Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 399: Is Deep Work Still Possible in 2026?

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

It’s been a decade since the original publication of DEEP WORK. Do its ideas still hold in 2026? This is the question Cal tackles in today’s episode: reviewing the four major “rules” from his book, reviewing what still holds and what changes he would add. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode:youtube.com/calnewportmedia DEEP DIVE: Is Deep Work Still Possible in 2026? [2:03] INBOX: - Will I lose the ability to write if I use AI? [39:45] - The effects of AI on education [45:30] - Avoiding social media [52:24] WHAT CAL IS UP TO: - What I’ve been doing [53:38] - What I’ve been reading [55:26]  Books: Mistborn (Brandon Sanderson) Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow  Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at https://peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/opinion/technology-mental-fitness-cognitive.html Thanks to our Sponsors:  https://www.factormeals.com/deep50off https://www.shopify.com/deep https://www.wayfair.com https://www.notion.com/cal   Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Nate Mechler for research and newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ten years ago, I published a book titled Deep Work. It argued that the ability to focus without distraction, the activity that I call Deep Work, was becoming increasingly valuable at exactly the same time that it was becoming increasingly rare due to distracting digital technologies like email and social media. Now, the conclusion of my book is that this presents a huge opportunity. If you are one of the few individuals or organizations to prioritize digital. depth, you will enjoy a big competitive advantage. Now, here's the thing. This book hit a nerve, became a bit of a word of mouth sensation. It sold now more than two million copies in over

45 languages. And that number still going up. Jesse, earlier this month, we sold a new language rights for the Sinhala translation. Nice. That's a course to language spoken by the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka. There's more languages out there than you might guess. Anyways, this is all great, but this book is now a decade old, which motivates a natural follow-up question. Do its ideas still hold in 2026? This is what we're going to explore today. So I brought my first edition copy of the book with me. I'm going to crack it open.

We're going to reread its core ideas. I'm going to point out what remains true and what requires updates. Spoiler alert, I have a lot of new ideas to add. So if you felt like you've been drowning in distractions and are unsure if there's any hope for escaping, then this episode is for you. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. And we'll get started right after the music. All right, so here's the game plan. The book Deep Work is divided into two parts.

The first part makes my case for why depth is valuable, and the second part offers four rules. for getting better at depth in your professional life. So it's the second part that we are going to revisit. I want to go through each of those four rules from the original book, one by one. I'll summarize the 2016 advice and then answer the question, what would I change if I was rewriting that chapter today in 2026? All right, so let's get started with the first of the four rules from deep work,

which is work deeply. Now, I opened that chapter by discussing my friend David, the Wayne's concept for the Utimodian machine, which was a theoretical plan for an office that was centered on deep work as a primary activity. Now, he described it as a one-story rectangular building where each of the rooms is connected to the other. There's no exterior hallway. You have to go from one room to the next. And he said, the first room when you enter the building is the gallery where you're exposed to interesting examples of work that other people have done. You get your creative juices flowing, you feel a little bit competitive. The next room you would proceed into

would be the salon. He said there would be couches and coffees and Wi-Fi. It was a place to, like, talk with people and brood and think and brainstorm. If you continued into the Unimodomah machine plan, you get to the office space. Now we have cubicles and conference rooms and white boards, and you're sort of just like doing the shallow work of work. And then finally, if you kept moving into the building, you would get to what he called the Deep Work Chambers, which he described as being six by 10 rooms protected by soundproof walls, and that's where the real uninterrupted focus would happen. So I tell the story of this sort of theoretical plan for this building to open the chapter. Interesting point, Jesse, I noticed on this reread a mistake that no one has flagged

before. What do we got? At the beginning of explaining the eudamonia machine, I say, Duane's plan calls for five rooms in sequence. And then I go on to describe four rooms. I cut one of the rooms out. And I don't remember which one it was. But I think there was, David's going to correct me, he listens to the show. I think there was like an antho chamber to the deep work chambers where like you took a shower, like you effaced yourself to like prepare your mind for deep work. And or there might have been a room outside of the deep work chambers where you would like reintegrate out of like deep work mode.

I think there was an extra room like that that I cut out. No one's noticed that. There we go. I noticed it. Anyways, here's what I then wrote. Let me quote from the book. In an ideal world, one in which the true value of deep work is accepted and celebrated, we'd all have access to something like the eudamonia machine. Perhaps not David DeWain's exact design, but more generally speaking, a work environment and culture designed to help us extract as much value as possible from our brains.

Unfortunately, this vision is far from our current reality. We instead find ourselves in a distracting open offices where inboxes cannot be. neglected and meetings are incessant. A settings where colleagues would rather you respond quickly to their latest email than produce the best possible results. All right. And then I said, this is the goal for this chapter,

is to simulate the effects of David Duwain's theoretical Utimoti machine in your actual concrete real life. And I go on and give a bunch of advice for how to put in place rituals and routines to make deep work a protected regular part of your professional life. All right. So that is what I did in the Work Deeply chapter of Deep Work.

What would I change or add in 2026? Well, there's two major ideas that are relevant to exactly this question that have emerged in recent years of my work. And if I was rewriting this chapter today, I would add both of these two ideas. The first of these ideas is the notion of hybrid attention, a hybrid attention model of working. I first introduced this in an article I wrote for the Atlantic two years. years ago. And here was the idea. You have a hybrid schedule at your office, meaning some days are in the office and some days are remote.

Okay. You synchronize it so that the remote days, most people are doing the remote days on the same day. So that way we have synchronization on when that's happening. And then, and this is the key part of the hybrid attention model, and I'm going to read this from my Atlantic article verbatim here, declare that the day spent working remotely will be dedicated completely to actual uninterested. interrupted work. No meetings, no email, and no chat. Each team should follow the same schedule, saving conversations about work for when everyone is in the office together. Right. So the idea is deep work days at home, shallow work days, meetings, conversations, office collaboration at the office. All right, let me go on and give my rationale. Again, I'm reading here for my Atlantic article. Given multiple days each week to do nothing but make progress on tasks, you'll more easily contain your backlog of commitments.

This model should also reduce the total number of incoming tasks you're asked to handle as the days without email or meetings or days in which your colleagues can't ask you to do more things. With less new work coming in and completed work going out faster, you'll be more efficient and less overwhelmed. The ability to take breaks from the digital whirlwind will also make life more bearable regardless of its effect on your productivity. So I think this is a fantastic idea that can now be implemented at the team or office level that really would help you take advantage of the advantages of deep work in a simple to describe,

implement, and maintain plan. It's just when you're at home, I don't want to hear from you. When you're in the office, you can tell me all that stuff you got done when you're at home, and that's when we can have meetings and emails. People would adjust quickly. You're never more than one day away from being able to talk to someone. I think the rate at which high quality work would be completed in this model would be significantly larger, and it's much easier than having to negotiate each individual norm or habit or system or rule that's distracting people throughout the day. It's one rule that would immediately give you some pretty big deep work-related benefits. The second big idea, and this is something I've been talking about really just in the last year,

that I would add to a 2026 version of this chapter, is the idea of having clear rules for how you use and don't use AI to help make sure that these tools are not accidentally completely destabilizing your ability to go deep. Here is one example of an AI rule that I've been promoting really two different things I did in March. So a New York Times article I had last week, which we'll talk about in the final segment, and in a Chronicle of Higher Education interview, I did. I propose a rule in the work environment, don't let AI write for you. Write your own emails, write your own memos, write your own reports, create your own slides, make them concise and informative. grappling with the blank screen to produce something that's clear and informative,

taxes your brain in a way that gives you a better grasp over the material that you're dealing with and produces much better results. Yes, you can take a lot of strain off your brain by letting chat GPT create drafts and kind of edit the drafts or go back and forth with it or have it write it all together. But now you're missing out on. on that key cognitive strain that keeps your brain really locked in on what your business is doing, which allows you to actually be better at your job. It also avoids what's known in the literature now as work slop, which is the written products produced with heavy use of AI might feel more

efficient for the writer but are often way less useful for the recipients. And the total amount of work required to actually get to an actual high value outcome is reduced. And that's just one rule among many that probably has many exceptions that you could add on to it. But the bigger point here is AI is emerging as the biggest threat to deep work that we've seen probably since Slack. And that is a big deal. Because unless AI can take over your job entirely, in which case we're all screwed, to have it kind of come in here and make deep work harder and take lop off more of the peak strain of the deep work stuff you do is just going to make you dumber and make the total output coming out of your team company or individual much worse. You need some sort of AI rules that

push these tools at least right now much more towards automating the shallow than trying to make the deep easier. Be very worried about any use of AI that's primarily just trying to make deep work feel like it's less of a cognitive strain. There be dragons in the knowledge sector. It's like using polies to help you do pull-ups in military boot camp. You're missing the forest to try to save a few trees. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. Now I want to tell you about one of my secret weapons in the fight to stay healthy. healthy. Factor. Factor offers fully prepared meals designed by dietitians and crafted by chefs that deliver it straight to your door and they're ready in just two minutes. No planning,

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That's Shopify.com slash deep. All right. Let's get back to the show. Rule number two from the book Deep Work was titled Embrace Boredom. This chapter was about the need to train your brain to get better at focusing. don't just assume you're very good at concentrating without distraction. It's actually a skill you have to practice. Now, I opened this chapter on the story of Adam Marlin, who's an Orthodox Jew with three Ivy League degrees,

who in his 20s started practicing Shavruda, Hevuda, sorry, I said the Hebrew wrong, which is where you study either Torah or Talmud with a partner. So you sit at the same desk and you're going back and forth trying to do interpretations, debate, and argue as intellectually very intense. actually write about that later in deep work, I call it the whiteboard effect. It's true for like many intellectual fields. When you're doing something synchronously with someone else, you get a lot more depth of focus out of it because you have to maintain your focus, in order to keep up with the other person, and they push you on the edges. So actually working

with a partner can be really mentally straining in a good way. Now Marlin reports how he had thought of himself, he had all these Ivy League degrees. When he began the practice of Heruta, he thought of himself as a smart person. But when he began, he began, began working with these people who had been doing this, other members of the shul who had been doing this for years, he said, and I quote, they could run intellectual circles around him. And that's when he realized they're smart in the sense of like, I know a lot of stuff. And then they're smart in the sense of I can apply my mental horsepower with incredible focus and that he was missing on that part. So he got really into the study. You do it every day, 6.30 in the morning, because you would do it before work. And he recognized that over time he started to see a difference in his ability to do cognitive efforts in his job beyond this particular practice. Let me read you a passage from this chapter here. After a while, Marlin began to notice positive changes in his own ability to think deeply.

I've recently been making more highly creative insights in my business life, he told me. I'm convinced it's related to the daily mental practice. This consistent strain has built my mental muscles over years and years. This is not the goal when I started, but it is the effect. And then I go on in that chapter to give a lot of other advice for how you might train your brain, such as the idea of you should think of yourself as taking breaks from focus to schedule some brief moments of distraction as opposed to the opposite way around, and you should do things like memorize a deck of cards,

which is a shorthand for focus requiring activities that get you used to focusing. All right, what would I change if I was rewriting rule two from deep work in 2026. So over, you know, years of talking about focus training and training your brain, I have a whole extended toolkit of suggestions that, you know, were not in that original chapter, but I would add today. I've picked out four. These are four brain training things I've talked about pretty regularly in the last half

decade that I would almost certainly add an updated version of this chapter. All right. Number one, you've heard me say this a lot in the last year or so. when at home, you keep your phone plugged in in the kitchen. If you need to use it, you go there to use it. If you have to check it on a text conversation, you go there to use it. If you want to listen to a podcast, where you do the dishes, you use wireless earphones. This is really important because two things happen.

One, there's a lot of circumstances where you would be fighting the urge to pick up your phone and it would make it hard for you to lock in on something. But those circumstances are significantly made easier if the phone is not nearby. Because if the phone is nearby, there's pattern recognizing neuronal bundles or your short-term motivational systems. Like, oh, there's the phone, and then they fire. And then they vote for, let's pick up the phone. If the phone is in the other room, then they're not firing as loud. So you don't have as much of a cloying sort of distracting pull at your attention.

So you'll focus, you're going to focus better. this over time is then going to give you experience with what it's like to be without your phone. You sort of normalize and habituate to that. And now think about all the things you do at home that if your phone was in the kitchen, you would now do with full focus. Simple things. Like I'm having dinner with my family. You're just going to be there having dinner talking to them. Or I'm watching a movie with my kids.

Like you'll just be full out watching that movie. It's a completely different experience. Over time, the positive long-term returns will help reproachers. will help reprogram your long-term motivation system to be like, oh, I really like what it's like to watch a movie without distraction. I don't even want the phone, right? So there's all sorts of positive benefits. All right, number two, read real books either in paper or on Kindle, but not on a phone or tablet. So not in a digital environment that you also associate with other types of distractions. If you're reading nonfiction books, take notes in a notebook after every chapter to try to

consolidate the big idea. So the information comes in in the reading, the writing of the notes help cement it in your brain. Reading real books triggers all sorts of complicated processes in your brain. It helps you build up what the researcher Marianne Wolfe calls deep reading processes, where you build connections between parts of your brain that aren't normally connected. They wouldn't have been in a preliterate age. When these different parts of your brains are all connected together, it unlocks more sophisticated understanding and thoughts.

It literally makes you smarter. So reading, I mean, this is like basic cardiovascular. vascular exercise to your physical health, reading it's to your mental health. Reading pages of books gives you a smarter brain than if you're not reading pages of books. And that smarter brain is going to understand your world better, understand yourself better, understand complicated ideas better, produce more complicated ideas. So that's absolutely important. Three, I would say, find a hobby that rewards focus and punishes distraction, so you just get used to being able to lock on something and get a reward feedback from it.

There's a lot of sports to do this. tennis does this. My wife is taking tennis lessons and was saying if her focus flags a little bit in tennis, you're done. Because you have to constantly be tracking what's going on and predicting what you're going to do next. Basketball has this field. Golf, I assume, Jesse, right? Like, if you're not

locked in, you know, like before your swing, it's... Yeah. For sure. If Jesse doesn't lock in, his typical, like, 69 might flare up to like a 72, 73. Is that what happens? I wish. Am I using the right golf lingo? Yeah, that was perfect. Your birdies are going to become bogeys.

Double bogeys. Double bogeys. There we go. So, okay, that makes them out. You will get used to locking in and focus. Final thing I would say is self-reflection walks. I talk a lot about this. Walking without distraction.

Thinking about yourself. Your life, what's going on? Just get used to the life of the mind. Get used to the inner dialogue voices in your mind. Get used to having noisy, clamoring, competing thoughts, picking out the important one, sticking with it, making progress on it, finding insight on the other end. that type of mental activity contemplation. It's critical to a life well lived. Best way to practice

it is to do it. And the way you do it is you go for walks, be moving without a phone. Or if you have to have a phone for emergencies, put it on ring and in the back of a backpack so you can't grab it without digging through some things so that you can think about what's going on. All right. That was chapter two. Chapter three, the third rule in deep work was titled Quit Social Media. Back in 2006, that was a really sort of provocative way to name a chapter. Now, a lot of people thought when they just skimmed through the book, that what I was arguing back then is that people should stop using social media. It's kind of my stance now.

Actually, what wasn't what I was arguing in that chapter? The quit social media title for that rule refers to one of the specific strategies that I discuss, which is this idea of quit social media dot, dot, dot, dot, for 30 days. to get a better sense of what value it is or is not creating. So I had the suggestion of temporary breaks from multiple different social media platforms so that you better understood what value they were bringing. And if you found it had no value, then maybe you would quit permanently. Or if you found it did, you might adjust your usage patterns to maintain that value,

but maybe avoid some of the value that would be worse. That's an idea that I then developed in my next book, Digital Minimalism. But the general point of the chapter was this idea of you need to adapt a more rational tool mindset for digital tools. I was arguing for other types of tools we encounter in our life, we're not going to spend money to buy it or use it unless we have a clear use case. I talk about a farmer named Forrest Pritchard, who I met here in the farmer's market in Tacoma Park. He wrote a book, cool memoir called Gaining Ground. and he talked about, he told me, and I quote this in deep work, about the complicated mental calculations farmers go through and deciding, do I need to buy this piece of equipment?

Like, well, here's how much a cost, here's the benefit. They all have some benefit, right? Here's the benefit it brings. Here's how much a cost. Is that benefit worse the cost? They're always thinking that through and how to make that ratio more to their advantage. You would never just like buy an expensive piece of farm equipment. Be like, I'm sure we'll figure it out.

It's got some uses I don't want to miss out on. So we're used to it other parts of our lives being really. careful, critical about if and when we're going to spend money on a tool. And I said, when it comes to the world of the digital, especially what I call network tools, things connected to the internet, we throw that out the window. We say it's not the creator of the tool's job that convince me that this is useful. In fact, if there's any possible benefit, I'll invest huge amounts of my time and energy into using this tool. And that was definitely still the mindset around that time. This was like the sort of Apple Watch period where you could launch a product like the Apple Watch.

And Apple literally was like, we don't know what this is for. That's not our job. That's your job. All right, Apple Monkeys, go buy this. And people were just like, I guess we got to buy Apple watches. And literally people were trying to figure out the idea that people now use them for like fitness and stuff like that. That came later. Like Apple was just like, we built the watch.

And people are like, give it to me. And then we'll figure out later what to do with it. So we were in this mindset where it came to digital tools. we were being like the suckers at the county fair. Like I will use any tool if there's any benefit. So the main thing I was arguing in that chapter is no, no, no. Make a tool earn your attention. Make the case that this is generating way more benefits than cost.

Here's what I specifically wrote. The use of network tools can be harmful if you don't attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for use of a tool, then you're unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed. in the world of knowledge work. I then propose an alternative approach, which I call the craftsman approach to tool selection, which I define as follows. Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life.

Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweighs its negative impact. So I was saying, be a much more wary consumer of tools. All right, so what would I change if I rewrote this in 2026? Well, when it comes to social media in particular, which was like a big example through that chapter of a tool that you should really weigh its value versus cost, our relationship with social media back when I was writing this book, which was really like 2014, 2015, a 2015. Our relationship with social media back then is very different that it is today, and it would change the way that I talked about it. If you go back to that 2014-2015 period, which is when, by the way, I first began writing about skepticism around social media. My first post about this came out in 2014. If you went back then, people were thinking about tools like Facebook or Twitter through a lens of personal positive benefits.

So if you said, I don't know, I don't think you should use Facebook. They would come back and say, here are like the benefits I'm getting, right? Like I'm keeping up with my friends. It's how I find business contacts. And there's new sources I can't get elsewhere, right? Twitter, they would be like, this is important for my professional brand. If I don't have a voice online, I don't exist. And it's going to be hard to get jobs.

So we really were still at the tail end of seeing social media tools as being utilitarianly useful. I don't want to give up on benefits. If you go back and watch my TEDx talk, quit social media. media that went viral and it's at like 11 million views now. I recorded that the summer after Deep Work came out, I believe. Go back even then, right? Watch that talk. I'm mainly responding to people's objections to quitting social media based on the value they think they're getting, right? So it's all responses to the types of things where people say, I don't want to give up this value and I would have to argue like that's not as valuable as you think and the cost there is bigger

than you think, right? So it was definitely a like utilitarian calculus people were applying to social media back then, which is why I approached it with this like, let's weigh pros and cons. It's kind of like a quiet push, quiet touch to get people to use less social media. Today in 2026, that is not a relationship with social media. It has completely morphed away from value propositions and has leaned into sort of pure addiction. Like, think about a tool like TikTok and how different this is than like 2014 Facebook. TikTok no longer is like, hey, this is about people you know.

You're not following friends. You're not getting updates from people you know. TikTok, unlike early Instagram, is not about, okay, I have selected maybe like more well-known people who I'm very interested in and I want to hear their takes on things. So I'm following an artist I like and I'm following a writer who has like inspiring quotes. TikTok is like, no, no, you don't follow anybody. We're just going to show you stuff, right? We're just going to show you stuff that's engaging.

So you cannot tell yourself you're keeping up with people or you're trying to follow people that you think is interesting. The huge change here, and this is so big compared, we forget this, but such a big. change. None of these platforms are about posting anymore. They were entirely about posting back then. It was about your stuff you posted, you wanting to put stuff out into the world, right? One of the original addiction hooks that Facebook introduced in their product was the like button. And I write about this in digital minimalism, which came out a few years later, this idea that I have an unpredictable indicator what people think about me. So I put a post

out there, and there's going to be this number. If the number is low, that's like people being mad at me. If that number is high, then people are lauding me. And that was like the most addictive piece of information you could imagine. Of course, I have to go back to this device a lot. I have to see that number. The like button made mobile-enabled social media incredibly addicting, right? This is what it was about. When I said in Deep War quit social media for 30 days, one of the big things I wrote about was you think people really care what you have to say, but you'll notice when you quit for 30 days that no one even noticed that you were gone. So posting was a big part of social media.

Not today. You're on TikTok. You're not there to post your own videos. You're just there to consume. You're on X. You're just there to consume. You want to see the circus. You want to see the people, you know, the gladiators fight.

You're on Instagram. You just want to consume. You're no longer like posting photos of your vacations as much anymore. It's just pure consumption that has been made to be as compelling as possible to keep you on device as much as possible. So no one argues anymore. Oh, I have so much value from this that I'm going to miss out all these opportunities and keeping up with friends. No, they're just like, I can't help myself. It numbs me. It makes chemicals flow. Life is hard. This is my booze, basically. So it's a completely different relationship. So if you're writing a chapter

now about trying to get rid of consistent sort of optional digital distractions, you would write it more like a how to get sober guide. Like, that's where we are right now. We see it as something that is a little bit unsavory and we can't help ourselves. It's like smokers in the early 90s. You're like, this is not good. We know this is kind of on the way out. I'm trying to stop and I can't and I could use some help. So I would completely change the way I thought I would think about it.

And this is where I'd give my advice like you've got to retrain your brain. You have to have the phone away from you more so that you're not firing those short-term circuits. You've got to retrain long-term motivation circuits to learn the deep reward of sticking with something without distraction is better than the short-term reward of looking at the phone. You got to take all the stuff off of your phone that's going to give you high reward signals anything where people make money the more you look at it like you really got to make that phone dumber.

Look at my video from our episode from what was like a month ago Jesse where we talked about how to simplify your phone and make it seem like an incredibly simple dumb phone while still having useful apps on it. Like that's all the type of stuff I would talk about. This is no longer a argument about tool selection and pros

versus cons. It's an argument about sobriety. So that chapter is one that I think would change drastically. All right, the final rule in part two of deep work was called Drain the Shallows. This is the chapter where I tackled trying to contain the administrative and logistic task that, if left unchecked, make it really hard to find time for deep work or to remain focused during deep work sessions. Here's what I specifically wrote. I'm reading here verbatim. The shallow work that increasingly dominates the time and attention of knowledge workers is less vital that it often seems in the moment. For most businesses, if you eliminated significant amounts of the shallowness, their bottom line would likely remain unaffected.

And as Jason Freed discovered, if you not only eliminate shallow work but also replace this recover time with more of the deep alternative, not only will the business continue the function, it becomes more successful. All right, so I was mentioning Jason Freed there. That's because the opening story of that chapter was about how Jason Freed, with his company 37 signals, now it's called Basecamp, experimented with a, four-day work week for certain times of the year. And they found that productivity went up. And then I talked about this controversy that happened where a reporter wrote an article and was like, oh, yeah, Jason Freed and his company are just making people jam five days of work in the four days, like great productivity, you know, tip.

And Jason Freed fired back. He's like, no, they're not working more hours. They're just doing less of the nonsense. There's like less meetings. There's less back and forth. People are just a little bit more on task. They're not working more hours, but more stuff is getting done. And the point there was like, we have a lot more shallow work in our schedules than we think, and it's a lot more removable or optional than we think. So that was the motivation. All right. So I had a bunch of strategies. I actually am going to go through quickly the five particular strategies that I mentioned in this chapter. And for each one, I'll give a thumbs up if like, yeah, that held up and a thumbs down if like, yeah, that didn't really work out or we don't really do that anymore. And I'll do this real quick. All right, the first idea in there was time blocking. That definitely held up. I think time blocking is a continues to be.

be really the only way to manage your time and attention if you have a busy knowledge workshop. The second strategy, quantify the depth of every activity. I actually gave a way of you a heuristic for how to actually numerically score activities so you could sort of see how much deep work each requires and prioritize the deep did not hold up. No one did it. That's something that no one ever did. All right. The third idea, work with your supervisor or boss to establish an ideal deep to shallow work ratio. In a typical work week, what ratio my hour should be deeper for shallow work. And then measure.

And if you're falling short, talk to your boss. Well, hey, we had this target we thought would produce the most value for the company. We're falling short. How can we make changes? That really held up. I threw that in as an after effect. And then I heard from a ton of people after the book came out that this was really successful.

So I really like that idea. I talked about shutdown routine routines, 100% that really works out. Have a clear end of day. Close the open loops. Check a box. say a phrase, be done with your work when you're done. Don't let it sort of bleed amorphously into the rest of your day. The final strategy was becoming better at email, and I gave a bunch of different strategies

in there. Some of those things work, some of them don't. I'm going to get into that in a second. One of the sub suggestions there was just don't reply more often. That triggered Adam Grant to write an op-ed in the New York Times, say, like, that's actually a bad idea. That's rude. And we ended up working this out, Jesse, on an episode of his podcast.

So look at one of my appearances on Work Life Podcasts with Adam, and we sort of in a good-natured way got into that. All right. So what would I add if I was rewriting this chapter in 2026? There was two big ideas that showed up in subsequent books after Deep Work that should fit absolutely here. The first idea is replacing the hyperactive hive mind. This showed up in my 2021 book, A World Without Email, which was meant to be the immediate companion to Deep Work.

but then I inserted digital minimalism between the two just because that book was more timely. But in a world without email, I said, okay, here's what I got wrong in deep work. Here's what I got wrong. In that strategy about becoming better at email, I was falling into the trap of imagining the key to improving the role of email in your life is that yourself to have more discipline and better habits and perhaps to shift some norms in your organization, like norms around response time. And in the world without email, I spent a couple years. I looked deeply at the rise of email and its impact.

And I was like, oh, that won't solve it. The problem with constant inbox checking in the professional setting has to do with collaboration strategies. A lot of our projects, we coordinate with ad hoc back and forth messaging through tools like email and then later Slack. If that's how you're collaborating, a strategy I call the hyperactive hivemind collaboration style, you have to check those inboxes and chat channels all the time. because ongoing back and forth conversations have to be serviced. Otherwise, things ground to a halt. So the real solution is not better habits yourself, like I'm going to batch my email checks, but replacing ad hoc back and forth messaging with other ways of collaborating

that requires many fewer inbox checks or many fewer chat checks, even if those new modes of collaboration are more annoying and in the moment require more work. You want to minimize the need to have to keep checking channel. So that's an idea I did not have in 2016, and by 2021 was a big part of my life. The second idea I would add here, and this is one I really laid out of my last book, Slow Productivity, which came on 2024. Workload matters. We need rules and systems for explicitly managing workloads.

If it's just informally bouncing stuff back and forth in messages, hey, can you do this, can you do that? We'll take on too much stuff. And when we have too many things to work on at the same time, they each emanate their own overhead, their own sort of shallow work tasks that sort of keep the project going, that aggregates. It's uncompressible. It's like water.

So if you do 10 things, and it's opposed to five things, you have twice as much of this administrative overhead that you have to service. And there's a tipping point you go past where the amount of administrative overhead you require to service all the things you're working on basically fully takes over your schedule. And then, like, you only can really do work early in the morning on the weekends and you're in a state of extreme unproductivity. And you're also miserable and burnt out. This is a terrible way to work.

If you instead have explicit rules for managing workloads in a team or a company so that I'm only actively working on a small number of things at any one time. What happens? The amount of concurrent administrative overhead drastically reduces. I have more time for deep work. Those things get done fast. They get done well. And the overall rate at which I complete things goes up.

And the number of things I finish per quarter also goes up. Doing fewer things now means I get more things done. in the long term, and I'm less miserable. The role of overload in attacks on deep work and burnout and workplace misery is critical. So again, my book's slow productivity gets into that. I did not really have that connection yet when I wrote deep work. All right, so there we go. I think Jesse, it holds up pretty well.

I mean, it's continuing to sell, but there's like a lot of updates that I think would make it better. Now, a lot of these updates are in my future books. They follow deep work. A lot of these updates are here on this podcast. A lot of these updates were in my writing I've done for the New Yorker on these type of issues. So you can sort of think of a lot of my work going forward as like revise and updated editions of deep work. So this stuff is largely out there. I eventually write it down anyways.

But this was sort of the seed that started a lot of the thinking that I've since been trying to elaborate and expand ever since. If you had to redesign the book cover, what would you do for a second? addition. Pretty canonical, right? This is, I remember, so if you want to quick backstory, this design philosophy actually came from the book that preceded this,

which was so good they can't ignore you, which is about don't follow your passions and career advice book. So here we go. So we're working on, we're working on so good they can't ignore you. And we're getting back these, like, bad covers. There's one with, like, pencils on it?

Pencils. Like, I don't know what's going on, right? And then the designer at some point gave us this like super big font text heavy. And this was back in the day when like Barnes & Noble was a big deal. And I was like, yeah, that stands out. Like be so good they can't ignore you and good and you. And that's where the design philosophy came from. Same imprint.

So we did deep work. We're like, yeah, we're going all in on big, just boom, big lettering. And it kind of started a cover trend. And a bunch of books did this. And now like the trend this kind of moved on. But there's a period where like just being big and declarative was a cool way to do title. So I would either do this.

And then slow productivity. is more inspirational with like the picture. I want to, yes, this is me going a completely different way. So with slow productivity, I was like, I want to do full bleed imagery. This is more of a thing from the fiction world. And I was like, let's bring this to nonfiction. I want to induce a psychological state in the reader, just seeing the cover, that is congruent with what the book is going to be about. So you see the cabin up on a hill with a path leading to it.

And your mind already goes to a narrative place of a life that's slower and focused on producing important things and is meaningful. it puts you in that emotional state and then you're like, what's this book about? And it's like, hey, how to do that, put those two things together. You're like,

boom, I want to go. So yeah, so we have to keep evolving. Like, I don't think this cover style is like the right style anymore. Yeah,

that's why I kind of asked. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was just because I know that you've been evolving. If I really was going to redesign it, I would either keep it there

or basically just have the dinosaur from Jurassic Park, that famous, the skeleton. It's a famous cover. It's a play. get back. No other explanation.

The Krient Estate has to give you those books for your new Maker Lab. We got to reach out. I want first editions for the lab. I'm going to reach out. Maybe I'll have you reach out. I mean, you're a huge fan. Yeah. The Krichton Foundation. I want first edition books, Kretem books for my lab. I'll send them a picture. It'll be great.

And you can write the biography. I know. I do want to write a Kreton biography. There's fewer words I could say, I guess beyond like the only thing it would probably make my agent even more nervous than me saying I want to write a biography would be like if I wanted to write

like a child's picture book. Like I don't know what would be worse from her perspective to be like I want to write a biography of someone that unless it was like, you know what worlds have not come together like enough recently? Pornography and cookbooks. You could probably do a good kid's book on baseball. See, she's in cold sweats now.

If she's hearing this, she's like Jesse stop it do not plant these seeds in his mind all right well that's enough hearing for me now it's time to hear from you is where we move on to the inbox segment to hear your messages before we get there though let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors now you all know that i'm a big fan of wayfair it's the one-stop shop to upgrade your spaces with quality pieces that work within your budget. In fact, Jesse, I actually just bought a bunch of stuff from Wayfair as part of the renovation that we're doing in the production office next door here in the Deep Work HQ, including,

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notion.com slash cal, to try custom agents today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. All right, let's get back to the show. All right, so now let's get going and open up our inbox. Remember, if you have a question for me or a case study you want to share, maybe just like an interesting article, you want to try to get me to do a rant. The right way to do it now is send an email to podcast at calnewport.com.

All right, Jesse, what's our first message today? The first message comes from Shelley. All right, Shelley, what we got here. All right, Shelley says, I'm a product manager in health tech. And I keep getting pressure from friends and family saying I should have AI write my documentation, market research, business cases, etc. My position on this is that it will make me dumber. And if my job is to persuade people to do something, how can I do that live if I lose the ability to articulate it in writing and understand it deeply? All right.

I've been hearing this a lot. I've got to say, Jesse, this, like, let's let AI do our writing. let's let AI, let's collaborate with AI to help like test our ideas and get our writing out. I find a whole thing to be very depressing and like anxiety producing and depressing. It's like you spend years uncovering and realizing and clarifying the importance of cognition in the human experience and in the knowledge economy and in science and in everything. And then it's just like a lot of chirpy people out in Silicon Valley like, yeah, just kind of like, let's not do that. I'll let computers do a lot. Let's just do that worse.

Wouldn't it be fun? And, like, of course, people are like, sure, because this stuff is hard, right? Like, look, if you are at Marine Boone camp and someone comes around and is like, hey, guys, I have this, like, little carjack thing you put under you when you do pushups and it, like, gives you, it takes a lot of weight off of it. You're like, yeah, pushups stink. I don't like doing all these pushups. So, yeah, let's use that thing. This is great. This is, I could do like a thousand pushups now.

In the time, it would use AI talk. In the time it used to take me to do 10 pushups, I can now do 30 pushups, you know. Be like, guys, the whole point of doing the pushups, it's discipline and strength because of, like, your soldiers. I feel that way about AI. All right, so I have two responses to Shelley. This whole thing is depressing anxiety producing to me. Point number one, rethink right is a cycle. Take an information.

You think about information. You write something based on that understanding. It is a fundamental cognition loop that helps you. make your human brain valuable and capable of producing valuable things, especially in like the knowledge sector, economically speaking. If you take one of those parts out or diminish it, if you say, like, I'm not going to really do much of the writing or I'm going to do it in a sort of kind of like half-aid way where I'm like sort of writing, but really just kind of like editing stuff, the chat GPT road, like you're avoiding any type of strain. That loop breaks.

And your brain getting increasingly better at being able to produce valuable original thought gets worse. You get dumber. Which is not what you want to do. when half of our economy is based on advanced knowledge sector types of companies. Point number two, no one understands anything about productivity. I mean, this was what my last book was about, the first part of my last book, about the num school ways in how we define productivity and knowledge work. Like anything being easier or faster, we're like, I'm more productive. Are you, though?

Like, is this, like, does this directly actually make you more productive? So, like, let's be specific here. And I talked about this two weeks ago in my episode about, AI making us worse at work. Let's look at like Shelley's example. Maybe you produce market research reports, as she mentions. Maybe this is like a key part of your job. Is this the bottleneck? Is the literal time it takes you to write the market research report, the main bottleneck on how much value you're producing for your company? Almost certainly not. I mean, you're probably producing one of these reports like once a month. So like let's say in absolute terms, you're replacing like,

hey, if I was prompting AI and not really doing the thinking myself, I could make this report in like 45 minutes. It otherwise takes me five hours. In the course of a month, does that really matter? Like, is that really unlocking a lot more value for the company? It's the time required to produce that marketing report was not the bottleneck. The bottleneck was actually probably the sophistication, nuance, and value of what you put in that marketing report. In fact, triple your time might make you way more productive from the sense of like this report is containing more value. We often mistake ourselves.

We think about efficiency because we have assembly line thinking, but we're not doing one thing on an assembly line. And when you're not doing one thing on an assembly line, raw efficiency on task execution time doesn't necessarily lead to more proverbial model T's being produced. Now, if Shelley's job was literally producing marketing reports back to back eight hours a day, five days a week, that's all I do. Which is like an absurd thing, but let's just use this thought experiment. then maybe, and they got paid by just literally, here's a report got produced. And someone's like, it looks like a report. Here's some money.

Like, if that was the situation, then like, oh, increasing the speed at which a report is produced would produce more money. But this is not the situation. I'm not writing marketing reports back to back to back to back. I mean, I talked about this one of my newsletters as well recently. Whereas like there's social science researchers are using like AI agents to help analyze data and produce plots. it's nice because that can be annoying, so it can make an annoying day less annoying.

But as I argued, it's not the bottleneck on producing academic papers. Academic papers are not produced by, I sit here all day long analyzing data and produce charts. That's it. I'm an assembly line worker. That's my Model T. And if I could do that faster, I produce more papers. Like, well, no, you're writing one paper every three or four months. There was one day in there which you're analyzing data.

It's nice if you could do that in a half day instead, but it's not going to produce more paper. So we need to have the real definition of productivity, which is the quality and quantity of the final thing that goes out in the world is actually worth money. Making individual things faster does not necessarily increase that. So we have to focus on the things that really matter. All right. What oh God? Next, we have a note from Emilio about AI and education. This is just going to make me more depressed, isn't it?

I don't even know what it is yet, but I can assume AI and education, the note is not going to be like, going great and just with a thumbs up. And then we move on to the next one. All right. I feel like I should have like a bottle of bourbon with me. That would be a fun show, Jesse. Every time we read something to press about AI, take a shot of bourbon. Paris would do that at times back in the past.

With Kevin. Yeah. They do wine. Sometimes they do tequila. I can talk to Tim. But then I think they both quit and maybe they started again. I don't know. They're old now.

We're all old. All right. Here we go. All right. I'm sure this is going to be uplifting. the effects of A.on and education, the effects of A.I. and education are frankly depressing. I'll see right off the bat, Jesse. He's previewing. This is very depressing when I'm about to tell you. All right, let's hammer on. Get my bourbon ready. I remember how much I struggled to come up with ideas and convey them in an essay, for example, and the deep satisfaction that came with it.

Well-written text used to be admirable. Now I see my siblings and friends in university delegating almost all of their writing the chat GPT, limiting themselves to curate text with prompts. and they love it. Of course they love it. It's easier. People don't like hard things. One of my peers proudly said to me something like, I never, never, ever write anything without AI,

be it a large report or an email. Look, I write terribly, even with spelling mistakes, and just let chat GPT fix it for me. We have to be thankful that we have these tools and take advantage of them. His senior project was written in this way

and he has got very good grades. He has arranged a PhD position after graduation while most of us are struggling to get any income at all. I mean, you might as well just buy an essay online, right? Like, yeah. Here's the challenge of education is not, okay, we've set up this obstacle course for you. And if you do it the obvious way, it's going to be mentally hard. If you can minimize,

what we want to see is how much can you minimize your mental strain? Well, in the end, like, why not just like I hired someone else to write the paper for me, right? Like, that's kind of where we're rapidly going. Writing is taking the information that you ingested through reading and conversation and taking that ideas and then outputting original information based on those ideas. That act cemented that information in your mind. If you go back and read my second book, how to become a straight-A student, where I studied a bunch of straight-A college students who didn't seem like they were grinds.

What was the number one thing that unified how they approached studying? Active recall. Like, how do I learn something? I ingest it. I think about it. And then I write it out. So from scratch, it was all about producing answers from scratch without looking at your notes. There was no more effective way to get prepared for a test.

Because writing is a key part of the information intake loop. You have the information. It's in there, but it's not necessarily super accessible. When you write it, boom, those connections happen. It's how you get smarter. It's the entire point of education. Yes, you can have a machine that has taken in like all of the writing on the internet. So it knows the structure of languages and topics.

It's seen it all. And yes, it can use all that information to write for you. You could also copy things out of a book and hand it in. That's also less strained. You can go on the internet and Google it and copy and paste things from articles. That would also be less trained. But it defeats the entire purpose of writing in an educational environment. Writing quality should be something that you admire because the better writer you are,

the more writing you've done, which probably means the smarter you are, because that's more time that you've actually spent actually cementing concepts in your head. Like, Jesse, I was surprised. We'll talk about more about this soon, but like I had this big New York Times piece a couple weekends ago. And one of the most consistent pieces of feedback I got from me, I got all sorts of messages. But one of the most consistent things I noticed was how many people in their responses were surprised about, man, the writing was so good. And it wasn't even like this was brilliant writing. It's just I care about writing quality.

It was a well-crafted essay because I care about that. And I think 10 years ago, that would have caught anyone's attention. It would just have been the ideas. But today, people are like, whoa, what was going on there? I mean, like, this is just like, you know, it's essay craft 101. It's got structure, clarity, callbacks. Like, you know, it's an active sentences, rhythm. Like, there's just clear things you do.

We're just not used to writing quality more. So I'm kind of going off on all sorts of directions here. But I do not like this idea of using AI to pretty. reduce human text for consumption by humans, I think this is a fundamentally human endeavor. Like, that's sort of the stance that I'm coming down on. I know people are going to be upset about that. I just think it's a fundamentally human endeavor. Go back, let's go back to, you know, go back to the Bible. Let's go to Brise Sheet. Let's go to Genesis, right? Like, right off the bat, metaphorically, what is the thing that, like, defines humans? The thing that God gives humans right off the bat is, like, the ability to have language.

they name all the animals and plants, right? This is like a metaphor for, like, really that development of the ability of language that humans developed about 50,000 years ago, right? Boom, we're capturing that in this sort of, like, ancient book. It is, like, fundamental to the human condition. And then the entire Abrahamic faves on which, like, all the ideas we have of everything from, like, liberal democracy to human values and modern ethics, morality, all comes out of this. Based around, came out of writing. writing. Where do you get the Hebrew bio? Where do you get Torah? Like these proto-Phanicians in the Eastern Mediterranean were one of the first alphabetic alphabet style languages emerges

emerges for writing that allows much more widespread literacy and in the ability to write all of these ideas come out of it. It is the human thing. There's some sort of like Tower of Babel type of analogy here to like well what if we instead of making this a deeply human important thing. We build like machines to try to like take this, you know, take this ability away, take it away from God or whatever. So there's probably a religious argument here. I just think there's going to be a resistance to this. I do not want to read stuff that a machine produced. If you want to use a machine to help you communicate, have it produce charts or tables or machine language, right? But English or whatever language, like the written language, this is

humans transmitting a cognitive reality to another human. I think it's a deeply human endeavor. And it has all these practical benefits. So I do not like this like, oh, I just let chat ChbD write for me all the time. That's not, it's not a small thing to say. It's not a small thing to say. It's like, yeah, you know, I make money by selling my organs. It's like there's a deeply humanistic thing here that I don't think we're recognizing yet, but hopefully we will. All right. Do we have anything more cheerful here? Don't, what do we have? We do. All right. Here's someone who successfully avoided social media with no real negative impacts. All right. So, well, let's say from anonymous, because I don't know if they know they were sharing this as a case study.

All right, here we go. Having said that I, having said that, I prescribe to what you write and talk about. I have no social media accounts nor watch TikTok or YouTube and basically just keep a LinkedIn profile to keep my business partner content. My standard excuse is that once I am able to return all emails, phone calls, and texts in a timely matter, I will then consider adding more forms of communication technology. In reality, I have no need and see others constantly distracted by them. I keep an open mind on most items. and someday may come when some form of these technologies make sense for me.

In the meantime, I will stay out of the matrix for as long as possible. All right, that's a nice note to end on. That's like straight out of deep work. Make the tool do the job and convince yourself you need to use it. It's not your job. You're not a beta tester. You're not a quality insurance tester. You're not a product reviewer.

You don't need to go use all these tools and then try to back justify why you have them. If they haven't convinced you, they're useful, you don't need them in your life. So, all right, that made me feel a little bit better. All right, let's move on to our final segment here where we check in on what I've been up to. All right, so I mentioned this New York Times article a couple times, and let me just bring it up briefly, Jesse. I should talk about it briefly. All right, so I had an article not yesterday, but the Sunday before. It had a bunch of different titles, including there's a good reason you can't concentrate.

And it was an op-ed that basically made a call for, and this is a cool graphic. That's Christoph Neiman. I like that. Yeah, he does a lot of New Yorker covers as well. He's a great graphic designer. So it makes the argument that we need a revolution and cognitive fitness like we had in physical fitness in the 20th century. We need to be like what we consume digital information and exercising our brain should be things we care a lot about, like we learn to care about what we eat and having to do exercise. So it's like a manifesto.

It's a long form piece. It's my seventh op-ed I've written for The New York Times. But this one, Jesse, was my first lead opinion piece. So this was the lead Sunday opinion piece. It was the entire cover of the Sunday opinion section that Sunday and got the feature in the opinion newsletter and their sort of full brunt of marketing. So that's basically like the biggest audience left you can get now in American like newspaper magazine writer. That's it. This is the last biggest thing you have is being the lead opinion piece.

So I was proud about that. I might, I bought the paper because it's a whole, you know, big. broad sheet of just this graphic of the brain lifting the whatever just like the whole whole cover was that so maybe we'll frame it for the HQ yeah um so that's good so it's got a lot of good feedback about it really exciting hopefully you read it hopefully you liked it it it it's a call to revolution that i really believe in and hopefully uh other people believe in it as well and we get a little bit of momentum here um on the reading front finished the sanderson book what did you think finished it on March 30th, so I got my five in. I liked it. It's a genre book, genre fantasy, and the thing I

hadn't done in a while, it's long books, 150 pages, short for Tannerson, but long for me. I hadn't actually done that in a while. One of those type of books where the whole point, they do a lot of world building, and the whole point is just to get lost. You just sort of like want to get into the state where you get lost in the world and you're just in the world and stuff is happening. The movie is playing in your head. That's the appeal of, especially John novel in particular, like you're just sort of like you get lost in these worlds. I read a lot of nonfiction, which is much more you get lost in intellectual world. You have ideas and you're playing with it.

This is much more like empathetic, visual action-based or whatever. I'm like, oh, that's fun. That's a good experience. So I'll probably read another one. Not yet. They take a long, they take me a while because they're long. Your kid read it too, right? Yeah, he read the, I think the whole misborn extended trilogy.

And now he's on the second of the stormline. light. He must like it. Those are beast books. Those are like a thousand plus pages. Yeah. He loves them. Yeah.

I told him we'll find a way to go meet Sanderson at some point. And we'll bring a copy of a name of the wind to get signed. Because, you know, you want signed copies are worth a lot. Remember, all complaints about sci-fi references goes to Jesse. He wants to hear it. So there we go. So I got my five in just in time. I got to figure out, I have to, I finished last night.

So I have to figure out my March, my 8th. April books. I was thinking about getting you a book. There's a new book about George Steinbrenner that just came out by Mike Foucaro from the New York Post. It could be interesting.

I might read that notebook as well. That came from a listener. The history of notebooks. Yeah. Yeah, I should probably read a baseball book now that the season's going. Which I should also warn everyone.

Now the Nationals are doing some interesting things. That'll be a, we're going to do a five-episode arc. Analytics. lineup construction and hits strategy. I don't know.

Five episode arc let's go. Actually the episodes are going to be and I think people want this is basically like live commentary.

So we just record you and I talking through the full two to three hour game and then like you go back and listen to us and like replay the replay the games.

Analyze a new ABS system. Analyze ABS. Like we get a little fun asides about the technology and ABC. or this or that. You know, if reading between the lines, I think it's what people want is more extremely

long-form super rapid quantity baseball content. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for this week. We'll have another AI reality check episode coming out on Thursday and then another advice episode next Monday. So as always, until next time, stay deep.