Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 321: Escaping Your Phone

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

It has become second nature to maintain a continuous partial participation in the world of digital networks. In today’s episode, Cal reflects on a week in which he spent too much time online, and argues why this continuous partial participation is dehumanizing, and what you can do to escape. He then takes questions and calls from listeners and reviews the five books he read in September.  Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmedia Deep Dive: How Your Phone Is Changing You [1:43]  - How do I teach my bosses to be deeper? [28:34] - How can I focus as a doctor when I have to keep switching from one patient to the next?” [35:46] - How do I overcome notebook overwhelm? [39:13] - Can “creativity” be added to the deep life buckets? [40:47] - How do I overcome the guilt of no longer being pseudo-productive? [44:51] - CALL: The Pomodoro Technique and overcoming distraction [49:33]  CASE STUDY: A 39-year-old changes careers [54:21]  FINAL SEGMENT: The 5 Books Cal Read in September 2024 [1:02:50]  Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? Thanks to our Sponsors:  This show is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/deepquestionszocdoc.com/deepshopify.com/deepzbiotics.com/cal Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So I'm here in my deep work, HQ. I joined as always by my producer Jesse. Yesterday we got a good episode coming up. We're going to do some phone stuff, which we haven't done recently. But I have a personal experience that's going to motivate today's discussion. Then we got some good questions. And because it is, believe it or not, this is our first.

episode airing in October because I think last week was the 30th of September. Yeah. We'll do the books I read the books I read in September 2024. So I'm excited for it. It's Halloween season, Jesse. Are you doing your lights? I'm working on the lights. I've added a second computer controlled strand and so they'll be synchronized.

We've got to get Jesse Skeleton going in here at some point as well once we have him going. there's no quicker way to alienate all of our new listeners and viewers than to have Jesse Skeleton show up in this show. So I look forward to losing many of you in the weeks ahead when we do our Halloween bits. We'll have to see, I think we have a recording right near Halloween. So we'll have to do it in costume or something like that. Yeah, it'll be good.

Anyways, we got a good show. So I figure why delay? Let's get rolling with today's deep dive. So as most of you probably know, I am not a heavy phone user. I do own a smartphone, but I don't use any social media. So my phone just isn't that interesting to me. When I work, I time block my day. So the idea of just casually looking at my phone for distraction is also something that I'm just not that used to.

That was until last week. A couple of things happened at the same time. First, I got sick. I was home sick for about a week. still hear it in my voice today. So I found myself without much to do, I was often bored and my phone was there. And suddenly I was looking at that thing much more than I normally would. Then, piling on, we had Hurricane Helene here in the States, which caused the disastrous flooding in Asheville. Well, I have a good friend in Asheville. And so I was really plugged in following the news,

trying to piece together from various online sources, minute by minute what was going on up there. And that also got me looking at my phone even more. So there was this period. It was less than a week, but it was a period in which I was constantly using my phone. It punctuated everything that was going on in my life. And I'll tell you, here's my review of that period. It was terrible. But the scary thing is, I think this is how a lot of people live basically all the time.

With that phone just sort of always there. never that far away from their life. This concerns me based on my experience. So what I want to talk about today is what happens. Let's define and explore what happens when your phone plays a constant presence in your life. And then let's get to some solutions, what you could do if you want to get away from that. All right. So let's start with trying to explain what it is that happens when you use their phone that much.

A statistic here I think is helpful. How often do we check our phones? according to one survey I found from reviews.org, which is roughly in line with other data I've seen, Americans now check their phone an average of 144 times a day. We're also spending an average of four hours and 25 minutes total each day on our phone. That latter statistic is up 30% from last year. If you do the math on 144 minutes of checks rather of your phone per day and assume roughly a 16-hour, waking day, that's checking your phone roughly every 6.7 minutes is what that averaged out to.

This means the average American has the networked digital world essentially never far from their attention. It is a constant cognitive presence. I'm going to give a name to this state for the sake of our discussion today. Let's call it continuous partial participation in the networked digital. Most people or at least a lot of people right now exist in a state of this continuous partial participation in the networked digital. That's what I experienced last week. That's what I felt was terrible. Let's try to understand what goes wrong in this particular state. The first problem has to do with brain fog.

So I noticed this in my own experiments with continuous partial participation is that it was, as if I was experiencing the actual world around me through a fog. I mean, I could see what was going on. I was having conversations with people. I knew where I was, but it was like you turned down the resolution on the video camera. The colors weren't so bright. The details of what was going on was not so bright.

You were there, but only sort of kind of there. Like you were remembering being there, not actually being in the physical situation that surrounded you. Now, this makes sense if we think about that statistic we looked at. when you're in this state of continuous partial participation in the network digital, you are never far from being exposed to this networked online world. There's a lot of information you've encountered, information that requires processing, especially since it's often highly salient information.

So your brain is dedicating resources to processing and making sense of what you last saw when you looked at your phone. You put your phone away. Your brain doesn't just snap and focus. on the new thing you're doing. It's still trying to make sense of what it just encountered. So you don't have 100% of the normal cognitive resources that would be dedicated to the world around you right now at your disposal. A non-trivial portion is still trying to process the digital world. Now, this is fine if you transition from the digital world somewhat permanently to the real world.

Okay, I'm done watching this movie and maybe for 10 minutes. I'm not completely present because my mind's making sense of the ending. But after about 10 or 15 minutes, now you're going to be. you're present, when you're checking your phone every once every 6.7 minutes, you never actually get that freedom. So you see the world as if through a fog when your mind is never that far from encountering the network digital. The second problem has to do with your perception of the world itself, the way you

understand the world and what's going on. I want to read a quote here. It's a little lengthy, but I think it's a good one. It's a quote from an important book that came out in 2009. This book was written by the science writer Winifred Gallagher, and it was called RAPT, with the subtitle, Attention, and the Focus Life. I talk about, if this sounds familiar, it's because it was influential to me, and I quote it somewhat extensively in my 2016 book, Deep Work. All right, so let me quote Winifred Gallagher here. That your experience largely depends on the material objects and mental subjects that you choose to pay attention to or ignore.

is not an imaginative notion but a physiological fact. When you focus on a stop sign or a sonnet, a waft a perfume or a stock market tip, your brain registers that target, which enables it to affect your behavior. In contrast to things that you don't attend to in a sense don't exist,

at least for you. 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 that is the key to controlling your experience and ultimately your well-being. What Gallagher is saying here, and she summarizes it this way elsewhere in the book, your world is what you pay attention to.

We tell ourselves this myth that there's just an objective world around us that we see through our senses. It's not really what we are experiencing. We are experiencing a mental construction of the world inside our brains, and some of it is visual, and some of it is auditory, and some of it has to do with what you smell. but some of it has to do with how you feel, and some of it has to do with what it is particularly that you're focusing on. So your world, your perception of the world, is shaped by what you pay attention to.

So what happens when we have this continuous partial participation in the online? Well, we are spending a non-trivial amount of our attention targeting at things that are highly emotionally salient. They're pushing buttons that makes it something we want to look at on our phone, and that could be fear. That could be outrage. That could be an emotional charge. It could be a sort of constant exposure to epicness, right? It's the surfer on the biggest wave.

It's like the violent crime that is super violent, right? Things are exaggerated past scale online. It's also a world of deep cynicism, a world in which people are cutting each other and trying to take each other down and carefully walking for taboo violations or trying to police their own. This is a world that's not so pleasant.

It is a world that is a mix of sort of Red Bull, MTV, and Orwell. And if you're looking at this network digital once every 6.7 minutes, the construction of the world that exists in your mind is going to overlap heavily with this amalgam of MTV, Red Bull, and Orwell. And your perception of yourself and the life that you lead in the world that is surrounding you is going to be dark, it's going to be exhausted, it's going to be strained out, it's going to be upset, it's going to be in a defensive crouch. It literally makes your world worse.

What you pay attention to constructs your world, and we're paying attention to things that construct worlds that we don't actually like spending time. I had a memory, a really strong sense memory when I was thinking about this portion of this deep dive discussion. I don't know why I remember this, but it was a random day from my tour. 20s, right? This would have been the 2000s. It was a random day when I was a doctoral student at MIT, because I remember being in the office. So this would have been like 2006 or 2007. And for whatever reason, I got this like really clear memory of that day. And what I remembered was this was pre-smart phones. I mean, I don't use social media, but even if I wanted to back then, they didn't exist. I mean, Facebook was around, but I didn't have a phone and I didn't use anything. I have this like this memory of what like a day was like back then. I remember on my way to the status. Center at MIT where my office was. Stopping at the Aubon Pan on, I think it was Main Street as you went from the Kindle subway

station on your way to Vassar Street and ultimately to the status center and getting an egg sandwich. Just being like, this is great. I like the egg sandwich here. Isn't it great just like eat an egg sandwich? I remember being in my office and I was probably working on a paper, giving that attention, and then working on a blog post. I was back in the day, I was blogging three days a week.

I probably wrote a blog post. And what I remember about that day, it was sunny. It was April. I know this because it was Marathon Day. And I was like, it's great at sunny in Boston. And the spring is coming. And I left early and I went down to watch the marathon. And I had the Red Sox game, which they play early on the day of the marathon.

I had it on. I had one of these little radios you could plug in. I was listening to the Red Sox game. And it was sunny. And I was enjoying the sun. And I remember being like, this is nice. And it's just nice that it's sunny. And spring is great.

Isn't it great. It's going to be warm or more. and baseball season has started. I'm excited about that. And I was probably looking forward to like, hey, we got this Netflix DVD in the mail. I'm excited to watch. And, like, maybe, like, my wife and I were going to go to the farmer's market

to get something for dinner. And it was just pleasant, right? It was just paying attention to, like, what you were doing, appreciating what was nice about the day, looking forward to some things that were coming up. The world my mind created that day was a really nice world to be in. And it would have been very different if I had a phone and I was on social media.

and I was just constantly checking in on things because I would have had one foot in this digital world that wasn't nearly as pleasant as just wandering over I went to the federal plaza I remember and there was a food truck my doctoral advisor's son had a food truck and I got some food from the food truck

and was walking over to watch the mirror and it was all great just paying attention to the moment it would have been so different if I had been in a state of continuous partial participation the network digital. This is what Winifred Gallagher gets into in that book wrap. The motivation for that book about attention is a cancer diagnosis.

And she learns that by paying attention to things that matter to her and to the positive, she was able to construct a world that was pretty sunny, even as she was going through, objectively speaking, some darker things. So it matters what world you're exposed to. All right. The third problem is lack of quiet, right? It is in the long pauses in life when nothing much is happening that your mind slows down and quiets and real insight can be had. The Catholics have a good term for this process.

They call it discernment, right? So they discuss this in terms of turning your intention interior to try to understand the sort of will of God. but it's a concept that secularizes nicely. That it's when you are quiet and turned inward, it's you alone with your thoughts and looking at the world around you, that some of your most profound insights come when some of the sharpest clarity is identified, where you realize here's where I am,

here's what matters to me, here's what doesn't, here's the path I want to be on. Here's how I have left that path, but how I might actually get back. hey, this really maybe difficult thing has happened to me. This is where I process that. I make sense of that. And I get resilient growth out of it.

The quiet, cognitive quiet, is so critical to a life that's not just rich and fulfilling, but a life that you can continually aim back towards meaning and depth. Obviously, if you exist in a state of partial, a continuous partial participation in the network digital, you don't get that quiet. because why do you tolerate that quiet when there is the perfectly distracting TikTok video just a second away, pull that out, hit that button? And I got to say, my experience of living this way last week was it's not like these distractions are fantastic, right?

The allure to your screen, that drive to go back to your screen, is stronger than the reward you actually get. I actually found the actual looking at the phone and the scrolling to be numbing in a sort of weird kind of unsettling way. You felt just sort of vaguely uneasy and like the edges had been rounded off of your emotions, positive and negative. It's not like you're getting something wonderful. You're numbing yourself with it. That was my experience of it. So the quiet is actually where so much of life is actually figured out.

All right. So if we don't want to exist in this state, what can we do? I'm going to give six ideas. You've heard some of these before, but let's just put them one after another. How do you escape a state of continuous partial participation in the network digital? One, make your phone less interesting. Take the social media apps off your phone. Stop using the social media if it's not vital to you.

If it is vital to you, use it on your computer. Don't have it on your phone. Don't put games on your phone. Don't put the YouTube app on your phone. Make your phone less interesting. Your phone should now be dedicated towards phone calls. text messages, information like maps, and audio content. Remember, the original vision of the iPhone that Steve Jobs laid out when he first introduced it in 2007

is that we made a really useful phone and we combined it with your iPods, you don't have to carry two. That's a great vision. I can scroll through my voicemail instead of having to dial into a voicemail system. I can listen to like podcast and music really well, and if I need to look up something, there's a map. Three, treat your workspace like it's a phone-free school. There's this big push going on right now. We should talk about this in another episode, but a big push that I'm a fan of towards phone-free schools.

And not don't have your phone out in the classroom, but have it out in the hallway or at lunch, but the model of your phone goes away when you walk in the door and you don't get it again until you walk back out. we just have too much research in the context of phones that this is so much better when the mind of the kids can focus completely on what's happening in school and the people around them and not being distracted by the phone and knowing that they're going to see that phone soon

and they want to see what's going on, we know it's a much better experience. Well, this holds for adults as well. Kids might be a little bit more susceptible to the distractions or the impact of these distractions, but it holds for adults as well. So treat your workplace like you're working in a phone-free school. And the way you do that is you put on a custom do-not-disturb mode on your phone that blocks everything but phone calls. You tell the people who are important to you in your life,

if there's an emergency, call me. And they will, if there is an emergency, which won't really happen, so they'll rarely call. But you don't have to worry that if your kid's sick at school or something that you're not going to find out about it. Because the calls come through. Put your ringer on and put that phone in your phone. bag. And just I don't use my phone while I'm working. Again, if there's a call, I'll hear it, but I don't, I don't use text messaging. I don't go on social media. It's a phone-free school. Simulated in my

workplace. Now, if there's like messages you want to check in on, maybe you're trying to organize something, great. You can schedule time for that. Over my lunch break, I'm going to take out my phone, catch up with people on text. And what am I going to say at the end of those conversations? All right, I'm about to put my phone away for the rest of the day. But this is where we're leaving this. And we can check back in after. In fact, this would be a good time to say, I'll be leaving around five. It's a half-hour commute. So like, you know, feel free to call me then, too, if we really want to work it out. Just let set expectations. I'm putting my phone back away. People will learn in about a week or so that you're not on text continuously during the

day, that you'll check it midday and you're accessible after the workday. They adjust to it. All right. Four, treat online content browsing like you would watching television shows. Right. Remember how it was in 2009? It was, I am a excited to watch this episode of this show tonight, and I'm going to go watch that. The Office is on right before Parks and Recreation on NBC on Thursday. It'll be great. We're going to get dinner ready, and we're going to watch those shows. That's very different than I'm going to watch clips of this episode spontaneously and randomly all throughout my day, no matter what else is going on, right? It's different. You should make your online entertainment

more like TV shows in 2009. I'm going to put aside a half hour, an hour, I'm going to load up my laptop, and there's like a lot of sites I want to check. You know, I want to get all of like the online chatter about the baseball team I'm following. I follow these Instagram influencers that are fun or aspirational. I want to check in on all of them and see what's going on, like what videos they've posted. I'm going to go down some rabbit holes of links and I'm going to have some fun and I'm going to do it from seven to eight. you can consolidate the experience of entertainment online

and not make it something that you just have in the background as like a constant thing you turn to throughout the day. All right now here's some, the last two ideas are a little more non-digital. Five, actively practice, presence, and gratitude. So like create an experience that you're going to enjoy. Look forward to the experience. when you're in it, force yourself to actually sit there and think and say, this is great.

I'm really liking this. And when you're done, be like, that was great. You know, like, I am going to go for a walk in the woods after I do a shutdown and I'm going to, like, bring my favorite tea with me, and I'm going to go and journal on this rock. And I'm going to look forward to the walk. I'm going to enjoy it while I'm doing it. I'm going to have some moments. Like, isn't this great? It's just retraining your brain to pay attention to the moment and enjoy what's happening in the moment. I was much better at this back in those grad school days I was talking about, and it made a big difference.

And finally, go analog in your activities. Journaling helps. It could be the structured journaling we talked about in an early episode. It could be you working through like a particular issue. It's analog and it's interior, and there's no digital distraction. Read real books. Reading is great. It slows everything down because after five or ten minutes, your brain is fully committed to constructing the world on your page,

and it gets you out of that sort of brain fog, partial attention type existence. Read more. And spend more time outside. Go for walks. Go for long walks. Go for runs. Go for rows.

Whatever it is. Analog experience. Heightened notable analog experiences where you get used to yourself, your interior, and paying attention to the world around you. All right. So there we go.

I did not enjoy being into continuous partial attention, given continuous partial attention towards the networked digital I don't think you should be in that state either you don't have to be in that state it's not worth it unless you have a lot of stock and meta or bite dance

some sort of stake in bite dance that's who makes TikTok if you don't you don't need this in your life that's what I'm saying reduce the footprint of your phone give yourself full attention to what you're doing either all digital or you're all in the real world

hopefully those ideas will happen. Jesse, I was not a happy man. I was like depressed. What were you scrolling? So for the Asheville News, it was, I was finding a lot of stuff on Twitter. Oh, so you have Twitter on your phone? Browser. I don't have an app.

Okay. Is there an app? Or Twitter? Yeah. Yeah. Is that an answer? Yeah. Yeah.

No, Twitter. So for most of the accounts, the issue is I have these burner accounts for doing. journalism, right? Because, like, you can't look at them without, so I have this longstanding burner account on Twitter that allows you, so you can go and look at, but it's, for me, it's like going to individual people's things in the browser and then looking at their feed. So I don't have, because I don't use Twitter, I don't have a thing where I don't have like a feed, I don't have a timeline. Got the word, right?

Like, where it, like, puts things into it from people you follow and stuff. I don't follow people. I don't have a timeline. but I go to individuals, right? So what I was doing was I would find, okay, here's someone who's on the ground there who has like some cellular access and then let me see what they're saying. Also a lot of stuff, news and web. Like, okay, there's an update in the city of Asheville, local news.

So like local news would post like clips and updates like what they were seeing, what was going on. So it was like a lot of consolidating news. It actually served a purpose. Like I eventually found, so my friend got out of there. But it's not easy to get out of there. Almost all the roads were destroyed. Astral's up in the mountains. Yeah.

Everything was flooded. How do you get out of there? I found on Reddit, someone on Reddit had posted, I was Google searching, someone on Reddit had posted, okay, we made it out. I-26 is open south of Asthma, the only interstate open in all the four cardinal directions. But to get there, you have to detour. it's closed in Asheville. So here is this very specific

detour on back roads that will eventually get you to I-26, far enough south that you're below the flooding, and then you can get from there to 74 to 80, whatever, and get that Charlotte. So, like, actually all that searching got an escape plan. For your friend? Yeah.

So you provided it to him? Yeah, got out. Eight by the map? Yeah, it worked. Oh, you saved him. It's still the only way out of Asheville right now. It's bad situation. But man, it's stressful. I mean, there's so many stressful things going on in the world that you could constantly be in that state. You know, like we're recording this the day after Iran lost 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. All right, there's something else you could do this all day long on.

I bet tomorrow there'll be something else. There is a vice presidential debate. Okay, like you could probably rabbit hole that for two days. I mean, you could really be in a state of like continuing. emergency. And that networked world is not a nice world. All right. Anyways, so now I'm done with that stuff and I'm great.

So glad to be back. Back more analog. All right, we've got a good question we want to get to. But first, here from a sponsor. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Look, I was just talking about in the deep dive, the stress and anxiety and mental impact of everything you see online. that is a good reminder that the most important relationship you have is the relationship with your own brain.

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First question is from Trevor. I run a small business and have two managers that are disorganized. They always prioritize the urgent over the important. They love to talk about stress and overwork. What can we do to better evangelize the deep life? Well, I'm trying to decide if this is the right terminology to use here or not, right? So when we talk about the deep life, we're talking about the intentional construction of a life that focuses on the things that matter to you and minimizes the things that don't. So a bad job can get in the way of realizing a deep life.

But what you're evangelizing to your bosses is not the deep life, but just having a sane way of. actually working. They don't need to know about the deep life, but they do need to know about administrative overhead and the context switching. That when you have too many things on your plate, more and more of your time is dedicated to the servicing of those obligations as opposed to actually finishing things themselves. So the rate at which you actually complete useful work goes down. It is not a linear function that the more stuff I push on my employees, the more

stuff that will get done. That's not actually the way it works. And they need to know about the cost of having to jump back and forth your attention between different targets. Like happens when you have bosses that demand instant responsiveness. Always emails, always calls. You always have to jump back and forth. It makes you dumber.

You've invested in these brains and your knowledge work organization and now you are reducing their ability to actually produce value. So in a perfect world, you make this case. and what would be the books? The books that I wrote to be relevant would be deep work, wrote without email, and slow productivity.

You make this case, you give them those books. They say, I like the sound of this Cal guy. These ideas make sense, and then they're not bad bosses. Probably won't work. It's worth trying,

but it probably won't work. So what do you need to do then? Well, you need to cash in your career capital to make your situation better. That could be either changing your sense, setup at your employer, changing your setup so that you are willing to trade accountability for autonomy. Usually that means I'm going to focus on just this thing, which is much more self-driven,

autonomously executed, as opposed to like juggling a lot of easy things, being a general vessel for like the to-does your boss might have. You say, no, no, I handle this type of thing. So I'm not super accessible and I'm pretty autonomous, but in exchange, you can hold me very accountable. And if I'm not delivering, like, objectively, the numbers are here, this thing is selling, the client dollars are coming through the door, however you measure yourself. If I'm not objectively producing value, then you can get rid of me or movie back to what I was doing before. That type of trade works well here, right? Because, you know, often the thing these types of bosses fear is they're being taken advantage of. Or like, you're not working hard or you want to get out or why do you want to work from home? Why do you want to be less accessible? I'm worried that you're taking. advantage of me when you're able to have accountability. No, no, you're going to look at this number. It's objectified. I'm creating this much value. It gets rid of that fear and it allows them to be like, okay, you're doing that. Great. And I'll go bother these other people with my email. The other thing you might do is just find better bosses. What should you be looking for?

When you're looking for a job, what should you be working for when it comes to these type of issues? I always say the main thing you should be looking for is not a particular idea that they subscribe to about management or work or time management. What you should be looking for is an interest and openness to systems. Bosses that say, okay, you have a way you want to organize your work. You have a reason you want to do it that way. Great. I love that initiative.

Try it. Let's see how it goes. You want to have bosses that if you ask them, like, what's your time management philosophy, that they're going to go roll a whiteboard into the room and be like, sit down. It's going to take a while. like bosses who think a lot about the actual structuring organizational work because they are going to be more open and adaptable to you actually trying systems of work that's going to be less frenetic, less hyperactive hive mind, less overload, less context switching.

I think anti-system bosses, like the types of bosses you have, are a real problem. And we don't qualify or quantify the impact of that problem enough. I think bosses that demand responsiveness have no interest in systems, have no interest in good or bad ways to work, but just sort of see it more as like, do you respond to me and I want to make sure no one's pulling a fast one on me? Like, that's as bad as having like a verbally abusive boss. That's as bad as having an incompetent boss.

That's as bad as having a boss whose behavior directly conflicts with your ethical values. And we should treat it as such. Like I really care about is this a workplace? that respects the way the human brain functions and is open to people being critical and systematic about how they approach their day and their time and their work.

And if it's not, I mean, I think you need warning sirens going. We should be more willing to see that as being a major problem. If more people push back about that, if more people chose employers based on that, if more people left employers based on that, I think employers would get better.

So I think anti-system bosses, we should treat that as the problem that it is. So I emailed with Trevor a little bit. He's the overall boss, and these are two managers below him. But I think the same advice probably holds true in terms of... Oh, that's change. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.

Oh, then you have some leverage there, Trevor. Give them the three books. And if they don't do it, you can get rid of them. Yeah, and have systems. Like, read the books, work with them. So how do you want to structure your workloads? How do you want to structure your communication? Like, what's going on?

Put the ideas from the books in place. have them read the book so they understand the underlying ideas, I think they'll come around because it's like a much better way to work. The people who have trouble with the more systematic way of working are the people who are leveraging the smokescreen of artificial busyness to get away with not actually doing work. Those are the people who have trouble. The people will say, wait a second,

if I actually have to go and execute hard things on a schedule, it's going to require a lot of focus on organization, it's not going to be easy and it might not go well unless I give it my full attention. some people look at that and say, I can't do that or I have no interest in doing that? Can't I just like jump back and forth on a bunch of emails and calls and be busy and be in the mix of things and kind of just give the pseudo-productive sense that like I'm around? Right. Those people sometimes struggle when you try to get more systematic. But that's great because you don't want those people, at least not in that type of position.

If it's in a cognitive production oriented position, you need people who can actually do the hard cognitive work of producing value. Yeah. All right. So Trevor, you're in a better situation I thought. but that other advice holds for anyone whose bosses above them are really being a problem. What do we got next, Jesse? Next question is from Blake. I'm a physician, and as I understand it, my interactions with patients is considered deep work.

The problem is that I have to contact switch all day between different patients. Physicians are evaluated by volume. Quality doesn't matter. To my managers, I just need to avoid a lawsuit. How do I navigate this situation in a deep manner? Well, there's two related issues here. There's a specific issue of modern medical practice and the volume of patients. That's a big problem.

Not a problem I'm going to be able to solve. That's a problem with medical care and reimbursement in this country. But your first issue is important because it gets to a general point that I think applies to a lot of people, which is what is the scale at which you're measuring deep work? Right. So you're saying you're thinking about each patient engagement as a standalone deep work session. And it is deep work. Like you're dealing with a patient, what's happening? You're bringing in a lot of information.

You're putting in the context. You're trying to figure out what's going on. You're looking for subtle patterns and realizing, like, I think it's this, but this symptom over here maybe isn't really fitting with that type of diagnosis and maybe something more complicated is going on. It is, it requires concentration and the application of hard one skill. But where I think you could change your view is you then see moving to the next patient as an unrelated deep work session. I'm going to say instead, why don't we expand the time scale of this deep work and say a morning spent dealing nonstop with patients is one long deep work session. And what happens in this deep work session is like I get different types of problems come at me and I have to kind of keep my focus steady and not get too distracted and be able to pivot from this to that and back to this. And it's all medical and it's all diagnoses and I'm in that context.

See that as your deep work session. increasing the scale is often helpful in this way because what happens otherwise, if you think, okay, this patient's one session, that patient is another session, you're going to release your focus in the two minutes in between. All right. I'm going to like look at my phone. What's going on with sports? What's going to? And you're going to introduce this concentration, sapping distraction into your kind of cognitive context. Whereas instead, you say, okay, here's my three hour deep work session.

I'm going to get through 15 patients. Let's keep our focus to see if we can do this. it's going to be much more sustained. I think the scale idea makes more sense when you look at other types of examples is more obvious. So if you're a math student, you have a problem set, right?

Ten problems. You want to say, well, my problem is I keep having to switch my context because first I'm working on this problem and then I have to work on this problem, which is a different problem, and then I'm working on this third problem, and it's dealing with something different,

and my context switch. Like, no, no, working on the problem set is one context. You're in the world of doing math problems. It's like a radio host, like what I'm doing now. I see answering these five questions I'm answering as a deep work session, not five deep work sessions that are kind of unrelated. So in general, think about this. If you worry that your deep work is too fragmented,

but what's happening is you have one deep work requiring thing after another, start treating that whole thing as one big set. It changes your mindset. You pace yourself. You maintain better concentration. And I think it just works out better. All right. Who do we got next?

Next up is Laura. I have a remarkable two tablet. And while I love it, I'm still drawn to using other planners and single purpose notebooks. How do I merge these tools? I'm feeling a bit of notebook overwhelmed. I think of my remarkable two as like a stack of a bunch of notebooks put into one. So however many notebooks you have in. you're remarkable two. You're saving yourself having to carry or keep track of that many notebooks.

I also don't have everything in my remarkable two. Mainly I do single purpose, single purpose notebooks. I still do those. Almost everything else I guess I do have my remarkable too. I've got my planner, obviously, time block planner's paper. I don't do that in my remarkable. I have single purpose notebooks. I don't have any going right now. But when I'm working on a new big project, I'll pull that out to really get into it. Small field note notebook just for working on a single project. And most everything else I keep in my remarkable. So I think it's okay if you have some other notebooks. If you have other sort of physical notebooks that aren't single purpose, you just sort of are using pages of some normal notebook or legal pad to work on something, you might want to bring that

back to your remarkable too. I kind of like the discipline of like this is just like my general purpose notebook for working out anything that needs to be worked out because now you have a nice copy of everything and you only have to bring one thing with you. But I think a planner plus remarkable plus single purpose notebooks, that's a completely fine combination. To me, that makes a lot of sense. Remarkable. All right, who we got? Next up is Natasha. Have you considered adding the category creativity to the deep life buckets of craft contemplation community in celebration? I guess this could fit into craft category, but I think it goes deeper than that. Well, when it comes to of Deep Life buckets, the key is having buckets.

The particular collection of buckets you have is somewhat arbitrary, right? So, like, the whole idea here is just to make sure that when you are reflecting on what matters to your life, that you're not getting myopic, that you're not having all of your attention snap into just one aspect of your life, such as your career. And so having the different areas broken out allows you to look at each of those areas separately and have a part of your vision for the life well-lived that touch. on each of those areas, right? So when you're creating that master narrative, your ideal lifestyle, these buckets are going to help you be sufficiently broad in that thinking. When you're

trying to take action to get closer towards your ideal lifestyle, these buckets will help you divide those actions among different areas that are important, right? So having buckets is critical. The specific buckets you use, it doesn't really matter. It'll probably change them. So for example, I've been experimenting recently with a different set of bucket definitions that are based off of a body metaphor. So I'll run this by you quickly. I should do a whole episode on this,

but just to give you a sense, like something I've been messing around with, because it actually works kind of well. It's not alliterative, but it's based on the body. So think about this. You have, when think about your ideal life, the head,

so this is where you're thinking about your mental life, your intellectual life. It's things like ideas and reading and what quiet and what role your phone plays in your life and the type of stuff we're playing in the deep dive. That's covered in your head in this metaphor. You have the heart. That covers relationships.

Connection to community, to family, to other people, right? So that's where you deal with like the role of other people in your life. Hands, this is sort of corresponds to craft. your work, like what it is that you're actually creating, but also like skilled pursuits that may be nonprofessional, like hobby type pursuits. But it's craft in general.

We think about like what you're building things with your hands. So it's like producing new things of value in the world and enjoying the process of doing it yourself. This is kind of stretching the body a little bit, but we could say the soul, the deal with philosophical, theological type of issues that are critical to your conception of your life to well lived. And then here's a new one I added.

So, Jesse, this didn't fall under the alliterative buckets that had the seas in it. Feet, and I don't know if you can guess, but what I'm thinking about for feet is the places you live and exist. So that's thinking about on the big scale, like where I live, you know, what city do I live in? What type of house door? In that city, where do I live? Like, it could be those type of decisions. But it can also be the spaces in the place you already live. So like the renovation I'm doing on the maker lab of the HQ,

that would also be something that would fall under the feet, the feet component of this type of deep life decomposition. It's like where you, the places you stand. That's one, it's coming up and I'm working on my deep life book. It's coming up that, uh,

we didn't deal enough with that probably in the show, but like the places in which you exist play a big role in like your perception of life, your spaces are like. So I'm messing around with that. It's a body metaphor. You know, I don't know. Maybe something else works as well.

What I'm trying to emphasize there is you do need categories for understanding the parts of your life that are important to you. But my categories might be different than yours. And your categories might change over time. Just like now I've moved on from the illiterative seas to try and out body metaphors. All right. Ooh, are we up to the slow, looks like this slow productivity corner? We are. All right.

So let's hear that theme music. For those who are new, the slow productivity corner is where we take a question that is relevant to my most recent book, slow productivity, the lost art of accomplishment without burnout. If you have not yet read that book, you should get it wherever books are sold. A large fraction of what we talk about on the show is based at least in some part of what we talked about that book. So it's sort of like the user guide, the deep questions. All right, Jesse, what's our slow productivity corner question of the week? It's from Susan. Moving away from pseudo work makes me feel very vulnerable.

I went from being able to tell my boss is about 15 teeny incremental updates to only being able to talk about one or two projects at a time. Nobody has jumped down my throat about this, but I'm feeling guilty. My friends are also judging me because I'm not putting in a solid eight hours at the desk. They believe in sit still and look busy. I'll do things like take a nap, hopefully to think better, wander around outside or sit in a comfy chair and journal about a work project to help me come up. with solutions.

Well, Susan, I like the direction you're going. I'm going to give you some reassurance here. First of all, your friends aren't judging you. They don't care. They don't really care about your work habits. Maybe someone made a comment once. I wouldn't worry too much about it. Two, I want to advertise too much.

This is like the hidden secret of people who follow the slow productivity philosophy. You know, you can construct these very sustainable, energizing, productive, professional lives. You're doing stuff that matters, but your life is very sustainable and interesting. We don't advertise it much. Because again, you're right. A lot of people don't get it. They are caught up in the cult of pseudo work, which as I explained in the book is where you believe that visible activity is the best proxy for useful effort. And to that mindset, anything that reduces work in the moment is dangerous. So just don't advertise. Take your naps, sit in your company chair, but maybe just don't tell people that's what you're doing.

They're probably not going to reassure you because they don't understand. And also, they probably don't care that much. Third, you need to focus on part three of the slow productivity framework. So you're doing the first two parts, doing fewer things, working in a natural pace, excellent. To make that work in a way that is sustainable, that doesn't make you feel guilty or similarly build up like a resentment towards work in general is quality. you need to become obsessed with the quality of what you produce now that you're doing fewer things at a natural pace. You need to get obsessed about the quality of what you produced

in a way that you didn't have to bother when you're doing 15 things. It's impossible to do anything that well anyways, you're doing 15 things. You're getting credit for being busy. Now you're going to get credit for doing things well. And as you start delivering things that catch people's attention as being unusually good,

the scrutiny on you will go down and your self-scrutiny on your behavior is going to reduce as well. You're going to feel more confident in this new approach to work. So be careful about your time, time block plan, make sure that you're giving large blocks of focused work on the things that matter. Adopt a deliberate practice mindset where you're trying to deliberately get better at the skills that you're applying in your work. You're like an athlete training to get a better free throw percentage or to cut some time

off of your mile run time. So you want to be practicing systematically to get better. get obsessed with quality, and then you'll feel much better about the other parts about your life that are now getting more sustainable. That's the whole mix that makes this whole thing work. You're not doing too much,

your pace is varied, but the stuff you're doing is very good. You have to have all three. I think as you obsess over quality and as you see the tangible results of that obsession, you're going to feel much better. So you're on the right track.

Slow productivity is such a better way to approach the working world. to keep it up, but get the quality in your crosshairs as well, because that's going to make this whole thing work. All right, let's hear that music one more time. All right, usually around this time in the show, we like to take a call from a reader or listener, I suppose. It's hard, Jesse.

I have so many different ways that people encounter me. They watch me, they listen to me, and they read me. So I have to kind of get that straight. We'll say listeners. All right. So do we have a call from a listener this week? We do. All right.

Hi, Kellanjassy. My name is Nancy and I live in Brussels, Belgium, in Europe. I have a question about episode 319. You tell us that when you did deep work and you've been disturbed, it takes about 20 minutes to refocus to do deep work again. But what about the Pomodoro Technique? Because then you work for 25 minutes and you take a five minute break and then you work again for 25 minutes. does it match with the 20 minutes it takes to regain focus? Thank you. Bye. That's a very good question. Actually, interestingly, you know, the 20 minute, that specific quantity, I was having a hard time remembering exactly where that particular number came from.

Now, the fact that it takes a long time on the scale of many minutes to return your focus after distraction. That is well known in multiple different studies. You can look, for example, at Sophie Leroy's work on attention residue, among others that have quantified this. But if you go back and read Sophie's papers, for example, she doesn't quantify exactly how long it takes. But I had this 20 minutes. I've always used this 20 minutes. I couldn't remember where it came from until I was researching for the deep dive at the beginning of the episode. I was going back to Winifred Gallagher's book, Rapped. And I discovered. Oh, that's where it's from.

She talks to a cognitive scientist in that book who's talking about the distraction and bringing your attention back. And he gives that exact number. It takes about 20 minutes to get your attention back after you're distracted. So it's like I rediscovered where that specific value came from. Clearly, it's not so precise. It could be seven minutes. It could be 27 minutes. It kind of depends.

But it's many minutes. Okay. So back to the Pomodoro technique. For that to work. So you're talking about 25 minutes on 5. five minutes off. For that to work, you can't initiate a significant context switch in the five minutes off. Back in the old days of my newsletter and blog, I had a term for this, I called it deep breaks. What you're doing if you want the Pomodoro technique to succeed, what you're doing during that time off is you're giving your brain a breather, but you're not distracting your brain.

So it's like, okay, I bring the intensity down, but then I walk to get coffee and come back. I go down the hallway and back. I stretch out and then do my next Pomodoro. What you can't do is expose your brain during that short break to highly salient distractions that are unrelated to the task at hand. So if you look at your email, if you look at social media, right, or start a conversation with a colleague about an unrelated project during that break, your next Pomodoro is going to be much worse. You probably won't, as you said in the call, you probably won't get your full concentration back towards the end of that Pomodoro.

A couple of things I would say, though, in addition to deep breaks, is if you're going to do a Pomodoro type technique, I call it interval training, concentration interval training. I would probably start, I guess 25 minutes is a good place to start, but you want to increase that duration as you get comfortable, right? once you can hit those 25 minutes without it being too much of a cognitive strain, make it 35. Once you can do 35 minutes without it being too much of a cognitive strain, make it 45. So maybe you want to do a week or two at each duration. You want that duration of comfortable focus to get pretty close to about 90 minutes, then you're set.

If you can keep focus on something for 90 minutes, it's not easy. But without it being, like a real impossibility where like your attention, just wanders off and you run out of steam and your mind can't tolerate it. If you can like consistently do 90 minute blocks, think about that as like you have trained the fitness of your brain to a level that like you can do some damage now with deep work. All right. So the first part of my advice is if you're taking short breaks in between sprints,

you can't expose yourself to highly salient distractions. I mean, if you really need to look at something, make it non-super engaging and super unrelated to your work. like you could look at baseball trade rumors on a break from like academic work because it's you know it's just like kind of interesting but it's not something that's going to capture your attention or create a lingering sense of distraction all right so that's my advice take deep breaks expand those Pomodoro sessions over time until they're much longer than 25 minutes all right i think now we have a case study this is where you my listener send

in your own accounts of putting the type of things we talk about on the show in the practice in your own life. Today's case study comes from Yail. Jail says, I've been a long-time reader and listener, and your advice has guided me well. I wanted to share some recent developments in my life as a case study. I'm a 39-year-old social psychologist, and as my children grew older, I felt the need for a career change. This led me to enroll in a master's program in counseling psychology at a prestigious

university in New York. your voice kept echoing in my mind, encouraging me to build on the skills and abilities I've developed over the years, which influenced my decision. During the first semester of the program, I used a time-blocking method. I even bought your journal, though I never wrote in it. I still planned my days on a simple notepad with your journal as inspiration. My grades were all A's. I submitted every assignment ahead of time and received excellent feedback. But that's not all.

During this first semester, I conducted meaningful research, built connections with a well-known professor, and presented our preliminary findings at a major conference in New York City. I also used to run a large Facebook group where I shared my thoughts and interesting discoveries from my reading and research. I loved how quickly I could jot down ideas and receive immediate reactions. However, it eventually became too time-consuming without much tangible benefit. I've often heard you explain how we like to believe things will work a certain way, like gaining popularity through social media and being discovered,

but that's not how things usually unfold in the real world. instead I've shifted my focus to writing my thoughts more coherently and I've started publishing them in a widely read newspaper. I like this case study for a couple of reasons. One, there's a good reminder here for students, which is that being systematic about the job of being a student will make you a very good student. Most students are terrible at being a student.

They don't manage their time. They don't have a realistic plan for how they're going to get their things done. They give no foresight to how they're going to approach their assignments, what techniques work, what don't. They don't adjust their approaches based on what they learn in practice. And because of that, if you are focused and systematic, it's a major advantage. And I hear from especially students coming back later in life, because students coming back later in life are much more likely to treat it like a job. I hear from these type of students again and again, I'm crushing it, right? Because I'm treating this like a job.

I'm an adult. So all students out there take this lesson to heart. If you apply the type of advice we talk about here to student life, you are going to seem like a superstar. I also like the point here about the Facebook group. It's easy to write stories about something and what it's going to do and why it's good, but the story isn't necessarily true. And you have to be willing to act on what you discover. So like, yeah, you're like, I'm on this Facebook group and I'm publishing stuff and I get feedback. And I have a story that this is important for my ideation because it's kind of

fun. And I have a deeper story that maybe I'm going to be discovered and go viral and it's going to lead to all these great things. But the reality you discover is like it's distracting me. It takes a lot of time. Maybe it strokes my ego, but it's not helping me get better at what I do. And so Yale said, no, enough of that. I'll do something harder and more traditional like trying to publish in a newspaper, push myself to get better. As she points out, we often tell this story to ourselves about social media. We often tell ourselves a story about how, uh, what we're doing professionally on social media is critical to our success. We have this big audience and we would disappear without it. And the reality is often that's not true. The sense that you

have an audience that cares is something that is carefully constructed by these platforms to keep you using it. But for 99.9% of people and jobs and companies, it's not at the core of doing what you do better. So, Yale, I appreciate that case study. All right, well, we got for our final segment. We'll be talking about the books I read last month, but first, you're from another sponsor. We actually have a new sponsor today. It is a game-changing product that you can use before a night out that will include drinks. The product is called pre-alcohol. Let's be honest, people like Jesse and I were older than we used to be. The 20-year-old Dartmouth student in my path, probably had an easier time having a few drinks with friends than the 42-year-old version of me,

where now you get two beers in and, you know, the next day you're on a stretcher. Or not as, can't party as hard as we used to there, Jesse. But sometimes it's nice to go out and celebrate an event or to go, like, catch up with a good friend. And that's where the idea of pre-alcohol comes in. In particular, the product I want to talk about here is Z-Bi-Bi-Bi- pre-alcohol, probiotic drink. It's the world's first genetically engineered probiotic.

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that business is Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. They're the home of the number one checkout on the planet and the not so secret secret that Shopify boost conversions up to 50% that means there's way less of your shopping carts are going to be abandoned and you're going to get way more sales. So if you're growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell whatever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web in your store, in their feet,

and everywhere in between. Shopify helps you at every one of these places. when we open up our long, I'm going to say like long anticipated, but probably Jesse the right phrase is like our long feared online deep questions store. Of course Shopify is what we're going to use. It's easy.

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Get the same checkout they all use. Sign up for your one. per month trial period at Shopify.com slash deep, but type that in all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash deep to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, let's get to our final segment. All right. It's the first episode in a new month. I want to review the five books I read in the month before. We'll be talking now about the books I read in September 2024. The first book I read, was The Devil's Teeth by Susan Casey.

I am a big Susan Casey fan. I'm actually trying to find a way to interview her because I want to interview her for my new book, maybe even get her on this podcast. If you know, Susan, let me know. But I'm going back and rereading some of the Susan Casey catalog. The Devil's Teeth, I think, was her,

maybe it was her first book. It takes place, so the devil's teeth is referring to the Farallones, or Farallones, I don't know how to pronounce it, islands off the coast of California, right beyond San Francisco. It happens to be the place that has one of the most consistent largest populations

of large Great White Sharks. And it's a typical Susan Casey book, so it is adventure slash science. So she goes out there and she spends time on the island and on a boat off the island and the boat almost sinks. But you learn about the people on the island and the sharks and what they're learning about the sharks.

And Casey does, she's a great writer. It makes sense. I mean, she was the editor at outside during the John Crackhour era. So she really understands how to do adventure writing. I'm actually rereading the wave right now. So I'm kind of in a Susan Casey trip. Her most recent book, which was about deep ocean. Oh, what's it called?

The Underworld. Also fantastic. I recommend it. All right. And then I read The Outrun by Amy Liptrop. It's a memoir. So Amy Liptrot, she grew up. on one of these

small Scottish island, sort of like beyond the Shetland Islands. I don't know the UK geography well,

but I think this is you go north from Scotland and they have these islands that people live on. Grow up on a small island,

escaped to London. I kind of love the city life, but became a really serious alcoholic. Returns to this island where she grew up

is a memoir. Return to this island is part of her process of getting sober. So it's kind of a memoir of that return to the island

and rediscovering herself and finding sobriety. She's a very good writer. I think I was attracted to it because I was attracted to these islands. It was cool to hear about what life is like on these small windswept North Atlantic Scottish islands. All right. Then I read The Amateurs by David Halberstam. This is about rowers, scholars, preparing for

84 Olympics, I think? I don't know. Which ones do we boycott, Jesse? Was that 1980? I can look it up. Well, anyways, it follows a group of scholars who are preparing to compete

for the spots on the Olympic team for one of the Olympics in the 80s. It's called the amateurs because the point was scolding was like kind of one of the last truly amateur sports at the Olympics in that there is no professional career in it.

These are people doing it in their own time. And Halberstan follows four or five of these characters. They're all ex-Ivey League rowers who are basically scolling full-time and trying to compete for these spots. And it's good. I mean, clearly he was influenced by John McPhee. There's definitely a levels of the game, sense of the game type vibe to this book.

maybe more detail than you really want to hear. I guess if I'm going to critique, it's a famous book. These people aren't that interesting. The story is kind of the same. They went to Yale. They wanted their dad's approval because they weren't playing football

like their dad and their grandfather and the great-grandfather did. They get in the rowing. They have freak bodies for rowing. They get really good at rowing. All they do is row. Rowing really hurts. They want to win the Olympics.

You kind of hear the story. story again and again. The main variation is, I think, one of them with the Harvard. But that's the thing. He really gets into the pain of competitive sculling, though, too. Like, it's just, part of it is just pain tolerance. Yeah.

For the last 500 meters when it's all lactic acid. But it's a classic book, and it really gives you a sense of rowing. It actually got me, I'm back on a rowing program. So it had that effect. I'm getting back in rowing shape. Because I have this dream of when I take my next sabbatical, getting back on the river. Yeah, there's a couple of boathouses around.

Do you know there's like a real serious boathouse in D.C.? Yes, I do because the Potomac. My buddies rode in college, and I think he was. Yeah, I think it's the Potomac Boat Club. Has some Olympians to train there. Oh, okay. Interesting. All right.

Then I read, and this has turned out to be timely, but I didn't know it at the time, The Machine by Joe Posnansky, the baseball columnist. The machine is about that famous 1970s era Reds team with Pete Rose and Johnny Bench that went on to win the World Series. And it's a baseball book that follows that season. And it's good. I mean, it's a well-covered season. He had a lot of – Puznansky had a lot of sources to pull from. He's a classic baseball columnist, so you're going to get that kind of classic baseball

baseball column style, which is like a very, if you haven't read these type of classic baseball books, you know, be prepared. It's a very specific way of writing that's like it's high energy.

It's sort of in the room. It's kind of like psychologically, like you're inside the minds of the players, like how they're feeling about things and it like moves around. But it also has a sort of old timey feel. It's a real stylized thing, but a well-written book. But anyways,

Pete Rose just died a couple days ago after, before recording this. So it's kind of sad. But it's a good look at that. Good look at that team. The one flaw from a baseball perspective is, I mean, look, this team, there's called a big red machine they used to call it. It had a fantastic offense.

But it doesn't matter how good your offense is. You win the World Series. You have to have your pitching just working, right? And in this book, man, the pitching doesn't come up that much. Like, they're pitching. It's fine. But it's like Pete Rose and how. he was hitting or this or that.

The other thing that seemed that caught my attention is the way Posnanski talks about hitting, it seems to be just a force of will. Like Rose was mad and wanted some hits and tried really hard and got a lot of hits, as opposed like the reality of hitting, which is like a game of timing and adjustments and trying to figure out what's going on with my swing and like what do I need to adjust it, what are the pictures trying to do with me? Modern hitting is a cat and mouse game where you are studying that picture

in the dugout and trying to understand, okay, here's what they're going to come at me with and here's my strategy to go after it. It's not just, I got mad, and I'm going to have a big game, and then you hit it. You can't force yourself to hit.

The last book I read, this is kind of crazy. I count books in the month I finish them. I've been like kind of slowly reading this book in the background for a long time. it's not really a book you're supposed to read through, but I did anyways. It's called You Shall Be Holy by Joseph Toluskin. This is a book on ethics,

and it's like a reference book. I mean, it's 600 pages, doorstop, and it's like topic by topic, and then with each topic, it's broken down in the numbered subtopics, and it's, here's the ethical thing here, here, here's citation for this, citation for that. It's kind of like a manual. But, you know, look, I'm a member of the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown.

I'm the director of the computer science, ethics, and society academic program at Georgetown. I'm more involved in my academic life at the intersection of ethics and technology, and I was thinking, I need to know more ethics. Now, there's the sort of formal study of ethics, like coming out of philosophy, and you can study Kant and all this sort of normative thinking. But I was like, I just need to, like, brush up. on like what do our ancient sources tell us about what's good and what's bad in certain situations. So I figure, okay, if you want to keep going back, you're eventually going to end up at Jewish sources. So much of the ideas of modern Western ethics originate and ideas to go all the way back to the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible, which then influenced Christianity, influenced Islam, and then influenced Enlightenment, human right-based thinking.

all of that goes back to ideas that were being worked out in the second millennium BC. So it's like, great, I'm going to read a book. This is Jewish ethics. So it goes through just super systematically. Like, well, here's what we know about this from Torah or what Talmud says here, what a medieval commentary says here. It's just systematic. At some point, I was like, I'm just going to read this whole thing. I'm just going to, like, load into my head a whole bunch of like pre-classical sort of like ancient ethical thinking.

the foundations that develop into the ways we think about these things today. So I read the whole thing. They give scenarios? Yeah. No, and it's like super, it gets super precise. Like, okay, we're gossip, right? We're talking about gossip. It's going to really break down in the subcategories.

Like, okay, but what happens if, what about the situation in which you're gossiping about another person, but that gossip could prevent the person you're gossiping to from being defrauded. So it's like the prohibition of gossip or the need to help your friend from being different. Like what takes precedence?

Like, well, in that case, you should help your friend from being defrauded but minimize the information you give so that it's sufficient to avoid that but no more than that because then you're reveling in the gossip. It's like, you know what I'm saying?

It's like categories, subcategory, subcategory. And it's meant as a reference book. Oh, I want to know about what is Jewish ethics they about this issue. I'll go to the chapter and then go to the subchapter and you look it up. But I just read the whole thing through. And I just did it at night. I just read like 20 pages.

And then it became like a nice, like, meditative background. I don't even know when I started that. But I finished it last month. So I count it. Here's the bad part, though. It's volume one. How many volumes? I don't know.

I think, I think two or three, but I think I got, I think I got it. I think I got a lot of ethics out of volume one. All right. Well, anyways, those are the books I read back in September. I'll report back in October what I'm reading right now. Okay, I think that's all the time we have. Jesse. Thank you, everyone, for listening to the show.

We'll be back next week with a new episode. 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, you're 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.