump ahead to results, and you'll start reading that to you. And I like the voices. I think the AI voice technology, I don't know, I feel like in the last six months, it feels like this has really changed, where it, you know, it sounds like someone is actually reading it. So your life just got a lot easier. Normally you'd get a two-week free trial, but my listeners are going to get a whole month free

if they go to listening.com slash deep or use the code deep at checkout. So go to listing.com slash deep for a limited time. You can get a whole month free. All right, Jesse. Let's do some questions. That listening comes in handy, especially if you're driving too. Oh, yes. Because there's so many times where I need to, and you can't write while you drive.

Yeah, that's fantastic actually, right? Like, okay, I want to read this article. that might be relevant for something I'm working on. Use the listening app and you can listen to it while you drive and you can hit the note-taking button. Yeah, I agree with that. All right, first questions from Mark. Do you have any book recommendations aside from your own

that will complement cultivating a deep life outside of work? So far from the past, I've heard you talk about Walden and designing your life. I'd love to hear more you consider good reading before you release your next book, which is a deep life book. So, Mark, I want you to read nothing. until my book on the deep life comes out. Everything else compared to my book is garbage. No, there's a lot of good books.

So I'm going to zig here, right? There's two ways of thinking about books about the deep life. There's books you can imagine to be actually instructive, right? So like designing your life or Tim Ferriss is like the four-hour work week, right? What's the Arthur Brooks book? We had Arthur on, his book with Oprah, you know, building the life you want. So you have straight-up instruct. books. My book on the deep life will fall into that instructive bucket. Like, here's the way to

think about this. Here's what to do. Try this out. But I'm going to recommend something different for you now. So the other piece about reading about the deep life is not the instructions about how you construct a deep life, but instead your internal exploration to understand what the deep life means to you. Like, what is depth? This is actually the big question that people have. Now, on the show, we say, first of all, life is too ambiguous of a term. Break your life into the different areas that are important to you. We sometimes call these buckets. So let's do that first.

And you might have craft and community and constitution and contemplation, celebration. At different ways we talk about this. But the areas of your life that's important to you. So now life is something more general. Then what you want to do is seek out in each of these areas of your life, examples that resonate. So it could be something you read about. It could be something you hear on a podcast or something you see in a movie or a documentary or read in a magazine article.

But you're trusting your own body's intuition. You're using your body as a depth detector. It knows. Like if it sees something that feels right in some way to me, I'm going to feel that. And so you start to capture these examples. And then once you have these examples and you're categorizing them, like the different parts of your life. Once you have these examples, then you can distill them in the properties. Oh, so what are the properties that these examples have? Let me distill those. These are the

properties I'm looking for into working part of my life. These are what resonate to me. I've distilled at the properties. Here's the properties I'm looking for in the community aspect of my life. I had these sort of examples of people and things and these books I read that really spoke to me. What are the properties they all shared that I want in the community part of my life? once you have those properties, now you have a portrait of your own goal as a deep life that you can start working on pursuing.

And that's going to be sort of fundamental to the book I'm writing on the deep life, the sort of lifestyle-centric planning. So with this in mind, though, this means this is another way to think about books is you're looking for things that resonate. Then you're recording the things that resonate under the right categories,

and then later you tried to distill properties out of them. So you don't necessarily need to just be looking for instructions, but instead the raw material you'll later need to construct a deep life. So Mark, that's what I might recommend. Read things that speak to you. And when you get that feeling of whatever this person is doing, why I'm reading a book about Lincoln and something about Lincoln is resonating with me of what's happening with the way he's dealing with X. Let me write that down.

I'm watching a documentary about Laird Hamilton, you know, big wave surfing on the north shore of Maui. I don't know what about this is resonating, but something is I'm going to write this down. So think about books in that way. is a source of intuition into what matters to you. And then, of course, we can later use that information to help construct a life that has those properties in it. And that's the whole lifestyle-centric planning. It's its own thing.

But anyways, I want to make that distinction. Books in the Deep Life is not just about how do I build this, but it's what do I want to build, discovering what it is you want to build. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Scott. do you think handwriting has a positive effect on cultivating a deep life he provides a link that we'll take a look at he also goes on to say you use your remarkable tablet and that implies that you like writing by hand

do you use it for reasons suggested in the article all right scott so we loaded up the article you sent to us i'll put it on the screen here for people who are watching so just listening so the article that scott sent us is titled why handwriting is good for your brain there's a picture of someone writing at some sort of like colonial looking desk. All right. Analysis. Research over the years has pointed out that there are many advantages and benefits to writing by hand. All right. So there's some cool pictures in here.

I'm just kind of scrolling through this thing. Look at that thing. This is like a writing device, Jesse. This weird thing here. It's a writing device that Nietzsche used. Okay. In a study carried out almost two decades ago, subjects were presented with words carrying a positive connotation such as sweet or negative such as rubbish.

Subjects had to indicate whether a word was good or bad by moving a joystick. Half the subjects were told to indicate that a word was good by pulling the joystick towards their body and the other half were told to indicate good by pushing it away. To indicate that a word was bad, they made the opposite movement to good. A consistent correlation was observed between meaning and movement. The quickest responses were produced by the subjects who were told to indicate good by pulling the joystick towards themselves and indicate bad by pushing it away. The direct involvement of the body and senses and mental processes can explain how writing by hand helps us learn letters and words.

This is backed up by the results of various studies, which they then go on to summarize. All right. Well, that's a good question. Do I use a remarkable notebook specifically to get benefits of handwriting? Not really. Not really. There's two advantages I like to it. Portability.

So handwriting is portable. You just need a surface, right? keyboards take space and it's it's a I can type much fast than I can write I mean I I take a lot of notes on my computer typing because I can type much faster than I can write but it's not portable so I like portability of handwriting I also like flexibility of formatting so in my remarkable I underline things I draw boxes I draw arrows there's a lot of information that can be captured diagramically right like I can draw things captures information I can underline things box things connect things with arrows There's a lot of extra information you can add with drawing in addition to just pure text.

So I like both those things about handwriting. I don't know that I understand or remember information better when I write. I'm frustrated that my writing is slow compared to my typing. My handwriting tends to get sloppy. Usually when I'm typing just because my speed is better, I can get out more ideas. I can develop them better. I mean, I actually like typed thinking. I feel like is more flexible for me than writing speaking.

but there's advantages to the handwriting, the portability and the ability to add diagrams. So I'm not a big booster of these notions that it will change my understanding if I write it as opposed to type it. In my book, I talked about this. I'm remembering this now. I talked about this in my straight-A student book

from years ago about how to be a student. And I argued in that book, like, hey, if you're able to bring a laptop, if you have a laptop and are able to bring a laptop in the class to take notes, that's probably better because you can type faster. to me it was all about keeping up, getting the information down that you can then later study from. And so I think from, if I'm thinking back, even from my early days, I was a big fan of speed, speed and efficiency.

So I like typing, but I do handwrite because it has its advantages. And if I had better handwriting, Jesse, I would do it more. Like some people have beautiful handwriting and there's like a draw. It's really nice. They have these bullet journals that look very artistic. My notebooks, if you looked at them, sort of look like you're capturing someone having a stroke in real time. Just in terms of like the handwriting and the,

so I get frustrated. Like, I want to go faster. Other than your $50 notebook back in the day. That one I wrote carefully in. That one slowed me down. That was in the book. I get frustrated. I can't type faster.

I type myself off of my keyboard. I go so fast, I type myself off my, I want to go faster. My thoughts move so much quicker than I can get information down. But that's true. So in my high quality notebook, I talk about in slow productivity.

I spent a lot of money on this notebook when I was a postdoc, so I would take my thoughts more seriously. My handwriting is very neat in there. So I did go slower in that notebook, and I did produce better ideas. So maybe there's something in that. How is your keyboard holding up that you bought over the holiday season? I like it.

My mechanical? Yeah. So by bouncing up the fingers, I'm faster. I can type faster. But I still type myself off that keyboard. I go faster than I can actually keep up. So you still use it all the time? All the time.

Yeah. Even in the HQ, when I use our new, her beastly studio computer setup, I'll bring my mechanical and plug it in. Yeah, I really do like writing on it. That's cool. All right. Next question's from Josh. I've struggled with learning in school and work my whole life.

I struggle with comprehension and my analytical and communication skills are terrible. I'm 33, and this inability to move up in life and grow is affecting every aspect of my life. I feel like I'm always working hard to no avail. Should I get a brain scan to prove I have a low IQ? Uh, no, I don't think you need to measure your IQ. I don't think you need, um, a brain scam. You know, I think what we need to do here is, uh, lifestyle centric planning, right? So this is like my key idea about the deep life is instead of fixating on particular specific goals that are, appealing to you and hoping that those goals if accomplished will bring in their wake and appealing lifestyle, focus directly on the lifestyle that's appealing to you and see how do I engineer

it. When you focus on the aspects of your lifestyle that are appealing to you first and work backwards, it opens up many more ways forward. You have a huge diversity of ways forward. And most importantly, you can mix and match your ways forward towards this desirable lifestyle to actually conform to your opportunities. obstacles, which are very specific to you. So I think lifestyle-centric plans is what's going to be good here because I think in your

mind, it sounds like you probably have these particular goals. I don't know. I want to be higher up in this job or I want to make this much money in this role. And there's obstacles to it. You're like, I'm having a hard time getting there. Whereas in lifestyle-centric planning, you say, well, what do I want? What do I actually want in the different parts of my life? It's not the specific job.

It's that I want to have, you know, this type of security and live this type of place and have this sort of engagement with the community and spend. this type of time. You build this image of your life. And now you can say, what are my best ways to get there? So if, like, this particular type of work you're in, maybe it's involving certain types of, like, very stylized business communication and lots of, like, fast analytical thinking about analyzing things.

And if that is not fitting well with your skills, okay, let's find a different way to get towards what you're looking for. The other thing you'll get out of lifestyle-centric planning is now you're working with your opportunities and obstacles, you can sort of work systematically to expand opportunities and reduce the obstacles. So if you're having difficulty with, you know, reading comprehension, for example, there are things you can do to make that better. Typically reading, building up a reading habit, starting with books that are incredibly appealing and easy and then sort of slowly pushing yourself on the complexity. That changes your mind. As your mind becomes a

reading mind, it changes it. Spending a lot less time with really high distraction, high salient attention economy tools like things on your phone. Spent a lot less time with that and more times with slow information and slow entertainment like books, like watching full movies, that'll rewire your brain in a way that will help. If there's particular analytical skills, practicing those skills will help. I want to actually practice doing this type of analysis, getting feedback, doing it better next time. So you can actually reduce obstacles and increase opportunities.

But all of this, I think, should be in the context of what do I want out of my life? Okay, what do I have available? What opportunities I have available? What are my obstacles? How can I expand those? Reduce those. Fine. But let me work with what I do.

I can do well. And figure out how to get closer and closer to these properties in the various parts of my life that appeal to me. So I think the flexibility of lifestyle-centric planning is critical here. Because otherwise, you might lock in on this is what I need to do, this job and this position in this job. And if that's not working for you, all you're going to feel is frustration. So that's what I would suggest there. Lifestyle-centric client, LCP. You know me, LCP.

That's a good question. All right, what else do we got? All right, next question is from Esteban. Do you recommend using ChatGPT for reading recommendations? No. I mean, ChatGPP has just digested a lot of information from people, and then it is going to be remixing that in sort of arbitrary arbitrary ways, unpredictable ways to try to produce a simulation of how real people it encountered

online would be recommending books. I think it's better just to go straight to the source material that ChatGPT trained on. People whose taste you find interesting or congruent, what type of books are they recommending? Trusting your own intuition, right? Like, what am I interested in right now? What are the parts of my life I want to understand better? What are the parts of the world that seem interesting to me that I want to know more about? what are good books there.

I feel like choosing nonfiction books. It's like this, especially nonfiction, it's this really subtle act. You know, I'm constantly, it's a very subtle act when I'm choosing what I want to read next. And a lot of different things in my life come together to choose this book versus that book. And it's really enriching to me. And even the selection process itself is an act of self-development, self-definition. So there's certain things like, yeah, this is great.

We can use a language model to make faster. This is not something we need to make faster. the more you have to find and understand what you want to read and why you want to read it as you get better at finding and making these selections, you are going to improve your own understanding of yourself. So do not fall back on chat cheap defense because again, you're just getting, right, it's a token generator. So it's like what would people that I've seen talking about books,

what are the types of things they would say here? That's not going to be better than just actually going to people who talk about books and seeing what they're saying. Because there you have a real mind with coherent agency on the other end of it. that you can actually relate to as a human being and figure out how to place their recommendations in some sort of larger social cultural context. It's a very human thing.

I think it's something that's worth keeping more human. All right. We've got another one. Who else do we have here? Next question is from Anna. How should I plan my gap year to ensure I don't waste a year? I want to experience the world, but fear I'll waste this opportunity. Well, Anna, first of all, I just want to give you

a little bit of reassurance. I think relative to the length that you've been alive so far, the gap year feels like a large, a large portion of time. Like this will be like one 19th of my life so far, right? So I understand when it seems like such a big part of your life, you don't want to waste it. But from another perspective, I'm looking at this from the other side of 40. That year is actually a much smaller piece of your life when you're looking backwards from midage back to it. So this idea that if I waste this, I'm wasting a. big part of my life. You're not. This is a relatively small part of your life during sort of

of your earlier year. So I just want to take the pressure off a little bit. Like you can enjoy yourself. You can you can embrace serendipity, kind of discover yourself, but also just sort of catch your breath, get a little bit older before you start the next part of your life. And that you will do no matter what. So you're not going to waste this. Don't worry so much about it. Now get a little bit more specific. To me, what's important during a gap year, I think it's about better understanding yourself and what's important to you and what you're looking for in life. Now, these answers are very contingent and they'll change what you come up with when you're 18 will be different than when you're 22, which will be different than when you're 25, different than when you're 35. But you have to begin asking these questions.

Gap year is great for that because when you're in high school, especially in the American context, it's not a time for self-reflection. It's, you know, school is my job. I don't have a ton of autonomy because I still still. live at home under the care of my parents, and I'm just trying to, like, do well and get into college. So your gap year might be your first real exposure to, I want to seek out information and experiences, I want to process them, and use them to better understand who I am and what it is I want to do in the world. That's really what's important about the gap year. Going to novel places in this context are important largely because it helps you have more fresh insight.

You're out of normal routines and rhythms so that like you're more likely to take the whatever Hemingway you're reading, John Williams you're reading and see it fresh because you're in a completely new context and your brain is not in some sort of just standard pattern. But like what matters to me is the information you encounter during your gap year. Trying to understand who you are, how the world works and what you want to do in it. That's what you want to come away with. So you want to journals with you. You want to take notes.

You want to refine these notes. You want to have a lot of time alone with your own thoughts to make sense of this information. wherever you go, walk a lot, do not have your earbuds in all the time. Maybe don't use social media for this year. So you really want your mind to be kind of starved of inputs except for what's going on around it and inside your own head. It's a time of process, process, process, so that when you go to college the next year, I kind of have a sense of identity. I kind of have a sense of what I'm about, what's important, what's not.

So what am I doing here at college to get towards those things or to make sure my life at college reflects those things? That's what you want out of your gap year. So it's really going to be about taking an information experiences and thinking about them and processing and taking notes. You should go through a bunch of notebooks on your gap year. And they're going to be embarrassing because they need to be because you're trying to work through these sort of deep thoughts. And so maybe you want to hide them when you're done. But you should be writing and thinking all the time. So a gap year to me is about cognition, much more than it is about location or specific places you are.

It's cognition that matters, having time for self-revellinger. reflection, learning what the interior cognitive contemplative life actually feels like, jump starting that early in your adulthood so you can draw from that deposit throughout the years that follow. It would be fun. Gap years weren't as big when we were young, were they? Did you take a gap year? No, I did not.

I got accepted a Middlebury, but it wasn't until the February or the second semester, but I don't want to do that because I would have had to stick around for a semester at home. Yeah, you're like, let's get out of here. And I wanted to play lacrosse. And I'm going to be a disadvantage when I get there in the spring. If you missed a fall. Yeah. Interesting.

That was the only thing that was somewhat similar. Interesting. So we might have been nearby if you had actually taken that because Dartmouth is not far. That's a good point. It's not far from Middlebury, though I didn't play lacrosse. Yeah. I was the same way. I was like, I wanted to get out of that house.

I mean, my house was great, but I just was, I wanted to be on my own. Yeah. Like, I was so, like, I am ready to be on my own. And then when I got to college, like, pretty soon, I was like, okay, I'm ready to be done with college. You know, I was just prematurely like a 37-year-old. My parents also owned a store, so I would have to work the whole fall. And I wasn't really appealed to that.

Yeah, I know. I worked a lot. Yeah, I had my own company. I was doing computer programming. Like, I worked a lot, you know. And, yeah, I was excited to, and I went to a school in the quarter system, which means you don't start to, like, pretty late in September. So even that, I was like, I'm the only one here.

Yeah. Everyone had gone to college and were like telling me these stories. And yeah, so I was, a gap year would have been okay. I just wanted to like be an adult. Yeah. So I don't think I even wanted a gap here. All right. Do we have, oh, we have a call.

Yep. And the call, it looks like, is going to be our slow productivity corner question of the day. Yep. Our slow productivity corner, if you don't know, is we try to have at least one question per day that, per episode that relates to my new book, slow productivity, which I highly recommend if you like the show. You need to read this book because it's sort of the source guide to everything we say about digital knowledge work. So our slow productivity corners, questions are call. Let's get some theme music.

Hi, Cal. My name is David. I work in marketing, and I'm calling from Perth, Australia. I'm listening to your book, Slow Productivity, and I was struck by how some of the examples you give, like Robert McPhee and Anthony Zyker and also the Slow Food Movement, reminded me of some interviews I read recently with a Korean-born philosopher, Byeong-Chul Han. Now, Han came to prominence with a 2015 book, The Burnout Society,

and it's really struck me that you and hear kind of describing similar things about the present moment. I'm new to your podcast and your work, and I wondered if you'd covered anything about Han. The connection just, it seemed to me to be. obvious and kind of important. So, yeah, just a small kneeling question.

Cheers. All right, well, thanks for the question, Mark. No, I did not know about Bianchul Han until recently. A couple people, actually, after slow productivity came out, sent me a pointer to his book, The Burnout Society, which I haven't read yet, but I want to.

I've loaded it here, so I loaded it up here on the the screen. I looked it up after your call. So here's the book, and let's read a little bit more about it, because this is interesting to me. It's called the Burnout Society. Here's the, let's read about the author first, Bianchul Han. Korean-born German philosopher, Bionchon Chulhan teaches philosophy and cultural studies at Berlin's University of the Arts. In the past few years, his provocative essays have been translated into numerous languages, and he has become one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe and beyond. His work is presented here in English for the first time. So this book is categorized. Sanford University Press published this book.

So it's a academic press book, not a pure trade book. Its categorization is philosophy, social theory, philosophy, post-structuralism and phenomenology, sociology, and culture. So this is more of a sort of academic book. So it sounds like what's going on here is Bianchuel Han has a really big following, especially in Europe, and it's a little bit more recently that he's coming in translation over to the sort of the English-speaking market. So he probably, his ideas had probably, I'm going to guess, are big in certain parts of the world and are just probably expanding their footprint here in the U.S., which might be why I hadn't heard about him before.

Let's read a little bit about the book itself. This is from the description on the publisher's website. I'm going to read just a few quotes here. Our competitive service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual rather than improving life, multitasking, user-friendly technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention-deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Bianchul-Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences

in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. He looks, now I'm going to paraphrase a few things. He looks as stress and exhaustion as not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomenon. He denounces a world in which against the grain response can lead to disempowerment. He draws on literature philosophy and the social and natural sciences

to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection. All right, so it sounds like there's sort of a lot going on in this book. So there's an economic argument lurking in here that a consumer economy that's based on low friction and availability of information and goods and services changes our engagement with difficulty and hardship. And so, you know, hey, I'm just used to everything being easy. So when things are hard, I have a hard time actually dealing with that. So I think that's an interesting point. There also seems to be something in here about lack of intellectual

reflection. So what he calls intermittent intellectual reflection, lack of time for that, and instead having constant neural connection through technology is also having some sort of negative impact. So these are obviously like ideas that are congruent with the things I talk about, especially that last one. Intermittent intellectual reflection, this like this comes back to I think digital minimalism where I talk about solitude deprivation. Like you need time alone with your own thoughts, so there's negative consequences and technology makes it possible to avoid time alone with your thoughts. So I think that's there.

Taking an economic lens, I think, to trying to understand some of our psychological or philosophical on we. I mean, that's something I do as well, though I think we focus on different ideas. So, for example, it sounds like he's focusing here on easy availability of goods and information as making us ill-suited for hardship. In slow productivity, by contrast, I talk about pseudo-productivity as leading to a real problem. So this idea of redefining productive labor as visible activity is causing a lot of problems, both economically and personally and psychologically, when it comes to the knowledge work.

So it's a similar lens, but it's looking at different aspects of it. Multitasking, and we both dislike that. Anyway, so it sounds like, yes, Myeong Chulhan, like a lot of authors right now are tackling these problems we have in our sort of technological world there's a lot of these we are not as happy as we used to be

and there's problems and it sounds like he has some interesting angles some interesting things I agree with some interesting things that are different than what I talk about I talk about some things that are different there's a bunch of other books like this but this one looks cool

and I like that it's a little bit more academic so I will check it out and then I will report back about what I learned. All right. So there we have. our slow productivity corner question of the day. I also want to do a case study.

This is where I read an account sent in from one of our listeners about how they put the ideas we've talked about on this show into practice in their actual life. Today's case study comes from Ashley. Ashley says, I was listening to your episode on the Deep Life Stack 2.0, and you mentioned putting your phone on the charger right when you get home from work. This is something I have been wanting to do for a long time,

but for a lot of dumb reasons have never actually committed to it. I finally committed and put my phone in our council table drawer so it will be out of sight when I am home with my kids. Yesterday was my first day doing that, and I was doing well until I put my baby down for her nap. My four-year-old is still awake at this time, so usually I will put a show on for him, but I am too tired to do anything productive because the baby still isn't sleeping through the night. So I will watch YouTube videos or listen to a podcast and generally, just waste this time. I was debating getting my phone out or maybe watching a movie with my son,

but didn't want to go against the spirit of the rule around putting my phone away. As I am deliberating this choice, my son comes up to me and tells me something that has been going on at school. Normal kid drama, but something that has been really bothering him and that he has been struggling with. I am convinced he wouldn't have told me this had I put on a show for him. It was only because he had the space to sit and think and I was available in distraction-free that he thought to talk to me about it. And it was a really important conversation for us to have. I am grateful for the reminder to focus on my relationships and to remove the distractions that are getting in the way of me connecting with my kids. I still wasn't productive during that time, but I had probably the most important conversation I have ever had with my son up until this point.

So thank you. I think that's a great case study. So she's talking about the, Ashley's talking about the phone foyer method where when you're at home, you don't keep your phone as a constant companion, but instead something you can go to look stuff up or use if you need it for a very specific purpose. I can put on a podcast to listen to or take a phone call, et cetera, but not something you pull out at the slightest hint of boredom. Ashley is emphasizing one of the advantages of this method when you have kids is that the device really can be a boundary that goes up between you and your kids. mom, dad, they're looking at their phone. They're not engaged with me or my world. I guess I'll go do my own thing.

It's a boundary that does sit between us and our kids. It's a boundary that does eliminate those sort of boring stretches where sometimes something really interesting comes out of it. Where the kid just wants to start, my sons will do this all the time, just start downloading something they're thinking about, and this leads to something else. And soon you're like learning something important or you go and we're going to play a game. We're going to go throw the ball around. Then interesting stuff comes out of it. A lot of good comes out of just sort of informal structuring of time with people in your family. And then the phone can sort of get in the way of that, especially if the kids themselves have phones too.

And now you've essentially dissolved any of these sort of strong in the house type of social connections. There really is a cost of that. So I do appreciate that. And one thing I want to clarify, Ashley, Sue, well, two things. One, as you know, because you have other kids, I have full empathy about the kid not sleeping through the night phase. and just a reminder that goes away because that's a terrible phase. I mean, it's a good phase

because it's a phase where like your baby's really young, but man, that's also a hard phase. So that does get better. I always say that when a parent writes it. The sleep does get better. But two, you said, I still wasn't productive during that time.

Well, there's no reason to be productive during that time, right? So it's not so much about productivity. When we say, I don't want to always be distracted about my phone. at home. It's not because if I'm distracted by my phone, I can't be producing more widgets. I can't be producing something useful. Now, the issue with the phone distracting you is that it keeps you away from things that are even more meaningful. It's not a lack of productivity we're

fighting here. It's a reduction of meaning. It's a reduction of more intentional activities. There's nothing productive about using, like the, we have this little loom that, like, my five-year-old likes to kind of make, you kind of knit things on it. I think productive about that. But it's like a meaningful or intentional activity that the phone could get in the way of. So, yeah, we definitely don't want to think about our at-home behaviors through the perspective of productive or non-productive, but meaningful and intentional versus arbitrary or out of our control. So anyways, that's a great case study of the phone FOIA method in action. And thank you for sending that in. All right.

So we have a cool final segment coming up where I have some entertaining news about slowness from around the world. But first, let's hear from another sponsor. So I want to talk about Mint Mobile. You know, it's spring cleaning season right now. And one of the takeaways we often have after we do a spring cleaning is we wonder how we ever live like the cluttered life we were living before we did the cleaning once we see what it could be like when it's clean. Well, it's kind of like when you find out that you've been paying a fortune for wireless. When Mint Mobile has phone plans for $15 a month when you purchase a three-month plan. So it makes you say when you discover that, how was I paying so much money for phone service before?

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All right, Jesse, let's go on to our final segment. I'm calling this final segment slow news, three different things from around the world that involve the notion of slow in an interesting way. So this is sort of a tribute to my book, Slow Productivity, which again, Again, if you like the show, you need the book because it's sort of the source code to my thoughts about how to manage digital area knowledge works. You can find out about the book at calnewport.com slash slow. All right. So I have three things I want to show you.

The first thing comes from Switzerland. I have it on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening. This is the slow watch that moves at half the speed of a normal watch. So let me show you a picture of these. watches. So as you can see, Jesse, what's missing on these watches, and I'll zoom in, what's missing on these watches is a minutes hand or a second hand. It has 24 hours and one hand that just move slowly through all the hours of the day. So that is the slow watch. These are 300 bucks, if you're wondering. Let's read about it here. They have some text about this. So what's the idea?

so slow they can't even get their website to work. Here we go. It is ironic the website was slow when I was working with it earlier. All right, so here's our explanation of this concept. All right. A 24-hour one-hand watch allows you to see the entire day in one view and experience time in natural way. This fundamentally changes the way you look at your watch

and it will give you a much better consciousness about the progression of your day. This way of showing the time is inspired by the original clocks that were based on the sun clock. Those early clocks indeed had only one hand that displayed all 24 hours. You can still see them on some old church towers. Only when people's lives became busier and busier did they feel the need to create this unnatural split of the day into two 12-hour halves and break each hour down into 60 minutes. That's when we started to chase the minutes and get stressed by time.

So let's turn back time and be slow again. Time and timekeeping as a technology and how it impacts our understanding of the world is a well-worn topic. is a well-worn topic in technology criticism. If you go back to Lewis Mumford's book, Technics and Civilization, he sort of opens that book talking about the monastic orders inventing sort of usable clock so that they could time their prayers and talks about how this changed our conception of the world. The time was broken into discrete, evenly space units.

And so just inventing this technology changed their understanding of the world. my understanding about minutes and seconds was the railroads made this useful. So like for large-scale international railroad networks to make sense, we needed some way of, we needed time at just finer granularities, right? Because we actually had to know

when a train arrive so that you could get from that train to another train and that completely changed the way we understood time as well. There's a lot of cool discussions. Oliver Berkman has a good discussion about this in 4,000 weeks. Anyways, it comes up a lot.

It's a cool topic. All right. next example from slow news i'm going to read something here looks like the slow watch is still on the screen jesse i don't know if that's there we go all right let me read this letter from a listener i really love slow productivity it's a fun read so much of it really resonated for me as an author who has embraced the slowness of a creative life especially one away from social media i know that i write better books when i take my time with the stories my next next book is perhaps an interesting slow productivity case study. I wrote the first draft in 2012,

and it got a book deal in 2014. Then because of getting pushed by other books I had coming out first, and then my editor moving to a different publishing house, the book sat for years. In the meantime, I kept writing other things and would occasionally take another stab at editing the book. I wasn't happy with the ending. About eight years after I wrote the initial draft, I realized I had the skills to completely rewrite the book and make it better. Almost a year after that, the Indian finally worked itself out. This is a picture book.

It's not very long. And yet it still took over 10 years to get right. All right. And it turns out this picture book, which I'll load up on the screen here, Help Wanted One Rooster. There's the picture here. That comes out in June.

So 10 years later this book is coming out. I thought that was a cool case study. This idea of, idea of spending 10 years to get a book right, not a long book, right? But just let me come back to it. It's not quite right. This really resonates with the third principle of slow productivity, obsess over craft. It's, you know, you want something to be good. You want to get better at what you do. Completely changes your relationship to work. And something like this, like spending a decade working in the background on a book, makes a lot of sense in the slow productivity mindset

in a way that it might not otherwise in a pseudo-productivity mindset, which is focused instead just on activity. So Julie, thanks for sending in that entertaining example, an informative example of slowness in action. All right. So my final thing is it's actually from England, and this is going to be something about me. So a couple people sent this to me.

I guess there's a satiric literary magazine in England called something, private eye, I believe. and they have a literary review section. Anyways, they had a comic I put here on the screen. This is from a literary magazine, and it's a satirical comic called First Drafts. All right, so here's the, I'll explain this cartoon. I appreciate this cartoon. For those who are listening at home, it's a three-panel comic.

In the first panel, there's someone staring at a blank screen on the computer. In the next panel, they press one button, and the letter C goes up on the screen. And in the third panel, they're leaning back satisfied drinking a cup of coffee. The caption for this comic is Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. So there we go. I think it's satire of slow productivity. You write one letter after great contemplation and consider you've done your work. I'm merely just happy, Jesse, that whoever drew this comic thought that me in that book is well enough known that people would understand a comic.

Yeah. That's the good news, I think, that, you know. There's an assumption that enough people in the UK have seen this that they'll actually understand the comic. Well, you had that big profile on the Financial Times like last year. That's right. Yeah. And I was on the bestseller list over there. So, you know, it's making, and I'm going over there.

I'm going mid-May. I am going to London and doing a few days of publicity activities over there. I wish I had a, this would be nice. We should get a copy of this comic. It would be nice to frame for the HQ. Yeah. Private Eye. All right.

Maybe I'll have to grab a copy of that one. I'm over there. I don't know how often it comes out, but maybe I'll try to find a copy of that to bring back from England. It'd be funny. It's the first time I've been featured slash satirize in a cartoon. Good, I suppose. All right. Well, anyways, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, 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 calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.