Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 361: Do You Need an App Blocker?

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

Are you worried that you’re using your phone too much? An app blocker might make sense. But how do they work, and which one is right for you? In this episode, Cal goes deep into the motivation, technology, and ultimate end game of this distraction fighting technology. He then answers listener questions and discusses some intriguing comments he’s been seeing about limits to AI’s ability to code.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: Do You Need an App Blocker? [4:35]- How do I succeed with task management? [29:07]- How can I put boundaries on my administrative work for my university job? [33:58]- How should I manage X if I only use it on my desktop? [39:31]- How should I read through my weekly collection of newsletters? [41:11]- What do you think about Polyphasic sleep to prepare for deep work? [44:22]CASE STUDY: A ticketing system in action [45:21]WHAT TO READ: On the Limits of “Vibe Coding” [50:58]Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newportCal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?sciencefocus.com/science/youre-not-actually-addicted-to-your-smartphonenytimes.com/2020/01/20/style/quit-smartphone.htmlsupport.apple.com/guide/iphone/get-started-with-screen-time-iphbfa595995/iosyoutu.be/OuizzRCALCU?si=FqHzEEFdq7k4ao13x.com/AglaiaCodes/status/1942636133248061590x.com/GaryMarcus/status/1942478390323552588/photo/1Thanks to our Sponsors: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp:betterhelp.com/deepquestionsmybodytutor.comexpressvpn.com/deepindeed.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. Normally, I'd be joining you from my Deep Work, HQ and Tacoma Park, Maryland, but not today. Jesse is there, but I am, as I do, each summer, recording this episode from an undisclosed location up in New England, where I go to escape the summer heat and to write. Jesse, what am I missing down there in sunny Washington, D.C.? Some humidity. A little bit of humidity? I don't believe it. It's not dry and nice.

It's humid up here as well, but not so hot. So I'm pretty happy. Pretty happy to be up here. Can't complain. I am, I told you before you started recording, but just to give a little peek into the writer's life. It had a frustrating couple of days. A key chapter in the Deep Life book that I'm working on. It was the first chapter of part two.

So I showed up here having finished all a part one. And I'm working on the first chapter of part two, which really lays out the ideas. Like, this is the key thing. And I was not quite sure how to make it work. We went on a long hike up in the White Mountains. I sort of cracked it. I felt did two days worth of research and writing on, if I want to be more specific, the hormones that play a role and the neurotransmitters is kind of a distinction between those two can get hazy.

that play a role in feeling good, feeling satisfaction and meaning. And I did all this work and wrote up this whole section to explain them all. And just this morning before we started recording, realized I got to cut that all out. How did you realize it? This is just rioting for me is I have a feeling inside my head about whether something is clicking together or not. And if it's not quite right, I feel physically uncomfortable. And I just knew it wasn't quite right. I didn't quite understand, I didn't understand them to a high enough depth, but also the reality of how these things function were such that it was not going to present the clean picture I wanted.

And the friction began to build up. And I began to, I tried to ignore the heat, but the friction built up some more. And then finally I went for a walk right before we started recording today. I said, no, don't, don't try to get so biochemically cute here. do not try to take your long-standing intuition about lifestyle-sitre planning and make it too closely coupled to the physiology of sort of the human endocrine system, what have you. So I aborted it and we'll have to go back. I have a better way of doing it now. So that's writing.

Sometimes you spend the first few days of vacation making a lot of progress and then in the end, say I'm basically where I was when I first got here. So there we go. That's my writing report from up here in New England. Well, two days is a lot better than two months. Some writers go months when writing stuff. Well, you know, I mean, I've said it multiple times on the show. I threw out six months of work. All of that's replicated now.

Like I'm past where I was. But, you know, sometimes that's just writing. You have an instinct. It's either working or it's not. But I feel good now. I think I'm going to hit the ground running with this new. Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast, which is something from slow productivity. So there you go.

I also want to mention briefly, the friends of mine who started this service, Dunn Daily, you hear me talk about it sometimes, so I want to give it another nudge here right now. If you haven't heard me talk about it before, done daily is an accountability service that helps you accomplish the things in your job that are mission critical.

You get connected with a coach online who helps walk you through, something that's like the multi-scale planning we talk about here on the show. They're clearly and openly influenced by my philosophy of productivity, which I'm happy to because I know those guys and I like it. And they help you implement daily planning, weekly planning, strategic planning. So anyways, I just want to throw in that plug for them because I like what they're up to.

Check out donedaily.com if you haven't recently. But let's talk about today's show. Jesse, we got a good pragmatic topic that has some unexpected twist and turns that I actually didn't realize existed until I got into it. So I think you'll enjoy that. Some good questions. And then as I like to do in the third segment, we'll talk about. what I have been reading.

All right, sound like a plan. Sounds like a plan. All right, let's do today's deep dive. I want to talk today about app blockers. Those apps that you put on your phone to block you from accessing other distracting apps. Now, people ask me questions about this topic all the time. Here's the three main ones. Number one, do I really need something like this?

I mean, it seems sort of extreme. Question number two, okay, if I do, which app blocker should I use? use. And question number three, what's my long-term goal here? If I'm using these apps, what behavior am I hoping to permanently change? Well, in today's deep dive, I want to explore answers to these three queries, which are in all three cases more nuanced and complicated than you might at first guess. So if you've been at all concern that you've been using your phone too much and that it's starting to become a problem that's getting the way of other things that matter to you more, but you're not sure what to do about it, then you need to listen to this

episode. All right, I want to start with this first question. This is often missed, but it's the question of do I really need to use these apps? Now, what do I mean by the fact of this question is often missed? I want to step back here a little bit, because I think this is something that a lot of professional commentators and technology critics miss when they think and talk about smartphone use. What professionals like me don't always realize is that for the average user, this topic of smartphone overuse, this topic of smartphone overuse, and distraction and addiction can carry with it a lot of self-doubt and anxiety. A lot of people feel maybe like, hey, am I being overly concerned?

Am I being overly sensitive? Is it dumb that I'm considering having to bring in technology to stop me from using my technology? Right. We've been perhaps bullied a little bit into thinking that, hey, if you're really worried about your phone, maybe you're falling into a moral panic. Maybe you're just being weak. It's worth taking a moment to address this because I think it's important and it's something that we let slide. So I want to give you an idea of where these type of doubts come from.

So, you know, if you're unfamiliar with this idea, people worrying about their troublesome phone use actually not really being a problem. I want to give you a sense where these type of self-doubts come from. I picked up an article here that was in the BBC last year they published this article. It had a paternalistic title. You're not actually addicted to your smartphone. I'm in this article, the BBC interviewed an expert psychology professor. And what I want to do is give three quotes. These are three specific quotes from this article that I think do a good job of capturing the general type of abivalence that a lot of professional commentators and critics seem to put off about people's concerns about their phones.

Okay. So here's the first quote from that article. We talk about things like, oh, I played that game or watched that show the other day and it was so addictive. What do we, what we mean there is that we, we really liked it or that we played it or used it a lot. In some cases, we say it with a bit of a negative connotation. What we mean is that we've been watched, binge watch the TV show, and we didn't feel so great afterwards. That's how we use the word addiction in day-to-day terms. Obviously, addiction has a different meaning, a very strict clinical definition to describe things

like drug addictions or gambling addictions. All right, let's step back and look briefly at that quote. The move there in that quote, which we hear all the time from professional commentators, is to belittle the experience of feeling addicted to your phone. It's basically the expert in this article arguing, hey, addiction is for people with a drug problem or people who can't stop gambling away the mortgage money at the blackjack tables. You're using that term because you're unhappy about a guilty pleasure or you're just meaning that to me.

You know, I like something and I do it a lot. So that's one move we get is a sort of professional belittling of the experience, of the personal experience of addiction. All right, let me read you a second quote from this article from the expert here. So is there such a thing as healthy and unhealthy screen use? Yes, maybe. But I wonder whether we're asking the wrong sorts of questions, or rather we're framing the questions in the wrong sort of way.

We are fundamentally social animals, right? And social media, the clues in the title, it's a social connecting experience. All right, so in this quote, we see another common response from professional commentators. They're basically saying it's not a problem. to use these apps a lot. They're actually good for you. You're wrong that you feel worried about it.

They do lots of stuff that's good for you, and it would be a problem or a shame to miss out on those. All right, here's the third quote. It's understandable where those worries come from because experientially we all feel as though we've had bad experiences with their devices, and there's a need to hold the industry to account. This is the final move we often hear from professional commentators on these issues. this idea that, look, you're concerned

you're voicing about your phone isn't really about your phone. It's a front for something else, like the fact that you dislike the tech industry. Maybe you had a bad experience or you're upset about something that a tech company did, so now you're going to get back at them by saying, oh, the technology they produce is bad,

but technology is actually fine. This is just a misplaced feeling of frustration. So if you're worried about your phone use and thinking about, hey, do I need something like an app blocker? And then you run into these sort of typical responses you sometimes get from the expert class. It can be really discouraging. It can make you feel at best like you're overreacting and worse, like you're disingenuous or maybe just weak willed. But here's the thing.

And this is something I argued in my email newsletter that went out two weeks ago. By the way, if you don't subscribe to my weekly newsletter, you should probably do so at calnewport.com. The newsletter that came out two weeks ago was titled, trust your moral intuition about phones and the core argument of that is your instincts aren't wrong. If you feel really worried about your phones, if this is why you're interested in app blockers,

then you're likely right to be worried even if that professor in the BBC tells you no, that's not how you really feel. So to try to emphasize this to sort of validate your concerns about your phone and you need to use things like app blockers, I'm going to read you a different quote. This one comes from the poet,

Lisa Wells in a New York Times op-ed, she wrote about the experience of quitting social media and how it reminded her about her battle to quit smoking. Here's Lisa. About a year ago, I noticed a distressing tendency in myself to drift off while the people I loved were talking. It didn't matter if they were talking about a book they had read or recent health problems or crushing grief or revelations from therapy. Never before had I struggled to listen, but now I couldn't help checking out. Several times in the last year, my husband has had to ask in the middle of the middle of the middle of the middle of, of a conversation, where did you go? Where did I go? Nowhere good. Usually my mind returned me to the small computer in my pocket, to an unanswered email, to a like or a retweet, to a comment I found

threatening or flattering. Suffice to say, I went away. In giving my attention to the device, I withheld it from the people I valued most. And there were some other troubling symptoms. It was hard to read or write for sustained periods, which is concerning because that is my job. I was forcing myself to push through a handful of pages before reaching for the phone as a reward, oriented toward the activities I loved as if they were chores and toward the objects as a source of pleasure. It was more often a source of anxiety. I hadn't deliberately chosen to worship my smartphone, but when you repeatedly bow your head to something stroking it thousands of times a day, it begins to shine like an idol. All right. So this is my answer to our first question.

Do you need an app blocker? if you feel trapped by your phone, like it's becoming your idol, and that the people that you love and the activities that you used to cherish have now become obstacles that you have to ignore, just try to grind through before you get back to your next digital fix,

you're not wrong to want help. You're not falling into a moral panic. You're not lashing out at tech companies because they annoy you. You're not weak. Your experience is valid, regardless of what the expert class says. If you have a problem, we should try to fix it.

And if the phone is your problem, app blockers can do it. All right. So that's where I want to start. We'll get now into the gory details of how you actually do app blocking. But this was just something that had been on my mind recently is that so often people really are feeling sort of dismissed in their concerns, they look to the technocratic class of experts and they all have huge skepticism. They don't like stories of techno-determinism. They don't like stories about technology, sort of uniformly causing problems. And they have all this sort of academic skepticism. And they missed the fact that this really makes people self-doubt. So I'm giving you permission to say, yeah, I want to find out

how to get some help. All right. Question number two, which app blocker should you use? This question is a little bit trickier than you might imagine, as you're going to see, at least from a technological perspective. As I looked into this more, it turned out to be more complicated than I realized. But let me tell you how I'm going to approach this question, because the first thing that became clear when I thought about app blocking is that there's different categories of solutions. They differ by the intensity of their intervention. Not everyone needs the same level of intensity of intervention. It depends really where you are, your honest assessment of how much trouble you're having.

So what I'm going to do here is organize our discussion of app blockers into three levels of intensity of intervention and we'll go from the most moderate to the most severe. All right. the first level of intensity of intervention would be to use, for example, on your iPhone, just the built-in screen time, oops, to use the built-in screen time app, right? So there's a built-in service in iOS. There's something similar in Android plus apps. You could do something similar that allows you to have pretty fine-grained control over the apps that you use.

So an Apple screen time app, for example, you can begin. by just getting a report of the total amount of time you're spending on different apps or categories of apps each week. Like, for example, it might say you're using four hours of Instagram a day on average. When you're in the screen time app on iOS, you can also set limits on the total use of specific apps per day. Like, I don't want to use more than one hour per day of Instagram. Or you can create windows of time in which you're allowed to use a given app.

So, for example, you might say the substack app is something I'm only allowed to access between 6 o'clock and 8 o'clock. So for example, after work hours, but not after bedtime. All right? So you can set those directly. There's other apps. If you don't like the interface for screen time, there's other apps that allow you to do similar type of restrictions or Windows. Freedom is a popular one. Some people like its interface better than the screen time interface.

Here is the shortcoming and why this is a model. at level of intensity. Here's the shortcoming of this approach. These blocks can be easily turned off. So yes, you can set a limit for yourself in screen time. And it will enforce it. Like, hey, you've overcome your limit for the day, but you can just go in the settings on your phone and turn off screen time.

Right. Similarly, Freedom uses a VPN to block apps. So it actually runs all of your traffic through a Freedom VPN so it can just throw out packets that are aimed at the apps. You say you want to block. But you can just go in and turn off VPN. VPN's in your phone settings, and the block is turned off. People get really good at this.

You do it so fast that it can seem almost automatic. So who is this level of intervention for? I think it's for people that just need a little bit of nudges in the right direction. So for some people, it is enough just to see the statistics. You're like, oh man, I didn't realize I was using Instagram that much. All right, enough of that. Other people, they respond well to some minor friction, right? It says, oh, no, you're outside of your window for using Instagram.

Yes, they could go turn that off, but that friction is enough of a reminder for them. Like, oh, yeah, I didn't want to use this so much. Great, I'm not going to use the app right now. So for people that are using their phone too much, but with a little bit of reminder can make changes, that level of intervention is right for you. All right, level two is getting into more serious app blocking. So here's the question, right? And this is the question I had.

if screen time on your phone, for example, is easy to turn off, can't you use a stronger blocker that's harder to turn off? This is where the answer turns out to be dependent on the platform you're using. So if we're talking about a like a desktop machine or a laptop machine or an Android phone, then yes, there are stronger app blockers that are much harder to circumvent. An example I want to focus on is cold turkey. which has a super strong app blocking feature. They've really thought about the ways that people try to circumvent blockers

and they've made it impossible to use these, right? So you can't easily turn it off in the settings. You can't go to, as some people will do with other blockers, to your task manager and your computer and try to shut down the process running it because it works lower level in the operating system. Rebooting the machine isn't going to help either. It turns out the only way to circumvent

something like a cold turkey app block is to do something like booting, your computer from an external hard drive to get around where cold turkey has been integrating to your operating system. It's such complicated hacker stuff that really it's a block that you can't really get around. But here is the thing. Most people, when they think about app problems, they're thinking about their phones. And for a lot of people, that phone is going to be an iPhone. You can't use an app like cold turkey in that way on your iPhone. Here's what happened. This is a story that I think a lot of people have missed. From the very beginning,

meaning, Apple, which tries to tightly control their app experience in the app store, was worried about the idea of apps that could control other apps. To them, that was a violation of their controlled experience goal. If I could download some random app that starts messing around with other people's apps. So they made it difficult for that to happen. Now, there's workarounds. Companies like Freedom figured out workarounds like using VPNs. But then in 2018, Apple said, no, no, we're going to be very specific about it. You cannot have an app in the app store that stops or limits uses of other apps.

If you worry about distraction or phone overuse, the only game in town is screen time. So that is when they introduced screen time. And they said, this is the only way you're allowed to control your access to other apps. Third-party apps can't do this. Now, of course, the problem is, as we talked about in level one, screen time is easy to get around. You can just go to settings and turn it right off. So are you out of luck if you use iOS but need a higher level of intensity of intervention into your app usage? Not necessarily.

So this is what the Internet seems to think is the right way to do this. You can set a passcode for your screen time settings. Now, this is meant for kids. I'm giving a phone to a kid. I want to control their screen time. I'm going to have a passcode for those settings that the kid doesn't know so they can't turn it off. That is actually a very strong passcode. If that is in place, there is no easy way to circumvent the passcode to change or alter your screen time settings.

So the consensus of the internet is the way then if you're an adult, and you want to have a higher level of intensity of app blocking. The way to succeed is set up the settings you want on screen time, then give it to someone else to set the password and don't have them tell you. All right? It could be your spouse or like a boyfriend or girlfriend or a friend or a family member. You have them set the password. Hand you back to phone.

You don't know what that password is. Now, if you want to know more specifically where this password lives, you go to setting screen time, you turn on screen time, you choose this my iPhone, but you tap then use screen time passcode, and that's where you type in that passcode. This is basically the way to do it. Now, if you don't like the screen time interface, you can use this with other tools like Freedom as well. So again, what you would do here is you would set up freedom on your phone, and then using screen time, you restrict your ability to turn on. the features that allow you to turn off freedom and then you put a passcode on screen time. And you can look up more details of that online. But basically, this is the long and short of it.

If you want a more intense level of app blocking on iOS, another person has to be involved. But if they are involved, that app blocking is going to work really well. Without them giving you that password, you're not going to be able to circumvent those settings. All right. Well, what's the third level of intervention intensity? This is to actually go cold turkey, not the app cold turkey, just go cold turkey. Delete any social media accounts you have. There's nothing to log into or switch from a smartphone to a dumb phone.

So forget worrying about pass codes or who's going to help you or what your settings are. Just take the activity that you're worried about out of your life, throw out the Marlbrose. Now, who would this final level of intensity be for? people who really struggle with certain apps and don't really have a great reason to be using them. Like there's not some scenarios where it's really important that they use them. And so they say, you know what, why don't I just take this out of my life altogether? That second level intervention will work well if I'm using this too much, but I do sometimes need to use them. The third level might just be the solution for, I have a real problem here.

And let's be honest, unlike what that professor from the BBC article said, I don't really get a lot of value out of these apps. All right. So those are the three levels of intervention. All right. So this brings us to our third question we're going to address, what's the endgame here? Is the idea just to have app blockers on your phone for the rest of your life? Or is there a different outcome that we're hoping for? Well, here I have good news to share. When it comes to these app blockers, they tend to do an effective job relatively quickly of eliminating the urge to check the apps that you're blocking. In other words, it's more common than not that when you've had a blocker like this on for a moderate amount of time, you can then take it off and you won't feel immediately recompeled to go back and check those apps that you were blocking.

I want to return to Lisa Wells, who we quoted earlier about her phone addiction. Here's what she wrote about the experience of, in her case, she did a level three intervention and replaced her smartphone with a dumb phone. It took about 72 hours to teach my body that we had gone back to the old ways. Though I had assumed it would take much longer, the change was almost instantaneous. Moderation requires effort and willpower, but when the device is gone, there's nothing to resist. I can read a book for hours in a sitting, and when my loved ones speak, I hear the story that they're telling, which is to say, I am free again to enjoy the things I've always loved to worship the God I chose. So as you can see here in just a few days,

her mind began to adjust back to not looking at the phone or being that interested in it. If she left those blockers on or in this case use a dumb phone for, let's say, a full month, I would argue that even if she went back to a smartphone, it would not have that same pull over her that it did before. So that's the good news about app blocking. It's not a permanent configuration. It is a training tool that can recalibrate your mind back in a useful, way.

All right. So this is what we got. That's my discussion of app blocking. It is okay if you feel like you have a problem. You're not broken or in a moral panic or just trying to lash out at tech companies.

It's neither is it a quixotic pursuit either. App blocking works. You find the right level of intensity. Some are more complicated than others. You'll feel a change almost immediately. And over time, those deep grooves that get you rolling towards

trying to use your phone more that you want, they will fill in. It is a solvable problem. All you have to do is choose to write strategy for you. All right. So that is my summary of app blocking. I should add, if you found that useful and you know someone who's struggling with this or feels bad about feeling they have a problem or has a problem, doesn't know what to do about it, send them this episode. Maybe they'll find it useful. All right. So we've got some good questions coming up here. But first, let's take a quick break to hear from a sponsor.

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Hiring. Indeed is all you need. This podcast is also sponsored by Better Help. One of the topics we talk about all the time on this show is the stress of the modern workplace. Now, I've written about many sources of this stress. from the rise of the hyperactive hive mind collaboration style to the overload that is caused by our embrace of pseudo-productivities, but those issues are systemic and not issues that you can

fully solve anytime soon. So if in the short term you're experiencing workplace stress, regardless of what generates that stress, you want to make sure you're doing all you can do right now to find some relief. This is where therapy can enter the scene. Working with a therapist can help you learn positive coping skills as well as how to set boundaries, it will empower you to be the best version of yourself. This is an important point for my listeners. Therapy can be practical. It isn't just for those who've experienced major trauma

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First questions from John. How do I make the transition from relying on my memory to sort and organize tasks to a paper trell system? I first tried David Allen's system and recently bought your time block planner. Whenever I try to switch, I tend to do both systems. How can I switch? Well, John, I think part of the problem here is that much of David Allen's system, at least the parts you're talking about, is focusing on a different component of time management than my time block planner. Now, if we think about time management as a system, like I'm doing this in my new book.

I've really been trying to articulate in a clear general way how time management works. There's really three questions that you're trying to answer. It's what do I have to do, when do I have to do it, and why am I doing it? David Allen is really good for that first question. What do I have to do? And it's this idea that the tasks that you are committed to, things that are obligations in your life, need to get out of your head. They need to be in what he calls a trusted system, a place where you know you're not going to forget them and therefore freeze your head from trying to remember them inside itself. So it gives you that stress relief of I no longer have to keep this just in my head.

The second question is, when do I do the things you need to do? That's where the time block planner comes in. It's a planning tool. It doesn't store tasks for you. It's not a place for you to keep track of what you have to do. It's a tool for making a plan for the current day. How do I make the best schedule for the current day? Now, you might consult your task storage when you make this plan, just like you might

consult your weekly plan, you might consult your strategic plan, but it's basically a planning tool. Now, David Allen has his own answers to that question of when should I do the work. He thinks it should be based on context. I get into this in my new book a little bit more. You should basically have lists that are corresponding to the different physical context, like I'm on the phone or I'm at my computer, and then you look at that list. list for the context you're in to choose things to do.

I have some issues with that approach in the modern workplace. But the key thing I want you to know is there's a division between storing things and deciding what to do with them. So you need a test storage system. Use whatever system is going to be the lowest friction and most natural for you. It could be a paper notebook. It could be a Google Doc. It could be Trello like I use.

It could be a phone-based app like To-doist. I don't really care what you use. The goal there is to have something that you write things down in and you trust it once it's there that you'll see it again and not forget it. So whatever you're most likely to stick with go with, and only after you're comfortable with that, can you then move on to the question of like, oh, how do I make a good plan for my day? But again, that's separate from the question of how do I store what I have to do and the tools

involved can be quite different. All right. Who we got? By way, I got to say, Jesse, I thought, I have a whole chapter in my new book, just on time management where I've had to distill 20 years of my thinking on this into. like the big, here are the big picture questions. Here's the big picture strategies. Here's your options for these different strategies.

It was a really hard exercise, but I'm glad I did it. Yeah. Is that something that stuff you had to delete? Yes, I wrote a bad version of that. And then I figured out how to write a better version. The bad version was too specific. I was like, do this, do that, do this. And I was like, wait a second.

Different people have different fits. So instead, I introduced this concept of bottom up timing. management where you start with those big questions, right? Here are the things I want to answer. I give a major principle for each of those questions. Like, here's the key principle for answering this question, right. And then I go over a lot of different options. There's a lot of different ways now you can answer it. So start with something that works for you, start with something simple, get a system in place that works. Maybe it doesn't cover everything in your life, but you stick with it, and then slowly customize it to capture more of what really matters to you, that I want you to build

the system from the ground up, I will give you the top-down guidance, answer these three questions, satisfy these three principles and here are some options. But it's up to you to build and slowly evolve a system for you. That's more likely to stick than what most people do, which is in their time management books, I'm going to get so specific because I have a lot of pages to fill. And pretty soon you're going to have 19 level hierarchies and task wheels that you connect this to the phase of the moon and then you build a Rube Goldberg machine. And if in the end the goldfish gets knocked by the ping pong ball into the target that means that you're supposed to make a phone call like things get complicated it's like here's an expert giving you a super complicated system

it just doesn't work because it only takes a little bit of friction before you give up on it all together so i yeah i redid it it's this bottom up i give you the big picture idea is you build it from you build it from scratch so i feel better about but took forever yeah it took that took a long time to write and then rewrite and then the cut and then the clarify but i'm really happy with how that is All right, who's next? Next is V. I'm a lecturer teaching actuarial science and have recently taken over as an assessment lead for the undergraduate and postgraduate programs at my university. The May exam cycle is just finished and I'm feeling burned out.

Please, can you suggest ways in which I can put boundaries on my administrative work so that it doesn't encroach all waking hours? It wants to do that as well. I know your pain, V, having my own off and odd administrative positions in academia. It is a hard beast. It's like a hydra. You try to cut off one head, three more grow back out, and all the heads are shaped like email requests for you to jump on calls. I do have four things to suggest here that I think help you corral administrative work in a position like this.

All right, one autopilot scheduling, regular times on regular days for regularly occurring administrative work. So it doesn't just exist. Otherwise, if it just exists out there, your mind will say if there if there's any work to people, need me to do administratively, like I should probably work on it. Your mind is going to be like, my goal is to get to a place where there's nothing I need to do for this piece of my job before I'll work on anything else. But that never comes. Because as you finish some things, new things come in, and this is how you get trapped in the cycle of always sort of just reacting to the new stuff. So with an autopilot schedule, these are the times I work on the major things.

It's on these days and these times and these locations. And that's when I do it. And if I'm not in one of those times. I don't think about the work. If you build your autopilot scheduled correctly, you keep up with things, but you're freeing yourself from this impossible goal of finish everything before I can move on. All right. Second idea is office hours. You really need to try to avoid unscheduled back and forth communication through email and Slack as your main way of collaborating with people.

As much as possible, if there's questions or queries that can't be answered with a single message, stop by my office hours. You probably need to make those office hours every day, which is different to what a normal professor does. I need to defer people to it. Hey, just call me during my office hours next time you can. More and more defer things to quick, synchronous conversation in these fixed times. It will save you from like constantly having to be in your inboxes.

Number three, for everything else, have communication protocols. So if there's certain administrative work you have to do all the time, figure out this is how we're going to communicate about it. Here's the process. You put the form I need the sign into this shared document that I've linked to from the website, shared folder rather. And there's two days a week when I go to that share folder and I process the things and then I move them into this other folder for you to take and the review and then you have to get back to me on Friday if you have any issues. And then I will pass it off to be submitted or whatever it is. But you have protocols for how common work

unfolds to try to save you from having to just have like people emailing you attachments and files or saying, oh my God, this is due tomorrow. Can you do it? So you put together communication protocols. My book, A World Without Email, gets into more detail about how to design those. Finally, my fourth suggestion, you might have to have a touch of the Feynman. What I mean by that, and I wrote about this in a few of my books, Richard Feynman famously said his strategy for not drowning in admin work as he became a higher and higher level professor at Cornell was to just not be very good at it. He said, I actively cultivated a reputation as being irresponsible and then people left me alone. They went to,

give you as much stuff to do. Now, you don't have to be as much of a malcontent as Feynman attempted to be, but it's okay not to be great at the admin work. By what I mean by it's not dropping the ball and not by doing it poorly, but also not being like you're doing it on your own schedule. I have autopilot, I have office hours. It gets done. I'm not the fastest. It gets done well, but it's not, I'm not like amazing, and from other people's perspective, which usually means you're like very responsive and you're on things all the time.

I do a passable job on things that aren't core to my success as a professor, but I don't try to do a great job on them. And like I say no more often. And people kind of get upset at me. I get, you know, some evil look sometimes, but I do an amount of work that I think is useful. Like, it's okay.

You don't have to please everyone. Your goal as a professor is not to be good at admin work. You're not rewarded for being good at admin work. So you don't have to put your considerable intellectual gifts and skills towards that goal, save them for things that matter more. So those are my four suggestions that hopefully tame a little bit of this. When you took on your admin role, did you use a lot of those tactics? I try to use a lot of those tactics, yeah. And I'm still working on it now. The other tactic I have

is insisting on the hiring of associate directors who can take on a lot of different work. My main problem recently has been the one associate director for my one admin role was on parental leave. So I have to take on a lot of that work. He's back. The other associate director and the other role just went on parental leave. So I thought I had a great system. And in both cases, I'm yet to have a situation where all the systems are up and running. But I'm working on this all the time. So I have a new academic year coming up. I'm going to update my systems before it gets rolling. And I think a lot of longtime fans know that you took on that role, it was for a couple years or is for their duration of your? A couple years. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know.

There's an end in sight. There's an end in sight, yeah. And I'm doing a passable job. I am not dropping the ball. The work is getting done, but I'm working at my own pace and am not volunteering for extra work. Let's just put it that way. All right. Next question is from Brooke.

I'm a medical doctor and a journalist from Ethiopia. Twitter allowed me to start my journalism career in medical school. However, I don't have the app on my phone, but I still use it daily on my computer. essentially I can't stop tweeting even on my desktop. How should I manage this? Look, it sounds like it's a problem. You're having, there's benefits for this tool. It helps you make some connections,

but you're having a hard time using it. That sounds like a problem. I would either do a high level of intensity app blocking, like we talked about in the deep dive of the school show. So if there's like some key tweeting you think is really necessary for your career, I bet that can fit into 30 minutes a week. I'm yet to find someone, well, okay, there's some exceptions, but there's almost no one for where the situation is like it really is key to my career that I check Twitter all the time.

So either do high intervention blocking. If it's only in your desktop, this is not so bad because now you can use tools like cold turkey directly. You don't have to do these workarounds with sharing a password. Do that or just move on from Twitter. I'm like Lisa Wells. Give it a few days and you're going to feel a sense of relief. If you're worried about your career, keep this in mind. People have become successful journalists.

They've networked. They've met people. They've gotten opportunities even before Twitter became a popular service in the early 2010s. That wasn't that long ago. There are still ways to be successful in journalism without this particular tool, which in the history of journalism is very, very new. So you can look into that as well. But yeah, if you're on a computer, it's not so hard to block it. So listen to that deep dive and see if that helps.

All right. Who's next? Next up is Tim. I receive several weekly newsletters, including your freshly revamped one. I find it difficult to read them. How do you read newsletters? Jesse, have you seen the revamped looking newsletter of mine? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we got, for those who haven't followed up, but I've been trying to take my newsletter more seriously. It's once a week, the type of ideas we talked about on this show. More, I would say my newsletter has more editorializing, kind of more op-eds, more like commentary and critics, more so critiques than I have on the show. But I'm doing every week now, and the new newsletter director, Nate, has cleaned up the act literally. So the newsletter itself actually looks better.

For those who haven't seen it and Jesse can attest this as true, the newsletter is now a giant image of my face. And then as you click on different parts of my face, there's a flash animation that brings across, like, text that's related to it. So what am I seen this week? you click on my eyes and then like a bunch of flashing text goes by with something about that. And what am I listening to? You click on my ears. It does play like really disturbing sounds when you click the buttons. And it is unfortunately configured in such a way that you can't mute your phone

or stop the sound. So it can be a little bit embarrassing to use in public. But I think it's better. You know, it cost me $300,000 to program that too. So I think it was worth it. No, but it looks nice. So I'm a writer. I realize newsletter used to be a big part of my life. I wanted to be a big part of life. And again, so calnewport.com to subscribe. All right. Let's get back to the question.

How do you read newsletters? Here's what I think you should do. Curate your newsletters, right? Like, here's newsletters where I like these writers. We're in a golden age of newsletters right now where really good writers are writing really good newsletters that are either free or cost a small amount of money. I think this is a great thing. So you can have a curated selection of newsletters.

you really like. I think you should consume newsletters like a magazine, like the best magazine you've ever subscribed to because it is super bespoke to exactly your interest. So what does that mean? Have a folder or a label for newsletters. Then when they come in, you can just throw them into that folder or apply the label to if you're using Gmail.

And then on a semi-regular basis, like once or twice a week, you can go through there and read those newsletters like you're flipping through a magazine. You can print them out, you can put them on an iPad and bring them to a coffee shop or bring your laptop to a bench outside your office. I'm going to read through three or four of these at a time. And you see it as like this is a magazine that a bunch of writers I like all are contributing to every week. So I think that's the right way to do. Consolidate and read like a magazine. It really is a golden age of content because there's so many of these good newsletters and they're so cheap or free,

you can really piece together a really cool weekly experience of reading good content, as opposed to like kind of just reading it reactively as things come in. For my newsletter, I do, though, appreciate if like what you should do is have it chiseled in the stone so that you can have like a really permanent relationship to the text. All right. Who do we got next? Next up is Arjun. What are your thoughts on polyphasic sleep to prepare for deep work?

It's basically multiple sleeps in a 24-hour period. look people have to sleep different people need more sleep than others but you can't really hack it just sleep i mean people especially at silicon valley they love this idea especially in the 90s they love this idea that leonardo da Vinci was a polyphasic sleeper and there's a way to sleep like a couple hours at a time and never like more than that and you'll have all these more waking hours or whatever and in the end you get really tired and upset because we are evolved our species is evolved to have a period of sleep and a period of wakefulness and all of our hormones and chemicals are oriented around it and that's just what you have to do and you have to try to get as much

sleep as your body typically needs and if you're finding a hard time doing this like you don't have enough time to get everything done you want to do do fewer things but sleep is not something it's like trying to get around eating you kind of just have to do it the way we're evolved to do it so no I'm not a big believer in hacking sleep in any sort of significant way all right so let's move on to a case study these are where people write in to talk about how they've applied the type of advice we talk about on the show in their own situations. Like today's case study comes from RGJ, who says, I work as a software engineer at a tech startup.

About five or six months ago, my boss started a requiring us to post updates on our work in a Slack channel once a day. We use a ticketing system similar to GERA to track work, so the updates are just a couple of bullet points about our progress on our self-assigned tickets. While I do think this is a little heavy-handed and smells like micromanagement, I managed to spin this into a positive in my working life with some of your deep work principles. Thanks to your advice, I recognize an opportunity to set up some habits that have helped me excel in my work. I spend the last five to ten minutes of each workday documenting what I did that day in a little journal note on my computer. This has become a clear shutdown ritual for me, something I'd never been able to maintain before.

I've been pleasantly surprised with how much peace of mind it gives me on my commute home and in the evening. Also, each morning, I copy what I wrote in the journal, edited it a little, and posted to the Slack channel. This morning ritual gives me something to do right as I start work and gives my brain a little bit of time to warm up before jumping into the day's deep work session. The only downside is that I have to open slack in the morning, which can at times be distracting. At the bare minimum, I plan on carrying a shutdown ritual wherever I work, regardless of whether there's a mandate or not, thank you again for codifying and sharing your heart and wisdom with the rest of us. Well, I appreciate that case study because shutdown rituals are fantastic, giving your brain some closure each day on what you did or didn't do, and making sure you're not leaving any open, loops or urgent things you're not dealing with, gives you peace. You get so much more relaxation and recharging, but also just enjoyment out of your

non-work time. If you take 10 minutes to really shut down your work time properly. So I'm sorry you have some micromanagement in your job, but I'm glad that it led as a side effect to you having a shutdown ritual insert into your life because it seems like it's doing a lot of good. We've got a good final segment coming up. We'll talk about what I'm reading. But first, let's hear from another sponsor.

How do you choose which internet service provider to use? The sad thing is that most of us have very little choice because ISPs operate like monopolies in the regions they serve. They then use this monopoly power to take advantage of their customers with things like data caps and bandwidth throttle. You know, that list goes on. But here's the worst of it and something most people don't realize. ISPs have and use the ability to log every website and service you use. they can then sell this information to third parties or use it for their own purposes. This is why you need a VPN because a VPN can prevent them from doing this.

Here's how it works. When you use a VPN, instead of just directly talking to a website or service, which allows anyone like your ISP to see what those websites and services are, it's right there in the packet of the header of the packet. You instead encrypt the message you want to send to the website or service. you are interested in, you send that to a VPN server. The VPN server unencrypts it and then talks to that site or service on your behalf, encrypts the response and sends it back.

So what is your ISPC in this case? Only that you're sending messages to a VPN server. They have no idea what the actual sites and services you're using. Your privacy is protected. Now, if you're going to use a VPN, use the one that I recommend, which is ExpressVPN. Here's some of the reasons why I like ExpressVPN. First of all, it's easy to use. You can fire up the app by just clicking one button,

and now all of your apps and sites you're using will be going through the VPN, so it's very easy to use. It works on all your devices, your phones, your laptops, your tablets, and more, so you can stay private, whatever device you're using or wherever you happen to be. And people like it. It's rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge. I'm always reluctant to use the internet if I don't have a VPN,

and if I'm going to use a VPN, the one I trust is ExpressVPN. So protect your online privacy today by visiting ExpressVPN.com slash deep. That's EXP-R-E-S-S-V-S-V-N.com slash deep. And you can get an extra four months free when you go to ExpressVPN.com slash deep. I also want to talk about our friends at My Body Tudor, T-U-T-O-R. I've known Adam Gilbert, my Body Tudor's founder for many years, and he is my go-to guy for fitness advice. His company My Body Tutor is a 100% online coaching program

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If you're serious about getting fit, Adam is giving deep questions listeners $50 off their first month. All you have to do is mention my podcast. When you join, go to my body tutor t-ut-ut-U-T-U-R.com to learn more. All right, Jesse, let's move on now to our final segment. All right, so this is a segment where I like to talk about things I'm reading that either I'm enjoying or I'm finding interesting or challenging things that I'm thinking about. I actually wanted to share.

This is maybe a first for this segment. Two tweets that were brought to my attention. I didn't discover them myself, but they were brought to my attention. They're both on the same topic. I think they present an interesting curve, and I wouldn't say challenge, but more of like a bit of a course correction

on a current theme that's getting a lot of coverage in the tech media. And that is using AI the computer program. So this idea of vibe coding that you can just tell an AI model what you want a program to do and it will

produce the code to do what you want it to do without you really having to learn to code or use the code is a topic that's being talked about all the time in the media. I mentioned this in a recent episode. There's a lot of things that aren't due to AI that are being ascribed to AI because of this narrative. So, you know, we have the post-pandemic tech industry contraction, which is leading to some layoffs and reduction in jobs at tech companies and computer science majors going down. A lot of reporters are credulously just jumping in and saying this is because AI is taking those jobs because AI can computer program now. It's not true.

That's not why those jobs are going away. We got into that. But this is a really popular theme right now that we're moving up the ladder of complexity of computer programs that AI can just do. This brings me to these two tweets that were recently brought to my attention. I'll give a hat tip here to Gary Marcus on helping to identify these. All right. So the first tweet, this comes from AGLia.

And let me read it. Alas, just the other day, I tried vibe coding a non-trivial unity shader, and after hours of trying to make it work, I went back to human-made tutorials and started writing it again from scratch to get the desired result. I would love to just vibe code, but it doesn't work past Hello World examples. LLM-enabled autocomplete is helpful for boilerplate to avoid rewriting the same thing 100 times. So what Agilia here is saying is she had a relatively straightforward thing she wanted, a unity shader is like a bit of code, code that helps impact how Unity does shading. It's a 3D engine for making video games. And just asking AI models to work didn't work.

But she makes the point at the end, LMs are still useful for coding, but in the autocomplete setting of like they help you fill in boilerplate code, so you don't have to remember like exactly what function calls are, what parameters functions have, or how to access different libraries. But in her experience, creating code from scratch wasn't working well. Let me read another tweet.

This one comes from Stuart Winterterre. Actually, no, he's retweeting this from someone else. This is actually coming from a Reddit thread. All right, so let me read this Reddit thread. I am giving up. I just want to say that I'm giving up on creating anything anymore. I was trying to create my little project, but every time there are more and more errors and I'm sick of it.

I'm working on it for about three months. I do not have any experience with coding and was doing everything through AI. But every time I want to change a little thing, I kill four days debugging and other things go south. So I don't have any more energy in me to work on this. It is hopeless. AI is just so stupid and will fix one thing but destroy 10 other things in your code. I am really sad because I was enjoying it in the beginning. But now it is just pain and rage.

Hat down for those people who can create something and it's working without coding knowledge. All right. So here's the point I want to make. How is AI helping computer coding? There's two ways. One, if you're a serious software developer, there's tools. like cursor or copilot, GitHub copilot,

that help you create your code by preventing you from having to go look things up. So again, I mentioned this before, but you might want to call a library in your operating system and you don't quite know what the call is or what the parameters are. It'll just kind of give you a sample code

for how to do that, and then you can edit it as needed or you want to create a new function for an event handler and you forget exactly what the format is. It can fill that in for you right away. So it is a very useful aid to your coding on the scale of when Google became big,

it was a big quantum leap for computer programmers because now they could Google things from forums like Stack Overflow instead of having to go to reference books. Then there's this thing called vibe coding, which is where you basically just ask AI to create a program from scratch. This is really cool,

but the things that I think these tweets make clear is that it has a variable success rate. If you're careful and you know a little something about coding and the thing you're coding is at the right level of complexity, it can really help you save some time. A friend of mine, for example,

was telling me about how for his kids' school, they were having some sort of fundraising charity auction. And he was thinking, like, hey, if we had like a little website and we could do this to a web interface, it would be much easier than people, like, filling stuff into a shared spreadsheet or just emailing their bids.

He told me, like, it took a few hours. He's not a great coder. And he used AI, and it kind of helped him figure out what services to use and write the code. He's like, this is cool. And I don't think I would have done this if I had to go out and do it from scratch. It's a great example of vibe coding working. There's other examples where I think Kevin Ruse had an example where he was able to get a Tetris game to work right away, just asking AI. That's less impressive because just those games exist. And so it was basically just taking code that already existed. But as seen in these tweets, it's not a magic wom. And if you don't know enough about coding or what you're doing is complicated enough or just the AI models on the cranky side. of the bed that day. It can be really frustrating, right?

It is more fickle than people think. So, on one hand, we have these conversations about whole software industries are disappearing. Every job loss or lost computer science major anywhere is due to AI. We have this idea that it can already handle coding up to this level completely and now it's going to get to the next level. The reality is more complicated. It sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. It depends on your comfort and what you're trying to do.

A lot of people are struggling with it. my point here is I think coding is one of the areas like I talked about in my big article on this last month where AI is going to be very useful and has been very useful, but it is not yet a magic wand or panacea. So even in this area where there is perhaps no better of target for the capabilities of a large language model, we're still in a sort of uncertain phase in terms of the rewards and success we're having. So progress is being made. These two tweets show be very wary about people that are overly confident in talking about how much AI can do

from a coding perspective. It really depends on the person and the context and it is not yet a general solution to a whole class of type of programming efforts or jobs. All right, so there's my AI rant

of the week, Jesse, and I guess I will leave it there because I got to go outside because it's nice up here. I'm in an undisclosed location to England and it's not a billion degrees outside and I can go

for like a nice walk and not be hot and I'm going to do that now. So thank you everyone for listening. Be back next week with another episode recorded up here in my undisclosed location. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions Podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com.

Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you've got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.