Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep 33: Rethinking Delegation, Pandemic Childcare, and Balancing Deep Work with Deep Hobbies

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about the hidden difficulties of delegation, the impact of pandemic childcare on productivity (hint: it's not good), and the balance between deep work and deep hobbies, among many other topics.To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. You can submit audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportPlease consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners decide to try the show).Thanks to our sponsor Optimize. For a free trial and 10% off go to optimize.me/DEEP.Thanks to our sponsor Blinkist. For a free trial and 25% off go to blinkist.com/DEEP.  Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:WORK QUESTIONS  * Spreading yourself too thin [11:11]  * Willpower fatigue [16:58]  * Deciding when to delegate [20:06]  * Work hour equity [23:03]  * Pandemic-induced childcare [28:45]  * Digital minimalism in the entertainment industry [34:19]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS * Storing longterm notes [43:38] * The value of site/app blocking software [45:22] * Concentration and pornography (rant alert) [46:44]BACKSTAGE PASS [54:50]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS * Deep work versus deep hobbies [1:00:49] * Stopping ruminations [1:03:57] * Binging on productivity videos [1:07:47] * Seeking depth when hopelessly distracted [1:10:32]Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. 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 where I answer questions for my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. Now, in the introduction to last Thursday's Habit Tuned Up mini episode, I mentioned that a topic I have been interested in recently is household productivity. When it comes to productivity systems for the workplace, we have a lot of big ideas. there's a lot of thinking about this. There's a lot of discussion about how you organize work tasks,

how you execute work tasks, how you keep track of work tasks. I don't think we have, as I mentioned in that episode, enough thinking about the work that happens outside of the office, the work that's required to run a family, to run a household, just to have land, to have cars, all the stuff that requires time and attention,

all the stuff that creates a large, incoming flow of often ambiguous tasks, We don't think enough about that. So that's what I've been trying to do recently. I'm trying to think through, experimentally speaking, what are some good best practices for managing the load of stuff that happens outside of work? All right, so I promise I'm going to share a few ideas. These are things I've tried before or things that I'm thinking about trying.

So here's my three ideas for being productive, but in stuff that happens outside of work. One, automation, to the extent that is possible, I think is very useful. So what you're trying to avoid, at least this is my philosophy of household work. What you're trying to avoid is having things that exist only in your head. You know, just knowing in the back of your mind, we should probably clean the gutters. Knowing in the back of your mind, you know, this radiator has a leak. Maybe we need to do something about that.

getting that out of your head, I think, is very important. So things that show up maintenance like household or car maintenance, but also physical maintenance like the dentist, the doctor, etc. Have that automated. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to remember to do it. You have, let's say, calendar reminders on your calendar. So when you get to the time of year, you're supposed to do a gutter cleaning.

You get an email from Google Calendar. Gutter cleaning. Here's the name of the company we use. here's the number, rock and roll. Dentist appointment time, you know, here you go. Whatever requires you not to have to remember in the moment, oh, this is something I should do, let me go set that up, I think is better. When it's possible, for example, to set appointments at the end of the existing appointment

for something that happens regularly, that sounds like a small thing. I think it makes a big difference. Like, this is how I handle my haircuts. When I'm done getting my haircut, I say, let me while I'm here schedule the next haircut. I never want to have to think, ooh, I think I need a haircut. Maybe I should schedule it.

I want it just to be on my calendar when I get there. I go. Same thing with like dentist appointments, right? That's why they have you schedule your next cleaning when you finish the current cleaning. You don't want to have to just remember, you know, it's been a while.

I should probably go to the dentist. You just want it to happen. All right. So that's one idea. It's sort of automation of reminders, so it's not in your head. I think we neglect capture too much in life outside of work.

there is a ton of things incoming in life outside of work. Some come in through mailboxes like letters and bills and notices and some just pop up. You notice something, you see something that needs to be fixed, you remember something in a conversation. You see that one of your kids' shoes is getting scuffed up. Like, oh, we probably need to get new shoes. There is a ton of information, incoming information about things that you need to do. We need trusted capture systems. You have to have capture systems that you trust.

You can get that stuff out of your head. and know it will be processed. Some of that has to be physical. I think a physical inbox where you can put letters and notices and bills. It makes a lot of sense. You know, you might even do the old David Allen trick. When he was talking about full capture, we obviously had computers, we had email,

but it was more of an analog world back then. And he really liked this idea of physical inboxes. And for non-physical items, like you remember, my kid needs new shoes, you have like a stack of index cards next to the inbox and you write kids shoes

on an index card you throw it in the box you literally have a physical pile that represents things that you need to do that have not been processed we need good capture systems like that I think we underestimate the amount of

unnecessary stress and anxiety that we are inducing in our lives outside of work by trying to keep track of so many things in our head finally, in my experience, I hate that this is true, but I think it is true. Probably 30 to 60 minutes most days needs to be put aside just for processing and trying to act on some stuff. To process those inboxes and just to try to make progress on some things. There have been times of my life when I do this and I'm always happier when I do.

The first time I did this is when my wife and I years ago bought our first house. there was so many new logistics about being homeowners that we had not had to face before that I eventually just put aside 30 minutes every single morning before I started work. And that's what I did. That's what I think if I remember correctly, it was like the first 30 minutes after our nanny got there. But before I'd start work. So as soon as I handed off the kids, but before I would start work, I would do 30 minutes.

and it was just generically put aside. There was always stuff to do. Oh, well, let me work into the car registration. I got to figure out this thing about the insurance. Let me process these things. There's always enough to do. Now, I remember that really did make a difference. Probably we need to be doing that almost every day.

All right. Anyways, those are just some ideas I had, but I think the underlying point here is a big one. We underestimate the cognitive burden, the stress and anxiety caused by our obligations outside of work. We like to think about it as like, well, work is really hard and then we just have some, you know, you have some stuff we have to keep up with for life outside of work. No. Household obligations, obligations outside of work can be as

burdensome, as voluminous, as anxiety provoking, as a full-time job. And if we don't take it seriously, then all of the type of bad things that we're trying to avoid in our work in terms of overload and stress, we're just going to get them immediately once we're home from work. All right. So anyways, I'm continuing to brainstorm on this topic, but it is very much. one that does interest me. So moving on with the show, let's do our spotlight review of the week. This is an actual five-star review from iTunes, and today's five-star review comes from JS8141902. Probably not his or her real name, but hey, you never know. Could be like one of Elon Musk's children or something like that. If you don't know what that means, look up Elon Musk's children's

names and you will get the reference. All right. So this review is titled Helping Me Win at Grad School. J.S. says best and most actionable advice on productivity, not productivity for its own sake, but for building a more impactful career and living a more enriching life. This podcast in all a cow's writing digs deep into the 20% of the 80-20 rule. I reread Cal's, I reread Cal's book deep work at the start of every semester. Having this podcast is like getting personal coaching two times a week to keep me

motivated, focused, and deliberate about the valuable work I need and want to do, and how best to do it. Well, JS-841902, I appreciate that review. As I appreciate all reviews, as I've mentioned, subscription reviews and ratings is how this podcast spreads. So thank you all for that support. Now, if you want to contribute your own questions for the Deep Questions podcast, you should sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. Once every month or so, I send out a survey to that mailing list, soliciting the questions that I ask.

Also, you get my weekly articles I write on the same type of topics that I tackle in this podcast. We have a great group of questions that tackle in today's episode, but before we get started, let's take a brief moment to hear from one of the sponsors that makes deep questions possible. Are you looking to supercharge your quest to cultivate a deep life? Then I highly recommend Optimize. As I've mentioned in last Thursday's episode, I've been friends with Optimize as co-founder for many years. I have followed this company for many years.

I use their service. So what do you get if you're a member of Optimize? you get access to over 600 of Brian Johnson's Philosopher's Notes. These are detailed and erudite summaries of very impactful books, books that will help you understand how to transform your life into a deeper life. You also get access to over 50 101 courses. These are video lectures from experts on how to take major action towards improving your life. I have filmed one of these.

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The reason why the service works is because all of this content comes out of the mind of Brian Johnson. Brian lives a semi-monastic life that is centered around deep work and thinking and contemplation. He is driven to helping people live a better life. I probably can't give a lot of these names publicly, but there's a lot of high-profile people who use Optimize as a way of actually optimizing their own existence. So what I want to say is that if you are interested in cultivating a deep life, this is a great resource.

You get a 14-day free trial at Optimize.me slash deep. That's optimize.m.m.m. slash deep. And if you use a coupon code deep, if you decide to ultimately sign up after your 14-day free trial, you're going to get 10% off that cost. Check it out. You want more depth. Optimize. will help you get there. So let's get rolling with some work questions. Our first question is from Nick, who asks,

do you ever wonder if you are spreading yourself too thin? Would your contribution to computer science have been greater if you did not have six other jobs? Well, Nick, that's a good question. Now, to clarify, some of those other jobs are unavoidable

regardless of whatever else I was doing. So some of those six jobs are put in place by the university, like taking on administrative positions within the department. That would be there, whether or not I had my writing career or not. Some of those jobs involve my kids, like homeschooling, that type of thing. That would be there regardless as well.

But it is true. My professional attention does get some division between core computer science publications and the type of writing and podcasting I do about technology and culture. If I did no writing, if I was only focused on computer science, I think yes, I would probably publish more. Maybe I'd have some more higher impact results. Now that being said, I'd publish a bit, quite a bit. I've had some high impact results. I'm pretty happy with my record on core computer science, but I think it would be better. If I could dedicate a lot more time to it, I think more would come out.

That's a pretty straightforward equation. Similarly, if I was not a professor, if I was writing full time, I would probably produce more. So if you go back and listen to last week's episode with Ryan Holiday, here's an example of someone who puts his full-time job into this type of writing. He publishes books at a faster rate than I do. I mean, he publishes books at a faster rate than almost anyone. But he also produces quite a bit of content. You'll notice.

He has multiple different daily email subscription list like the Daily Stoic, but also the Daily Dad. he has a daily podcast. He publishes books once every three months, roughly speaking, or at least it seems that way. So yeah, I would be publishing more non-computer science work if I wasn't a computer scientist. So why do I do both? Well, three reasons. I mean, one, I like both of those things. I really like doing core computer science research. Some of the most intellectually stimulating things I do is try to solve these essentially math problems

with really smart collaborators and try to get them published in places that are incredibly competitive. I just really enjoy that. I think it pushes my brain to an extreme, and I really like when people build on my work. But here, I'm typing as I, as we speak here, I am typing into my computer

So here we go. Let me get my statistics here. All right. So I'm looking at Google Scholar. You know, I've been cited over 4,000 times, my pure academic work, and I have an H index of 30. It means I have 30 papers that have been cited 30 times or more. Those are good numbers. And I really like that. I really enjoy it. I also really enjoy writing books that have a high impact. I like writing articles for places like New Yorker or Wired or the New York Times. I like doing podcasting, having a way of connecting with my audience, answering questions. I mean, I think I have a good mind for advice.

I think I have a good mind for ideas. It's a skill I've always had that I can sort of assess a situation. I can assess the situation and sort of get some sort of understanding of what's going on. What are the hidden forces? What's the system that's going to help here? Get away the noise and get to the signal. And so I enjoy it as well. So I enjoy both.

So that's an important reason. two, I think there is conciliance. These aren't two different jobs. I'm an academic, I'm an intellectual, I'm in the technology sphere. Some of what I do is produce highly technical papers talking about computer science theory. Part of what I produce is more public-facing writing or podcasting about, roughly speaking, the impact of technology and culture, depth and increasingly technologically distracted world. These are all reasonable things to be produced by an intellectual.

who deals in the space of technology and culture more broadly. So I don't see these as competing jobs that much. I see these all as part of the output that you might expect from a public-facing intellectual. And then finally, I do find that there is a emotional psychological balance that comes from having these two semi-related foci of attention. And this was particularly useful back during, I don't know, maybe like grad school, when imposter syndrome was a much bigger issue. When you're at MIT, imposter syndrome is a huge issue because by a lot of metrics,

you are an imposter because there are just some really brilliant people there, right? And it really helped me that you had these both worlds to go back and forth between. Oh, I'm having a hard publication year. Yeah, but my book did pretty well. or my book's not doing what I was hoping, but my publications are going well. They could balance each other out, and I found it kind of smooth over the psychological or emotional ups and downs of sort of training and developing myself in both of these fields. So, Nick, that's the way I see it.

I could publish more papers. I could publish more books, but I don't think either of those options would be better either for me or for the world. Luke asks, I'm just wondering if you ever suffer from willpower fatigue. I'm a music producer and I love producing music, but sometimes after several hours of working, I will lose focus and it becomes harder and harder for me to keep going. I'd like to be able to work longer hours without this happening. Well, Luke, there's a couple factors going on here.

And to some degree, there is just a limit to how much deep work you can do in any one day. these limits, as I've mentioned before, however, they come from studies of professional musicians, and I think the intensity of focus that's reached when you're practicing your instrument as a professional is up to an order of magnitude larger than the levels of concentration most people obtain doing their sort of normal type of deep work effort. So I don't know to what degree the limits from those research studies, which is roughly around four hours. I don't know to what degree that actually applies to something like producing music. Again, it's just not much hard.

It's cognitively demanding, but it's not this incredibly sustained concentrating so hard you forget to breathe type focus needed to do something like practicing an instrument at a professional level. So I don't think the issue is that you're hitting some upper limit of deep work. So that leaves physical and psychological barriers. Physically speaking, it is demanding to focus. Are you sleeping? you eat very well? Are you in good shape? Are you moving all the time? Right? I mean, are you doing the things you need to be at maximal human physical capacity? That plays a big role in your ability to sustain focus. That sort of internal energy makes a big difference. So getting after your physical

health and fitness makes a big difference if you want your cognitive efforts to be done in a high level. And then at the psychological aspect, you know, our Are you convinced that what you're doing is the right thing to be doing? When you say you're producing music, is it like, yeah, I know what I'm doing here. I'm doing this type of effort, and if I could do more of it, it would be better. You've got to convince yourself that this is a useful effort, and there is reward for you doing more of it. That will reduce the procrastination effect. The more you can streamline your efforts to get rid of friction, you have a really good setup.

You like it. There's not a lot of wasted time or ambiguity. That friction otherwise can burn away your willpower bit by bit. So after a couple hours, you have none left, where if you minimize that friction, you can go much farther. And then finally, just what's the story you tell about yourself? You know, if you convince yourself, like, hey, I'm a Rick Rubin-style character that's going to monastically hold myself up and into my cave-like studios and produce magic,

then your mind's more on board. Yeah, let's keep rolling. Let's keep rolling. So I think the physical and the psychological can help, but also, you know, practice some self-compassion. Hard work is hard. It's not a huge failure if you're not able to do it all the time. Melissa asks, how do I decide what shallow work to delegate? She notes that she's a professor at an R1 school and she's talking about, for example,

sometimes her research has these repetitive tasks that she could hire a research assistant to work on. But the effort involved in hiring and training and supervising the research assistant sometimes seems worse than just doing the work in the first place. So, Melissa, where I've landed on this recently, because I've had a lot of different configurations, I've had assistance, I've had, you know, various publicists work for me in the past. I've had, in the academic context, all configurations of graduate students and postdocs and undergraduate students and various university provided coordinators and assistants. And I've worked with a lot of different configurations.

And basically, I think for people like you or I who don't run businesses, but are basically, you know, what we call ourselves, solo operators, we're like professors or we're writers, I'm going to be careful about delegating. It's usually better just to reduce what's on your plate or simplify what's on your plate so that no delegation is needed, and there's no undue burden on yourself. I think the exception is, you know, if you can isolate a small number of very stably occurring

activities that clearly produce value and clearly take time, okay, then there you might want to have someone to help with it. Like if you're a podcaster and you have someone edit and mix your podcast episodes, and you know that's going to happen every week. You know it's going to be a pain. You know it's going to take up a lot of your time. You know they could do it better. Maybe it's a headache to try to hire someone and train them and get that workflow going, but that's worth it. On the other hand, if you're working on a research project, you're like, oh, there's this one stage of it that would be useful if an assistant did it. I don't know. Maybe it's just worth doing it yourself or designing the research so you don't have too much of those tasks. Basically, you know,

I heard someone say once, and I apologize, I don't remember who said this. But I heard someone say once in the entertainment industry that this urge that a lot of actors have to hire assistance is misguided. This person was saying that if you have enough going on that you feel like you need to hire an assistant, the right answer is to do less stuff. Because it's a weird, as you point out, Melissa, it becomes sort of a mixed bag. There's a lot of cognitive cost, hiring someone, the training someone, the supervising someone, dealing with it when they leave, trying to hire someone new. And so I've been on this sort of essentialism, minimalism kick recently, is how do I, how do I simplify my life to the point where the work I do is pretty straightforward.

I've streamlined it. It gives me a high return for my time. And there's very little that I end up actually needing to delegate. Ben asks, how do you respond to the argument that if people want to work many hours, why should a company stop them? So I actually had to look at the elaboration for this question to understand what's going on. But what Ben is saying is that there is a movement. at least he's heard this discussed among his friends,

that companies should consider putting caps on how many hours you're allowed to work to try to gain some sort of equity in output. The main inequity here being that people that say who don't have kids, they can put in more hours than people that have much more constraints on their time, therefore they're going to get a professional advantage. Ben, based on this elaboration, is not so happy about that idea, and he's basically asking me about it. So, Ben, that's an interesting issue. I agree with you that I don't think it's practical, and I don't think it is advisable to try to limit in these sort of knowledge work settings, the amount of hours that someone wants to put in.

I mean, I think this is always been the case that a hungry 23-year-old that's willing to, stay up late, be like the Tom Cruise character and the firm, you know, or getting there at the office to study for the bar exam at 6 a.m. or whatever, you're going to have the 23-year-old who's doing that, and it's going to accelerate their rise, and they're going to put in more time than the 33-year-old what the families can be able to do. And it's going to be hard to stop that, and I'm not sure if we'd want to stop that.

However, just because we cannot get this sort of perfect level playing field on how many hours are put in. Something I've long been arguing is that we have to go in and at least try to solve the major height mismatches in that playing field, if you'll excuse me, sort of stretching this metaphor, perhaps too far. So I'm not going to tell Tom Cruise in the firm

don't get after and get up early in work. That's not fair because I have kids. But on the other hand, I think there are punitive punishments that are completely unnecessary for people who have, let's say, kids that we could get rid of, and at least make that playing field a little bit more reasonable. Now, the big one I often talk about is that if your organization deploy something like a

hyperactive hive mind workflow, where it's constant interruptions, constant distraction, just things get worked out through emails or slack messages on the fly, ad hoc unstructured messaging, hey, how about this, obligation hot potato, I don't want to deal with this, I'll bounce to you, you bounce something back to me, let's jump on Zoom. if you operate one of these workflows where there is basically no significant periods of time without contact switching.

You're taking this playing field and you're making it incredibly uneven because what happens in those type of organizations? Well, two things. One, deep work gets done only early in the morning and only at night. So now Tom Cruise coming into his law firm and the firm at 6 in the morning.

It's not just that he wants to get a few extra hours, is those are the only hours where deep work can get done. Now, that's a problem because people with kids, for example, don't have the mornings free. They don't have the evenings free. So they basically can get no deep work done, or they have to do it very late at night and sacrifice something like sleep. Now that plane feels getting too uneven. The other thing that happens, if you have this haphazard workflow, where you just rock and roll

and send email some slack messages, is that jerks get an unfair advantage. You know, if there's no real rhyme or reason to how we assign things, if we don't have some common way of saying, what's on everyone's plate, who has room, who should take this on, what's reasonable? If we just throw things out with email, the jerks get less on their plate because they say no, or they're a pain, or you don't want to deal with them. And the people who are nice get a lot more on their plate. So this is something unrelated to kids, but another type of, you get this in equity here that you don't actually. actually want and why do you get it? Because you have no structure. You have no structure on how work is actually tracked. Who's doing what? How do we assign tasks? What's reasonable? What are you working on today? Does that make sense? We just throw it out. Hey, can you do this? What about this? What about this? Obligation hot potato. A new task came into my inbox. I don't want to deal with this. Let me just thoughts, question mark, forward to someone else, right? That takes this playing field,

which is never going to be completely level and puts like giant ravines into it. So Ben, that's what I think. You want to keep the playing field reasonably level, and I think one of the best ways to do that is you have to move past ad hoc unstructured messaging as the foundation for your work and have a much more organized approach to identifying a sign, reviewing, and executing task. That's going to help a lot. That's going to avoid you having a over-the-top punitive cost to be nice versus being a jerk. But then once you've made those changes, you know, that playing field is still not going to be level because you're still going to be the, you know, Tom Cruise character showing up. at six. And, you know, some people might just have more cognitive horsepower going on to someone else. Some people might just genetically be gifted with more discipline and they can stick to their time block schedules better. I mean, it's never going to be completely level playing field. But let's at least try to bulldoze over the giant ditches because that's not helping anybody. Except maybe Tom Cruise at the beginning of the firm. All right. Next question comes from Graham. Graham asked, I am in my last semester as an electrical engineering student.

I have a four-month-old. And because of COVID, I am in charge of the four-month-old during the day while my wife works from home. I've been able to work during naps, then read my baby my notes and explain concepts during her awake periods. Any other advice? Well, Graham, the first thing I would say is that we all need to recognize that trying to work right now if you're in a situation where you don't have child care because of pandemic-related restrictions is basically like trying to get work done in a dumpster fire.

It's a huge crisis. We are not giving enough attention. Public figures just don't want to deal with it because they don't know how and it doesn't play as well as, you know, yelling at the other political team or focusing just on the dashboard numbers that they're worried they're going to get blamed

for and trying to keep those numbers down or whatever it is. But it is a major crisis that we're basically ignoring because no one wants to deal with it. Which is all to say, Graham, be very easy on yourself. Look, you're trying to do something very difficult. And this goes for everyone out there who is in a similar situation where your kid's school or child care is closed and you're trying to somehow make that work with your own work. It's a temporary situation. It is going to get better. while you're in it, you're basically in that dumpster, that dumpster is on fire, and you're trying to keep it from lighting your clothes, right? It's a crisis situation. I think when you acknowledge that, you'll go a little bit easier on yourself. Oral just get really

frustrated with leaders for not talking enough about this either way, but I think that's worth acknowledging. Now, too, Graham, I will say, you are actually in a situation that's in a lot more tractable than most people right now. So I used to actually talk about this. When I would give talks, I would talk about this example of the common scenario of typically be a doctoral student that had a kid as a doctoral student and had no child care because doctoral students have no money and would have to raise a baby while doing, let's say, dissertation work. I used to talk about the degree to which they would actually be surprisingly successful at this. And that for a lot of doctoral students who would actually speed up their progress towards earning a dissertation. Because if you do

exactly what you're doing and clearly identify the small chunks of time you do have available and then try to make the most out of those small chunks of time, it turns out for a lot of academic pursuits, that's sufficient. So if you're writing a dissertation, if you have, like, there's going to be a two-hour nap and then a one-hour time in the evening where, like, your partner has the baby. That three hours a day, if you really get after it, it's usually actually enough to write a really good dissertation. Same thing if you're a student, like the situation you're in where maybe you have some classes to prepare for, you know, if you're like, okay, I have two hours a day and I just very focused study. And maybe I do a little bit of like, like you're doing active recall when the child's

awake. So maybe while I'm pushing her or him in the stroller, or as you say, you're kind of reading the questions to the baby because they don't know. They don't know what you're saying, right? and it turns out, yeah, that's about enough. Now, the reason that works is because I've written about this for years, for a lot of student work at both the undergraduate and graduate level, if you are focused, if you get after it, if you're very organized, you don't actually need that much time. Students actually make those jobs a lot harder than they need to be

by approaching them very casually. Procrastinate on writing, waiting until night, doing work with a split attention, like I'm in the library, and I'm kind of studying, but I'm also looking at my phone. I'm also talking to my friends. I stay up all night. You know, it's easy to transform it into a more time-consuming endeavor. But when you treat it like a professional, like let me lock in, let me go.

I got two hours. Let's do it. That often it turns out to like, okay, this job doesn't need that much time. So Graham, you might be fine with what you're doing. You would not be the first student to have to take care of a baby. A lot of graduate students do this. The only thing I would add in addition to that is use the pandemic-induced extra child care responsibilities as an excuse

to be as irresponsible as possible with other types of professional obligations. You know, if you have an advisor, for example, who's like, well, can you do this? Can you go to this meeting? Can you give a talk for this? Just use that as an excuse. Like, look, I'm drowning here. I'm in the dumpster. The dumpster's on fire. I have to take care of my four-month-old completely because the child care is closed. Use that as an excuse to the extent possible, right? Keep your life outside of just the core academic work you have to do as simple as possible. And that will really help. Again, as a grad student, you can get away with that because there isn't really things you have to do that that's important. But the fact that you can get away with

this probably, Graham, and I think you will and I think you'll be okay. I think just underscores, again, the difficulty of the situation so many other people are in right now who are not grad students. And you have normal jobs. And everyone's just saying, like, well, you know, I think you just need to you need to just keep doing it. It's not my problem. The school's closed. You know? So I have a lot of sympathy.

Again, I think we're in sort of like a national dumpster fire when it comes to work right now. And I think we should all be shouting about that just a little bit more. All right. Let's do one last work question. This one's from Nicholas. He asks, how do you apply digital minimalism to your job when you work in the entertainment industry? He notes that he works for a, he runs actually a digital agency. In his elaboration, he says, I feel overwhelmed by the pressure of the digital environment

and clients who are looking for more and more online presence, more profiles on social networks, more posts, more videos. Well, Nicholas, first of all, we got to clarify terminology. Digital minimalism, at least as I use that term, is not about your professional life. digital minimalism as I lay out of my book is about your uses of technology and your time outside of work. So I don't think it's an appropriate application of that particular term. I think people have read into that term what they want to read into it. I think that the most common misreading of the term digital minimalism is to think that it means that you should minimize the technology you use.

In all aspects of your life, the less technology, the better. That's not what it means. It's actually a philosophy of technology use outside of the professional sphere, which says you should work backwards from the things you care about that choose which tech you use and how you use it. It's about using intention and specificity to help structure the role of technology in your personal life so that you get the most possible value and avoid the most possible cost. Now, what you're talking about, Nicholas, is the world of work. And the big idea I have in the world of work is deep work, which says when you're doing cognitively demanding things, you're going to get a lot more done if you do that work in longer chunks with no context switching, no distractions, just giving it full concentration, and that we have lost track of that.

We try to, we have too many context switching. We spend too much time in email and slack and looking at our phones while trying to do hard things. We get less done. But again, again, that's not about minimizing technology. that's about maximizing your brain's ability to produce value. But when I read your question, I think that's not quite your professional issue. And when I read your question, it seems like you were just fed up with the world in which you are working.

You are fed up with helping clients work on social media presences, post videos. It just feels shallow to you. You've been hanging around me too long, Nicholas, that's what's going on here. You're just like, what is this? I don't want to spend my life helping people get Twitter follower accounts up. Well, that's not a productivity issue. That's not a digital minimalism issue. That's not a deep work issue.

That's a philosophical issue. You just don't love what you're doing. Okay, and I get that. I get that. And so, you know, what should you do here? Well, now I think we're talking about a career issue. So the book I would actually turn to you that I wrote would be so good they can't ignore you. There's nothing to do with technology, but it's about how do you shape your working

life towards things that resonate and away from things that don't. And that book would say, well, don't start from scratch. Don't shut down your agency to start a yoga practice. Instead, identify the career capital that you have. Where do you have earned valuable skills that are valuable? Figure out how to leverage that capital to gradually begin shifting what you or your agency does away from the things that don't resonate, like helping celebrities with social media profiles. and towards things that still use your capital, that still take advantage of your rare and valuable skills, but that feels more impactful or meaningful or responsible to you.

Now, this might involve like firing some clients. It might involve introducing some new services and then waiting until that business gets large enough that you can start cutting back on your other businesses. But I really think what you have here, Nicholas, is not a technology problem, but a career problem. And so that's what you should do. Take the skills you have, the career capital that you have,

I say, how can I leverage this to start reshaping my work towards things that resonate? If you can't find out a path to do that, then the question is, how do I get more capital? Do I need to develop a new skill? Do I need to have a new high impact approach? Like, whatever it is. But that's what I would suggest is you need to alter what you're doing every day to make a living. More so than you need to care about particular restrictions on your technology use. I'm going to take a moment here to talk about a brand new sponsor of the deep questions podcast, Blinkist. You have probably heard of this service.

What they give you is condensed summaries of important nonfiction books. They have thousands of books in their library, and each of their condensed summaries, what they call Blinks, can be read in 15 minutes. There's over 12 million people who use Blinkist. You can do it on an app. You can do it on a tablet. You can do it in your web browser. But it is a fantastic tool if you want to expose yourself to this sea of wisdom that exist out there in the world of nonfiction,

but feel like you don't have enough time to just read everything from scratch. Now, I've been a longtime blinkus user. Here is how I use it in my capacity as a nonfiction writer. I triage books. So if there's books, I think, are relevant to a topic. I'm going to go through a lot of blinks. Each of these summaries takes 15 minutes. I go through book after book after book.

And this allows me to get my arms around that topic area incredibly efficiently. Now, typically what I find when I do this type of nonfiction condensed consumption is that, let's be honest, 75% of the books I come across, I say, you know what? I got what I needed out of this summary. I do not need 200 pages. The other 25% I say, okay, this is a. something I want to go deeper on it, then I buy the book. There really is no better way to very quickly master a topic than to go through 15 to 20 blinks. You get the best ideas from 15 to 20 books on that topic. You buy four or five of those books and read those. You know,

one month later, you're at world expert, world class expert level on the topic. Anyways, it's incredibly efficient, especially if you're interested in the world of ideas. I highly recommend it. They have a lot of new books. Like, I'm looking at their list right now of their popular. books. You have things like the four-hour work week by Ferris. You have Michelle Obama's becoming. All of my books, or not all of them, I think a lot of my books are on there. I just read the digital minimalism summary. It was very, very good. Other books, if you look at like their technology and future section, I just noticed they added Zuckt, waking up to the Facebook catastrophe. This is Roger McNamee, who I've met. I've done some events with him. It's his book about

how he mentored Mark Zuckerberg and now regrets it. That's one worth checking out. Anyways, I love Blinkist. That's how I would suggest using it. Good news is that right now for a limited time, they have a special offer just for the Deep Questions audience. So if you go to Blinkist.com slash deep, you can try it out for seven days.

So get a feel of how good these summaries actually are. And you will save 25% off if you end up subscribing. So that's Blinkist, which is spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial. Remember, you'll save 20% off, but only when you sign up at blinkist.com slash deep. All right, let's move on with some technology questions. Well, this first one was not actually submitted in my reader question survey, but it's just something that a lot of people have been asking me recently.

So I just thought I would address it real quick. People have been asking me about this Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, about the way that social media companies manipulate their services to manipulate their users. A lot of people are asking why I was not interviewed for that documentary. And the easy answer is,

I came to wider prominence in terms of my techno-criticism around the time I released my book, digital minimalism in 2019, they did most of the filming for that documentary before then. So there you go. I think sometimes people don't understand how long it takes to build these documentaries. You think if it comes out on Netflix this week that they filmed it the last six months, but these things take years to make. So that's the simple answer is my public prominence on these issues was probably just a lot less when they were working on it. I know it's before I had the New York Times bestselling book on it, before I did Good Morning America, before I did

CBS this morning, before I did the Breakfast Club, before my New Yorker pieces, before a lot of my New York Times op-eds, before my wired pieces. They just worked on this, I think, before I was as well known for these topics. But I do appreciate everyone's concern about that. Okay, so moving on, Nick asks, what is your workflow for reading, taking notes, and storing those notes in a way that allows you to then reference them for future writing. Well, you might gain some insight on this question from last week's podcast episode in which Ryan Holiday was my co-host. Ryan is famous for not only the amount of reading he does, but the way in which he captures notes from all this reading on actual note cards filed away in boxes. You know, as we talk about that in that episode,

so Nick, you should go back and listen to some of that. You'll get some insight. In terms of what I do. When I read a book that I want to remember things by, I will mark the book. So as I've talked about, I mark the corner if there's interesting notes on the page and then I use checkmarks and brackets with pencil to actually mark the relevant sentences and sections in a book. That's how I mark a book. If you mark a book this way, you can go back and extract all the useful information in just a 10-minute skim. It's highly efficient. In terms of ideas, work-related ideas, that is book-related ideas, et cetera. I keep those in Evernote. So thoughts about books, thoughts about articles, thoughts about my business. I keep those all in Evernote, and I review my Evernote notebooks about once a month.

In fact, today the day I'm recording this, I have a calendar reminder telling me, a recurring calendar reminder telling me to check my Evernote notebooks. I also use Moleskin notebooks for capturing ideas and thoughts about my life outside of work. And I will, the same time, that sort of monthly review of my Evernote notebooks, I'll review those moleskins as well. So that's where I keep track of my ideas. Sawyer asked, for someone new to practicing deep work, would you recommend using tools like websites or app blockers?

Sawyer, I would. And I would see them as a training technique. So to train your mind do not expect or crave hits of, algorithmically optimized stimulation when you're trying to concentrate, these really help. So if you are going to do a deep work session and make it impossible for you to go on the web, impossible for you to access a social media app on your phone, that's fantastic training. Your mind will rebel, but it can only rebel so hard because it doesn't really have an option to go to. You do that enough times, it stops rebelling.

So I highly recommend it. And this is what I always say. my experience hearing from people who work with these blockers is that at first, those blockers are doing a lot of work for them. After a few months, they realize they don't need them anymore. And that's where you want to get, Sawyer, you want to get to a place where you don't need a blocker. You just, when you're working on something, you're working on something. The notion that you would context switch or make a glance at an inbox, make a glance at a phone,

will just seem anathema to you. The blockers will help you get there. All right, here's an interesting one. Eric asks, can you discuss issues around the accessibility of pornography and its impacts on deep work? As a boy growing up with a computer and internet in the early 2000s, I had endless access to pornography at a very young age. Now as I take my study seriously in my PhD work,

I notice how easily I switched to the dopamine energizer of porn as a way to feel validated when having trouble entering or staying in a state of deep work. Well, Eric, you have to be very careful with technologies that are subverting or manipulating or trying to take advantage of very deep human drives. You have what sounds like a mild pornography addiction. Those are more common than people realize, because people don't like to talk about it, but they exist for exactly the reason you're talking about, that we have these deep networks in our brain

that for obvious genetic survival reasons take sex very seriously, pornography subverts and plays with those networks and can create compulsive behaviors as a result. And so I want you to be very wary about things that mess around with these deep networks, just like I would say be wary eating a lot of junk food, is that's going to subvert your fundamental hunger drive in a way that's going to make you very unhealthy,

I would say you need to probably step away from pornography. It sounds like to me like there is a problem here. It is getting in the way of you actually doing the things you value. Now, at the risk of sounding sort of excessively prudish here, I think you need to step away. Just make it clear. I don't do that. just like if you were really overweight, I would say, I think you need to be done with McDonald's.

All right. So, Eric, now I'm going to say two things that are very old-fashioned and maybe not that popular, but, you know, whatever. I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I guess I'd say two other things about it. One, if you've been immersed in this stuff since you've been like a kid, it's going to corrupt the way you think about the opposite. sex. It may be a non-modern thing to say, but it's the meaning. It's the meaning the women,

and I think if you grow up only seeing that, it is going to change the way as a young man that you think about the young women around you and not for the better. It's not going to make you happier. It's not good. And that's old-fashioned to say, but I don't think we've ever done this experiment before until recently where we give 12-year-olds phones that can look at porn videos. I think it's it corrupts the way they grow up as they go through adolescence thinking about the opposite sex in a way that's not good. And the other thing here, this is very old-fashioned. So, okay, again, my apologies. This is my tipper gore impression. When you do not have access to that, let's go back a generation or two. Where does that energy you have as a young man go? Well,

that energy goes into like, well, I probably want a girlfriend. And here's the thing. The quest to get a girlfriend induces good things in you. You say, okay, I guess I have to sort of get my act together. I can't be the skeezy guy in the frat basement with the poorly trimmed facial hair and the sweat-stained backwards baseball cap. I'm not going to get a girlfriend that way. Okay, so I got to be presentable. I got to get my act together. I have to be able to talk archedial. I have to be able to talk, articulately about the world. I have to be interesting. I have to listen to people. I have to show some ambition or aspiration. Basically, all the things you have to do as a young man to get another young woman to tolerate you are all good things. These are all things that are going to help you

become an adult. So if you take this out of your life, and so that energy now goes in towards, okay, how am I going to actually get, you know, a young woman to actually want to spend time with me? It's probably going to make you a better person. So I don't know. Those are those are, to kids these days, kids these days style ideas, but, you know, I don't know, I have a lot of kids these days, so I guess I'm becoming more old-fashioned. Let's talk more generally, though. Let's step beyond just pornography and talk in general about the danger of modern innovations that play with ancient drives. So I mentioned fast food playing with our drive for hunger. That's a classic example. we evolved to crave fat and the crave sugar

because we didn't have a lot of it and we needed it to survive. Today we have too much of it. That drive gets us into trouble. I think Twitter does something similar with this ancient drive we have towards tribal protection.

I want my tribe to be safe because if it's not, we're going to die and I won't pass on my genes. And I want my kids. and I want my tribe to win over the other tribe. This is a deep human drive. Basically, one of the main endeavors of the Enlightenment was to suppress this drive through the application of reason

because it doesn't lead to good places. It leads to death. It leads to destruction. It leads to despair. This is one of the big drives of the Enlightenment is that we also have higher reasons. We can overcome this ancestral drive. Twitter is just putting a needle right into that drive and just pumping it towards full of accelerating.

This is social media, in other words, is playing on this same type of dangerous effect of playing with ancient instincts, which I think is really problematic. I mean, look, if you go on the Twitter and see some of these like angry back and forth and how mad people are getting, it's junk food, it's pornography, same idea. you know, this like, I am so mad at these other people that I can't even imagine why they exist. I guess you felt that way a lot. The cavemen looking at the cavemen over on the other hill. And it helped them out because those cavemen were trying to hunt the same elk. So they get really mad at those cavemen.

They could kill those cavemen. There's more elk for your family and your tribe and you're going to succeed. So there's a reason why that evolved. We don't need that in 2020. Social media companies, they have managed. manipulated their products cynically to go back in there and take that drive that we work so hard through both the Enlightenment and the liberal democratic project that arose from the Enlightenment. We work so hard to establish and says, nah, let's go get that going again.

Let's get people mad at each other. Let's get people furious on their phones. Like, well, I'm going to show you. Let me just type this in here real quick. And yeah. And then they're like, Okay, I got, wait, wait, what did they say? I got to go back and check. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, okay, I'll show you, you know. It's chaos, it's bad. It's cognitive obesity. It's cognitive pornography addiction.

It's the same type of idea. It's plain with ancient drives. So, Eric, I used your earnest question for two reasons. One, to do my best impersonation of a 1930s era prude, and two, to do a rant about social media. It does not take much to get me to do that second thing. It does take quite a bit to get me to do the first thing. So it's an interesting answer all around.

But I hope that's useful. And to get back to what you originally said, I just think you cold turkey it, man. You're not a boy anymore. You're a man trying to become a respectable citizen of the world. Right? That takes some hard work, and it's time to get after it. All right, I think that's a good place to leave the technology questions.

Let's do a quick backstage pass. This is the segment where I give a brief look inside my own life and my own struggles to live deeper. So something that's been going on recently that's been interesting is I've been teaching my middle child how to read. So reading instruction is sort of one of my dad roles. But it's been interesting this time around because since my first son learned how to read, I have done a lot more learning about the neuroscience of concentration and the neuroscience of learning because it's just relevant to the work I do as a writer.

Now, it's had an interesting effect I've noticed on how I am now conceptualizing the task of teaching a child to read. I mean, it's almost like I can, I can see the appropriate hormones and neurotransmitters moving around my child's brain as we're doing reading instruction, and I can tailor my activity towards what I know is going on under there. So building off of, for example, this recent blog post I did about Andrew Hooperman at Stanford, who works on neuroplasticity and talks about the cascades of chemicals that leads to rewiring and learning. And he talks about how there has to be a release of neurophanephynephrine at first, which gets you a little agitated. And this is when people often break their concentration. But if you can enforce concentration at that

point of agitation, then you get the release. I think it's acetylcholine, neurotransmitter, that can come in and do productive rewiring. Well, when I'm working with my kid now on reading, so what we're really working on is sound out of multi-syllable words. And you got to do some rewiring to do this. It's a very unnatural thing, right? And so what we'll do is we'll get a little, we'll get a little bit agitated. Okay, we're going to do this. We'll get a little bit agitated.

We use hand signs, right? So I'll be like, okay, let's get the sounds here. Okay, let's do a blend of these sounds of this syllable. All right. And then we'll, I'll show them physically. I'll use my hand. Like I'm grabbing and holding that syllable in the air. All right, let's hold this.

Let's hold this. Okay, great. So we're holding this. Okay, hold that. Now, what are those sounds? Back to this. let's keep holding it. We're kind of in a state of agitation,

but using physical motion, like holding syllables abstractly in the air to try to induce that acetylcholine-releasing focus within the state of agitation. And then you can just almost hear those neurons, click-clock, click-clock, rewiring, reforming, the circuits required to do that type of work, strengthening.

Anyways, it's just been very interesting. Coming at this with my kid, and the reality of how the brain does things. And it really emphasized to me the degree to which why in like professional spheres or this type of rewiring or this type of concentration can significantly impact the bottom line, why do we just not care about it at all? And so yeah, whatever. It's easy if you would just answer my email, so forget that.

So that's been an interesting thing to return to my role as reading instructor and see how it's affected by the work I've been doing on. understanding the brain. What else is going on backstage pass? The DeepWork HQ continues. It's evolution. I have upgraded the audio equipment in my in my HQ. I don't know if I have the settings quite right. So I have a sound guy. I don't know anything about sound. I have a sound guy, but he's in New York. So we have to kind of do things remotely. So it's a slow back and forth. So he will be listening to this episode. And then he will come back and he literally on FaceTime helps me turn knobs. That's kind of where we are.

So the sound will continue to improve. Most of the benefit that I got from the sound equipment upgrade is it's not to change the sound you hear, but it's some other sort of things. Like my gate and enhancer, so that really make sure that some of the background sound near my office doesn't pick up on the recording. There's some other things about being able to handle multiple input streams that I needed and some monitoring issues. None of that you'll notice, but it does make my life easier. I'm also much closer now on getting the video to work. I have all the equipment. Just getting up to speed on some of the software.

The complicated thing about video is I have a video stream coming through a capture card from a camera. I have an audio stream coming through a mic through audio processing equipment. All this is coming into my computer separately. It doesn't sync up exactly. So, you know, this type of stuff is endlessly fiddly and I'm not good at it. But I want there to be at least video of me doing. some of the answers from each week's episode, and my goal is to actually have video versions

of the episodes relatively soon. So stay tuned. Stay tuned for that. The final updates here is I am in my library at the DeepWork HQ. I have these two big old desks that were left here. I don't even think they fit through the doors. So I'm actually going to combine them into a large

kind of table in my library, as opposed to getting rid of those and buying a library table. I'm going to try that first. But the big issue I'm having, and maybe people have suggestions out there, is that these desks have a, like, a gray for mica-style surface, which does not read library to me. So if anyone has the idea about how I could do something to the surface to be more antiquarian,

to be more conducive to concentration, some sort of material I could put on the surface, or something that would be, I don't know, period in some sort of interesting way that could help induce that library concentration mindset. Let me know it interesting at calnewport.com. I'm definitely open for suggestions. All right, that's the backstage pass for this week.

Let's move on to our final segment, which is some questions about the deep life. Alex asks, how do you recommend balancing professional deep work with deep hobbies. Well, Alex, in my experience, there is no single correct answer to how you balance out

professional and non-professional activities. And a lot of different models. I know people, for example, who have a government job, I live in Washington, D.C., this is very common, that has very prescribed hours. And some of these government jobs

because they are dealing with security clearance, those hours are tight because you are not allowed to work outside of those hours. You literally can't access the computers unless you're at the office. And they have extensive hobbies outside of work. Usually like athletic related, you know, they might be really into like hunting or mountain biking or trail maintenance or whatever, right? And then there's people who, like myself. I don't really have a lot in the ways of deep hobbies.

I mean, again, I work seven jobs. Notice every week I add one more job to that list. A little bit of job creep here. I work 17 jobs. And I have a bunch of kids and our schools are closed,

et cetera. So I don't know. I'm doing family stuff and I'm working. Yeah, that I don't, and I read a lot, but that's basically it. Right?

So you see all different points on this. that spectrum. What I do think is important is the balance between deep and shallow. So the thing that I think gives people rewards, the thing that helps fuel the deep life is focusing on activities that are high return, activities that you find to be important and that you could give real concentration. Now, whether that activity is professional related or hobby related is not as important as to whether or not that's a quality activity or a non-quality activity. so that there are no circumstances in what spending a lot of time on low-value

shallow activities is going to be the recipe for an optimal deep life. So that's the trade-off I care about, deep versus shallow. Now, whether like me you work 27 jobs or you're like the government employee who works one job and it's not allowed to work outside of work. And so whether like me who works 29 jobs, you have a lot of, you don't have a lot of time for hobbies or you're like the government worker that has a lot of time for hobbies, that's not the important distinction. The important distinction is are you for the most part putting a lot of energy into things that matter and not spending too much time on things that don't? Or are you lost in a sea of Netflix and social media or chemical consumption? You're drinking too much. You're eating too much junk food. You're just sort of looking to feel good or whatever it is. That's the distinction that matters. Deep versus shallow that matters. Quality versus non-quality matters. Professional versus personal. There's just a lot of variety there that can sometimes be hard to control, especially if you're like me and have 32 jobs.

All right. Davy asks, how do you deal with your mind overthinking and returning to recurring thoughts and circumstances? Well, Davy, this is a really important topic. If you take away anything from my answer here, it is that rumination is very impactful from a psychological perspective,

and it's something that you need to take seriously, just like you would take seriously any sort of health, physical health problem. If you had a pain in your knee that was making it hard to walk and you feared it was going to get to the point where you couldn't walk at all, you would go see a doctor.

Well, if you find yourself with excessive rumination, so this could be either excessive rumination about fear of what might happen, anxiety, or excessive rumination about what you've already done wrong or things that didn't go well or things that you regret, that is the psychological equivalent of having the pain in your knee. Excessive rumination about fear of things to come, that is the foundation of a generalized anxiety disorder. Excessive rumination of things that you have done before or things you regret or things that you were self-recriminative about, that is the

foundation of depression. So you want to take those really seriously. Now, if you just have some of this, It's pretty easily to be controllable. If you have a lot of this, you might want to get help from a professional. So there's three waves. Look, I'm not an expert on this,

but there's, I know a little bit about a lot of things. There's sort of three waves of psychotherapy. The first wave, you can think of as like classic talk therapy. Second wave, you get things like cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the first modalities to actually be tested empirically for efficacy.

And then the third wave, you have things like acceptance commitment therapy, which also has been tested empirically. For ruminations, you're going to want second or third wave. So cognitive behavioral therapy will actually have you address the ruminations, identify the distortions, replace the distortion with a more reasonable thought. You're actually rewiring thought patterns.

If you want to get exposed to a book that just introduces you to this idea, there's a book called Feeling Good that introduced this concept. It's an older book. I don't know if this was from the 80s or the 90s. Classic, one of these books that have sold millions of copies. But to introduce the idea of cognitive behavioral therapy, now if you're interested in third wave psychotherapy, like acceptance commitment therapy,

which does not try to engage with the ruminations, but basically ignores them and instead turns your attention towards value-driven activity, there's a book, I believe it's called The Happiness Trap. I think that's right. And that'll introduce you to that style of psychotherapy. So you might want to check out those books just to get some tools and see if that helps. And then if it doesn't help, find a professional that deploys one of those strategies that you like.

So if you like the CBT stuff you encountered, find a second wave psychotherapist. If you like the ACT Act, acceptance commitment therapy style approach, find an act style therapist. This is worth spending money on. All right, Davy, this is important. I think people underestimate the degree to which ruminations are actually the psychological underpinning of major down-the-road psychological issues. So sorry for the serious answer to what might not be a serious problem for you, but I know a lot of other people are dealing with this, especially now.

I think like the anxiety people in particular having a hard time with the pandemic. So sort of like a public service announcement type response. All right. So Davey, thanks for giving me an excuse to talk about those issues. Okay, so let's move on to Sarah. Sarah says, I'm watching endless YouTube videos on self-growth, productivity, motivation, spiritual, etc. Though I don't use social media. Is this some type of addiction?

She elaborates that she's doing this all the time and she feels like it's actually taking away time from doing the types of growth-inducing, motivated, productive activity that all these videos talk about. So Sarah, it's possible that you could categorize this as a mild behavioral addiction. Mild behavioral addiction means that when you have access to the behavior, you do it more than it's useful or more than it is helpful. And that probably describes what's going on here. There's a simple solution. Treat these type of YouTube videos as a TV show that you really like. You don't want to step away from them.

I don't think it's necessarily bad to watch some. inspirational content, especially on growth issues, spiritual issues, productivity issues, motivation. That's good. Actually, it's good to give yourself spurs. You know, it's good to

give yourself regular doses of motivation from a psychology perspective that helps. But if you're doing these videos all the time, if they become an escape and they keep you away from the value-driven activities that they're trying to induce in the first place, it's an issue that needs to be addressed. So my solution is to treat it like a TV show.

I should probably clarify in our age of Netflix. I mean, treat it like a TV show in the year 1995. Where in 1995, you might say, I really like to show friends. And it's on Thursdays. And it's on 9 o'clock on NBC. Now, nine o'clock on NBC, I put on that show and I really enjoy it. That's how you should think about inspirational YouTube video consumption. Have some set times on set days for set durations,

that's what you do and you really lean into it and you love it. You know, Wednesday night after the kids go to bed and I pour a glass of wine and I get fired up and watch inspirational YouTube and I do it for one hour. And then I do the same thing, whatever. It's Friday morning. Then you still get the benefit, but you're corraling it so that it can't explode password it's useful and actually start to get in the way. So that's my general suggestion to people who use social media or the internet.

for inspiration or motivation is just to treat it like a TV show. It's just like friends in 1995. You love it when it's on, but you're not spending half your day staring at Chandler and Phoebe. All right. So thanks for that, Sarah. Now for our final question here, I'm going to read two questions. Because I think they're both getting at the same issue. So I'll give a combined answer for both of these questions. So the first question comes from Laura. And she says, since I've been addicted to my smartphone, I feel that I'm not the same intelligence that I used to be.

Nowadays, I have to write my master's thesis and I'm not able to organize my ideas or to be creative. I feel absolutely mentally exhausted and cannot manage to move on. The deadline is very close and I am still escaping from the fact I can't help but feeling my mind empty of ideas and understanding but full of things to check on the phone. How could I start taking control?

the second question I want to read here is from Ollie. And Ollie says, what tactical tips would you give to people who buy in fully to the deep life philosophy but struggle to implement it in a meaningful way due to many bad years of bad habits? Constant email checking, phone addiction, distraction, etc. He elaborates, my problem seems to be that as a 41-year-old

who has never worked or lived in this way before, I have two plus decades of deeply rooted bad habits that I need to replace with more empowering ones. And I'm struggling to know where to start. Well, Lori and Ollie, thank you for your questions. I have talked frequently on this podcast about cultivating a deep life from scratch, but I think your questions give an additional angle to this quest that's worth highlighting. So in both of your cases, you want to shift from a shallow life to a deeper life, but in both of your cases, one of the major obstacles here is your phone. And so what I am going to suggest is that you start with technology. And you should do, I would recommend, a digital minimalism style month-long digital declutter.

That's how I would get started if I was you. So this is the idea that's at the core of my book, Digital Minimalism. As my longtime readers know, the notion behind or the idea behind the digital declutter is that you spend an entire month taking a break from what I call optional personal technology. So technologies that are not your work technologies, not your email, etc., but technologies you use in your personal life to escape, to distract, to numb, stuff that's not crucial. You take a break for one month. But during that month, and this is what's key to the clutter,

through experimentation and reflection, you try to figure out what you actually care about. And then when you're done, you reintroduce technologies from scratch. You start from a blank slate, working backwards from these things you identify that you actually care about, what you actually want to spend your time doing.

And for each of these things you care about, you say, what is the best way, if any, to use technology to help this thing I care about? And so you rebuild your personal technological life from scratch, but you do so in a value-driven way. I'm reintroducing Facebook because this Facebook group is really important to me because it's a way to stay connected to other people who are in a similar situation to me and I get a lot of growth out of that. Great. Now you know why you're using this particular technology. Now once you know why you're using a particular type of technology, you can optimize that use.

So if the value you get out of Facebook in this example, if there's a particular Facebook group that helps you grow, and then you say, well, why would I need this on my phone? And why would I need to spend 50 minutes a day on Facebook? And why would I need to be looking at a news feed? And why am I yelling at my uncle's cousin about QAnon? None of that has anything to do with a Facebook group in which I feel growth. And now you can optimize and say, well, take it off my phone.

I'll only access Facebook on my computer. I'll use the News Feed Eradicator plugin so that I don't see my uncle's cousin talking about Q and on. And when I log on, which I do once a week, it'll take me straight to the group. I can do the stuff I care about. So you do the declutter, you come out of the declutter with a much more streamlined technological life in which you're using less tech. The tech you're using, you're using with more rules. And these uses are directly feeding in the things you care about. I think that should be step one. Now, given that you have been immersed in a shallow life, you might have a hard time during that month really getting a definitive answer to like, this is what I really care about,

this is what I really want to spend my time doing because you don't have a lot of experience with this. That's fine. Think of your digital clutter as past number one. You're getting a tentative working answer to the things you care about, using that as the foundation to greatly streamlining your digital life. Now you're ready, I think, for the more types of extensive changes I've talked about on this podcast before. Once you've done that, the clutter, now you can do that system I've talked about before, which I'll just briefly summarize. You identify the important buckets in your life for each of these buckets. You try to get a keystone habit that you do every day and that you track in paper and that signals to yourself that you take each of these buckets seriously and that you're willing

to do non-required optional activities just for the value it brings. Once you have the keystone habits, then you can go from bucket to bucket. It's been one to two months on each box. and try to overhaul that area of your life and then repeat that cycle. But I think Ollie and Laura doing that digitally clutter, you got to do that first. I think this sort of keystone habits and remaking each part of your life, all of that's going to struggle if your eyes are going to that little glowing blast screen every five minutes. If your emotions are going towards outrage towards your uncle's cousin every five minutes. If you are in the state of agitation, as you're worried about what someone's going to say to your Twitter response, will they like it,

will they get mad at me? That type of turbulent soul landscape is not one in which the transformation of the depth can happen successfully. So I think you're both very perceptive that you have noticed that the digital aspect of your shallow life is the primary obstacle. Get that reasonably under control with one declutter and then really get after the quest of transforming your life, bucket by bucket, habit by habit, behavior by behavior towards something deeper. 41 years old is not too old. There is no age that is too old for this. And I'm telling you, Laura and Ollie, there's never been a more important time

to prioritize living a deep life because there has never been a time where the shallow life has been more turbulent and more distressing and more anxiety-producing and more difficult. Now is the time to know what you are about. So you can find pride and living a life that is true to that. and not be dependent on external factors validating you or making you feel happy. Because guess what? There's not a lot of good external factors in the world right now.

You're going to be waiting for a while. It's on you now. The deep life is going to be your way of building that resilience in an otherwise difficult time. So good question. Do the declutter. Once you don't have to the clutter, dive into the more extensive instructions I've given before for making this transformation out of the shallows and into the dark.

the deep end of a satisfying life. All right. So that is all the time we have for this week's episode. Thank you for everyone who contributed their questions. If you want to contribute your own questions, sign up from my mailing list at Calnewport.com. We want to help the podcast grow. Subscriptions, ratings, and reviews go a long way.

Feedback can come to Interesting at CalNewport.com. We should be back on Thursday with our next habit tune-up mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.