Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 35: Managing Deeply, Quitting Facebook, and Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Information Overload | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: October 12, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about deep work for managers, life without Facebook, and original thought in an age of information overload, among many other topics. I also continue our ongoing discussion of household productivity by sharing systems sent in by readers.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).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:WORK QUESTIONS * Optimizing deep work retreats [17:57] * Pomodoro versus longer focus sessions [23:02] * Timeblocking in advance [24:55] * How to choose a new career [26:42]  * Balancing quality and quantity in research [32:44] * Deep work for managers [37:31]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS * Online information gathering without distraction [45:35]   * Tracking academic papers [48:53] * P vs NP [52:24]  * Life without Facebook [58:30]BACKSTAGE PASS: Meeting Tristan Harris and HQ updates [1:06:49]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS * Deep work and leisure activities [1:14:30] * Non-digital interaction in the age of COVID [1:18:49] * Deep work when dealing with mental health issues [1:25:19] * Thinking for yourself in an age of information overload [1:32:34] Offer links from this episode's sponsors: * Optimize.me/deep * ExpressVPN.com/deep * Purple.com/deep10Thanks 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 queries from my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. Now, at the beginning of recent episodes of this podcast, we have been talking about household productivity. That is, how do you organize all of your obligations in your life outside of work? I noted this is a topic that I don't talk about as much on this podcast or am I writing. It's also something that is underrepresented in the biggest books, the books that have the most sales or get the most push behind them from the publishers within the business productivity space. So we have been exploring the topic. I propose some ideas I had come up with for experiments.

I might be trying to my own at-home productivity systems, but then I, also invited listeners to send in their own ideas and their own strategies. We got some really interesting feedback. So I thought I would share a few of these examples now here at the top of the show. So Regina wrote in to explain the system that her and her husband use. Here's what she said. We rely mostly on technology to implement our system, specifically a platform called Notion, which you can find at notion.com. which is like Evernote Trello Excel all in one. We made a task board, essentially a Trello board,

and continually add into things we want to do, whether in the short term or the next five years from now. Each item gets added as a card. We created a category chart of accounts, like logistics, finance, adventuring, etc., and add the appropriate category tags to each of these cards. Then at the beginning of each month, we sprint plan to decide what we want to accomplish for that month.

As a card gets completed, we move it to the done, column. At the end of every month, we have a sprint review and then gear up for the next one. We found that this way of structuring our life has been essential for our marriage. Now, the listener here will not be surprised to hear that at least one of the two individuals in that partnership is a software UX designer. This notion of sprints using tools like Notion, moving things into a done column. That all comes out of agile style software. project management methodology. So there we go.

So that's one particular way of organizing your home. Jazeem writes and talks about a system that was introduced by a productivity thinker named Lisa Woodruff. So Jazeem notes that Lisa Woodruff has a notion called the Sunday Basket idea. Jazeem uses it, finds it to be very helpful. And she has been supposedly Lisa has been writing about this for a while. So her website, the website where you can learn more about. the Sunday basket idea is Organize 365.com. So 365 is the number. You don't spell it out.

And if you go to organize 365.com slash the dash Sunday dash basket, you go right to that system. I looked at this. Actually, it's great. It reminds me a lot of what I came up with, but just more refined and more battle tested. You have a Sunday basket. It was like the universal collection box I was talking about where things get gathered and you go through it on Sundays, and Lisa Woodruff has some really good ideas about what system you use to organize your life and household work between these Sunday reviews. She emphasizes simplicity. I am 100% on board with that.

So Lisa Woodruff's work is for sure worth checking out. Rachel wrote, as she started, she's a little bit upset at first. She says, I have to admit that when I heard you declare on a recent episode that we italicized and in quotes haven't done enough serious thinking about household productivity, I felt aggrieved. So Rachel, the we I was referring to there was the productivity publishing world, though there are plenty of books published on productivity outside of the household. There are very few really big books

in that space, even though, as I argued, I think it's a major source of anxiety and stress for a lot of people and something that is really a universal pain point. I mean, everyone has life outside of work they need to organize. And so, you know, it's surprising we don't have books at the same level of classics as we have in the other types of productivity space. But, you know, fair point, Rachel, you were right that lots of people, we all think about this and we all spend a lot of time thinking about and sharing ideas. It's just, it's not getting the attention we might assume at the highest levels. All right. Anyways, Rachel goes on to share some thoughts on the system that her and her husband use.

She says it has been influenced by work and business productivity influencers, including David Allen, Karush Dini, Laura Vandercom, and yourself, as well as household and parenting influencers, including Kendra Adakchi, Jordan Page, and Becky Rapinchuk. So here was how Rachel's system works. I'm sort of alighting, by the way, some of the text here. Capture and process to-do-do-as and ideas. that's Category 1. Rachel says, I use Siri on my phone and Apple Watch.

If I say add call Kathy to my list in my watch, it will add a call Kathy task to my Omnifocus inbox. I also use the drafts app on my watch and iPhone to capture ideas that don't necessarily translate to a task or to do. Now, I'm going to press pause here for a second. If you're wondering what Rachel is referring to when she says Omnifocus, I recommend you listen to last Thursdays,

habit tune up mini episode, that would be episode 34, I discuss OmniFocus. I also want to add, though, as long as we're talking about episode 34, I noticed when I went back and was relisting to that episode recently, that I at some points during that question, misidentified the product Omni Focus with the product Omni Outliner. As I explain in my answer to that question, Omni Outlier was the original software that was included in all Macs. Omni Focus is produced by the same company, but what happened was is that a software developer named Ethan Schoenover wrote a bunch of scripts for Omni Outliner that made it to a productivity tool. And then the company that produces Omni Outliner integrated those scripts to produce a brand new product called Omni Focus. So my

apologies to the company that produces Omni Focus for accidentally calling it Omni Outliner. I know better since I researched it extensively for an article. All right, back to Rachel's system. Her next category is capture and process slash documentation. She says, we are a paper-free household. If any mail comes to the door, it is scanned and saved to Evernote within 24 hours of crossing the threshold. I have the scannable app on my iPhone, which makes scanning documents take less than a minute. I process the Evernote inbox once a week.

All right, and aside, I am very impressed by that. I'm inspired by that. That is a good idea. and I am thinking about it. All right, back to her categories. Rachel then talks about household items. We keep a digital inventory of our garage and storage spaces in Evernote.

Inspired by Amazon warehousing, this eliminates the need to manually search for tools and other objects you get at once a year. Well, that I think is impressive. Looking at the clutter that me and my kids have generated in our house, I think we would need roughly the same amount of database storage space as Amazon warehousing uses to keep track of everything in our house, but I admire the effort there. All right, another category,

reminders and responsibilities. Rachel says, rather than using my calendar for these, I have them set up an omnifocus. And then for routines, she says, I meal plan every Friday and do a weekly review of my system and Omnifocus every Sunday. I journal every morning and evening and transcribe those written notes into my Rome research database, which is where I also keep my reading and work notes. All right, excellent system, Rachel, is pretty high tech, so I'm going to assume that you probably have some connection to the world of technology. Also had a bunch of men write in. It was about 50-50, men and women.

Maybe actually a little bit more men than women that wrote in with their household productivity system. So I don't know what that means. I know the demographics of my audience is about 50-50. So I don't know. I think it just means we have more enlightened listeners here. Or we just have a bunch of productivity nerds listeners here who love to tinker with system. So anyways, Jim wrote and said he has two elements to his system. One is a weekly family

meeting where they review upcoming events for the week. And then they have a shared family calendar. And everything goes in that calendar with as much detail as possible on the actual calendar events. The whole family, including the kids, are expected to update and look at that calendar and use that calendar when planning their day. Chris wrote in and said, my family has been used. using the collection box idea for years. We call it the inbox. I found that I don't need to look at it every day once a week is fine. Why? For stuff that needs to be dealt with right away, like a kid's permission slip, I find it best just to put it on the kitchen table, sign it that night, and stuff it in their backpack right away. All right. Interesting perspective from Chris.

I was saying last week that you look at that collection box and process and do some household stuff every day. He says once a week should work. Rob wrote and had three ideas. first, I think you should use the same capture strategy as with work. Fewer inboxes is easier to manage when processing. Second, 99% of household stuff is minutia. The list productivity method that you deride is actually quite awesome for household stuff. My wife and I know if it's on the list, it gets done full stop. I assign blocks to essentially shallow household work activity in which I just crush whatever is on the list.

All right. And aside, I kind of agree. So he's talking about the list reactivity productivity method, the approach to productivity that most office workers do and that I say is not very productive. I recommend instead time blocking where you give every minute of your day a job. As long-time listeners know, I do not recommend time blocking your time outside of work. So you are sort of outside of work if you follow my philosophy on solid ground if you're doing something like the list productivity method. I mean, in general, I think what Rob is saying here is right, which is mainly what you need for household productivity work is what in time blocking we would call an admin block where you just rock and roll on the list.

And so I agree with them there. The only distinction would be, you know, when I was talking about my household system I was proposing last week, I said also you should do a weekly plan with your partner if you're married and larger things can get put on your calendar for specific time. That's sort of like time blocking. You know, this is when I'm taking the car to the car wash. We planned it out. That's not list reactive. But every day you probably also need just list reactive style time to make progress.

So I'm more or less with Rob on that. And finally, third, he says, for items that actually require thought or are urgent with a due date, just put them on the calendar like any other work block. Okay, well, that's just what I said. So actually, you know what, Rob, we are almost 100% on the same page here. Semantics aside. All right, let's do one more reader feedback on. this topic, Marine. She says, just a quick note on your idea for a physical inbox for the household. I'm assuming the activities in the box are meant to be split up among the household members.

At least that's how my house works. There needs to be a system for making sure that the things that one person committed to will actually get done. I can see my husband walking off with the cards he is supposed to be doing, and then they don't get done. All right, well, first of all, I'm remembering, yeah, tell your husband to stop being a loser about that, right? Look, you guys are running a household together. No one gets to play the role of the kid. He's like, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn't really get to it. You know, he needs to step up there and execute the stuff he says he's going to do what he needs to do. So you can tell him Cal is giving him an audio kick in the butt there. In terms of how you actually split things up, there's a lot of different

strategies for that. Now, one that I've heard about, rather, from several readers is a book, I think this came out last year. I mean, sometime recently. And the book is called Fair Play, a game-changing solution for when you have too much to do and more life to live. It's written by an author named Eve Rodski. And it really gets into, from what I understand, concrete strategies for work division within the household for household work between, let's say, you and your partner. I think there's something in there that involves cards. And anyways, I think the big idea that Eve has in this book is, and you're hinting at this morning, clarity. You don't get to just sort of say, yeah, I'll do my best, whatever, and just sort of not do it.

There's clarity. Here's how we split up work. When this is committed to you, you get it done. your husband's still not doing it. You got to tell them to grow up. All right, so that's interesting. I really appreciated this feedback on household productivity. I'm going to mess around with my system. I'll use this feedback to edit my system, and then maybe I'll report back in a little while

how the changes I made to my own household productivity system, what's working, what's not, how they went. We have a great show ahead of us, a lot of good questions. Before we get started, two quick things. First, from an administrative perspective, If you want to submit your own questions, you need to sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. Once every one to two months, I send a survey to that mailing list soliciting the questions I answer in the episodes that follow. It's also a good way to get articles sent by me to your inbox.

I've been doing that since 2007. I appreciate ratings. I appreciate reviews and I appreciate subscriptions. I'm going to skip the spotlight review today. for the sake of concision, but no, I read every single review that comes in, and I appreciate them all. Now, the second thing I want to do before we dive into the questions is briefly tell you about one of these sponsors that makes this podcast possible, and that sponsor is Optimize. Now, as I have been telling you in recent episodes, Optimize is a subscription service.

when you sign up for Optimize, you get access to three things. Number one, the famed philosopher's notes. These are six-page book summaries of some of the best self-development and wisdom books ever written. These summaries are all handcrafted by the philosopher, Monk, CEO, and founder of Optimize, my friend Brian Johnson. I found out recently actually that the first 100 of the philosopher notes he wrote, more or less, he wrote while in isolation in Bali. which tells you the type of guy he is. You also get access with this description to 50 what are called masterclasses. These are taught by experts on the big topics that are covered in those notes. I did one of these master courses, these 101 master courses on digital minimalism. You also get every day. The third thing is they're called plus one videos recorded by Brian. A targeted insight of wisdom about living a better life.

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currently have. So I was telling him recently about the library I was setting up here in the Deep Work H.Q. So he got inspired and he sent me a video earlier this week of on his land where he lives. If you follow a trail away from his house into the woods, he's building an outdoor office space. There's a roof, but no walls. You're sort of out there among the sounds and a the weather, but protected from the rain and staring into woods. So he's one-upping me with that. So it's on. By the time this war of escalating office spaces is over, I will have here in Tacoma Park, Maryland, as God is my witness, a sort of Neil Stevenson, Anatham-style monastery in which people will spend years in monk's robes doing nothing but deep work. So, Brian, it is on,

but in the meantime, you can share in all this wisdom at Optimize.me slash deep. Go to that website Optimize.combe. The slash deep is how they know you came from me, and you will get a free trial and a discount. So optimize yourself, and in the meantime, I have a monastery to start building. Okay, so let's say we get to some actual questions. We'll start now, as we always do, with work questions.

All right, James asked a question that is actually quite appropriate, given the war of office spaces I was just talking about between me and me and my friend Brian. James asked, what recommendations do you have for a deep work retreat? Other than removing distractions, what recommendations do you have for maximizing the output of that time I'm investing in? So James, I think there are three elements to a successful deep work retreat. You have aesthetics, ritual, and rules. So aesthetics is what a lot of people actually think about. When they think about a deep work retreat, what does it look like?

Visual cues, what the environment around you is like, the visual distractions, the auditory distractions. All of these can play a role in whether or not you feel motivated to do deep work. It's why at my deep work HQ, as I'll talk about a little bit later in the program, I'm building out a space that sort of echoes what you would find. at a library. It's a little bit over the top. Over the top is good. It helps push your brain out of the groove of normal type of semi-distracted thinking that it normally is in. I was just talking about Brian Johnson's excellent outdoor office. And, you know, one of the things he's doing is he actually is having a door put in, even though there's no walls. So you walk through

this door, why do you need the door? It's all psychological. You know, it's a process. It's a process. of cognitive effacement, that you're moving into the space where you think deeply. These type of things make a difference. So from an aesthetic point of view, if your retreat is somewhere scenic, if interior to the space, you could do something over the top, it looks different than a normal office. It looks different than the spaces in which you do email, the spaces in which you deal with your bills, and that can make a difference. You know, I opened my book Deep Work talking about Carl Jung's Bollinger Tower, the

stone-based retreat he built near the town of Bollingen on the shores of the upper lake of Lake of Lake Zurich in Switzerland. And as I've talked about in my writing, I mean, it turns out that Jung made this retreat purposely fantastical. He was he was hearkening back to the fantasies. He had as a kid of knights and lands of magic and what have you. And he did the this on purpose because he was trying to touch on deep archetypical inspirations, but just, I think, more pragmatically, it was so different from his busy existence in Zurich, where he actually was a practicing clinical psychologist where he would see the patients in his house. And so just everything was busy. He had patients in his house, the same place he was paying bills, the same place that he was

making food and cleaning up. And this was so different than that. It was a fantastical, inspired by Castle's type room with a meditation chamber he built into it and was really all over the top. But it helped put him into a mode where he could think deeper. So aesthetics matter. Rituals matter. So what do you do when you get there? What do you do before you go to the deep work retreat? If your deep work retreat is, you know, in the countryside somewhere, is there a walk you do like

Charles Darwin among a proscribed path that tells your mind that it is time to do deep work? do you have a coffee maker inside the deep work retreat where you make coffee in a certain mug and this is the ritual you do before you start doing deep work these type of things matter as well our brains are creatures of routine and it can help slip your brain from one mode to another the routine or ritual disrupts it and allows it to reconfigure and then finally you have the rules governing what you do in your deep work retreat. As I've mentioned on the podcast for the library of my deep work HQ, the rule that I am entertaining putting into place once I'm done setting up that space is no email.

I can do the email in my studio. I have a great big monitor IMac in here that I need for doing my editing anyways, and so I can use that for my email when I'm in the library, writing, it's reading, it's thinking. Those type of strict rules make a difference as well. So James, any combination of those things that are done intentionally can give you a good deep work retreat, whether we're talking about a corner in your basement that you're transforming or we're talking about an outdoor office in the woods, in the land that you own.

I mean, whatever is available to you when you're trying to take a space that make into a deep work retreat, aesthetics, rituals, rules. Give each of those intentional thought, you'll get a lot more out of that space than if you're more haphazard. Oliver asks, what are, in your opinion, the benefits of long, deep learning sessions over shorter Pomodoro sessions? Well, you know, I advise when you're doing deep work, so something that's cognitively demanded, you do it without distraction, You do it in relatively long stretches. The Pomodoro method says the same thing. The only difference is that it specifies how long those sessions should be

and what type of timer you should use in timing them. And I think the standard Pomodoro length is something like 50 minutes. There's nothing wrong with that. There's also nothing magic about that. I think people need to extend the amount of deep work they are comfortable doing without distraction, without losing their focus, 10 minutes at a time, until they get to somewhere between 90 minutes to two hours.

If you can do between 90 minutes to two hours, you have a very well-developed cognitive muscle for focus. Now, it doesn't mean that every deep work session needs to be 90 minutes to two hours because you probably won't have open stretches of time that long on a lot of days, but that should be the duration that at the very least you're comfortable doing. And then you fit the deep work to the time available.

I tend to think anything less than an hour is probably not worth it because it can take 10 to 15 minutes just to clear out the residue and get your brain up to full horsepower. Most people are going to need pretty significant breaks in a session that's longer than two hours. That's fine. You have to give your brain's rest. And just when you take those breaks,

don't expose yourself to things like email or related work that's not quite the same is that will give you a lot more attention residue. So you fit the deep work to what's available. sometimes it will be Pomodoro links. I don't think it should be shorter than that. That's too short. Sometimes I think it should be longer. Ava asks,

how long in advance do you time block plan? I recommend you time block one day at a time. You can either do the time blocking the night before the day if you want to hit the ground running or do it first thing in the day. I would not time block any more time than that in advance. I would also not time block time outside of your work day. That's going to be too much structure and too much intensity.

The one pseudo-exception to this rule is that for certain types of important work, both professional or personal, that you know you need to get done, it's not that bad of a habit to maybe block that time out on your calendar in advance. If you know I have to take the car to the shop, you might block out that time for four days from now in advance on your calendar so that it's protected and you know when it's going to happen because it might be something long or hard enough that you're never going to just stumble across enough free time to do it during the week so you want to get after it ahead of time and say I'm going to put aside this time.

Same thing for some work things. You know, hey, I really need to get this report submitted. It's going to take a couple hours. I worry about not having that time if I just, once I actually get to each day, so you might block out Friday morning to work on it. So that's my pseudo-exception, Ava. When doing your weekly plan for your work and for your life outside of work, there are some things you might block out on your calendar

because you just want to make sure that they get done, that you have enough time for it. But beyond that, in terms of actually building your time block plans, using something like my time block planner, you are going to want to do that one day at a time. Bradford asks, I'm looking for a new job. How do I choose between different career paths?

Well, Bradford, the philosophy I summarize in my book So Good They Can't Ignore You for how people end up satisfied and passionate about their work is something I call Career Capital Theory. Now, the idea is, as you build up more rare and valuable skills, this allows you to acquire more of a metaphorical substance I call Career Capital. capital. This career capital is what you can then invest to inject into your working life things that resonate with you. In other words, I think of career satisfaction as almost the outcome

of a bartering exchange where you are bartering things at the market values for things that you value in your life. Therefore, if you're looking for meaning and satisfaction, you might want to downplay to some degree just the match between you and the work. I call this match theory, and I argue that it is insufficient for explaining career passion and satisfaction, though it is also very common. This theory says that what matters mainly is the match of the content of your work to some intrinsic attributes or traits about you as a person, and that if you get the right job, you'll love it from day one, and if it's the wrong job, you won't. Match theory is often encapsulated in that simplistic maxim, follow your passion. I think that's all bunk.

I do not think people are hardwired for particular jobs. I don't think just the match of the content of the job to your personality will ever be a sufficient explanation for career satisfaction for most people. So career capital theory is the alternative. You get rare and valuable skills and you then trade those in for traits that make your work great. So with that in mind, Bradford, a few concrete pieces of advice. first, don't obsess over finding the perfect job for you. There is no perfect job. There is no one true match that will make you happy,

whereas everything else will make you sad. That type of mythology is largely untrue. On the other hand, it's not that any job is fined for you. It's not that you can just randomly select a job listing and you will be equally happy with whatever you come up. You still have to be reasonable. you still want to look for a job that is interesting to you that would open up interesting opportunities and flexibilities for you

if you get good at it and does not conflict with your value system and finally is conducive with other parts of your lifestyle that are important to you. I mean, if you're someone who's really into outdoor hobby style athletics like mountain biking and rock climbing, don't become an investment banker. You're not going to have a lot of time left over. might be looking for a job that actually is going to give you a much more steady schedule or even an adaptable schedule or a remote work setup that's going to give you the ability to do your morning surf if that's what you're into. What I'm saying is there are obvious as qualifiers, but I probably

don't need to tell you this because it's common sense. So if the job seems boring, don't take it. If you don't like it. If it goes against your values, don't take it. If it doesn't seem like it has an interesting place to take you as you get better, don't take it. And if it conflicts with certain things that are important to you in your lifestyle. Don't take it as well. There are probably many jobs available once you start searching that all make it past those qualifiers. Any of those can be the foundation of passion and satisfaction. So I'm not putting the bar for job selection onto the floor, but I'm taking it from the ceiling and putting it down much lower where it's much easier to step over. There is no one true job that's going to make you happy. There's many jobs that could.

you have to take some care in selecting them, but not an excessive amount of care. Two, concretely, take advantage of career capital that you have already acquired. So if you are not new in your career, you probably already have some rare and valuable skills. Rare and valuable skills is your main bartering chip for making your job better. So all things being equal and even all things being not that equal. When you're looking at the jobs that make it past those initial, disqualifiers, really bias yourself towards those that make use of your already existing career capital. Otherwise, you're going to have to do a lot more work from scratch. This notion of

romantically completely changing your job to a different industry, it just means you have to start over at roughly the entry level. Again, that's the most frustrating level. You have no career capital. You have more years of work of acquiring skills before you can start to get cool stuff in your work. It's not as romantic as you think. Try it. to go into industries that are going to take advantage of the skills you already have. It's going to definitely shorten your path to getting more satisfaction. Three, start to get a sense of what resonates for you. What are you looking for in your working life?

Put together this vision. It's helpful to key off of concrete individuals, right? I like this person's life. What they're doing for work, what their life is like outside of work. Maybe you imagine yourself in a high rise and you're, making moves and influencing industries, or maybe you imagine yourself in a cabin and you're fishing, and you only work six months a year.

And no one's in your business. See what resonates. And then make sure when you're looking at a job that you see some path where if you get good enough, if you are valuable enough to that industry, you will have a way of investing that career capital to maneuver your working life towards those things that resonate,

towards that image that resonates. So you have a plan there. All right. So those are my three concrete pieces of advice, Bradford. Of course, for more, read the book so good they can't ignore you. All of that is elaborated at length. All right. Amit has an academic question.

He asks about how do you balance between doing deep quality research and the need to publish more? Amit, this is a big issue in my field, computer science. there is certainly a pressure towards publication quantity that you need to publish. And I don't want to say that this is at the expense of quality in the obvious sense. So it's not just that you have to publish a lot of papers, but you have to publish a lot of papers and really hard to publish places.

So they have to be really good papers. You have to publish a lot of them. And if you go to a top grad school like MIT or Carnegie Mellon or Stanford, it's what they train you to do. Here is how you write, right, right, right. You often have to have multiple papers going in parallel. You have to constantly be deep thinking. You have to wring as much as you can out of your brain.

It's why when I came out of the theory group at MIT, I already had the embryonic ideas that became deep work implanted because it was just a culture there that focuses everything. Before we talk concretely about what to do about that reality, I just want to say that I do think it's a problematic reality in the sense that it does diminish quality in the more, I don't know, epic sense. So the stuff that really good researchers publish is really good.

But then there's the notion of the game-changing paper, the paper that changes a field or starts a new field. So not just like, oh, it got accepted at a competitive place. Not just it's mathematically very complex and very impressive, but that it actually had an impact on a field. those papers take a lot more time. This is probably what you're getting at a meet because they are often at odds

with the quantity-focused high-end publishing mentality. Now, is there a solution to this? Well, the CRA, so the trade organization CRA, they did an interesting report on the field of computer science about what the solution should be, and I really actually like what they suggested. They suggested that for hiring, so hiring someone to be a professor

and then again for tenure that you do not review a applicant's full publication record in fact they don't even submit their full publication record you instead highlight your most impactful work so maybe for a professorship I think they recommended that you submit three papers

and for tenure you submit five and those are sent out, you know, two experts in the field, how influential were these papers, and that's what you're evaluated on. So if you write three really important papers and nothing else, you will be more likely to be hired in this scheme than if you wrote 15 papers. They were all really good,

but you really didn't have any subset that were super influential. That's a really cool idea. I think that really would bias towards people taking more time in writing, more impactful papers. and it's also really stressful to publish that much. I mean, as I've mentioned on the podcast before, I've had sort of the first quiet year this year, because of COVID, because of my administrative role

of director of graduate studies, because of X, Y, Z, whatever, long list, a quiet publication year. I haven't had a quiet publication year since, I don't know, 2006. That's the pace, right? And it can be quite stressful. and doesn't necessarily, is not necessarily what's best for the field. All right. So what, I mean, can we do about it right now?

The CRA recommendations are not used anywhere that I know of. So what can we do right now? You need to have parallel tracks. So always have one paper that's like your baby that you're working on. You've been working on for a long time. You keep coming back to. That's where you're trying to craft your high impact thing. Then in your other track, you're trying to get the good papers public.

that high quantity. And you basically have to do that dual track publication. You have to be able to keep a couple things going at a time. That's just the art of doing really high-end academic research. It's just a really hard job. It is just really demanding. That's what you need to do. So just when you have this multi-track approach to papers, just dedicate one of the tracks to high-impact papers. It's a little bit scary because that takes away, slightly reduces your publication quantity on average because that takes away energy you could be putting into writing more papers in any given year. But it doesn't make that go down to zero. And those high impact papers do make a big difference. And it's good for the field. So that is what I would suggest. All right, let's do one more

work question. Andrew asks, do managerial rules require roles, rather, require deep work? Why or why not? All right, this is actually a good question. I don't think I gave this sufficient attention in my book Deep Work. In my new book coming out in March, a world without email, I tackle this question specifically, and I get way more into it. And basically, here's where I come away. There are a lot of managerial positions that don't require a lot of, what we think of just classic long stretches of uninterruptions. concentration on cognitive demanding task. You know, if you're a project manager at a software firm, you don't have the same demand as your developers to lock in on a piece of code for six hours. It's sort of a lot more on your plate that you have to balance and handle and help advance.

But, and I think this is what's important, the cost of context switching, So this cost of I'm working on one thing, but I glance at another thing, and then I come back to the primary thing, and now my brain is muddled, and I can't do it as well. That has a equivalent impact, even when you're doing more managerial style tasks. Let me assign this work. Let me get this thing filled out. I need this requisition. I need to gather these numbers. I need to make a plan for this employee. If you're context switching a lot, it's going to make that all harder. You're not going to do it as well. and so what I argue in a world without email is that managers, they need much more sequentiality than they have right now, the ability to do what they're doing until they're done and then move on to the next thing.

Then they do that until they're done and they move on to the next thing. Now, some of these things might be short, and some of these things might not require massive amounts of training and careful thinking, but still do one thing at a time until you're done, move on to the next. You're going to get a lot more out of your brain, which means your decisions are going to be sharper, the quality is going to be better, and the overall time required to do things is going to be shorter. Now, I talk about it in my email book because if you work in a culture in which you have no workflows,

you have no processes, most work unfolds with just an ongoing ad hoc, unstructured back and forth interactions over email and Slack. It's very difficult to have sequentiality because you have to constantly be minding these ongoing conversations because people might need you. If they have no other way of getting things done, except for this ad hoc unstructured conversation, they might need your response before they can make progress. And you don't want to be holding someone back. So you have to constantly be checking Slack. You're constantly checking email. So you're constantly contact shifting while trying to actually do the other tasks you need to do. You do them worse. And everyone ends up worse off. And so a manager doesn't need as much of like give me six hours. I'm going to think

deeply. But they might need 60 minutes without having to check email. That needs to be possible without the wheels falling off the bus. I found some good research I talked about in that book where you can actually also track that as the email load increases on managers, their thinking shifts increasingly from strategic to productivity focused. And then they become just,

I want to keep up with email, I want to keep up with Slack. And a lot of managers today would say, well, that's what I do, but it's not. And as this research makes clear, the big picture thinking, the strategy, the working with your employees, to make sure what do they need?

What's going on with Bob? What does Bob need? Let me talk with Bob. We can get a lot more out of Bob if we could figure out, you know, maybe there's some friction here we could fix or better work he could go. On this type of leadership style thinking

goes away when the email quantity gets higher. And then the manager just becomes a glorified one of those switchboard operators. Passing movies, thoughts. I moved this over here. Did you get this? that, pass this file, lots of stuff coming in from different groups within your organization.

We pass this on. Did my people see this? Oh, here's something from HR. Let me send this to my people. Did you get this answer? What happened with that? Leadership goes away. Your switchboard operator. So anyways, I have a lot more to say about that in the book, but basically, I think people need the ability to do one thing at a time, give it all the attention it deserves before moving on to the next. that's impossible if all of your work unfolds in an ad hoc fashion just using email or slack. In the world without email I talked about in that book, that's one of the big advantages is that managers can actually lead once they are no longer just absolutely entangled in that hyperactive hive mind of ongoing communication. Before moving on, I want to take a moment to talk about a brand new sponsor for the deep questions. podcast and that is ExpressVPN. Now as someone as you know who is quite wary about big tech

companies, I am the fan of products such as ExpressVPN. Now let me put on my computer science hat here for a second to actually explain how a VPN actually works. Two big things you have to keep in mind. One, when you're using ExpressVPN, instead of you just connecting from your home, let's say directly to a website, you're instead connecting to one of ExpressVPN's servers. You tell that server, oh, this is the website I want to go to, and then ExpressVPN's computers, they talk to the website. And then the website talks back to ExpressVPN,

which then turns around and tells you what it said. So now the website doesn't know they're talking to you. You're not talking directly to the website. You have an intermediary. So that website doesn't see your address. They don't know who you are. They just know they're talking to ExpressVPN on behalf of someone. Secondly, what ExpressVPN does is it encrypts that traffic.

So when I send a message to the website to ExpressVPN saying, I want to go to Calnewport.com, it will be encrypted on your machine. And that encrypted packet will be sent to ExpressVPN. And so if someone grabs that packet in between, so if you're on Wi-Fi and someone sniffs that packet off the air, which they can very easily do, they just see encrypted Ghibli gook,

that's the technical term. You can look that up in a cryptography textbook. They just see an encrypted cipher text, to use the actual term, that they can't read. And then the ExpressVPN servers unencrypt that, and then they talk on your behalf to calduport.com, and you receive the embarrassment of spending time browsing my content. Both of these things are very good.

Both of these things make a lot of sense in our current moment where the website on the other end might be trying to exploit you and hackers in between might be trying to see what you are up to. The old generations of VPN, people used to worry what slow things down. ExpressVPN, I gotta tell you, very fast.

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to learn more. All right, and with that, let's move on appropriately enough to some technology questions. Vijay asks, how do you use technology for academics without being distracted? I am preparing for my CA exams,

and I assume that means certified accountant. The relevant study materials are available online, but every time I sit down the study and open my laptop, I am being bombarded, with distractions. So VG, I have two answers for you. The first answer is what I tell to younger students who have this problem because more and more work

at the primary and secondary level includes this online portion where you have to go online and download information or find information, and I tell them, separate the information gathering from the actual working with the information. I actually talk about this method in my book how to become a straight-A student, but I talk about it in an analog sense

because that book was written a long time ago before people did a lot of research online. But in that book, when I talk about how to research for a paper, I have this whole method where you're in the library because we used to use the library back then, and you would Xerox relevant chapters, and you would staple them together,

and you would write up a quick summary of here are the main points in here that might be relevant. You would build up these physical packets of stapled together Xerox papers with summaries on the front. That was the information gathering phase. In an unrelated session, you take that stack of physical papers

and you begin going through them and building an outline for a paper to write. So the gathering the information was separate from the use of the information. Well, you can do the same, obviously, in the online context. Gather the information you need for a study session.

Then you disconnect from the internet, maybe go to a different machine or unplug your router and do the studying. It could be right then, or you could do it in a completely different session if you really want your mind to shift out of online distraction mode. My second piece of advice here is a little bit more harsh, which is just when it comes to these distractions,

when you're trying to do work, and you see distractions when you go on there to get your information, and therefore you get stuck in distractions. Stop it. You're not one of the little kids I talk to. You're not a junior high school student. You got to just do your work. Yeah, okay, there's distracting stuff online.

Just set a rule for myself. When I am studying, I don't look at distracting stuff. You know, it's probably good to have that type of discipline to get some hard edges like that to push up against. There's going to be no end to the temptations in your life, especially as an adult when you can do whatever you want. no parent looking over your shoulder. You live in your own place.

So you've got to have a little bit of discipline. So that is my sort of second harsher, tough love type response, which is just stop doing it, VJ. I'll give you the rule. When you're working around your exams, you don't do anything else, even if you see a pop-up.

And even if you remember that an interesting website exist. So just have that black and white rule. But if you still struggle with that, there always is strategies like this separating gathering from processing. All right, Ed asks, in one of your podcasts, you described your methodology about how you read books, which you were using for articles and books you are writing. I would like to know how

are you reading scientific papers. How you keep track of them, do you use software for that? Ed, it's an interesting question because academic papers are often quite hard to read. and let me qualify this. If you're reading an academic paper as a journalist or a book author and you want to just pull out some insights from the paper, that's not so hard. But if you're reading an academic paper because you need to understand a complex result that you might yourself build on or leverage,

so if you are like me a theoretical computer scientist and you see there's this brand new result on a problem that advances the state of the art and you want to understand how they do it, it's very hard. five to ten hours of intense concentration to figure it out probably. At least in my field, you're trying to take math proofs that are written with a lot of elision and fill in the gaps. And it's very difficult. It's necessary.

It's at the foundation of doing new work. You have to build on existing results, but it's very hard. So I don't read academic papers casually. It's very difficult in my field to just say, I'm just kind of reading these because who knows? one day it might prove useful, it's just too time-consuming and difficult. The activity is two-time-suming difficult to do it casually. So when I'm reading an academic paper, it's usually part of a specific project I'm working on. I'm trying to make progress on this.

Here's a paper that's really relevant. I might get something on this paper that directly helps me. Now I'm going to tackle this paper. Or I'm teaching this topic in an advanced graduate seminar. I need to know what to teach it. I'm going to dive into that paper. I'm going to spend the time. Now, given that, tracking and summarizing these papers, there's a natural way to do it because if I'm already working on a research project, I already, as I've explained in previous podcasts, I'm going to have a shared document written in a markup language called latex, which is what mathematicians use to write and typeset mathematical papers.

We're going to have one of these documents shared with my collaborators in which we are building out notes on what we're learning. we're putting in drafts of proofs. Eventually, the shared document will evolve into the paper we submit on the topic. So if I read a relevant paper for a given project, I'm going to add it to the bibliography of that shared document,

and I'm going to put the summary right there in the paper. So in other words, by the time I get to a point where I'm reading an academic paper, I already have a home in which that paper can go, so I don't have a general home for which I just generally summary papers. Different academic fields are different. There's a lot of academic fields where you can kind of dip into papers and get the main idea, and it's useful to summarize that with the idea

that I can come back to that later if I need to. But in theoretical computer science, this stuff is so mathematical and so hard that that is not as tractable. There's just not enough time to do it. So that's what I do. In the shared documents I'm already using for a project, I put in the citations and paper summaries of the papers I read while working on that particular project or if I'm teaching a class, it goes right into the class notes for that class. That's a good question, Ed. I haven't really talked about that before. So speaking of geeky academic questions, Joe asks, do you think p equals np? Short answer, Joe is no. I do not think that is the case. I think most complexity theorists would

agree. P probably does not equal np. Now I feel obligated to give a brief background here. The P versus N.P problem is a classic problem in complexity theory, which is itself a subfield within theoretical computer science. P is a complexity class, so it is a collection of problems that share a property. NP is a different complexity class potentially. That is a collection of problems that share a property. This is where things get a little bit... I mean, I don't know. I, look, I teach this to grad students, but how can I summarize this? So if a problem is in the P complexity class, that means that it is

solvable with a polynomial number of steps with a deterministic Turing machine where the polynomial is defined with respect to the input size. If a problem falls within to the complexity class in P, that means that it is solvable in a polynomial number of steps by a non-deterministic turn machine, or equivalently, it can be verified in a polynomial number of steps by a deterministic verifier turn machine. So that should probably clear it up for everyone, right? Anyways, it's an interesting problem because P is basically problems that complexity theorists think of as being tractably solvable by computers.

Not only can you solve them, but you can solve them in a reasonable amount of time. It's not going to take 100,000 years for the computation to end. NP is a really interesting collection of problems. It includes all the problems in P, but it also includes a lot of problems that are interesting and difficult and that we don't currently know how to solve efficiently with computers. So the big question is, which of the following two cases is true? Either P is the same as NP.

Everything in the class NP is also in the class P. everything this class NP can be solved efficiently with computers, or it's the case that there are some things in the class NP that cannot be solved efficiently by computers. People have worked on this problem for a long time. We don't know how to solve it. We don't even really know what technique would probably solve it. We were big on circuit complexity approaches for a while, but that turned out to be a bit of a dead end. There is a million dollar bounty on this question. So if you can prove it either way, P equals MP or P does not equal MP, you will win a million dollars. So it's not for lack of trying.

There's actually a headline not too long ago. I don't know. Time has passed now. It might have been a decade ago now. I think when I was a grad student or maybe as a young professor, you know, was on the front page of the New York Times. Probably one of the least understand articles to ever be on the front page of the New York Times where they had said the P versus M.P. problem had been solved that had been shown to be they were not equal. The proof was checked. Could not really be verified. There were some steps in there that didn't really make sense.

Turns out it was not correct. They did not win the million dollars. Now, the big textbook, there's a couple, but one of the famous textbooks in complexity theory. So the textbook that covers this, P versus MP for sort of introductory graduate school audience, it's written by an MIT professor named Michael Sipser, who at least at the time was the chair of the math department. So when I learned complexity theory at the graduate level, when I was at MIT, I learned it from Michael Sipser. I took Michael Sipser's famous class. It was exactly what you would imagine having seen movies like Goodwill Hunting. It was in this big auditorium at MIT in one of those big stone wings right next to the giant dome. And it was an amphitheater type setup. If I remember,

properly. And Sipser had three rows of chalkboards. So you know these chalkboards you can move up and down. You have three columns of chalkboards. And there's the permanent chalkboards. There's three high. So it's like nine chalkboards. So three columns, three high. And then each column had two moving chalkboards. You could move up and down. And Sipser had taught this stuff enough that he had the choreographer choreography of the chalkboards memorized. So he just knew where to write this on this chalkboard because he could move it up and it could come down later when he needed it. and he used all of those chalkboards masterfully. So I do remember his chalkboard etiquette.

The other thing I remember by Sipzer is that my memory was he was in charge of or on the jury that had to evaluate the submissions for the million dollar prize. The jury that had to say, you know, does this proof actually show P equals MP or doesn't equal MP? And my memory is they used to, in a theory group, assign some of these proofs. to the grad students to disprove. It was often harder than you thought. It turns out it's very easy to come up with a proof that seems incredibly solid

that gets you to an answer and that the flaw is really minor. So it's a really good exercise. I never was actually tasked to do this, but I had heard there were students that were being tasked to look at these proofs as training and it sounds like good training. I actually, you know, when I teach this to grad students at Georgetown,

I do, one of the questions I asked them, one of their problem sets is I give them a P versus MP proof that's really compelling and concise but has a subtle error in it. So that's the legacy of Sipzer. Anyways, Joe, this is a question that was probably interesting to three people in this audience and I think you and I represent two thirds of those people. But it's a cool problem. I think more people should know about it. So I am glad you asked it. Kevin asks, is it possible to live life without Facebook to be totally disconnected from something I feel is toxic and dangerous to society at large. Well, Kevin, yes, it is a hundred percent possible to live life without Facebook.

I have never had a Facebook account. And as far as I can tell, I'm okay. I have friends. I know what's going on in the world. I'm still able to talk to friends. It hasn't been an issue. Now, one thing I'll say is that I think it has become easier now to not be on Facebook than perhaps it was at some points, and I think this is due to a tactical error by the

Facebook corporation. So the big selling point for Facebook was network effects. We are easier to use than the social internet writ large, and lots of people use us. So if you want to easily connect with someone that you know, and they're already on the platform, you can easily connect with them. If you want to go to a new social media platform, well, they're probably not a member of that platform, so it's not that useful to you. So Facebook had this network effect advantage. Once they had enough people on there,

they became way more useful than any competitive network because it's very hard to build up a large user base. This was Facebook's pitch. Everyone you know is here. Their tactical error is that when they went through their great transformation between 2010 and 2012 in which they were tasked with trying to maximize the active

user minutes that every user spent on the service per day. They had to get their revenue in other words up their IPO could succeed. They noticed that this sort of social interaction wasn't generating enough

of these user active minutes. Now remember, the old model for Facebook was the wall. You published on your wall, your friends and family or what have you would publish on their walls, you would occasionally turn on to see what they had published.

You'd go over to their walls and see what it was. They shifted in 2010 to 2012 to a newsfeed model in which when you turned it on, what they were giving you was a endlessly scrolling news feed of information that their algorithms had selected using a statistical model

of you. They have an always updated statistical model of you as a person based on your activity that they use to help select what you want to see. Now, some of the stuff comes from people you know a lot of it doesn't. And they meld it all together. It's like, here's what we're giving you. It says ongoing flow of stuff that's interesting. So in the wall model, you weren't going to click on Facebook if you had recently checked on what the people you cared about had to say because people don't post their own stuff that much. But in the newsfeed model, there's always something new to see.

And it's been algorithmically optimized to push some buttons and be interesting. Now, I think this was a tactical error. In the short term, in the short term, sure, people used it more. Because now there was more to see. So you're standing in line. You're waiting for whatever your computer to update. You're walking to your car. Like, you can just hit it.

There's always something interesting there. But what they did, they accidentally reduced the network effect advantage. if the main thing I'm doing on Facebook is just getting entertained, then it doesn't really matter that my cousin's on there and that my friends are on there, my old college roommates on there, because I'm not really connecting with them that much. I'm just sort of seeing this constant flow of sort of algorithmically selected hyper-palatable pleasing information.

And so what happened is after that shift, people began to move more of their digital interactions with people they knew and cared about to other mediums, Most of which were not controlled by large attention economy companies. People begin using, for example, group text messages more. I think Apple I message made that very easy. More and more people say, yeah, my high school buddies, I've got a thread on my phone. We text.

My family, we have a thread. We text. My college buddies, we have a thread. We text. That's where that interaction happened. Baby pictures. Remember that used to be a big thing? your grandparents wanted to see baby pictures

so you had to be on Facebook so that they could look at your wall and see the baby pictures. Today, you text it to them. Also, there's been a large rise, especially internationally, in the use of group chat software, like WhatsApp. This is why Facebook bought WhatsApp, where interaction happens back and forth,

not on Facebook, not on the wall. Facebook has become like a TV channel, a stream of interesting information. So, Kevin, the thing is, is if that's what Facebook has become, well, there's a lot of places to find interesting information. There's a lot of places that can entertain you. So it's actually quite easy today to leave Facebook because the people that 10 years ago, you maybe didn't know how to talk to except for on Facebook, you're probably already talking to them now using instant messengers and text messages. So you're not really

losing anything. Facebook doesn't have anything proprietary to offer you. You can just offer to tickle your brain stem and engage you in ways that often leave you feeling worse off. So I think, Kevin, leave Facebook. It's never been easier. You're not even going to miss it. Now, if you're not sure, just take it off your phone, keep it on your computer, put in a complex password that you unsaved. It's a little bit of a pain to put in.

I will tell you from experience that little bit of friction of I have to load up my computer and type in a password will knock out 99% of the time you use Facebook, but at least you won't be worried that maybe. maybe I'm making a mistake by leaving it. So you can do that for a month and realize I never used it once I introduced some friction. And then you'll be comfortable actually deactivating your account. But that's what I would say. Facebook, they made a tactical error when they moved away from their network effect advantage.

Now they're just an entertainment source and people would rather listen to podcasts. People would rather join substacks or interesting email list. People would rather read honest-to-goodness books than just see what their cousin's roommate thinks about to anon. Now Kevin, you mentioned other social media platforms. The ease with which you can leave those other platforms, it really depends on what's going on in your life. Like, I will acknowledge for a lot of professions, it's difficult superficially speaking to leave Twitter because there's just this sense that this is where things are happening. If you're a journalist, you feel like you don't have your finger on the pulse, so that's like more complicated. Twitter and Instagram, there's a lot of

businesses to think they need it. I don't think that's necessarily true as much as people believe, but that's sort of a different situation than Facebook, where I think businesses use Facebook primarily to advertise. Where with Instagram and Twitter, your actual profile could be part of how you market or advertise. And in those cases, I just say you stripped a person away from the professional, you just do it on your computer, you have a schedule, and you really assess, is this really making a difference, you know, so that you're not spending more time than you need to. So the other platforms can be more complicated. Facebook is easy. You're not going to miss it. The other one I think is easy as TikTok.

That's brain poison. If that's on your phone, just throw the whole phone away right now. Don't even take the time to delete it. Just chuck it as far as you can. Let's start over. Get a rotary phone. Nothing's poison. Don't even get me started.

Zero purpose. Zero positive purpose. There's no reason for that to exist. Don't get me started. So Facebook, TikTok, no problem. Twitter, Instagram. It could be more complicated. but I get into this all in digital minimalism

about how you can untangle those. Anyways, I always appreciate an opportunity to talk about Facebook's great transformation away from the wall to the news feed and why it was probably a mistake. So Kevin, I appreciate that question. And speaking about sharing personal information, let's ironically do a quick backstage pass segment.

So in this segment, I give some insight into my own personal struggles to live a deeper life. I had two quick things I wanted to mention this week. First, as I mentioned in a recent podcast, a lot of people have been asking me about the social dilemma, the documentary on Netflix. And so I thought it'd be worth reporting that I actually finally got around to meeting Tristan

Harris. We did an event together earlier this week. Though I have met and spent time with other people involved with the Center for Humane technology. This is, believe it or not, actually the first time I have spoken with Tristan. And it was a good conversation. I really enjoyed it. We had a discussion in a Q&A session. I think Tristan and I are largely on the same page about a lot of points. I probably focus a little bit more on the individual, where he focuses more on the larger organization and regulation. But I think that is a, those are two perfectly fine approaches that both should be explored.

he probably thinks of the large social media companies as being more unavoidably central to our life than I do. I tend to maintain that their foothold on the zeitgeist is more tentative than people realize and that we can imagine a future not too far ahead of us in which things like Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or particular of these major platforms that seem so integrated into our life right now

or look back at as being kind of odd or fattish or arbitrary. I just don't find them as central as I think he does, though. I'll tell you what, I made that argument, and he didn't dismiss it. And in general, I just think, look, this is a guy who's in the arena with a big audience. I give respect to anyone who is actually in the arena doing the fight, taking the arrows, and staying up on their feet. So that was a lot of fun, and I'm glad I had that chance to meet him. The other thing I wanted to talk about, briefly in the backstage pass, is the Deep Work HQ progress.

I've been working a lot on the library. This is, as you know, the space in which I'm going to do my writing and proof-solving here in my Deep Work H-Q. The big decision I made was I wanted to try to make as most use as possible of the furniture that was left in this office when I took over the lease, as opposed to my original plan of maybe scrapping a lot of it and starting from scratch. I figured I should make the best possible configuration with what I have and live with it. it. And once I really get used to it, if I want to replace something then, like, well, an even better desk or something, then I can. But I wanted to get going quickly. So I worked with the existing bookcases. I worked with some existing desks. Here is the configuration I ended up with.

So you walk into this large area through kind of a big archway, not a large area, but like a big room. Directly ahead of you is two large, wide bookcases full of all my books. I have four rows in there just of various editions of my own books and then the rest are just the other books I use most frequently for research. There's a big rug on the ground. This was from my study

before I lost a study to our home school. It's a rug I really like. It's a mid-century Afghan rug. Then off on the right wall, if you look to the right, the entire wall is now a death surface up against the wall. So I don't know, 10 plus feet

of continuous desk surface. On it are now three modernist library lights that aim down and illuminate the whole surface. I'm ordering, I don't have them yet, actual wooden stained library chairs from a company that supplies chairs to actual libraries. I wanted a wooden library chair, not an office chair. So those are coming.

You have two chairs, very long surface, three lamps illuminate it. I have to put some artwork above it. know what. I have a lot of wall space there. Suggestions welcome. Interesting at calnewport.com to figure out what they put up on the wall above the desk space. Okay. If you go against the other wall, I'm going to have an armchair there. Actually, it's already there. I have an armchair and a lamp and a side table where I can do my reading. That's under the only window in that room. And then in the other corner, which is immediately to your left when you walk in, I have this giant standing whiteboard

that can flip over that I've put there. And I have this really cool. retro lamp with three glass bulbs on it that illuminate the whiteboard and also more of the room. So ideas I can work on that whiteboard on proofs. The walk across room to the desk and actually type them up. If I need to read, I go to the leather chair to read, then to the desk to write my articles. And so it's sort of like I have those three stations of deep work production. Whiteboard, armchair by bookcase, large open table. So I'm almost there.

I have to build the whiteboard. I have to get the artwork and I have to order the check. but I almost have all the pieces in place for version one of my Deep Work Library. And my rule is, as I've mentioned before, no email in the library. I'm going to see if that works. If after a while can I build an association that in this particular space, all I do is think. Not sure if that's going to work because I, you know, write down the hall, I will be doing email. But I'm going to try.

report back how that experiment goes. Before moving on to the always entertaining questions about the deep life, we had one more brand new sponsor to the Deep Questions podcast that I am excited about, and this is purple mattress. Now, here's something you don't know about me. I am a mattress knob. You know how mattresses you can order, have those money back guarantees, and you figure no one is actually going to go through the hassle of sending back one of those mattresses.

I 100% have done that. There is just a certain combination of firmness and softness that I need or my back gets sore, and I am a hot sleeper. I cannot have a mattress which sleeps hot. This is why I was excited about purple mattress. They have a technology called the Purple Grid, which 100% sets them apart from every other mattress. Sets them apart from the spring guys,

sets them apart from the pure foam guys. So this is this gel-based spring that has over 1,800 open-air channels, these neutralized body heat, which is crucial for me. It gives you a cooling effect that you just don't get from the foam mattresses. You just don't get from the spring mattresses. They also do pillows that have the same technology. That is absolutely crucial. You have the same issues with your head with overheat or not having the right softness that you would have with mattresses. They sent me, and I have been working.

working with some of this purple grid products, and I can tell you as a mattress snob, they have figured out something really cool here. And if you care about sleep, as everyone who focuses on deep work should, purple should be on your radar. So experience a purple grid and you will sleep like never before. Go to purple.com slash deep 10, the word deep and the number 10,

and use promo code deep 10, and for a limited time you'll get 10% off any order of $200 or more. That's purple.com slash deep 10 promo code deep 10. You actually use the numbers, 1-0, for 10% off any order, $200 or more, terms apply. We will kick off our deep life questions with a query from Christopher, who asks, how do I apply deep work and digital minimalism principles to my personal life hobbies, which require depth and deep thinking, i.e. how to set up the rules for this

without losing the looseness of my free time. Well, Christopher, looseness in your free time, one thing I'll say is probably overrated. This idea that the absence of structure is the foundation for physiological recharge is largely unfounded. We tell ourselves today,

the reason why I need to have nothing to do tonight, except for whatever, I'm just going to watch Netflix and just whatever comes I'm going to do, it seems appealing in the moment because maybe we're coming out of a workday that was very structured and very driven, and we think the lack of structure will be refreshing, but it's not really. I think we all know this. A night spent doing nothing really at all, just sort of haphazardly chasing down positive chemicals, is never a night that we end feeling really good. Structuring to some degree your free time can actually help you get more positive affect, more recharging and more relaxation out of those moments.

Now, I say somewhat when talking about structuring because, as you know, and I've talked about even in this podcast episode, you can go too far. I don't, for example, recommend strict time block planning of your leisure time. Time block planning, it's incredibly effective, but in part it's effective because it's intense. This is what I'm doing for exactly this much time, and I got to be really focused on hitting my mark. Now, if you do this during the workday, you're going to get a lot more work done, and that's good. Keep doing that during the evening.

You're eventually going to say, like, okay, I can't be completely locked in all the time on what am I doing right now. The activity has to be completely right. You will burn out. You might stop the discipline altogether, even in your work life. That's not good.

But having a loose plan for, what do I want to do tonight? That's good. having some rituals or daily habits that are positive that you always do. I always work out and I always read right before bed and I go for a walk at a certain times. Having that type of structure of habits that occur at the same time, that's also good. So a night that is a mix of habits you always do and some loosely planned activities that seem like a interesting positive mix of things. I think that's going to be better than just saying let's just rock and roll.

let's just see what's on Netflix, let's grab a beer. So I would say, Christopher, don't worry about losing looseness, worry about wasting those moments. And again, don't be hyper-intense about this. You need a time-block plan, but you need some sort of plan. So how do you do that? Well, again, like I suggested, I think is enough. You probably should have some habits that are good for you that you track.

My time-block planner, for example, actually has a daily metric space. So every day at the end of the day, you can track, here are key behaviors I want to do every day and how I did them. And I recommend in the introductory material of that planner that you track both professional and personal metrics. Have some things you do every day, reading, exercise, etc. Conversations, you call someone in your family, do you call a friend, et cetera.

I think that's good. Structure, it's not loose, it's good. And then loose plans. Okay, tonight I'm going to work on this. and then I'm going to go do this or whatever it needs to be. And the loose plan might be I need to take like a hot bath and bring a glass of wine in there because I'm just exhausted. But at least that's leisure that you're planning and you're kind of optimizing.

I'm going to watch this show and I'm going to have the hot bath. And it just seems more intentional. So the summary of all of this is that lack of structure is not something we need. We can't be intense all the time. We can't avoid sleep. We don't want to do the same activity all day long with no break, so you need all of that. But to have some structure around it is not a problem. So get some habits, track them, make a loose plan for your free time.

You will probably be happier. Rick asks, what to do about the walled garden otherwise known as Facebook? For those of us askewing Facebook accounts and thus locked outside of that walled garden, what are the alternatives in this era of reducing? real-world social interaction. Well, of course, Rick, I'll first point you back towards the question I answered back in the technology section where I argue to Kevin that there's actually not as much

social interaction happening on Facebook as there used to be. You probably are doing your digital social interaction already in other non-walled garden platforms, such as just through group text messages or phone calls or Zoom calls, etc. So you've already probably largely solved this problem of how to do digital interaction without Facebook. And if you haven't, everyone else has solved this problem. So you should not have that much trouble following their example. But you noticed that you noted that this is an era of reduced to real world social interaction.

So there's one other thing I want to say here, which is why I put this in the Deep Life section. Real world social interaction is different than digital social interaction. Waldgarden or not? Whether or not you're on a completely neutral text message thread or a completely exploitative Facebook feed. Real-world interaction is different to digital. In my book, Digital Minimalism, I get really into the science on this, but there are a lot of channels and brain networks involved in interacting between humans. Only a little bit of these channels and only a little bit of these brain networks actually deal with the linguistic content of interaction.

sending text back and forth on a screen is an impoverished form of interaction that misses out most of the richer cues that have to do with facial expressions and body movements and intonation and pacing and limbic consonants and all other sorts of complex physiological and psychological

terms that describe the dance of back and forth human interaction. And the point is we're a very social species so interaction without all those other channels and without all those other cues feels like an impoverished form of interaction to our brain. It's why you can be, for example, a heavy social media user and still feel lonely. Hard to completely replace real world.

Video helps and voice helps. I think Zoom is about as close as you can get. In a digital world, we can actually see them and hear their voice and actually see their body. That helps. And I'm glad we have Zoom. And I think it really helped during the early stages of the pandemic when people really couldn't see other people.

But even Zoom is not going to get you the same thing as I am here with you. So Rick, what is my recommendation? Do more real-world interaction. I think we got in the habit of not doing real-world interaction because of the uncertainty and scariness of the early months of the pandemic. But now we have people at this later stage in states like my own, in which 99% of businesses are open to some degree with reasonable mitigation factors, still talking about being in quarantine, still using the word lockdown.

still not leaving their house. Now here's the thing. If you are interacting with someone outside and you have some reasonable distance, you're not going to get COVID. And so you should do that. Now it's a very safe way to do it. Once you're at sufficient distance outside,

it's just not how infectious respiratory disease actually pass. It's not like in that Denzel Washington movie where if the person possessed by the evil spirit touches you, then you become infected, and you start singing, time is on my side. Do you remember that movie? Fallen? It's not like that. It's not like, we actually got close for a second.

Now you have the evil spirit, and you know it. It takes typically extended periods of in-person interaction. So all I'm saying is, you know, hey, stay far apart. But like, you get all the benefits of real-world interaction, even if you're kind of far apart, but you're still in each other's proximity. So I think people need to do a lot more of that, just like you figure I need to drink more water

and take more vitamin D because I don't want to be too unhealthy during a pandemic. Well, you don't want to have psychological ill health. And so it feels paradoxical because we've been told, you know, people are bad, interacting is bad, but actually you're going to end up in an even worse place if you're cut off from real world interaction. So you actually have to make the effort to do it.

And again, you do it outside, you do it with distance. It's safe. as I always say, you don't need me to tell you not to go down to the underground rave in the abandoned warehouse down by the docks, right? You're adults. You know about the epidemiology. But I don't think we have enough people pushing for. Talk to people. Talk to me in the real life. That matters. It's different than text. It's different than Zoom. And it's crucial for your mental health. So that's what I would say, Rick. And then, of course, just calibrate as you need. Like if you're compromised or you're in a high risk group or you work around people in high risk group, you know, don't meet with crowds.

distance large. If it makes you feel better, you could do the interaction masked. I mean, you're really talking about this point, minuscule, minuscule risk, getting hit by a car on the walkover is something to be more scared about. So I've been trying to advocate for this for people. Because I think this is standard public health. I don't know why we're not doing this with pandemic, but it's sort of public health 101. Right. And this is like Julia Marcus at Harvard, I think, has really been good writing about this. She's at the Harvard School of Public Health, and she did a lot of work on interventions for HIV spread internationally. And she's saying public health number one is you don't go around stigmatizing behaviors like

wanting to interact with people or wanting to feel love. You don't try to shame people or get people not to do those activities. You figure out how to do it in a safe and sustainable way. You work with people's human needs and drives and find a way that how do we accommodate those drives in a time where things are different. And I think we're fortunate here that there's an easy way to do it, outside at a distance, but take the effort to talk to real people. You might need it more than you think.

So, Rick, I don't know if this is your problem. I'm just using this as an excuse to talk about this particular issue. I spent a lot of time studying human interaction for that book. And I came away with a new appreciation for how important seeing someone with your eyes and the real world actually is when you're talking about them, even if those eyes are above a mask. We need it. Go get it.

All right. Got a good one here from Alex. Alex says, how do you combat mental health issues while trying to do deep work or just be productive? I am someone who has battled with anxiety and depression for a few years now and I feel like I've had a few days a year when I could really concentrate. I take medicine and sometimes see a therapist, but I find myself having these ideas and goals, but no feasible way to ever get to them. Well, Alex, I'm glad you're talking about mental health and deep work. This is, I think, a point of frustration or shame or discomfort for a lot of people who maybe like some of these

ideas but find that they're not very conducive for, let's say, being in a state of depression, being a state of anxiety. These are activities that require a lot of work in your brain and focusing it to do things that require a lot of motivation and a lot of focus, very difficult to do if you're at a state of heightened depression or anxiety. So I'm glad we get a chance to talk about it. Now the first thing I would say is the baseline. The baseline to all of this is taking seriously your battle. You know, you mentioned that you sometimes see a therapist. I mean, you might want to actually do the work to find a therapist you really like.

You seem to be on the same page with, the way that they interact, that their approach resonates. And really get after, like, what's our plan here? And let's meet and meet and meet. let's keep it regular. So you want to be serious. You want to have a baseline of a professional working with you. Professional you like and that you work with regularly

at least as long as you're in the period where you feel like there is a problem. Two, I would say it's a good sign that you're saying that you're frustrated that you can't make progress on the things you want to because you have things you want to make progress on. All right?

So I think that is a good sign. There is not an intensity of a hedonism here or a hedonic back pressure that's making it impossible to even have goals there's still things you want to do now you're having trouble doing them right that's a better place to be

a lot of people even without anxiety and depression have a hard time acting on it so now we're among company we're on solid ground which we can do some things here Alex and then third I would say let's maybe moderate you might want to moderate the ambition

of some of the goals right so if you're having a hard time mentally then four hours a day of hard novel writing might not yet be in the cars but be where you're trying to get and that's okay and you let yourself off the hook a little bit. A good place to start, once you have this

foundation working with a pro and the pro is giving you the foundation, they're guiding you through this battle. A good place to start in terms of optional activities you can do in addition to the professional help is to like I advise, identify the main bucket. that you think are important to living a deep life,

things like craft and constitution, contemplation and connection, the type of things I talk about a lot in this podcast. And instead of trying to have a really big swing in each of these things, that's going to require a lot of cognitive resources that are at perhaps short supply right now, do that first step of my deep life transformation process that I talk about a lot and just try to get a keystone habit in each.

In each of the buckets you identify as important have one thing you do. It's not super hard. You can do it sustainably, but not just completely trivial. That signals to yourself that you take that element of your life seriously and that you are able and willing to do non-required actions to support that part of your life. You can contemplation, it could be as easy as you read a book chapter once a night, same place, same time, whatever you need to do to make that a little bit more appealing, but you read that book chapter. And with Constantiation, you know, you use a morning walk you do and it's an hour and you do it every morning. Not super hard, but not trivial. That makes a world a difference. Once you feel like, okay, there's parts of my life that are important and then I am able to make a little bit of progress in. There's a bit of a momentum that builds there. There's a bit of a self-image that shifts.

And you just get the benefits of in each of these areas that you're important, you're actually doing some things that help those areas. And once you got that keystone habit in place, the next thing I always advise is that you go bucket by bucket and give each some time, a month if you need it, six months if you need it, and go through and say, let me make some more changes to how I live. They try to promote things I care about in this bucket. So when you give your month or six weeks for constitution, you clean up the diet, you clean up your exercise a little bit. This stuff matters. And you want to take your time. That's why I say start with the keystone and do things one by one.

And don't do sweeping overhauls. Just make some changes as you give each bucket your attention. But what you're doing here is that you are taking the nutriments of a fulfilling and satisfying life. And you're making sure that they're well fed, that they're present, to get time from you. So you start to get those benefits. And you begin to change your personal understanding of yourself to be someone who has things that are important to them. makes progress on them, even when it's not required. And that's someone that you feel good about being.

I mean, if depression is at play here, depression is highly ruminative, right? Depression symptoms come from this sort of aggressive, negative, ruminative self-talk. You know, this is, what are you doing here? You mess this up. What about that? Don't you regret this? It's basically ruminating on the past, for anxiety is rumination on the future. Oh, this bad thing's going to be.

happen that bad thing's going to happen. Same types of ideas, but they express themselves differently. But when you're actually, you have your keystone habits, you're doing some overhauls in these areas, in conjunction with the actual professional work, I can't emphasize that enough because if you have a therapist you like, they're a third wave therapist, they are using techniques that are validated by science. They probe the brains, they know what works, do not miss that piece. you can help diminish the impact of that rumination because actually you are the type of person that you respect and you're making changes in areas that you care about

and you're seeing the results of those changes, you're getting positive examples of what you're doing. So I think this deep life notion dovetails nicely with the professional approaches to these types of issues. And in the meantime, while you're doing that, you've got to let yourself off the hook, deep work, is like one of the more difficult things to do if you're suffering from either end of the anxiety to depressions,

spectrum. So don't make the four hours of novel writing what you want to be doing tomorrow. Maybe you want to be doing that a year from tomorrow, but tomorrow you have a habit you're trying to get in the place. You do these things and things get better. All right, so Alex, I appreciate that question because it allowed me to talk more broadly about this issue and I know a lot of our audience thinks about it. All right, let's do one more question here. This episode is a little longer than normal because we added that discussion up front on household productivity, but you are all friends here. We're all having a good time,

so I think we can fit in one more question. So the honor of the final question goes to Nicolay. He asks, How does an information junkie balance information intake with thinking for yourself? My struggle goes one step further because I feel that all the reading I do online and all the listening I do, I assuming it means podcast, prevents me from thinking for myself. I don't know about what my opinion is about stuff.

I feel like a collection of other people's opinions. Well, this is a good topic, Nicola. I've talked about this before from various angles, but I think the way you present this question opens up a fresh angle, which is the difference between exposure to information and understanding. Now, let's start with the positive. About our current moment. By our current moment, I don't mean like the last few years.

I mean, let's say, the modern internet era, so the last 20 to 25 years. It's hard for people who were born within this period to understand the degree to which information was really hard to come by before. The degree to which there was just a very small amount of things you would hear about, a very small amount of narratives that were acceptable that you had easy access to, and that was it. When you can read like Noam Chomsky's manufacturing consent for like a whole take on why this could be problematic. So the internet, the consumer facing internet arising in the mid-1990s has been a paradigm shifting change in terms of the democratization of information.

Nicolet, you have access to more information today by several. orders of magnitude than let's say I did when I was 10 years old before any of this technology was available. And that is a sort of humanity shifting change to our culture. I think it's a positive one. I think it's a positive one. Now, of course, there's good information, there's bad information, there's crazy information, there's funny information, there's information that's downright damaging, there's information that is just neutral, there's information that's a waste of time. So, of course, overload is an issue with information. But you can solve the overload problem with your own habits.

It's very difficult, however, to solve the problem of not having access to information. This is why I generally think of the Internet as being a source for good within the context of information flow. So my key advice for how do you solve the overload problem is that you have to deeply embody this notion, that exposure to information only shows you things that might be interesting know about. But it doesn't mean you know about them. You want to know about something you still have to do the hard to work, which I'll talk about in a second. And you make that distinction.

You make that distinction. So if I'm going to be out there, I'm going to see a lot of things. I can see it on the internet. I see it in podcasts. They listen to interesting people. Maybe I'm on Reddit or something. Look, I don't know what people do on the internet, but you know, whatever it is you guys do where you get exposed to all this information.

think of that as like I am collecting from the rainforest, interesting-seeming herbs that maybe are interesting for curing diseases, but I still have to do the science on them to see which ones actually do, which ones to willow bark and which one's poisonous.

Then I think you can actually walk this tightrope between the advantages of a lot of information and avoiding the disadvantages. So what does it take to actually know something? Well, look, I've given this Socratic method multiple times on this podcast, but I really stand by it. You need to consume,

long-form information about the topic. The medium matters if you're trying to learn about a topic in a very short medium like Twitter. The whole way you conceptualize that information and how it fits into your epistemological frame is going to be different and it's going to be less effective. If you're just consuming information, let's say through Twitter, it's going to give you an epistemological frame in which there is just sort of very clear binaries and people who are very right and people who are very wrong and you're often just like one dunk away from showing the wrong people that they're wrong and it's it's all angels swinging swords at devils that have fiery spears.

And it's not a useful epistemological frame for actually gaining knowledge of the world. Long-form consumption tends to do better. We know this historically from Gutenberg onwards. Long-form information consumption, so reading something complex and carefully written or listening to an interview with someone who was carefully articulating their argument, perhaps in the face of questioning. This puts us into a much more useful epistemological frame that is able to capture nuance, and is able to mix together different types of information that complements and conflicts and try to understand how these fit into a coherent worldview. It is much more conducive

in general for building a workable and effective understanding of the world, one that actually explains how it works and can make predictions that turn out to be true. So long form consumption. What type of information should you long form consume when you're faced with a topic? Well, what I always recommend is the Socratic approach. You consume the best possible long form case for the idea or the philosophy or the theory or whatever it is. You consume the best possible critique. If possible, you find an alternative. An alternative that might not even reference the original thing at all.

The alternative might predate it, but you say, I'll only expose myself to an alternative that's trying to understand or do something similar. Those things collide. Socrates is called the dialectic. Deeper roots of understanding shoot into the ground beneath that collision. And now you're getting towards knowing something. And now you are getting towards having an opinion on something on which you can actually base your understanding of the world and importantly your actions. It gives you a bit of philosophical piece. It gives you philosophical confidence. I think Aristotle would say that that type of deep intellectual understanding is at the key of the eudaimonic quest for full human potential realization. So that's all good. And so that's what I suggest. Expose yourself to lots of information because if you're not on

the internet, there's so many interesting things that could play a big role in your intellectual life that you're not going to know about. Take advantage of that. You worry about doing on social media. You know, I'm a bigger fan of doing this on blogs and podcasts and newsletter, subscriber list, and taking people that you really like and see what they have to say. And I think there's ways to do this that are probably cleaner than just seeing what comes across your Facebook news feed. But look, to each their own. So I won't get into that here.

You know my thoughts. Expose yourself to information, the stuff that keeps catching your attention. Say, I want an opinion on that. I want to know about it. That's different. Long-form consumption. Best possible case. Best possible critique.

Best possible alternative. Now you know something. That's what I recommend. So, of course, where we get in trouble, where people get in trouble is where they skip the know-something step. What happens, for example, when you skip the know-examination. that step of differentiating exposure from knowledge? Conspiracy theories.

Imagine what happens to a conspiracy theory, to someone is conspiracy-minded, when they do the whole Socratic process where they don't just collect the anomalies that will answer me this, how did that happen and this happen? How is it possible that this person was over here and over here and the bullet went through his brain but then also hit Governor Connolly from this angle

but also said, well, let me look at the best possible critiques. Let me look at the best possible critiques. Let me look at the best possible alternative explanations. How many conspiracy theories last? How many conspiracy theories last when they go through that ringer? Like how many of the 9-11 is an inside job crew? I mean, I remember talking to someone that, like, they were fixated on this notion. I don't know a lot about this conspiracy theory, but they are fixated on this notion that the melting

point to steel is X, and jet fuel burns at a cooler temperature. And they're like, okay, look, there's no way you could melt steel with jet fuel burning. I don't want to know about this. I've been exposed to that. It's an inside job. But what would happen if that person said, well, what's the best possible critique here? And it turns out the critique is really easy. It's like, well, wait a second. The melting point is the point at which the metal pools, like if you're going to actually intercourse, like if you're going to actually in a crucible and an iron manufacturing plant actually melt it down the pooling.

But if you expose it to the heat at which jet fuel burns for a long period of time, it softened significantly to the point where the load of the building below will buckle it. There's no problem understanding that once you actually ask someone

wants the alternative, but if you skip the alternative, you end up in conspiracy theory land. What else happens when you do not differentiate between exposure and knowing things? You can radicalize to huge extremes. And we see this again and again

in all sorts of different context, secular and religious, on all elements of the political spectrum from far right wing to far left wing, where if you're just exposing yourself to the information on some particular point of view or idea without trying to know,

without doing long-form consumption, without trying to challenge it with the best critique, without trying to compare it to the best alternative, it is incredibly easy to end up radicalized. And terrible things have. after radicalization again and again, regardless of the context, regardless of where you're on the spectrum, it does not lead to good places. And the final problem I'll mention, again, exposure without knowing, you end up alienating people you care about. I mean, everyone has the uncle or the cousin or

the aunt or whatever that you just can't talk to anymore. Because on whatever the issue was, they've just been exposing themselves to information about it without trying to know, and it pushes you to this place where they're just, they're mad and angry because it pushes our human buttons, right? And you say, I don't want to be around this person. And you lose friends, you lose contact with family members, and to what end?

There's no good end that comes out of it. You're just mad because it exposed yourself to some information again and again that was pushing your buttons, and you just didn't do anything about it. and now you're mad and people don't want to be around you. It's not like you're solving the problem. And again, let me skip to the end, the spoiler alert. That doesn't end up well either.

So, Nicolet, this is my advice for thinking for yourself in an age of information overload. Expose yourself to information. This is one of the miracles of the internet. There's a lot of ideas that are important that we would not know or would not be widespread today if we did not have digital dissemination. However, always have the epistemological humility

to know that information that you've been exposed to, no matter how compelling it might seem, is different than you having true knowledge, the type of knowledge on which you can base true opinions and actions to get that. You have to do long-form consumption of the best argument for the information, the best counter-argument, and the best alternative. Once you've done that, your roots of understanding grow deep and you're ready to actually rock and roll with that particular philosophical, ethical, political, or personal religious stance. I recommend this for all aspects of your life for all of the buckets that make up a thriving deep life. Expose yourself, see what resonates, or, by the way, what repulses you, what scares you. That's worth knowing about too, right?

You're in 1938. You're starting to hear about fascism rising in Germany. You might want to know about that. It scares you. You want to know about it. What's really going on here? Because you can have problems ignoring the stuff that's really bad as well. So things that resonate, things that repulse you, take the time to actually know it is part of your civic duty, but it is also, as Aristotle would say, part of what it means to actually be fully human. It's what separates us from the other animals. So, Nikolai, that's a great question.

I've been coming back to this theme again and again from different angles, but I like this angle, and I hope more and more people out there are able to take advantage of these ideas so they can take advantage of all of the wonders that is the internet while sidestepping all of the easy traps. All right, so that is all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you to everyone who submitted questions. Thank you to all of our sponsors,

Optimize, ExpressVPN, and Purple. If you want an opportunity to submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. We'll be back on Thursday with the next Habit Tuneup mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. Thank you.