Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 300: Hidden Technology Traps

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

There has been a lot of attention paid recently to the impact of technology like social media on the mental health of young people. But this is not the only technology trap lurking for this generation. In this episode, Cal talks about three subtle but significant ways in which our current technology culture is setting up young people for professional failure in the years ahead. He then provides some advice for resisting this fate. In addition to this discussion, he answers questions from the audience and reacts to one of the coolest examples of slow craft that he’s encountered in a long while.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: The Burnout Society [7:53]- How can I stop distraction relapses? [35:18]- How can I reduce my social media addiction without abandoning these technologies? [39:37]- How can I schedule deep work with a scattered class schedule? [44:29]- How should I reintroduce video games after a successful digital declutter? [47:14]- How do I apply Slow Productivity later in life? [51:04]- CALL: How to formulate a deep life when you’re young [54:41]   CASE STUDY: Tweaking the time block planner [1:06:44] CAL REACTS: A Slow Reconstruction of an Ancient City [1:11:00]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/  www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8Ewww.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/2023-cs-smartphone-research-report_final-for-web.pdftenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl/Thanks to our Sponsors: drinklmnt.com/deepcozyearth.com/calexpressvpn.com/deepmybodytutor.comThanks 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 Cald-Duport, 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. I joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, a little bit of personal news. I don't know if I mentioned this to you or not. This would only make sense to people who understand the American academic system. This is all nonsense to everyone else. But my promotion to full professor came through.

I didn't know you weren't a full professor. This is why we sweat over these things and no one understands. What were you before? Associate Professor. Oh. So the American system, okay, this is not that interesting. The American system, when you get hired as a 10-year track professor, you start as an assistant professor, and that's without tenure. The next rank is associate professor.

Typically, though not always, that goes hand in hand with tenure. So you get promoted to associate professor with tenure. So if you see an American professor, a professor at American university, say they're an associate professor. That means they've gotten tenure, which is sort of the hard hurdle. Later in your career, you can go up for full professor, which is the final rank you can get to. So you can think of it as going to associate professor is based in part on what you've done, but also like you're still your potential academically. Okay, you know, I've done good stuff and I'm on a trajectory to do important stuff in my field. full professor is almost all retrospective.

You're saying here's what I have done as an academic, and then that's being judged to see if it's sufficient to move to the full rank. So it's confusing because in the American system, you don't use the word full in the title. You just use professor. So in America, if someone is in an academic context called, you know, Professor Miller, that means they're a full professor. And they say an associate professor would mean they're associate professor.

So they just leave off anything, professor by itself. in Europe that means something completely different. So. The professors have agents? No. Do you guys ever get poached by like other like coaches? Yeah. Like does Harvard hit you up and like. Yeah, it happens.

Oh yeah. So professors move around a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And they do get poached and different different departments. So kind of siddle up and be like, hey, so you interested maybe in something, something? So no professors have agents? You don't, they don't have agents, yeah.

So it's, it's the blind leading the blind. So it's like professors who know nothing about any sort of real life common sense being poached by other professors. So it's, you know, nothing, it's not Jerry McGuire, let's put it that way. But it does happen a lot. Professors move around a lot. The real tricky move, okay, here's the tricky move, the professor that will start to get poached, go down that path up to, like I've interviewed, I've gotten letters. to use as negotiation with their home university. To get paid more.

Yeah, to do something. Like something they want, something they want more of. That happens all the time in, like, coaching jobs. Yeah. So, like, a little of that happens in academia. So we'll see. Anyways, there we go.

So as of August 1st, I can scrub the word associate. It's funny. I have a friend, writers, this is the truism in writing, is professors who write. Everyone always tells them, and they're right. No one understands academics. systems. No one knows the different ranks. No one knows the difference between tenure track professors, non-tenure track professors. I have a friend, friend of the show, who does, he has like

an affiliate position with a well-known university where, you know, once a year he will teach sort of a seminar there. And he's like, as far as my readers are concerned, I'm just like a full professor at this university. This is someone who's no PhDs, ever been an actual professor. People don't know. They're like, oh, Georgetown. In fact, a lot of people think I'm an MIT professor. because they just see vaguely like I studied at MIT or something. So we sweat it. We're like, okay, I don't want to be associate. I want to be full.

And, you know, most people just see the fact that, like, you went to some university. You're like, oh, I think he's the president of that school. Like, the readers don't know. They don't care. Does Friedman work for MIT? Which Friedman? Lex. Lex Friedman.

I don't. It's a good question. He's a last I heard he was a lecturer, which is like an adjunct position. So you can get these. So Lex Friedman was an AI lecturer, which I believe at MIT is like a long-term contract adjunct type positions, right? So when it comes to adjunct professors, so professors who are not on the tenure track but come and go in universities, there's typically short-term contracts and long-term contracts. So short-term is we have to cover this class. We don't have the personnel to cover this class in the fall.

And you'll bring in an adjunct professor maybe who will help teach that class. They didn't get these multi-year contracts where it's like, no, no, we want you to be affiliated with developing courses and teaching them. You have other things going on, so you're not a full-time professor doing research when to be on the tenure track. But you have a long-term relationship with us. At Georgetown, we call these multi-year non-tenure line faculty. So Lex was that.

And I don't know if he still is. It's a good question. I think he moved to Texas. Yeah. So I don't know. That's a good question. I was listening to your Rich Roll interview. Yeah. And he was talking about how professors like yourself can just talk nonstop without everyone looking at a teleprompter.

Yeah. It's true. He was like you and Huberman. He's like, I was studying your YouTube videos and you like never looked down. I'm like, oh, he's right. We're talkers. We're professional talkers. I can tell you doing Andrew Huberman show with his, which was, you know, in my memory, it took, it was like seven hours long. Not really, but he has like a sheet, one sheet of paper. So we did a three and a half hour. conversation. He had one sheet of paper with essentially doodles on it, like a word here, like something here, just to remind him of points. And he would occasionally glance on that three and a half hours. Yeah. So professors can talk. There should be, I would say there should be more professor podcasters. But the problem is we can talk for a long time, but we don't necessarily talk in ways that humans understand. So you can't just grab a random professor and say podcast because we get pretty specialized. We also get very careful. We also get very

careful because in a world of academic writing, it's incredibly nuanced. Like, I'm taking this complicated argument, especially in humanities, and I'm taking this piece of this argument, and I'm trying to advance it. And so you have to be pretty careful because, like, there's so many experts in here. I can't just come in and be sweeping because it won't be, I have to be very careful about, okay, I'm doing this and it's provisional, which is a different tone than when you're trying to do public-facing communication. So you have to somehow, as a professor, to do public-facing communication. Take the ability to talk for a long time and then change how you talk so that human beings don't want to poke their eyes out with needles. That's the sweet spot. Less needles,

more talking. All right. Speaking of talking, we've got a good episode coming up. I have a deep dive speaking of professors about young people and technology, but with some ideas in there that I think are going to be relevant to everyone who's worried about technology destabilizing their economic future. We got some good questions and I think a nice, I'm going to call it a sort of profile in slowness for our final segment. So a sort of nice uplifting profile of someone doing something slow, but really interesting. All right. So Jesse, let's get started with our deep dive. So I recently went on Scott Galloway's podcast, Prof G, to promote my book slow productivity. After that, I began doing more of a deep dive on Scott's work.

One of the things I came across was a TED talk he just gave recently. I have it up on the screen for people who are watching instead of just listening. There's Scott Galloway on stage at TED. All right, here is the title of this TED Talk, How the U.S. is destroying young people's future. So in this talk, he gives a list of reasons. for why the way we have things set up right now in the U.S. is really bad for young people. A lot of it's economic.

I'll put some of these charts up on the screen. There's various charts on the screen. You can see it if you're watching. A lot of it's economic policy, economic policy that more benefits, let's say, like baby boomers, than it does youth. But he did mention technology. So near the end of the talk, he said technology is also part of how we're sort of screwing young people. and in particular, he talked about social media and the way that it is hurting young people, especially their mental health, citing a lot of the work that John Haidt has in his new book,

The Anxious Generation. So this got me thinking. I mean, I agree with Scott and John Haidt that, yes, social media is a problem for young people. It is going to affect their mental health. But I think the story of how technology might be destabilizing young people's future is large, and more interesting than just that. And in particular, what I want to argue in today's deep dive is that there are multiple realities about our current technological future that are going to sort of screw the

current young generation in terms of their economic professional future in the decades ahead. So I have three things I want to mention that weren't mentioned in Scott's talk where technology is setting up young people for professional failure in their 20s and into their 30s. and then I'll talk about for each of those at the end, a couple things that you might be able to do to help counteract some of these forces right now. All right, let's get started.

What's the first issue here that has been mentioned yet? The idea of treating our phones like a constant companion has an economic ramification for young people. All right, let me tell you what I mean here. First, let me quantify what I mean by this. I'm going to bring up on the screen here a 2023 report from Common Sense Media. It's about young people and phones. The report is called Constant Companion,

a week in the life of a young person's smartphone use. I'm going to take some credit. This idea of Constant Companion is a term to describe our relationship with phones as something I introduced in the pages of the New York Times back in 2019. I wrote an op-ed about the problem with the Constant Companion model of smartphones and also in my book Digital Minimalism. So I'll take credit for that. There's a chart in here I want to pull up in particular.

let's quantify what we mean by using a phone like a constant companion. So what's on the right here on this chart is a figure that's labeled average daily smartphone pickups by participant age, a number of times you pick up your phone during a day. There's three bands for each of these frequencies for different ages. Let's look at the dark green band. That's going to be 16 and 17-year-olds, so sort of the teenagers in this study. And what we'll see is for the top two groups here, which are the smallest number of pickups, zero to 25 pickups a day, 26 to 50 pickups a day.

These have the smallest shares of 16 and 17-year-olds. So the least likely number of times you're going to see one of these teenagers in this study pick up a phone are the smaller numbers. What's the most common number of pickups you're going to see with teenagers in this study, 51 to 100 times, followed very closely by 101 to 150 times, followed closely behind that with 151 to 200 times. So somewhere between 50 to 200 times is where the bulk of the survey responses fell. When they did the math over all the age groups, it averaged out to about 100 times a day you're picking up your phone. That's the constant companion model of using your smartphone. And it's different than, of course, the ways the smartphone was originally interoperated.

the tool it was originally introduced as. It was not introduced as a tool to be your constant companion, but something you use to make calls and listen to audio content integrated into a really nice unified package. As I've written before, Steve Jobs never meant for the smartphone to be something we looked at 100 times a day. But that's what it became. This was driven mainly by the mobile social media revolution. It's once the social media companies turn their goals as they were heading towards IPO to getting engagement minutes up as opposed to just getting subscriber numbers up. That's when they began engineering mobile versions of their experience that were meant to pull you back to your phone. This retrained us in general to look at our phones all the time.

Okay. So why is this a problem for the professional future of the young people who are growing up right now with the constant companion model? there's two impacts that are relevant. One is that it prevents the robust development of your ability to focus. If you're looking at a phone on average 100 times a day, you are going to have very few moments in which you are actually sustaining concentration on something difficult for an expanded period of time without some sort of cognitive relief by looking at distraction.

Now, as I write about in my book Deep Work, this is a problem because it's actually in that sustained concentration that important things happen, especially in the knowledge economy, important things such as learning hard, new skills quickly, and producing really high quality results in reasonable amounts of time. If you do not develop that focus muscle because you have no experience with just keeping your focus on one thing without cognitive relief, this is a real hindrance to your professional development, right? So if someone like me or who's older than me, we went through a childhood, we went through

college years, we went through our early young adult years without a constant companion phones. I graduated college in 2004. The constant companion model didn't really take off until the 2010s. So I was able to develop and practice an ability to focus. I didn't have this handicap in the way that the current young generation does. That's going to give my generation or above a real cognitive advantage over. our younger peers because we're comfortable locking in, learning something hard, producing something

difficult. The other, this is subtle, but the other problem of the constant companion model on the professional future of current young people is that it creates what I called in my book digital minimalism solitude deprivation. We have to be really careful about how we define this term. In my book, I use a definition of solitude that is common. and I think is important, which means time-free from inputs from other minds. So in this definition of solitude, it's not about physical isolation. It's about being alone

with your own thoughts. You're observing the world around you and you're thinking about stuff in your own head. You're not listening or reading someone else's thoughts. The constant companion model of the smartphone made it possible for the first time in human history to essentially banish all solitude. All of the moments where historically, and by historically, Jesse, I'm talking about, you know, when we were in college, I'm kind of upset that that's now historic, but in this context it kind of is. Historically, when Jesse and I were in college, you know, and we had to take the wagon to pick up our togas or get our horses from the horseshoe place, you had solitude all the time because you would just be in line somewhere. You would be walking across campus. You would be waiting for a lecture to begin.

You got there a little bit early. And what would you do in this time? It's you and your own thoughts. You're looking around. You're thinking about things. All right. As I argued in digital minimalism, solitude is very important,

especially for young people because it's where you make sense of your life. This thinking, being alone with your own thoughts, is where you integrate your experiences and feelings with your growing schema for understanding your life, your position in the world and the trajectory that you're going on. you literally, in a, maybe not literally, I guess you psychologically, I should say, you psychologically develop your adult identity through reflection and time spent alone with your own thoughts,

especially when you're young and so much is changing and so much input is new. You've got to sit there and make sense of it. This is really important for your professional future. This is how you become, you put on, try on for size, polish off and convince yourself this is right. your sense of adult identity, which you need to succeed professionally. You have to come out of this sort of social psychological cocoon to grow into a sort of professional butterfly. You have to do a lot of work inside. This is who I am.

This is different than how I was before. This is kind of scary, but this is okay. Here's how I fit into this world. Here's what's important to me. You need time alone with your own thoughts to do that. When you don't get that, what you're going to experience is more of a sense of an arrest. development, especially with people in their 20s, going to their 30s, you get terminology like adulting becomes more common.

That's a direct reflection of missing out on the time alone with your own thoughts. You make sense of yourself and what is my adult identity? It's what gives you more of a comfort and confidence with navigating the professional world, taking on responsibility, stretching yourself, dealing with difficulties and hardships that occur and work and how you're going to navigate that. It's how you gather the respect of other people. It is how traditionally, you know, we become leaders as opposed to being in our childhood phase followers.

So a lot of this gets impeded if we don't have time alone with our own thoughts. I know it's a subtle thing, but its ramifications aren't. All right. So the constant companion model of the phone, which didn't affect us or anyone older during our developmental years, is going to have a professional impact on young people. All right. Issue number two, I think of this as the influencer culture tax, by which I mean there's a tax that is levied on individuals who grew up in this age of social media and social media influence. And I don't mean by influencer culture just this idea of there being very professional social media users who are influencers. I mean the whole culture that this engenders, which is a culture that says,

you have to see yourself as a mini influencer. Even if this is not your job, you need to cultivate a following online. It could be small, but it could be your friends and some random people. But you've got to think a lot about this online persona, what you stand for, what you don't stand for, being interesting, producing content, tending to your followers, carefully monitoring to make sure that you haven't transgressed some sort of implicit Overton boundary that's specific to your particular online tribal cohesion. This uses a lot of time, attention, and energy. Here's the problem.

It's exactly the flavor of time, attention, and energy that you would have otherwise been putting into developing your status within your real-world professional context. So it's subverting. This influencer culture is subverting the instinct we have as humans to monitor the communities in which we exist in, to try to. emerge as a trusted authority or leader in those communities, to help manage our social standing in the communities. This is exactly the energy you have to expend to begin to develop professionally. This is traditionally the energy we would expend to think about my actual communities that I'm

involved in, including my professional communities. I want to what's going on here. I want to read the room. I want to understand the different points of view. I want to emerge as a leader in here. this is a really important thing we do, a really important drive that humans have. It's a really important drive for getting ahead in business and your job. And the social media, the influence culture is subverting that energy over there. It's a fake online world where what everyone is really doing is just clocking in into their data factory on behalf of Mark Zuckerberg so that his stock price can go up. So when you put all of your energy about how do I become a trusted member of the community and leader to these sort of, fake online worlds, it doesn't get expended in the real worlds where you actually have a job

and where you're really dealing with these people. And we're putting in an intense amount of energy to become a leader in that community would have really big economic benefits for you. So we don't talk about this one as much, but I think it matters. I think it matters. We're subverting a drive that we really should be. If you're young in your 20s, you should be putting a lot of that energy to how do I get a lot of followers at the nonprofit world? I work. How do I get a lot of likes, you know, in the department I work for this large company?

So that energy is being subverted for the benefit of a small number of people who own shares in these companies and away from your economic future. All right. The final issue that I think is disproportionately technology driven that's disproportionately impacting the economic and professional future of young people is this rise of pseudo-productivity. So, of course, it's one of the big ideas in my new book, Slow Productivity, that knowledge work is built on this idea of pseudo-productivity, which says visible activity is going to be our proxy for useful effort. And as I argue in the book, when that combined with the front office IT revolution, email, Slack, personal computers, mobile computing, it supercharged this idea of performative busyness. It's supercharged the experience of knowledge work as this sort of frantic, fine granularity demonstration that you're constantly doing things. Lots of emails back at force, saying yes to a lot more projects, constantly having all this administrative overhead.

It's productivity as activity, making those two things synonymous. Souter productivity had been around for a long time, but it was in the 2000s, especially in 2010s, that it really took off as technology tools really amplified it. this disproportionately hits young people, right? Because what does pseudo productivity do? Well, by forcing you just to be busy all the time, showing activity all the time, you're not able to do the slow development of new skills that are going to be valuable. What I call in my book so good they can't ignore you career capital development. Now, if you're in your 40s like I am, you've already built up a lot of skills.

You know, that's what we're doing in our 20s and we were, getting better at things, et cetera. Pseudor productivity is not so bad because it, you know, it gives me a little bit more flexibility. I can step off of the cognitive difficulties of building new skills and being held accountable for what I produce and just, hey, if I want to spend, you know, the next five or six years to jump in a lot of calls and being in meetings and whatever, that's fine. It gives me a little bit of breathing room, but it stinks for the young people because they're never actually building the skills they're going to give them security. You put a 23-year-old in a technology hypercharged pseudo-productivity environment, they can play that game well because they don't have other obligations. They have a lot of energy. They can stay up late just doing emails and responding to things.

But they're not building up the career capital, the hard, rare, and valuable skills on which ultimately you need to take leverage over your career. So pseudo-productivity kind of frustrates people of my age because we're like, this is not real work and it's frustrating. but it can be a major obstacle, more than just frustrating, but a major obstacle to professional development for young people because they're not

getting the chance that other generations had to do the hard, deliberate practice of building up new skills. So all three of these things, we have the constant companion model of smartphones,

we have the influencer culture subverting our instinct towards leadership, and we have pseudo-productivity blocking us from actually building up skills that we can use as leverage. All three of these things,

I think are they're all related technology. They're all three presenting obstacles to young people's professional future, especially we're talking about knowledge work. There's stuff we can do about this. I'll give a couple quick examples. Maybe I'll give an example or two for each of these three things. All right. So the constant companion model, if you're young and you want to push back about that, begin to

think about concentration like a muscle that you have to develop and you either put in the time to develop it. I get into a lot of this in my book deep work. But you need to be practicing, focusing. You need to be very careful when you're working. The block time that's non-distracted working versus time where you're doing more distracting things. And in the non-distracting time, I'm working on one thing. And it feels uncomfortable, but that's okay.

I keep going because, you know what? The bench press feels uncomfortable. But if you do it long enough, your muscles get bigger. So you have to adopt a mindset of focus is something I have to train. And we live in a world of cognitive junk food. so I have to be pretty intentional about doing that training because otherwise the default is I am going to fall out of proverbial shape here.

You also need to prioritize solitude. That is time alone with your own thoughts, which is going to mean do things without your phone on a semi-regular basis. You just get comfortable with, I went for a hike, I went for a walk, I went on some errands without my phones. I'm not having my phone all the time, but on a regular basis, I'm alone with my own thoughts.

So you get used to solitude. And journaling can help with this as well because journaling helps jumpstart this idea of self-reflection with your own thoughts. Okay, let me try to make sense of these thoughts. If you journal enough, you get pretty good at this. And even when you're just waiting on the train or you're going on an errand, you're able to more with more facility, think about things that happen to you and make better sense of your life. But time alone with your own thoughts plus journaling, it's just trying to claw back in this sort of self-reflective solitude into your life. The pushback on the influencer tax, if you don't get paid to be saying things online, stop posting things online. We won't get into like consuming social media right now, and some of the questions will get into that.

Fine. You want to consume social media for this professional, this question of professional development. Let's not put, let's put that aside. But don't post things. That's a simple change. But when you're not posting things, you're not commenting, you're not putting things up, it removes this. this idea that you have this important audience that you have to tend to and that cares what you're doing and it needs a lot of your attention. And when you remove that idea, you're still going to have that impulse because you're young and you're becoming an adult and we're a social species.

You'll still have that impulse. And when it does not have managing this sort of simulacrum of a community that the online world gives you, you will seek other places for this impulse to be fulfilled and that's going to become potentially your working world. So just don't post things. you're not an influencer. Don't think about your audience. Your audience is the people that actually you work with day to day. Your audience is the people that write paychecks for you. Your audience is the clients that actually forward you money because of the services you're giving them.

Put that energy into making that audience happy. Not this fake audience that was been constructed by these social media companies to play exactly on those instincts just to get you to look at a glowing piece of glass longer each day. And finally, when it comes to pseudo productivity, well, you have to resist it. Look, I just wrote a whole book about this, that my book, Slow Productivity is in detail how you systematically rebuild the notion of productivity in your job so that you don't get trapped with pseudo productivity. And yet you also are able to succeed with these changes without annoying everyone in your orbit. It's a complicated thing. We talk about it a lot on this show. But let's just set the intention.

Business is not usefulness. Productivity is not synonymous with activity. It's what did I produce that matters. and probably the simplest mindset shift you can make is starting to ask your question, what did I produce this year and what did I produce during this last quarter that I'm proud of? Write those things down. That's the list you want to grow. Everything else will come from there.

You say, I want at the end of the year point back to things I did I'm proud of. And then you ask yourself in the moment, what am I doing today so that that list I'm going to be more impressed by? Suddenly, I got through my inbox quickly and squeezed in seven Zoom meetings. is going to seem as sort of nihilistically absurd as it really is, because none of that is directly connected to producing the stuff you're proud of. Again, there's a lot. We talk all the time on the show about specifically how to escape pseudo productivity, but you've got to start by just recognizing suitor productivity is not the game you're playing.

If you're playing the pseudo productivity game in your 20s, you'll do well at it in your 20s because you have energy and you're on your phone all the time anyways. But then you'll get to your 30s and 40s and realize all of these points I was racking up in these games aren't actually worth much. Now that I want leverage and control over my career, I want stability, I want to do something new or bold. You say, oh, the game I should have been playing is building up skills that matter.

And that's a different game. So just recognize that's not the game. And so starting to look at metrics that aren't just busyness in the moment is one thing you can do to make that change. All right. So that's my addendum to Scott Galloway's talk. Technology has all sorts of subtle ways

that it's undermining young people's professional future. those are three, not exhaustive, but three particular ways and some advice in there that hopefully will help you think better about that. All right. I think about it, Jesse. If the people that get caught up in managing their social media audience that aren't like professional influencers, that same energy put into your day job would make a huge difference. I like that advice that not do it if you don't get paid. Yeah, don't post if you're not getting paid. I mean, look, we can get the same effect and save you some money.

Just send a check to Mark Zuckerberg once a month. Same idea. And then it's quicker. It's more efficient. Just send them a check, right? And get an applause machine. Send Mark Zuckerberg a check. And then just like a few times throughout the day, just look out in the space and say, clever quip and press the applause machine button.

People love me. You really love me. And then send your check to Mark Zuckerberg. Gets you the same effect. But saves that energy now for actually getting a better paycheck. All right. Let's do some ads. So I want to talk about our long time friends at Element, L-M-N-T.

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If I'm really dehydrated in the morning, I use it, especially after a long day of teaching or podcasting. It's how I rehydrate. So I am a big element fan, have been for a long time. I wanted to mention, though, they have this interesting new product, element sparkling, a 16 ounce can of sparkling water that includes their zero sugar electrolyte formulation that you already know from their drink mix packs. I'm very excited about this. Now here's the thing. Element Sparkling is not yet available just to the general public, but it is available to Element Insiders. So if you're an Element Insider, I mean you've bought in an Element Insider bundle in the last nine months.

You're eligible to get sort of early access to Element Sparkling. You can just go to the Element Sparkling product page at DrinkElement.com and they'll help you figure out if you're an insider or not. But I just wanted to mention that. So we got the drink mix, which I love. And now coming soon is Element Sparkling, which Element Insiders can try right now before the main public release. So you can get a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase. If you go to DrinkElement.com slash deep, that's DrinkLMNT.com slash deep. And if you're an Element Insider, you will also have first access to Element Sparkling,

a bold 60-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. That's drinkelement.com slash deep. Also want to talk about our friends at Cozy Earth. Cozy Earth makes the sheets that I absolutely love. We have multiple pairs of these sheets because I cannot tolerate any others. They are incredibly comfortable, very soft, and temperature regulating. They don't, something about the bamboo viscous bamboo. they make it out of temperature regulates.

I also now have a cozy earth, I guess you call it like a sweatshirt made out of that same material. It's cool on the skin even when like it's a little bit warm. I wear that thing all the time. I love it. We just bought some cozy earth for, I'm going to tell you two real cozy earth stories. Okay. A, my parents are coming to watch the kids. I'm going to England to do some book tour stuff and my wife's going to join me for some of that.

My parents are going to watch the kids. Our gift of them is we bought them some cozy earth. products because we know they will love it. Second, we went on a trip recently, just a weekend trip at a beach rental. And normally, normally we would just have the linen service, like bring us sheets. This time we said, no, no, no. I would rather have the difficulty of having to bring our own sheets and undo the beds and bring the sheets home so that we can bring our cozyer sheets with us. Cozy Earth knows this.

They now actually have a tote, a travel-friendly, has to be a travel-friendly, has to be able to be. free Cozy Earth bedding that can come in an adorable tote, so it's very easy to travel. We're not the only ones who love this so much that we want to bring it with us when we travel. So if you want to rest easy on your vacation or any other time, take a trip to cozyearth.com slash cowl. Then you have to type in my personal code Cal at checkout, and you'll get an exclusive 35% off. That's promo code Cal for 35% off. It's my way of saying, thanks for

listening. Oh, one favorite. Choose podcast in the survey they offer you after you order and then select my show from the drop-down menu. I know it's like an extra 10 seconds, but that's how Cozy Earth really knows you came for my show and it really makes a big difference. So hopefully you'll do that. That's CozyEarth.com slash Cal, promo code Cal. Thanks and happy sleeping. All right, let's do some questions. Who do we have first? All right. First question is from Nate. I've struggled with distraction seeking with technology since I was a preteen. Distraction seeking technology as I was a preteen. With a great deal of effort, I've made significant progress using your techniques, app blocking the phone foyer method. But I struggle when I'm sick or I have a poor night's sleep. Basically, I relapse and waste a huge portion of the next day. How can I get back on track when this happens?

Well, I sort of have a double-barreled answer to this question that my two answers will seem different, but they can relate. So my first answer is like hard days are hard days. You know, you're sick. You're really tired. It's okay to say, yeah, I'm not going to get a lot done this day. So let's start with that, right? We want to adopt a slow productivity mindset, which is about over time producing stuff you're proud about, which is very, different than a fast or pseudo-productivity mindset, which says what matters is activity.

If you've internalized the pseudo-productivity mindset to be kind of sick and like I didn't really get much done today, seems like a problem. I was unproductive. I was less valuable to the world. This was a quote-unquote bad day. If you have a slow productivity mindset, it doesn't matter. You're like, yeah, today's not a day I'm going to produce much that that's good, so I didn't. What matters, though, is, hey, I'm still on track for at the end of this season to have,

have produced some stuff I'm proud of. I mean, I talk about it in my book, Slow Productivity. One of the examples I give, Mary Curie honing in on isolating radium so she could build have a first example and really understand radioactivity in a way that wasn't known before. She was going to win a Nobel Prize for this work, working in this in Paris in this sort of drafty basement research lab, honing in, summer comes. She's like, now we're going on vacation for two months. We're going to France.

The pseudo-productivity mindset is like, oh, my God, you're so unvvvvavis. valuable, why would you do that? That's, you're unproductive. The slow productivity mindset says, I am working on something cool. I'm going to produce something cool. And she did. And she came back and she kept working on it. And she got the result.

And she got a Nobel Prize. Took some more vacations. Got another Nobel Prize. Things were fine. So let's get rid of the mindset of taking time or slowing down or having variation in your intensity is somehow a bad thing. It's not. Now, here's my other answer, which could also be relevant.

If what you're thinking is like, look, it's not that I'm feeling really bad and there's nothing I could do. It's just like if anything goes off a little bit, I get stuck in a sort of rabbit hole of distracting behaviors when there's better things I could have been doing. Not maybe more productive things, but like it takes away the quality of my day. Like if it's a relapse type situation, it's not what I wanted my day to be. It just that was enough to hook me into that. There's a lot of ideas about this from the addiction literature. These are called habit triggers. smokers have this big problem after they quit, that there's very certain things that happen

that they just associate with a cigarette. And when those things happen, it's very difficult not to smoke. The addiction literature, they say, yeah, you have to practice and cultivate alternative habits. All right. In this situation, so, like, I'm a little bit tired and I'm not really on my schedule. Like, what do I do? What's like the habit I fall back on to to sort of like rewind or recharge that's not just going down a YouTube rabbit hole for eight hours, and you practice with something different until you

associate those triggers with the new behavior. So you have to just find the triggers that I'm tired, I'm a little bit sick. I mean, for you, I think it's the like something is off and it knocks me off the ability to follow a more optimizer structured schedule, have different fallbacks you do in those situations, which are recharging, but don't leave you with this feeling of I really don't, not happy with how my day unfolded. So both of these answers can be true at the same time. Ease up on yourself. Productivity is not activity. It's outcome over time. And the second, if you're not happy with yourself when you fall into these, you're like, I don't want to do this regardless. I don't care if I'm sick or not. I don't want to be on TikTok all day. It's a trigger.

You have to have a specific other thing you associate with that trigger. And it'll take a few cycles of finding what works well and doing it a few times until you change your association with that. So anyways, thank you. Nate. Who do we got next? Next question from Zachary. My attention span seems to have diminished to a new low. I used to love movies, reading books, and having long conversations with people. Now I can't do any of these things, and all I do is scroll TikTok, Instagram, or other iPads or other apps on my iPad. Is there a way out of this without completely cutting out all these technologies?

My first question is why not cut out all these technologies? The things you're mentioning that you're not able to do anymore seem like they're important to you. movies, reading, having long conversations, those feel like things that you don't want to necessarily give up. Now, what are you giving them up for scrolling TikTok and Instagram and other apps on your iPad? So why don't you consider prioritizing that first group of things over the second group of things? Now, if we want to structure this a little bit, abstention might sound scary. Do a digital declutter.

Like I talk about on my book, Digital Minimalism, say, I'm going to take a little bit. a 30 day, I guess, step away for 30 days from all these optional personal technology uses. 30 days. Then, during those 30 days, I'm going to very aggressively explore alternative activities that are important to me. I'm going to build rituals around them. I'm going to put aside time for them. I'm going to go to the library. I'm going to read in the woods. I'm going to set up a lot of social events with friends. I'm going to go to the Revival House movie theaters three times a week to see all these different movies that are playing. You really aggressively start experimenting with and structure your day around other sorts of valuable activities.

Don't just sit there and white knuckle it. Do other things. And then at the end of the 30 days, say, okay, is there something really important that I'm missing from the technologies I temporarily put aside? I think you're going to find for most of these things you're going to say no. Nothing really bad happened that I wasn't on TikTok, right? There may be a few uses that pop up. We're like, well, you know, using Instagram to keep up, whatever, with my nieces and nephews

and the photos that are posted of them. Like, that is important to me because then when I'm on, like, the text threads, I feel more connected to what's going on in my family. If you find these specific uses, then you can say, great, if that's what I need to really miss about this tool, how do I put that back into my life in a more focused way with fences around it? And so, like, in this example, if this is really the thing you missed about Instagram, you could say, well, it doesn't have to be on my phone.

What I really should do is, like, why don't I, on Fridays, you know, log on. to Instagram on my computer. It's kind of an ugly interface on there. Only follow my family members, see what's going on, like with my nephews or nieces. Or maybe just like move more of this to our family text thread, which doesn't have that same sort of addictive pull that the app has and just sort of post more of my own photos on there. So other people are posting photos. And now we can really keep up with each other without having to be in an addictive ecosystem. When you know what you're trying to do with the technology, you can put up good fences. right this is very different than what most people do which is saying i by default bring these

technologies into my life if they could be cool and i wait until i feel as if the negative the negative pressures of this technology are so big that i feel like okay now i just i have to throw up my hands and get rid of it that doesn't work very well because unless the technology is really destroying your life it's a hard burden to pass you'll be like yeah it is bad but a lot of times it's not bad. Like, that's the issue with these tools, like Instagram or TikTok. Like, a lot of it is fine. It's the volume of what you do.

It's how it makes you feel over time. It's specific content on the tools. So if you're just strictly trying to build a case against something, it's a very hard case to make when it comes to technology. If you're instead trying to build a case for using something, like, what's the positive case for using this tool? Like, what do I really need in my life that's very important in this tool? that becomes difficult as well.

You're like, well, there's not much there really. Or this thing's important, but I could, why not just put these fences around it? So do the digital declutter, Nate, and be willing, or Zachary, sorry, be willing to radically change your relationship with these tools. Like, I want to be the one to tell you, if you're not watching movies and reading and talking with your friends and family, and this matters to you. And you're doing this because you need to scroll TikTok more, Instagram more. That's a problem and you should fix it. And those first things are more important than these second things. Those first things, especially as you get older, are going to bring more sort of sustainable goodness into your life than the second set of things.

The second set of things is your factory, you're checking in at your factory at the bite dance or meta factory to do your shift, giving data over so they can make money off of it. You don't have to keep that job if you find these other things to be more important. So I'll give you that strong message. Leaving those technologies is not a bad thing. But do the digital clutter and find out a little bit more subtly what's important here and what's not. All right. Who do we got? Next question is from Elmerie. I'm in a master's program and find it hard to schedule deep work sessions throughout the day

as my core schedule is all over the place. Once I get in a groove, it's time to pack up and head to my next class. How can I schedule deep work with a scattered class schedule? Good question. Sort of like a classic, so early Cal academic advice question. Autopilot what you can. So any work that happens regularly each week, you just know this thing is due. every Friday. We have to do reading response

every Tuesday and Thursday. Find the right time and the right place to do that work and then keep that constant week to week. And you've got to be really realistic about this. Like how much time do I really need to do this problem set? Well, it might be you need three sessions and one of them

has to be three hours. Like be realistic about how much time you need the successfully finished a recurring work at least 90% of the time. Same day, same places. It's on your calendar recurring. so that you're taking out the decision-making, the energy expenditure of like, what do I want to work on next, and talking yourself into actually getting the energy to work on it.

So autopilot as much work as you can. The other heuristic I tell students is don't waste first thing in the morning. If your first class is at 10, there might be a really nice block in there, right, that like 830 to 10 or something where you could get a big chunk of things done. So don't necessarily wait until you're well into the day before you start. thinking about time as being fair game for getting things done. That time in between classes, a lot can get done there. If it's too scattered to finish big things, figure out consistently how to break up big things.

So like, okay, here's what I do. I have this hour between these two classes, for example. It's not enough time to finish a problem set. But I know consistently that's usually enough time to prepare a problem set that I'm working on. Go through the problems, answer the easy ones, figure out what the hard ones are and what I need to look that up for and like where that material is. And that's like prom set prepping.

And then maybe the next day I have like this two hour block where if I tackle a prepped prom set, I can get a draft of like all of the answers typically. And then another day, I have another hour long slot, which is a prom set polishing, where I go through and I rewrite all of my answers for my notes onto what I'm going to submit and I double check to math. That takes about an hour. If I do these three blocks consistently, same time, same places every week, the problem that gets done, it looks good.

So if these blocks are small, and the things you need to do are big, have a consistent way of breaking up to work and then autopilot their smaller schedule. So I'm a big fan of recurrent work and school should have a recurrent strategy for being handled. All right. Rock and rolling, Jesse. Who do we have next?

Next question is from Danny. I'm coming to the end of my month of digital decluttering. To say it's been helpful would be a massive understatement. Since getting off of Reddit and you YouTube comment sections, my anxiety has disappeared. My question relates to letting things back in my life. I was most looking forward to returning to some video games, but worry that it will take

away from my new love of reading difficult books. How should I balance this? Well, Danny, first, I appreciate the mini case study there. Zachary from before, listen to the benefit Danny got from digital decluttering. Reading Reddit and YouTube comment sections, which was probably just like a default behavior for Danny, was giving him anxiety. And he learned in his declutter, I feel better when I'm not doing that. He no longer does that.

His life feels better. We don't realize sometimes the cognitive burden of our technological habits until we take a break from them. All right. To the specific question, video games versus books, I'm going to argue having rituals around both, Danny, being intentional about it. So when it comes to video games, I think it's fine if there's like a particular video game you really like playing. Or you like the idea of there's a new video game. I like video games. I'm going to play this through over the next month or two

and then a new game comes out. I get that game and I play it through. I think that's fine. Video games are a pretty impressive media art form right now. They have budgets bigger than big Hollywood movies. They make more money than big Hollywood movies in a lot of cases. It's an interesting art form. The danger here, I think, is online video games.

So if it's a video game that you play it online with other people, those can be some of the most addictive activities in the whole digital space, be very wary of those. Engineered games that are meant to be played over about a 40 to 50-hour period that you spread out over a couple months and it has an arc and then it finishes. It's like a drawn-out movie or novel experience. Fantastic. Online games, I just say there would be dragons.

You know, that can eat up inless time and press buttons in a way that almost nothing else can. If you want more on that, read Adam Alter's book, Irresistible, where he talks about addictive technology. Those massively multiplayer online video games are the... most addictive technology. So be wary of those. All right. So what do I mean by rituals? Have a ritual around video games. This is when and how I do it. I look forward to it. Have a ritual around reading hard books.

This is when I wear I do it. I've learned to look forward to it. Like for video games, it could be like, yeah, there's certain nights. Like Thursday night after dinner, I have this nice period. And also like Sunday morning. These are like my video game times. And I've put it aside and I can really get lost in the game for three hours. I do this two times a week or three times a week. You know, that could be fine.

It's when I do it, where I do it, I look forward to it. Same thing with books. Yeah, I really, I want to get in this habit of reading hard books, and here's how I do it. It's, you know, it's like most nights at seven, like after dinner, but before I put on TV, and I make the certain tea or have like a little bit of whiskey or like whatever. You know, you can make a thing about it, put on a record, and I just make this a habit. I have a ritual around it's done at the same times. Just have these really nice rituals around both of the things.

rituals that are built to a schedule that gives you a reasonable balance. So I think video games are cool. I just don't like the massively multiplayer online ones. They're meant to be addictive. If the game costs you $70 and you can only play it for 40 hours, I have no problem with that. If the game was free and you can play it 40 hours a week and still not be enough, be very, very wary about that.

Right. That's the way I think about that. So just make rituals and schedules about both those things and keep both those things still in your life. And congratulations on the declutter sticking. I mean, imagine all the cool stuff you can do without that time spent stressing about Reddit and YouTube comments. All right. What do we got next? Next question is our slow productivity corner. Oh, fantastic. Let's get that music. It's from Dirk. And Dirk says, Slow productivity embraces a larger time scale. This makes perfect sense if you expect to have

enough lifetime left to finish your projects, i.e. books and achieve your goals. But how does the idea of slow productivity relate to age? How do you apply it to older people who fear that they may be running out of time? Good question, Dirk. For people who don't know, Slow Productivity Corner is our question. Once per episode, we have at least one question that is related to my new book, Slow Predictivity. All right. So Dirk is talking about an idea I mentioned in an earlier question of this episode as well. that slow productivity says look at productivity on longer time scales. Not did I have a productive day, but was the last five years productive, right? When you think about productivity at larger timescales, you don't sweat the busyness of a particular day.

What you worry about is like returning to important things over time. All right. So, Dirk, what you're saying is like, you know, if I'm later on in life, maybe I don't want to be thinking about a 10-year time frame. I think that's fine. I think fair enough, right? There's other reasons, by the way, that you don't want to be thinking about a too long of a time frame as well unrelated to being older. So, Dirk, like in slow productivity, I talk about – there's a section where I talk about laying out your vision for the long term and measuring your productivity against it. And I said there's natural – sometimes there's natural breaks in this.

Like if you're in school, you're probably thinking about what do I want to look back on my school, experience and say this is what I did and here's what I'm proud of it. That could just be two more years. You're a sophomore. You're thinking about your next two years of school. It could be a particular job like a posting. I work for the State Department. I've been posted to, you know, Tel Aviv for the next two or three years. That's a natural constraint. I want to think about what do I want to look back on this post, this time limited part of my life. What I want to look back at and say it happened in here? I would do this when we had babies, right? Like, I would see that as there's this particular year, typically when you have a new baby. And, like, what do I want that year to look like? And it's very different, because it's a very difficult year in terms of, like, you're trying to take care of this young thing. And you have a different measure of what productive means than another part of your life. So, Dirk, these longer time scales don't have to be decades.

It could be like, what do I want to do, like, what would productive be for me for this year? What would productive be for me for this season? It's a particularly, completely fine time scale. Like, okay, it's winter time. What do I want to do? What would I look back and say this was a successful winner? Like, well, you know, I want to learn how to do this. I want to finally, like, clean that out.

I want to, like, spend time outside every, like, build a habit of, like, getting outside every day when it's cold. So we can, the timescale bigger than just the immediate future is key for slow productivity, but it doesn't also have to be the distance future. The timescale used to slowly measure your productivity. productivity can vary depending on what's going on in your life. All right. So good slow productivity question, Dirk.

I think we need that music one more time, Jesse. All right. Let's, uh, do we have a call? We do. Let's do a call. Hi, Cal. This is JJ Colley. I'm a senior in high school.

And I had a question regarding formulating a deep life vision and living that out. So I have some big decisions coming up regarding where to go to school for college and university, what to major and what to study, and eventually what career to go into. But given my youth, I don't know how to formulate an actual deep life. I just simply don't have enough life experience to know what a life well-lived good like, would look like. So I'm hoping you could speak on to fellow young people like myself who just don't have the life experience to know what a deep life should look like and how to formulate that vision. Thank you. That's a great question.

So let me talk briefly, generally about my philosophy around the deep life. And then let's get to your specific question about what's someone at your age, a high school senior, how you should be thinking about these ideas. All right. So what's my general conception around the deep life, a term that I coined early in the pandemic. And it's sort of our shorthand for a life that's lived on purpose. It's intentional. You've constructed the life in a way to amplify the stuff you really care about and reduce to stuff you don't.

It's a life you're sort of proud to be living. It's a life that's remarkable to other people who know you. So this is what people really want, that sense of I have designed, my life is mine and it's on purpose. It's what people really seem to want and what a lot of people seem to be missing. So what's my general philosophy around this? Well, longtime listeners of the show knows. I'm not a fan of what I would call goal-centric planning, which I think is the

dominant, this is the dominant mode of thinking about something like the deep life in the Western culture, especially American culture of the last 100, maybe 150 years, especially the last 100 years or so. It's this idea of you need a big cool, cool, goal, right? Like this big thing I'm going to go after and do. And if I can get that cool goal in it slipstream, the rest of my life will become good. Often this is professional, right? So, this is, this could mean a couple things. It could mean we have to follow your passion terminology here. So often this means like, well, if I can just find the perfect job, that's my passion, my whole life is going to feel redeemed and validated. I'm going to really enjoy my life. Sometimes it's

much more just baldly achievement focused. If I could just reach this level of achievement and this complicated competitive path, the rest of my life will fall into place. So it's a big, bold goal. We see, especially during times of disruption, like the financial crisis and then more recently during the pandemic. We have location-based, goal-based planning. If I could just move to this dramatic place, my life is going to be better. I could just leave the city and be on a farm or whatever. The side effect of this one big change is going to make a big difference.

The other other type of goal that goal-centric planning often builds around is ideology. If I could just have like an all-encompassing ideology that I can dedicate my life towards, then I'm going to have the – my life is going to be – remarkable and all the other parts are going to be good. Here's the problem. That doesn't typically work because there's a lot of elements that go into defining your everyday experience. It is unlikely

that the pursuit of a specific grand but narrow goal is going to have, happen to have the right positive change in all these different aspects of your life, many of which have nothing to do with, you know, professional pursuits. So I'm a big believer in lifestyle-centric planning.

Why don't you just directly identify this is what I want the different aspects of my life to be like. And then say, how do I directly engineer my life to get closer to these things? And now it's more like you're moving chess pieces around the chessboard, the chess pieces here being the particular options you have. Like, well, if I go for like this job in this place, in this way, these three different things I can sort of get closer to.

And this thing over here I can handle by doing this. It's just directly getting to the core of the issue, which is what defines the quality of your life is not what is the top item on your, like, resume or your obituary. It tends to be what does most days feel like. Where am I living? What am I doing? Who am I around? What's taking up my time?

What's not taking up my time? It's the day-to-day lifestyle that determines your subjective well-being. So why not, like, directly identify an engineer that lifestyle to be what you want, as opposed to hoping that one big goal, one big swing will somehow fix all these parts of your life and just some sort of happy coincidence. So that's really my approach towards the deep life, lifestyle-centric planning over-gold-centric planning. All right. So now let's get to the particular question here.

The caller is in high school, about to go to college, and says, I don't know how to make these plans yet. To which my answer is, yeah, you don't. That's fine. The first, like, reasonable lifestyle-centric plan that you should produce will be later in your college career when you're deciding what to do right out of college. So you're going to build your first plan later in your college career to cover you, like, through your mid-20s, expect to revise that plan after a few years out of college and in the real world. And then you'll be able to revise that plan to cover all of your time through your 20s and set you up for interesting options in your 30s, but not be too specific. As you approach your 30s, you're going to revise this plan again.

So you revise these plans a lot. You are too young to have your first plan. So what is your goal for college? It's going to be gathering enough raw material to build your first plan later in your college years. Right. Some of this is going to come from just you getting older and being in an environment where you have more autonomy that you can just reflect and figure out yourself and your identity. You're going to be learning things about yourself and about the world. And you can build your sort of first draft of your adult identity, which will help you identify your first lifestyle-centric plan. It's also where you're going to be able to expose yourself to new fields. You're going to gain a lot of information about like what people do. This person graduated. They went to this job. You're just going to learn a lot about your. yourself and about the world that will help you make your first plan later in your college career. So you're off the hook having to have a vision right now. So then how do you select a college? Lower the stakes in your mind. Okay. You're not selecting a college right now

as a key. This college has to be just right. Otherwise, my plan for a good life won't happen and I'll be miserable. Lower those stakes. You know, go to probably like the best school that is reasonable for you to go to. Like the best school I can get into and we can afford. Like you're never going to go wrong with that. I want to be around interesting people,

think about interesting things, and have access to as many opportunities as possible so that when it comes time to determine my first lifestyle-centric plan and start making some decisions for life after college, are going to have as many interesting opportunities as possible. So it's like go to the best school that you can afford.

It's not bad advice. And for a lot of people, that means like, let me aim, because college is getting expensive, folks. It might mean, like, let me aim for, like, I have a good state university in my state, unless, like, things are my academic, whatever's going well enough that I can maybe get access to, like, a pretty elite school. We can figure out a way to make that work, and maybe that's worth it. Or if you're, look, if you have a very specific skill set or interest, there's also some matches that happen here,

I mean, if you're really into math, if you're really, like, into science and math and are really good at it, and it turns you on, you're like bored, then like a school like MIT is going to give you an experience, you're not going to get elsewhere. If you're really into government, like for whatever reason, your young Bill Clinton, think about Georgetown, right? I mean, there's classes here that we teach at our campus downtown where the class walks to the Capitol to sit in on hearings as part of the class, right? So, you know, we have a longtime listener who's a French horn player, shout out with a Juilliard, because, okay, that makes sense. you don't, it's not like I need this very specific thing. Go to the best school you can that makes sense. You want to be around the best people you can, have access to the best opportunities you can.

That's the raw materials. Gather, gather, gather, and then we'll make our first plan as we get near the end of college. Let me point you towards a couple things to help you get through that college experience then. I want to point you towards my newsletter, my early days of my newsletter where I was mainly addressing, where I was mainly addressing college students. go to Calnewport.com slash blog, go to the archive, go back to 2007, 2008, read my post on the Zinvaldictorian, read my post on the Romantic Scholar. I'm going to lay out there a mindset and framework for going through your undergraduate years in a way that you're exposed to lots of interesting things. You open up lots of potential interesting opportunities, but you also have a sustainable, meaningful experience, intellectual, social experience on campus that's really, that you're really, that you really.

enjoy that you get to know yourself that is fulfilling. So you can get some advice there about how to navigate these years. We can gather raw material, get to know yourself, really love your time at college, have cool opportunities, get all those things done. What I hate to see, for example, is when people see college as like a boot camp. Yeah, I've got to grind through this thing because that's what's going to open up the whatever job I really, the really elite job. And so I'm going to suffer through college so I can get that job and then I'll get the

benefit. Of course, you go to the first few years of that job. I'd be like, well, this really sucks, but that's okay. If I could just suffer through this, I'll get the managing director, and then I'll get the benefit. Well, then you get to that. You're like, well, this is, you know, I want to get partner. And so, no, I really got to suffer through. It never ends.

Don't have the mindset of I want to suffer through so that the benefit comes. So, you know, check those things out to help guide you, romantic scholars and valedictorian, to help guide you through college, go to the best school you can that makes sense, best school that makes sense for you that you can. gather the raw material, learn how to your adult identity and how to get interested in things and be an autonomous human. And then we'll make our first lifestyle plan as that gets a little bit farther along. I'm thinking about a lot more of this now, Jesse, because I'm, you know, I'm in the early stages of my deep life book. And so I'm starting to think through more, how to more clearly articulate, like, what the

deep life is, this idea that emerged during the pandemic here on this podcast and the newsletter and how to actually pursue it. I'm really leaning into now just the idea of just being practical. Like, it's just, if we put aside the what of your definition of a deep life and just get to the how of, like, how does someone figure out what's important to them and then make that actually happen. So take out the specificity of like, these are the things that should matter to you. And more about, here's how you find out what matters to you. And then here's how you much more systematically get more of this in your life. It's not going to be one bold goal.

It's going to be this sort of lifestyle-centric plan. that we talk about on the show. I'm really trying to work that out. Have you been taking walks with a single purpose notebook? I filled one. Yeah. So I have to open up another one. I spent like a month, the last month of my book tour, just working on these ideas in a single purpose notebook. And then recently, I finally, I filled a feels note. And I finally kind of cracked like, okay, I see a structure for this book I'd be happy with. And I recently then moved up. all into Scrivener. So now there's a Scrivener project for the book where I can start gathering

sources for the chapters and it's moved out of my notebooks into my more formal professional system. Now that the project's unfolding and it's going to generate a huge amount more of ideas and sources, it's moved from my single purpose notebook and into Scrivener. For those that are new to the show, we had an episode on single purpose notebooks like 10 episodes ago. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Definitely check that out. It's on the YouTube channel as well. All right, let's do a quick case study before we get to the final segment, case studies where people send in a report of using some of the things we talk about on the show in their own life so we can see what these things look like in actual people's lives. So this one comes from Valerie, who says,

I've been tweaking Cal's practices to my personal life as a retiree. I love adapting Cal's practices to the range of activities I undertake in my life, voluntary work, life management, deepening hobbies and interest. Today I had some fun thinking about how I had used a range of callisms, a range of calisms to a long-winded but important task. In my new time block planner, I have decided to have themes for a morning's tasks to avoid context switching. And today my theme was health.

Specifically, I dealt with three things relating to a long-term mobility issue. Number one, a concentrated period dedicated to making a query about my medical insurance and its coverage. Two, tackling a related subject because my brain was in the zone, which was investigating and ordering some orthotic shoes online. And three, and one, I'm very proud of, searching for and finding appropriate YouTube videos to learn more about chair-based yoga. much of this got done as a result of deciding an overall context. Apologies for the detail, but it amused me to see how over the years of listening to Cal, various elements of practice have become a way of life. And having written this email, I've included another element,

reflection for future learning, which I got from your episode with Dave Epstein. So many things and can't wait for the next episode. So Valerie, I appreciate that case study. The thing I want to underscore from that for everyone else is the appreciation. of the cost of context switching. We get into this a lot, but it's really hard for the human brain to switch its context rapidly between different things. This is why just going through an email inbox in order is very tiring. Because you have an email about your kid's camp, and the next email is about an unrelated event,

and the next email is about your car needs to be taken in to get its registration renewed. Each one of these emails triggers a cognitive crisis in your brain. Oh, my God, what's this about? what do we know about this? Let me shut down these neural networks and turn on these other neural networks. We kind of force our way through and move on to the next context before we ever fully switch there. It's very tiring. So if you can put a lot of tasks that share the same cognitive context together, it feels less difficult.

That's because of the way our brain works. And that's what Valerie did. These are tasks that are annoying. But if you put them all together, she kind of got into the zone because she's like, I'm in my personal health kind of logistical mode. She picked up steam and got through a lot of these, including stuff that was optional that she otherwise wouldn't have done, like finally learning about chairbase yoga. It's a great idea. You can do this in your personal life. You can do this in a professional life.

Type together tasks of the same type. You should even do this when answering emails. You know, have a label in Gmail for like temporary inbox and go select a bunch of emails that are all the same context. It's all about the same project or it's all about your kid's school. and then just label those and show only those on your screen and answer those one by one by one. You get like one or two emails in, like, I'm in the zone because your brain loads to context once and uses it again and again. And then go find another group of emails that are another context. Go through those.

This is going to feel much better and you're going to get better results than trying to take all these emails and they're leaving them together. So I love the idea of, I call it monotasking, but working on the same context as long as you can, even when dealing with small. all things. And also, I appreciate the mention of the Dave Epstein episode. That's another sort of secret fan favorite. Dave is great. He's got the best ideas, I think. So check that out. That's, God, I don't, that's, it feels

like it was recently, it was not. Yeah. It's been a little while, right? It's probably, look it up. Yeah. Anyways, worth checking out. All right. We got a final segment coming up, like, sort of like profiles and slowness, which I'm looking forward to. But first, let's take a brief break to hear from another

sponsor. I want to talk in particular about our longtime friends at ExpressVPN. Look, if you use the Internet, you need a VPN. Here's why when you access a site or service, you might be encrypting the contents of your message, but the address of those messages is not encrypted. So if you're using a wireless access point out somewhere in public, people can look at what you're sending on the airwaves

and see exactly what site and service you're talking to. If you're at home in the privacy of your own home, your internet service provider sees what sites and services you're talking to. They can gather that data. They can sell that data. They do gather that data. They do sell that data. Going into private mode in your browser does nothing about that. You're still sending packets that have the address of the site and service you're using.

Anyone who's interested can see it. A VPN solves that problem. With a VPN, you do the following. You say, okay, if I want to access this site, right? I want to access Calnewport.com, and I'm going to Google the word Calism. There's a new website, calism.com, and I'm kind of embarrassed to go there. If I use a VPN what happens, instead of contacting that site directly, you send an encrypted message to a VPN server. And inside that encrypted message, you say, what I really want to do is go to the Calism website.

And the VPN server contacts that site on your behalf, gets a response, encrypts it, and sends that back. you. So what is people near you looking at your packets in the air, your internet service provider, what do they learn that you are contacting a VPN server? That's it. They have no idea what sites and services you're actually using. So you need to use a VPN to protect your privacy online. If you do, I suggest ExpressVPN. They have servers all around the world. So you're never that far from a server to get a nice connection speed. They have a lot of bandwidth. Their software is super easy to use. Once you've installed it, and you can install it on any of the devices you use to access the internet, you can even install it on your wireless router at home, so just all communication in

your house goes through a VPN server. Once you've installed it, you turn it on with a click, and you use your sites and services like normal. You don't even know it's on, but you get the privacy protection. They've got plenty of bandwidth. Really, ExpressVPN is one of the best in the business. Makes it easy to get the protection of VPNs. So if you're like me and you believe your data, is your business. Secure yourself with the number one rated VPN on the market. Visit expressvpn.com slash deep, and you will get three extra months for free. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-N.com slash deep.

Go to expressvpn.com slash deep to learn more. I also want to briefly talk about our friends at My Body Tudor, T-U-T-O-R. this is a online health and fitness company that I really believe in because their idea makes so much sense. If you want to get healthier, the hard part is not necessarily getting the information, what you should eat, how you should exercise. It's the consistency, actually following the advice. With My Body Tutor, you get an online coach dedicated to you. They help you build a specific plan around your nutrition and your fitness fit to your life.

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Let's make a change. I have a trip coming up. What should I do? And you have that coaching. but because it's 100% online, it's going to be much cheaper than having a personal trainer in person or a personal nutritionist. So the price is right for a fantastic product, which is helping you take control over your own health and fitness. So if you're serious about getting fit, Adam Gilbert, the old fitness advice guru from my website and the founder of my body tutor, is giving deep questions listeners $50 off their first month. All you have to do is mention the podcast when you sign up.

look if you have any questions Adam wants you to call her text he puts his personal cell phone number at the top of every page that shows you like how much of a dedication to customers this in it's crazy Adam's crazy I love it so go to mybodytutor.com

TUTORM mention deep questions to get $50 off it is the right to get healthier all right Jesse it's to our final segment I wanted to react to something I found online that I just thought was cool it's a demonstration

of slowness in practice. That's why I'm calling it kind of a case study in slowness. All right, I'm going to load this on the screen. Definitely, if you're listening, if you want to see this, the link is in the show notes, but also this is episode 300. Just go to the deeplife.com slash listen. Go to that episode. We'll post a video below. All right.

So what this is, it's a website called a portrait of Tenoctatatil. I'm not saying that quite right, but the original name for Mexico City. It's an octotillin. Now you see this picture on here, Jesse. It looks like a photograph of a city. What this is is an entirely computer-generated, meticulously researched computer-generated image of this city, circa 1518. Right. So this, Thomas, I believe this is his name is Thomas Cole.

He's a programmer from the Netherlands. Just took on this project. He's like, what did this? Mexico City when it was before the Colombian contact when it was still let's see an empire ruling

over more than 5 million people with 200,000 people in the city alone this old Aztec's capital what did it look like back then and he began this long slow process here's more look at that's computer generated Jesse that's great see that the temples the causeway across

the lake and he spent about a year and a half just slowly learning about this, learning all the tools he used to build this were open source, right? Just using free software. Just slowly learning. There's another rendering.

And just sort of meticulously working on this because he just thought like it would be cool to just what would it look like to go back in a time machine. There's another picture here. Look at this. Here it is. The main temple at sunset, the twin pyramids.

These pictures are cool. They're beautiful. here's another one. So you can see like the main temple and the lake and this is like what this. This is accurate stuff as well. So archaeologists, people who work on this have commented on this project and said, this is really cool. I have a couple of quotes from Thomas here. Let's see here.

Here's a quote from them. The really hard part was gathering all the information than trying things out. How do you create a city when you don't really know anything about it? How do you start gathering that information? That was really difficult and involved throwing out a lot of things when I found different sources with conflicting information. That's part of being a pioneer venturing into the unknown, into what no one has done before. But also, that's very difficult because it takes a lot of time. Also, I don't speak Spanish, and I'm not an academic, so I really approach this as an outsider.

There's a rainstorm coming across the city. Another cool shot. All this done with free software, too. Here you did these comparison shots where you can see the same angle before and after. This Mexico City today. the Aztec capital in the 1500s. It was what I liked about this. This one's cool.

The new fire ceremony. So it's the ceremony. The Aztec calendar is on a 52-year cycle. They would do this ceremony every 52 years to begin the new cycle. It's beautiful renders, historically well done. He got a lot of appreciation for this from people who studied this Aztec history. But this is a profile of slowness. It's something he thought would be worthwhile.

and interesting. And he just took his time to do it well. He did it on the side. It's not a business. He's not trying to crush it. Not trying to hustle. Not trying to build up followers. Just worked on the slowly, built up something that was beautiful and cool that he really

liked and other people really liked as well. Took him almost two years. Slow productivity right there. There's no hustling here. There's no complicated, you know, organizational systems. He just took us time to produce something cool. he's pretty happy it's done, but that was probably also a really fulfilling two years,

just sitting there and working on this and making progress and seeing this thing that was important to you come to light. So anyways, I just want to show this because I love this type of thing. The slow pursuit of something cool can be just as rewarding as the fast pursuit of attention or clout or shallow achievement. Sometimes just taking your time to do something that feels worth doing

could be one of the more fulfilling things. So we got a case study here of a deep life intersecting with slow productivity, hitting all the buzzwords. I'm sure he used a lot of deep work to do this. And he's a digital minimalist and got some career capital out of this as well. So Thomas, you've hit the bingo card, the Cal Newport bingo card. But well done with this project. I love this type of thing. I bet when my kids get older, I need to do something like this, I think.

But for me, it's going to be. Richmond? Over the top. No, it's going to be. over the top Halloween animatronics. It's going to be like to the point where people are a little bit worried about me. That's what, that's going to be my version of this project is over the top Halloween animatronics.

But there's just something. I'm just working on this slowly for no other reason that I want to see my, my intentions made manifest concretely in the world. It's a cool way to do things. Anyways, Thomas, thanks for sharing that. Links in the show notes. That's all the time we have.

Next week, I'm going to be in England. So you'll see I'm going to be playing an interview. You have an interview episode. It's actually me being interviewed. I think you'll like it. And then after that, we'll be back with another standard episode of the podcast. So see you in two weeks.

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.