Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 5: Tackling Procrastination, Building a Productivity System from Scratch, and the Intellectual Shallowness of Social Media | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: June 21, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions on tackling procrastination, building a productivity system from scratch, and the intellectual shallowness of social media. I also play some question roulette, and in a new segment, provide an update on what I'm up to in my own deep life at moment. To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.comFull list of topics tackled in today’s episode: * Deep work without alienating customers. * Reducing attention residue. * The distinction between deep and shallow work. * Combating procrastination. * Unpacking my work philosophy. * The future of VR. * Building a productivity system from scratch. * Storing notes for future books and articles. * The promises and peril of YouTube. * The Study Hacks story. * On smartphones and addiction. * How to learn about the world. (Hint: not on Twitter.) * Meditation skepticism. * Getting started with a Deep Life. * People not interested in depth. (Sermon alert.)Thank you to listener Bit Holiday for the original theme music and transition sound effect (bitholiday.net). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries for my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. Now, today, among other topics, we're going to cover the truth about procrastination, building a productivity system from scratch, and the intellectual shallowness of social media. We'll also try a new round of question roulette. I also have a brand new segment called Cal's World where we will check in with what I am up to these days. Or anyways, let's get moving before we do. Just remember that I solicit the questions for this show from my mailing list. I occasionally send out a survey that allows you to submit your query.

So if you want to contribute your question to the show, make sure that you are signed up on my mailing list, which you can do at Cal Newport.com. All right. So with that, let's get started with work questions. Ville asks, how do you do deep work as an entrepreneur without alienating your customers? Will, what I've learned from studying this topic is that customers, what they really want is clarity, not necessarily responsiveness. If a customer says, oh, I really need you to answer my emails right away, I really need you to answer my phone calls right away. This is usually because they don't trust that you're getting to work done. They feel like they have to keep prodding or checking or things will fall through those

cracks. If you give them reassurance, hey, here's how it works. Here's how it works. We have a checking call every week on Thursday. We will give you a status update. You can ask any questions. We'll record everything we promised and was discussed in the call. We'll post that to our client portal, to our project website.

So there's a written record of everything that was discussed and everything we can. committed to. If you have some sort of system like that in place, that gives clarity and reassurance to the client, they won't need you to be able to answer the email right away. They won't need you to pick up the phone right away. So remember that clarity trumps responsiveness when it comes to customer interactions. All right, Victor has the next question. What's an effective tactic to reduce attention residue? So readers of my book, Deep Work, will remember that attention Residue is one of the under-emphasized villains of productivity in the modern knowledge work workplace. Attention Residue is the cost you pay when you switch your attention from one target to another

and then come back to that original target. When you come back to that original target, the temporary switch leaves a residue in your brain that reduces your cognitive capacity. Now, this, of course, is what happens all the time in the typical office environment, because what you're constantly switching over to temporarily is email inboxes and Slack channels. So we know from attention residue theory, when you do that seemingly innocent, quick check of an email inbox, you just look for 60 seconds, just to see. Maybe you're waiting for a response from someone that you're having a back and forth scheduling thread with or something like this.

It seems innocent. 60 seconds, then you're back to your main hard task. It feels like, yeah, that shouldn't have caused too much trouble, but it does because seeing that inbox, even for just 60 seconds, is going to leave attention residue. You saw messages you're going to have to answer later. You saw messages that might be concerning. You saw there's people waiting to hear from you. That takes up a portion of your brain, even after you try to go back to your main task.

Now you can't do that main task as well. So how do we minimize attention residue during? the standard workday. Well, two things I recommend. One, you need to batch the tasks that can create that residue. So you might have a block on your schedule where you say, I'm doing email, I'm doing Slack, and maybe I'm going to knock off five or six small tasks that are waiting that are going to require me to quickly switch context. You test, this test, this test, this test. You batch it all together. Say, great, let's bathe an attention residue for the next hour where we're not trying to do anything cognitively demanding anyways. Now, after that is done,

I can have an hour or two unbroken working on a hard thing. The second thing I recommend is having some sort of transition ritual before you go to a longer, harder, deep work session, a ritual that gives your mind some time to clear out that attention residue. So go for a walk, refresh your coffee, engage with information that has nothing to do with your work. So you just could be chatting about sports with a friend or reading a chapter of a novel. let your brain clear out the professional-related cognitive detritus so that is now ready to do the deeper sessions. All right, Dominic asks, can you give a subtler distinction between shallow and deep work? So Dominic gave me a little bit more background.

He's a software developer. And he says there's tasks that feel like they're deep but require shallow type behavior. and he pointed in particular to fixing bugs in code. He wanted to know, is that shallow work or is that deep work? Because when you're fixing bugs in code, you're tracking down a lot of different things. You're not, let's say, sustaining your concentration on one isolated problem for a long period of time. So, Dominic, one of the distinctions I give in my book, Deep Work, between Deep and Shallow, is to ask yourself to question, how long would it take for me to train a,

bright, recent college graduate to do the effort I'm about to do. Now, what this gets at is skill. So if the effort you're about to do is something that you could train a college graduate to do in 10 or 15 minutes, so like you're putting together a PowerPoint presentation with the latest quarterly sales number, that's not deep work because you're not pulling on hard one skills. You're not applying hard one skills. You're just doing something that really any reasonably bright person could do. So that is, I think, an important distinction. If we apply that distinction, I think bug fixing does seem deep. You can't just grab a standard bright 22-year-old out of college and say,

hey, I need you to fix these bugs in this complex piece of systems programming I'm doing. They would actually have to train for a long time to learn to language, to learn to systems, to learn the context in which you're writing that code. So that would say that bug fixing is deep work. I think what's throwing you is that your attention is shifting frequently when you're working on bugs. Attention shifting does not necessarily mean that you're not doing deep work if you're switching your attention within targets that fall under the same cognitive umbrella. So going from one bug to another in a common piece of code, you can see that as all being under the umbrella of I'm working on this piece of code. And so though it feels like these bugs are different, you're really sustaining your concentration on one type of problem.

That's very different from the type of switches we just talked about that create attention residue. So if you're going from fixing a bug to answering an email to fixing another bug to working on a PowerPoint presentation, now you're doing tasks that fall under completely different cognitive categories. That's going to create attention residue. that's going to break your efforts to get the rewards of deep work. So I think that might be what's throwing you, Dominic, but bug fixing, requires skill, switching between a lot of bugs is not switching your attention out of your, out of a cognitive category.

So I think you can think of that as one sustained deep work effort. All right. Matt wants to know about procrastination. In particular, he says, how do you combat procrastination, even when you are aware, that you are procrastinating. Well, Matt, my theory on procrastination says that it comes from one of two places. First, if your mind does not believe in the importance or necessity of what you're trying to accomplish, it has evolved to try to resist putting energy into that particular endeavor.

This is why, for example, when you have some sort of busy work on your own, you know, your plate until you really feel like there is a threat. You know, if I don't get this done, my boss is going to yell at me or if I don't clean the gutters in my house, this next rainstorm is going to flood my basement. Without that threat of something bad going to happen is really hard to get your motivation up to do it. This is why in particular people have trouble with a lot of self-development initiatives where they'll put in place these very ambitious lifestyle lifestyle engagements like I'm going to do a jocco-willnick style wake up at 4.30 every morning and get after it and lift all these heavy weights. Those often fail because your mind, if it doesn't

believe, hey, we are going after something here that really is crucial. It's really going to be bad if we don't do it. If your mind doesn't believe it, it's hard for it to muster motivation. So if you have just arbitrary self-improvement type habits you want to put into your life, you might also feel a sense of procrastination. It's also why when people are trying to launch professional self-improvement efforts that they often have trouble, you know, hey, I'm going to, I'm going to work on, you know, learning this language every day. I'm going to work on my novel every day. If your mind's not convinced, like this is actually crucial for whatever is happening in our professional life. Again, you are going to procrastinate. The second source of procrastination, even if you're

your mind believes in what you're doing. If it doesn't trust that you have a reasonable plan to get the work done, it's also going to hold back motivation and you are going to suffer from procrastination. Again, our minds evolved to be plan evaluation machines. We generate lots of ideas. Our mind evaluates those ideas. Okay, this one seems reasonable. Great. I'll give you motivation. These plans seem bad. The example I always give is that the, the, caveman having the idea to charge the mammoth and jump on its back and try to bash in its head with a rock, your brain will say, huh, I don't think that's a pretty reasonable plan. So I'm not going to make you feel motivated for that. But another plan of let's surround the mammoth and throw spears at it,

your brain says, I believe that could work. So let's have some motivation for that. Let's not procrastinate on that particular plan. That still happens today. This is why athletes have coaches. You know, you trust the coach knows the best way to get in shape for your sport. So you take this source of procrastination off the table. I trust this type of effort's going to work. I'm much less likely to procrastinate now on this training. It's why people trying to lose weight, use diet programs. You can trust the program has been designed to work and you're more likely to stick with it than just coming up with your own rules. So Matt, to get back to your original question, if you're dealing with procrastination, make sure that you're picking your targets very carefully.

you know, it can be harder than you think to figure out things you want to go after. It has to be something you really believe this is going to be important for me. And then two, make sure you have a good plan to get there. Make sure that you are looking at experts. You're looking at the examples of other people who've gotten there. You're bringing on training programs, maybe even some sort of informal coaching. But really try to convince your brain, I have the right plan to get to this goal. You do those two things.

You'll find procrastination. won't play as big of a role in your life. All right. Final work question will come from Ian. Here's what Ian says. I was telling my friend about your writing, and he said, isn't the message just basically,

get on with your work? What would you say are the most fundamental points beyond this? Well, Ian, that would have been a much shorter version of my books, I suppose. I could have instead published an index card that just says, you know, hey, idiot, get on with it. And to be honest, that probably does capture about 50% of my message. So your friend is perceptive. But, you know, for the sake of elaboration, why don't I lay out here the main points about my deep lifestyle philosophy about work? Right. I have four points.

One, figure out what matters, focus on the thing that matters, try to minimize the time you spend on everything else. Two, when working on the things that matters, to the degree that it's possible, do so in a state of depth. Unbroken, undistracted concentration produces more from your brain than any other cognitive state. Point three, deliberately train these skills, like a musician or an athlete or a professional chess player. If you want to get better at a hard skill, that's important, you have to practice. This means you have to do work designed to. stretch you past where you're comfortable, if possible, get feedback to help point you towards where you need work, where you're falling short, where things are going well.

Deliberately practicing will expand your skills much faster than just trying to do something more and more. And my fourth point, use the career capital these skills generate as leverage to take control of your career. To craft your career around activities and behaviors or what have you that resonate and away from things that don't. So you put these together, work deliberately and deeply on valuable things so that you can control your professional life. Put those things together, that motto, I think is a very consistent path towards a fulfilling and meaningful professional career.

All right? I mean, look, it's nerve-wracking. I think it's nerve-wracking to not do this. If you're out there and saying, here's my plan, I want a job that has a good salary, and hey, I'm going to show up and I'm going to be busy. I'm going to answer emails quickly. I'm going to put together the PowerPoint presentations they want me to put together. I'm going to volunteer, volunteer for activities. First one and last one out.

If you are basing your career on just showing up, doing the work, being busy, you are in a vulnerable position. I mean, this was my reaction to the lockdown from the coronavirus pandemic, right? We have this lockdown. Big organizations are suddenly like, ugh, this could be bad economically. University starts saying, oh, we're going to freeze raises. We're going to cut salary. We might have to start letting people go. You hear from publishers, ooh, we don't know how this is going to go, right?

We might have to cut back advances. We might have to, we editors might get fired. Publishing houses might go under. I'm looking around at this and I'm thinking, this makes me nervous, just trusting, hey, I have my job, I'm trying to show up, I'm trying to do my work well, I just hope it goes well,

makes you nervous when bad times happen. On the other hand, you take the deep approach. I'm deliberately and deeply building and applying skills that are very valuable. I'm using this to get autonomy. I'm using this to take control over my own career. you feel like you have more resilience to the hard times.

You feel like you are controlling your own ship. I think the economic distress caused by the lockdown is making that message clear. My response to that economic distress is my hustle instincts went into hyperdrive. You know, I launched this podcast. I launched a few other projects. There's some business deals going down.

My thought was this emphasizes. I'm seeing here getting these messages. Well, you might have to cut this. And we can't guarantee this job. And who knows, we might have to let people go. I don't want to be beholden to large organizations and just hope they treat me well. Now, how do you get out of being beholden exactly this philosophy? Work deeply and deliberately on valuable things.

Use them to take control over your professional career. So, Ian, what I would tell your friend is you do want to just get on with it with your work, but you also want to redefine what you think about your goal is with work. If you were like me, you should be a little bit suspicious about busyness for a large organization will get you through your career. I think that is a vulnerable position. The deep life approach to work gives you more autonomy, gives you more resilience. All right. So let's now go back and try once again our new segment, question roulette. So as you might remember, the way this segment works is that I call up on my computer a question

I have not seen before from a reader and tackle it no matter what it might be. So let's do it. I have my randomly loaded question on the screen now. All I know is that it's from someone who identifies with the name H. Let us see now. I'm scrolling down. What is H's question? How do you deal with the anxiety of not being productive enough?

Oh, that's a good question. That's a good question. lots of people who you would identify as being quite productive, myself included, often have this anxiety. Am I working on the right things? Am I working on enough things? Am I getting enough things done? This is, I think, a common state, a common, let's say side effect of pursuing a more

productive professional life. So what can you do to try to get around this? Plan. That's my answer. Plan. I want to say plan. I mean, plan at the larger. scale, like the quarterly scale. You know, what's my vision? What's my vision for this piece of my

professional life? Okay. I want in the long run to get here. What am I going to do this quarter to get there? What are my goals for the next three or four months to get to that goal? If you trust in your plan, then when it comes to the day to day, you're just working backwards from what efforts I want to do this week, what efforts I want to do today that's keeping me on track for this plan. If you feel like you're more or less on track for the plan, then you can be confident that you are productive enough. If you're really not making progress towards that plan, then you say, I'm not working on the right things.

I think this is really important because, again, without it, without these type of plans, if it's just, I want to crush it, I want to hustle. I want to be the guy who's up just getting things done. You will never have enough. You will always feel like you're not doing enough. You'll always feel worried about it. You know, I mentioned former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink earlier in this episode.

I was listening to an interview with him recently, and he actually had a very revealing monologue about exactly this issue. So as I mentioned earlier, the famous thing online about Jocko Willink is that he takes a picture of his watch every morning at 4.30 a.m., which is when he gets up to exercise. And he gave this monologue of this interview where he basically said, look, I wish, I wish I could sleep more. I wish I could just like, you know, let me just rack out and get more sleep. But he says, I have this voice in my head that came probably from military service that always says to him, the enemy is up.

The enemy is already training. You got to get up. You got to get training. You got to get after it. Now, I think some of this, again, comes from the high stakes of military training, but it is an encapsulation of what happens when you're not. just working on a plan, but just wanting to out train the enemy outwork to competitors, it will never be enough. You will fall into whatever your own personal equivalent is of waking up at 4.30 a.m. So that's what I do. That's what I recommend H. Had the plan for what you want to

go for. Know what that means the next few months. Plan your day and week around making good progress towards that plan. And if you are making good progress, then you can be assured that I am doing enough have clear shutdowns, take the time that remains for other high-quality rejuvenating activities. I think that question went pretty well this week. So let's move on now to technology questions. Isobatar asks, how do you see the future of technologies like virtual reality? I'm very interested in virtual reality and in particular, it's cousin augmented reality. So in augmented reality or AR, you don't wear a helmet that completely

blocks off your view of the real world. You actually look through goggles or glasses and you see the world around you, but digital elements are superimposed on that world. So roughly speaking, if I have this right, in augmented reality, the things that are being imposed, the things you see sort of projected into the real world are clearly digital. such as like an interface with which you can see your email kind of floating in the sky in front of you, and you can reach forward and touch it and navigate. This is like Tom Cruise and Minority Report, where he has on those gloves, and he's moving all those pictures around on the screen.

That would be augmented reality. There's a variation called mixed reality, where there the goal is to project things into your real world that are supposed to look as if they actually reside in the real world. So with mixed reality, you might have, for example, a board game board on the table in front of you, and it's actually your rig might be using light sensors to get the light on it, the mass of light in the room, and it feels like there actually is this board game in front of you on the table. Augmented reality, I think, is going to eat the world.

The most important technological development of probably the last 30 or 40 years. So what do I mean by that? Well, here's the thing about augmented reality. Once its field of view and resolution gets to a sufficient point, it can virtualize all hardware. All hardware. So what do I mean by that? Why would I need a laptop if I have a sufficiently powerful AR rig

that can essentially project a laptop screen wherever I want to, in my space and it's indistinguishably sharp. Why would I want a widescreen TV if my AR rig can project a beautiful large widescreen TV wherever I want on any wall I want? And in fact, it can synchronize with nearby people, so we're all seeing the same screen as if it exists in the same space. Why would I need a smartphone? Why would I need to carry a separate smartphone if with a flick of my hand, I can have

the interface just floating right there in the sky ahead of me? scroll with my hand, scroll with my hand, that's the podcast I want to hear, it disappears, I'm listening to the music. This is why so much money is being put into augmented reality. It's why when this company down in Florida called Magic Leap claimed to be having a bit of an edge, they had some breakthroughs on what's called photonic gating, which is sort of the technology required to do some of this projection of digital elements into the real world, why they received billions, billions of dollars of investment, including a lot of investment from Google.

That's why Apple is spending a ton of money on AR technologies is because there is going to be this threshold. And when AR passes that threshold, massive hardware industries are going to disappear. I would not be investing in the long term, for example, in Foxconn right now. We're not going to need massive factories to produce smartphones and computers and tablets when all we need is exactly one device. So I think some of the most valuable companies the world have ever seen are going to emerge in the next 10 years and they're going to be AR. There'll be a couple big players, probably Samsung, maybe Apple, maybe Google. Amazon might make a last minute push into this because Bezos, he's really a savage with this stuff. He's brilliant business instinct.

Zuckerberg, I feel like got this a little wrong. He put his money into VR instead of AR. That's a whole other discussion. But I wouldn't put anything past Zuckerberg. He's also a very, very savvy business operator. So that's my prediction. Keep an eye on this. I think we're going to have a trillion dollar plus market cap companies in about 10 years.

And it's going to be a gigantic shakeup. It could be wrong, but it just seems way too logical and inevitable that that's the way we are going. All right, Muhammad asks, how do you build a complete productivity system when you're starting from having absolutely no system in place? Right. So in other words, let's say you're just realizing you need productivity in your life. How do you build a productivity system from scratch? So, Muhammad, when it comes to productivity, and let me just be clear here. When I say productivity, I'm talking about getting your arms around all the different systems.

stuff that you have to do, all of your different obligations. So this could apply to your professional life. This could apply to your personal life. Any successful system must have three pillars. Capture, configure, control. I'm sort of stretching the terms here so I can be alliterative because I like alliteration. There's probably better terms. So let's go with these. Capture, configure, control. So what does capture mean? Well, capture means, and this is David Allen's core insight from his system getting things done. Everything that is an obligation you have made, something that you need to do,

has to be captured written down somewhere. You cannot have obligations that exist only in your mind. David Allen calls these open loops, and he absolutely correctly diagnoses that open loops are a source of anxiety and stress. They make you less happy. They reduce your cognitive performance. everything is out of your mind. It has to be written down and it has to be written down in a system that you trust.

It's not just going to disappear, a system you were going to look at regularly. All right. Next comes configure. This is where I think Alan probably needs an update. To me, configure is once you have all of your obligations written down, categorizing them, moving them around, organizing them, making sense, in other words, of everything that's on your plate. So in the getting things done system, you do some of this, you move things into what Alan calls context, which is basically the physical or cognitive context in which you should work on the task. But I think we need much more advanced organization of what's on our plate. Some of the things I've been talking about recently, for example, is I break down obligations between the different roles I play professionally.

And then within each role, I break things down in terms of things such as, okay, here's an obligation where I'm waiting to hear back from someone about something. It's important to have a stake in the ground for those type of obligations. Here's an obligation that's on the back burner. I don't need to be actively working on it yet, but I do at some point need to do it. So I'm going to put it here. Here's a list of obligations that, okay, I'm making active steps

towards their completion right now, like this week, for example. So breaking out obligations by role within roll, breaking about into these different categories, it makes a huge difference. You get to visualize what's on your plate. You get to structure what's on your plate. You get to make sense of what's on your plate. That will give you the cognitive piece needed to actually make progress, which brings us to the third pillar, which is control. You must then use this fully captured, organized information to inform plans for what you're actually going to do. When I say control, I typically mean time control.

I think you should probably be having some sort of time blocking going on, Muhammad, where you actually look at your time in the day and give your hours jobs. During this period, I'm working on this. During this period, I'm working on this. Friday, I have a lot of free time in the afternoon, so I'm going to tackle a lot of these little tasks. I have this one big thing that's due at the end of the week, so I'm going to do one hour every morning until I get it done. You have to control your time. Use as your foundation, again, this captured and configured collection of everything on your plate.

that to make a smart plan for what you're going to do for your time in the days of head, then make sure that you're making progress on the right things. Now, I don't care if you want to implement this system on clay tablets or in something complicated on the other end of the spectrum, like an air table app, whatever you want to do. If you want to organize your life, capture, configure control, that is what you need for a fully featured productivity system. Anything less, I think, is going to get you lesser results. All right. Mark asks, where do you store information and ideas that you might use for a future book or blog post? Mark, I use Evernote for that purpose. Pauwell asks, what YouTube

channels do you enjoy? Now, I have mixed feelings about YouTube. I've written some about this on my blog, it's something I'm trying to work through. And let me explain this, Powell. I think that democratization of video is crucial to the future of the internet. Just like the worldwide web and the underlying HTML protocols democratized written text, just like podcasting is democratizing audio, I think the democratization of video, I think the democratization of video is going to be incredibly disruptive and incredibly important. Technology is getting to a place where it's becoming more and more possible to approximate the production values of what you see on TV

or what you see in the movie theater, to approximate, let's say, the production values of a cable show or an independent film for low thousands in terms of investment in technology. So once you can approximate the value, the fact that you can now have almost anyone work on this type of content is going to be an incredible source of innovation, an incredible source of interesting information. So I'm a big fan about democratizing video. And right now, YouTube is the platform that helps do that. It's a place where you can put that video that has really well-supported players. It's easy to embed. People can look at it on their phone. People can discover it. YouTube is where this democratization is actually happening. On the other hand, YouTube has the, those auto recommendations. And those can create terrible rabbit holes. You know how it happened.

Like, oh, look, I'm going on YouTube specifically to watch an interview of like Cal did. Right. I want to see something, you know, Cal did. Great. I have access to the video. I can see Cal talking on, you know, like the breakfast club or something like this. That's interesting. You're watching me on this show.

then you see a recommendation on the right. You're like, oh, man, dogs riding motorcycles? I probably need to watch that because that sounds awesome. You click on the dog riding the motorcycle. And then, you know, next to that, it's like, you know, dogs speaking the truth. And you click on dogs speaking the truth. And the next thing you know, you're down a rabbit hole

where you're looking at Nazi dogs that are, you know, spouting out supremacist propaganda. And it's three hours later. And you're thinking, bleary-eyed like, oh man, these dogs really scare me. And you're like, oh, my God, what happened? That's the danger with YouTube. So on one hand, it's a platform that really is aiding the democratization of video.

It's not a social network in the way that you have to have a be on there and look at a feed. And they're trying to push you. All you're doing is consuming this feed and you're getting feedback. And it doesn't have all of the psychological exploitations of, say, like a Twitter or a Facebook. but those auto recommendations do cause issues. So I don't know. I mean, I'm interested in people's thoughts on this. Where I land now, and Powell, this would be my advice for you.

Treat YouTube like a library, not a TV channel. YouTube is a place you go to, I want to see video on this. I want to learn how to replace the oil in my car. I want to, I like this author. I want to see some talks or interviews of that author. I think it's fantastic for it. that. Don't treat it like a cable channel. Like, oh, I want to be entertained what's on. Because again, you'll start somewhere innocent and you'll end up 20 minutes later with Nazi dogs.

So that's my advice. Treat it like a library. You go to look at particular content. Do not treat it like a general source of entertainment. I think that's dangerous. There are browser plugins that can help you here. If you use Chrome, a lot of people have recommended to me, D.F, tube, or distraction. free YouTube and that is a browser plugin that will get rid of the auto recommendation so you search for what you want to see you find a video you watch it no Nazi dog videos on the right-hand side really does transform it from a channel to a library that is the way I think you should use it okay master Wayne asks how did you get started with your blog well I started study hacks in the summer

2007. I remember my web poster A2, which is still my web poster, I found it because Merlin Mann had advertised it on 43 folders as his web host. I said, great, I'll just sign up for the same webhoster as Merlin Man started registered caldupor.com, started study hacks. The key thing about 2007 is that I had published two books right before that. How to Win at College was 2005. How to Become a Straight A Student was 2006. but it was late 2006, I think like in December. So late 2006 or early 2007, I launched study hacks soon after that.

The whole idea was basically to just cover material that wasn't in the book, sort of like the missing chapters. Like, oh, here's something else that wasn't in this book about student study advice or student advice more generally. And then I started adding in case studies. Okay, here's more case studies of people who have used the ideas in those student books and had some. success. And I did that for a while. Then I started to give some talks. I would go around to colleges.

I used to give talks at a lot of colleges back when I was in grad school. Again, it was this weird double life I led where my advisor, even at first thing, even though, I was writing books. And I would fly out to, yeah, I'd be flown out to go give talks at colleges all across the country, which was fun. When I was doing that, though, I began to learn directly from students about issues they were having with overload and stress. And so study hacks made a shift around 2008, where I began to talk more about building a meaningful college career while reducing stress. And I introduced ideas like the Zen Valedictorian and the Romantic Scholar. I used to go around then and give talks about reducing student stress. I would go to places like Princeton. I did one at Harvard. I did one up

at Middlebury. I did one up at Dartmouth, I believe at some point, and so on. So then I was really writing less about hardcore study advice and still about student stuff, but more about how do you build a college career that is satisfying, not overwhelming, not stress producing, but that will still give you lots of options after graduation. Then there's a big shift that occurs. This is the shift, I would call it the passion pivot. This was actually, it's an interesting question, Master Wayne, because I was talking with my wife about this recently because she remembers when I was going through this. It was like a really difficult decision.

I really felt like I was one of the top voices talking about student issues, especially student advice, study habits, stress issues. I was really a top voice. I was doing very well in that market. I could basically own that market. It kind of made sense. Focus on that. But I was starting to get interested in other topics. And in particular, I was getting very interested in this topic. of career advice and is follow your passion good advice. And is that what's going to make you happy? I'll give a shout out to my longtime friend Ben Kastnuka because I remember talking with him about this at this point.

It was actually talking with him that that original example about Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs telling people to follow their passion, but him not having done that in his own career. That actually came from Ben that ended up being the opening story of my 2012 book, so good they can't ignore you. So I really went through this hard period where I said, how do I do this? How do I start talking about career advice? I'm the student guy.

Shouldn't I just stay and own that space? But I really was interested in the topic. And so you'll notice the passion pivot occurs. I think it's in 2010, where I went to a strict 50-50 schedule. And I did a strict alternation, student article, career article. Student article, career article. And I did that up until so good they can't ignore you, came out in 2012. I wrote another book in between there.

This is my fourth book. And at that point, I dropped the student content. Now it seems like a completely reasonable thing to do, but it was a scary shift. That is where I was known. It made sense that I was a student guy. I had written some of the better selling books in that space. I was a student. And the switch over to more general idea, hardcover nonfiction was

not an easy move to make, but I did. And I'm glad I did. And then you'll see, okay, I'm doing passion, passion, career, career, career, career. You start to see pretty soon. First, I called it hard focus. And then I introduced the term deep work. I start going career, deep work, career, deep work. And after a while, it shifts over to just deep work. And then after a while, you see integrated with deep work, stuff about social media and personal technology use and digital minimalism and so on. So anyways, I appreciate the question, Master Wayne, because that was a nice trip down memory lane about how study hacks evolved over time. Now, I understand the reason why you're asking the question, and I know this from the

context you gave me, is you are interested in starting your own blog and how to be successful. And the main thing I will say is that throughout all of that, I had particular topics on which I had a strong point of view, and I relentlessly pushed that point of view. And I grew an audience because there's people who like that point of view. they liked that it wasn't for everybody. They like being a part of that tribe or being a part of that team. So have something to say that is interesting,

something where you are qualified to be talking about it and make an argument to your community for your point of view. That's how you get an audience in the blogging world. All right, let's do one more technology question. This comes from Calvin.

First of all, excellent name, Calvin. I give you plotits, lottits for that. How well does the science of addiction recovery apply to forms of compulsive technology use? All right. So, Calvin, I went deep into that question when I was researching digital minimalism. The question I was pursuing is, are we addicted to our devices, or is that the wrong term? The answer I came away with is, many of us are, but it's a certain type of addiction. that psychologists would call a moderate behavioral addiction, which is different, let's say,

than like a substance addiction where you actually have a psychoactive chemical component that can cross the blood brain barrier and directly affect the operation of the neurons in your brain. Those can be much, much stronger addictions. Nicotine can do that, alcohol can do that, heroin does that, meth does that. So when you have actual substances that can, that are psychoactive, can cross the blood brain barrier, you can get these very, very strong substance addictions in which you have, for example, medically dangerous withdrawal if they're taken out of your life. You know, you take the heroin addict and just stop using heroin. It can be actually dangerous because you're, you, you actually

change your brain chemistry. We do not have that same relationship with our smartphones. We should be clear about that. And I'm very clear about it in the book. It is much worse to be addicted to nicotine, alcohol, or heroin that it is to be addicted to your smartphone, just from the perspective of addiction science. So what is a moderate behavioral addiction? Technically, it is something that it's a behavior that when you have access to it, you do it more than you know is useful or healthy. So it's a behavior you will do to an excess,

and that excess has negative ramifications on the quality of your life. That's a moderate behavioral addiction. So the idea is, if I take your smartphone away and say, okay, no smartphone, you have to not have your smartphone for the next week, you might miss it. You might find yourself bored. You might even find yourself a little bit jittery, but you're not going to sneak out in the middle of the night and, you know, rob a Best Buy. He's like, I have to get the phone. You're not going to be, you're not going to have the shakes. You're not going to have to be hospitalized. On the other hand, if you have a smartphone around, you might use that smartphone way more than you know is useful.

You might use that smartphone when you're with your kids. And even though you know, like, I just want to be paying attention to my kids. This is a sweet moment. I can't help but look at it. You're out with friends. You're still looking at it. You're seeing a beautiful sunset or watching a show that's really engaging, yet you still pull it out and you still try to get those quick hits from services.

That's moderate behavioral addiction. One of the good analogies or examples that's given for these type of addictions is like if there's a bowl of junk food like donuts that are put out in the break room of your office, you really might just build a connection to like, I always have a donut. And they can become really hard not to eat that donut, right? It's there. And when it's there, you do it more than you know is useful. On the other hand, if the bakery closes down and no one brings in donuts in the morning,

you're not going to sneak out of the office to go find one. That's a moderate behavioral addiction. The problem with having a moderate behavioral addiction with your smartphone is that it is always available. right it's like the guy with the donut tray following you everywhere and say are you sure you don't want another donut now and so that's why people really struggle with it so uh i think that's good news bad news it means it's a easily conquerable addiction but it is a real addiction which means if you don't do anything about it it really can cause negative ramifications in your life all right so calvin as i would expect from someone with such an excellent name that was

an excellent question. All right, so what we want to do now is I want to test out this brand new segment, Cal's World. People often ask what I am up to in my own life, so I figured I would give some updates about what I have been up to this past few days. In terms of books, in terms of books, I read a lot of different books. At the moment, I'm reading in particular a book about the Comanche Indian which I'm finding very interesting.

As you might have noticed from some of my recent blog post, I'm also reading a book about Bhagavad Gita, which I am also finding quite interesting. The writing front, I'm pretty far along in a long-form piece about productivity in the workplace, and in particular answering a question that I think many of us don't even think to ask, which is, why is productivity in the professional context

something that we leave to individuals to figure out. Like, why is it not the first thing that happens when you go to work for a big company is like, we're going to do extensive training on our incredibly optimized systems for how you organize your work and get things done? You think we would have this massive increase in productivity if we did that, but we don't. You say, that's up to you, right? You don't feel productive. Go buy a book.

Go ask Cal Newport a question. That's on you. That's always baffled me. I'm working on a big article. about why we work that way and have found some pretty interesting answers there. I'm recording some video. I'm interested in video. And so I'm recording a video series on The Deep Reset.

This is a, I wrote a big blog post about this a few weeks ago about people's urge in times of disruption to try to remake their life into something deeper. I call that urge right now, the Deep Reset. I'm doing a video series that kind of goes into how you might do that. So we'll see how that goes. Video is something I'm somewhat new to. I'm also working on an article about the Shopify model versus the Amazon model. So the Shopify model is basically using technology to empower existing distributed sources of value versus the Amazon model, which is to consolidate.

As part of that, I'm also reading Tim Wu's, I think, a really great book from 10 years ago called The Big Switch. I believe that's what it's called. Let me look at my shelf. No, the master switch. I'm sorry, I have it in my library here. And it's all about the inevitability of monopoly within technology. And that's been interesting. I read it when it came out, but it's been interesting to go back towards that.

Finally, what's going on in my life is I am looking for a new layer. So I record this podcast right now in my study, in my deep work manner. However, in the quest for better audio and the quest for silence in a household that typically has many young kids in it, I have been looking at some office space here in downtown Tacoma Park, Maryland. So I'm hoping sometime soon to be able to launch an official deep work layer where I can retreat and record in peace. So I will keep you updated about that. Okay, so that is Cal's World. let's try to round things out here with a few questions about the deep life. Tom asks,

if you were half as intelligent as you are now, how would you tweak your learning method, if at all? Well, Tom, if I was half as intelligent as I was now, I'd be drooling into a cup, which is my way of saying, I'm probably not as smart as you think. I just am very diligent. I will stick with something for a very long time

until I've mastered it. You do that long enough, and then you can trick the world into thinking you actually know some things. But I think this is a good time to step back and say, what is my philosophy about how to learn about the world or develop philosophies?

When it comes to this goal, I'm heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhan and especially how he's been interpreted by Neil Postman. In particular, the idea that the medium, the medium in which you encounter information really does affect how you are able to internalize or make use of that information. So to be more clear, I'm a big believer in long form content. So the written word, the book or the really long article or perhaps the long form interview

with a thinker, that sort of long and careful exposition of idea. That medium, I think, is crucial because it lends itself to a complicated, critical, nuanced understanding of the topic. And so my learning method focuses on books. It focuses on long form interviews. It focuses on long articles because encountering information, when it's laid out very carefully structured over many, many pages. changes rewires the way that your brain stores that information such that your brain sees that topic

in a very rich and nuanced and critical manner, which I think is crucial for navigating a complicated world. So this is what I do. I read things. I spend time with it. I reflect on information. If I'm trying to develop a philosophy, I'll usually deploy Socrates trick, which is the dialectical method, which is take the thing that feels right. read about it and think about it carefully, and then confront it with another point of view. Also carefully reasoned, also carefully thought through, because Socrates pointed out, and he's absolutely right. In that collision, a much more nuanced and stronger rooted understanding is born. If you want to have a really solid intellectual foundation for certain issues that you feel good about,

then you not only need to be reading in long form, the most complicated exposition you can, can find on that issue, you need to be throwing against it the most competent refutations that you can find, the most competent alternatives that you can find. And in that dialectical clash, becomes a much more nuanced, a much more well-rooted, a much stronger foundation on which you can really, with confidence, approach the world, understand the world, shape your life, shape what you argue, have ideas that can move the world forward. And so that's how. I learn. Now, again, the media matters. So this is why I think if we look to social media, what do we see? Well, we see the understanding of the world that emerges out of social media

is quite different. And it's because of McLuhan, and this is because of Postman saying, what do you expect? The media matters. So let's look at the world if you spend a lot of time on Twitter. And God help you if you do. But if you do, what does the world look like? Well, I think for most users on Twitter, there is an incredibly simplified view of the world, where there's angels and demons. The demons are hopelessly wrong. The angels are clearly right. And what you do is just dunk on each other.

It's all about, like, you are 100% wrong. Boom, here you go. Here's my evidence that you were just terrible. emoji, exclamation point, or whatever people put on Twitter. done. Now, why is there such a simplistic understanding of the world? Because it's the medium. You have 250 or 500, however many characters is, but you have a tweet. That's it. You have a very short amount of information. If you're trying to understand the world through very short snippets of information, the understanding you get about the world, the understanding you get

about issues that are really important to you, that are really important to society, the understanding you get of these issues is going to be tweet like that medium can only support a very simplistic world such as there's angels there's demons the demons are clearly and hopelessly evil and what we do is we dunk on them to almost any other time period almost any other philosopher such an understanding of the world would be seen as downright paleolithic like pre-writing pre-language what a simplistic way to understand the world. But what freed us from those views was the invention of readily available long-form communication mediums

like the written word. In fact, Neil Postman argues in amusing ourselves to death, he argues that Gutenberg helped enable the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Now, we know this already, but we typically get it wrong, Postman says. We typically get the reason wrong. Postman says, we think it's because the printing press

made it easier to distribute information. And if you could distribute information, then you could build up other information. That's why we got the Enlightenment. That's why we got the scientific revolution. But Postman says it's not just that. It says once you get exposed to the written word long form content, your very understanding of the world becomes long form.

It became more nuanced and critical and structured. It changed the way we understood the world. And once we made that change, complex philosophy and science became possible. The medium changed our understanding the world and on that new understanding we can make progress. So to me, this is a really big point. The way you consume information

determines the way you're going to understand the world. We have known since the Gutenberg Revolution and everything that came out of that, that long-form content, the written word, the nuanced interview that goes on for a long time, This is probably the optimal way to learn about things and develop philosophies, especially if you can do so with reflection in the dialectical method,

run things up against the opposite points of view, and see what comes out of that clash. We've just known this for centuries and centuries gives us the type of critical understanding of our world that gives us our best chance for making progress as a society. So, anyways, that's what I recommend. I recommend be very wary about letting any medium that any medium in which bitmap emojis plays a major role in expression,

any medium where you can't write more than a few sentences at a time, be very wary of using those mediums as a way to learn more about the world as a way to figure out your philosophies, as a way to understand what you believe in and how to make progress. Long-form content transformed our species into one that could make sort of miraculous advances, Do not give that up. If I was half as intelligent as I was today,

I would hope that in between replacing my drill cup, I would still be reading books and listing to smart people, conflicting different ideas against each other, reflecting and allowing that vision of the world to grow more complicated and more nuanced. Okay, Kai asks, why don't you emphasize more the impact of meditation in cultivating a deep life?

Yeah, it's a good question. I don't have anything against meditation. I don't have a meditation practice myself, at least one of the classical meditation practices, but I know a lot of people get a lot of benefit out of it. There is some evidence that if, for example, you have a regular mindfulness meditation practice that sustaining focus on a single target will become easier, so that there could be some advantage you could get there. I tend to proceed with care when talking about meditation because there are some skeptical questions I have about it. But last time I brought up my skepticism, I got a bunch of Sam Harris fans really mad at me. Turns out I have an overlapping audience with Sam and his audience likes meditation.

So I always approach with care. I would say my main, I'll call it a concern, not a well-developed critique, but concern, is I wonder sometimes if meditation in the modern context is, is like a bandaid over a deeper problem, and that we need to focus on that deeper problem. In other words, I think a lot of people today use meditation because they do not live the deep life. Their life is frenetic and unmoored and uncontrolled,

and their mind is everywhere. It's a monkey brain all day long, and they need to get some relief. But to me, it's a little bit like saying, hey, I've got a great hangover medication. It's going to make you feel better in the morning. I know you've been having these bad headaches. It's tough to get out of bed,

but I've got a good hangover medication that's going to make it easier. I would say, well, that's good. But maybe I should start thinking about cutting back on all the drinking that's causing the hangovers in the first place. So that's the one point I will put out there about meditation. Is while I think it is good and you should do it, you should also be asking the question, do I have to be living a lifestyle that makes this a necessary curative?

If my lifestyle was deeper, if I focused on less things and did those things better and knew why I was doing them, if I had full-fledged productivity systems, where I was capturing, configuring, and controlling, so there's no open loops in my mind. If I'm unplugged from the noise and the chaos and the shallowness of social media, that portion of my brain, that sort of frenetic, stressful, understanding the world begins to diminish and I spend more time engaging in long form content. If I have clear work shutdowns, allowing me to give myself fully in the high quality leisure, you might find the need for meditation as a curative to an anxious condition of freneticism

might diminish. Now again, there's still advantages. Makes you better at focusing. Might give you some insights. So I'm interested in meditation. But that's, that's, the one point of skepticism I might put forward is before you jump too much into the camp of that being the solution to all your problems, you need to step back and say, why do I have these problems in the first place? All right, we have a longer question here from Rumen. So Rumen says, I read Deep Work three years ago when I was 20. And it seemed like a revelation to me, especially since I had a hard time in college up until that point. Ever since I've been digesting advice and strategies

and have tackled numerous aspects of my life, such as health and wellness and meaningful leisure, all because I want to become more focused and capable of learning new things. Three years later, I seem to have progressed only slightly, and the lack of visible progress has been demoralizing. Do you have any advice? All right, Ruman, I think it's a really good question, because you're asking, especially as a young person,

how do you take this interest in a deeper life and make it into a reality that's going to have demonstrable positive impact where you're going to see demonstrable progress? Well, there's thunder going on around me as I speak here. So this gives me a sort of Olympian-style feel of significance here, and so I hope I live up to the challenge of the heavens here at the moment. What would I recommend? Well, I would say, first of all, let's focus up.

Let's try to focus what are the core steps we want to do. Let's say between now and the new year. So the next six months. What are the core steps you want to take in the next six months to really lay the foundation for a deeper life? Let's try to make sure that we're not all over the place, trying this, trying that. focus our energies. So a couple things I would suggest. First of all, unplug from the chaos.

Do not be completely lost in a world of frenetic social media. Do not be lost in a world of YouTube rabbit holes. I would suggest for the next few months, 30 minutes every morning, catching up on the news, treat online entertainment like a TV show. There is certain times on certain days where you sit down at a laptop and expose yourself to things online that you're interested in when that time is over, just like when a TV show ends, you were done. So now you're going to have a lot more quiet, cognitively speaking. What do you do in that quiet? Well, consume long-form content like I was just talking about. Read books, listen to books, listen to long-form interviews. Now you're taking that cognitive piece and helping your brain begin to rebuild its ability to think

think nuanced, sustained, critical thoughts. This is foundation building. All right. Once you have that going in place, let's get two major projects for you to focus on between now and the new year, building on that foundation. Make one project learning some sort of important skill

in the professional context. I want to learn how to do this. Have a clear demonstrable positive outcome that means you've learned it. So not just I want to learn Python coding, it is I want to produce. a program in Python that does this specific

activity and have another major sort of self-development learning skill building project in the context of your personal life. So just two. Two projects that you make time to make progress on

every single day. Do that between now and the new year over the next six months. And I think you will feel like you are in a new place that your mind feels calmer and deeper and more careful, capable of complex thought that you have a couple examples of visible progress. That's going to give you a sense of efficacy. Oh, I do have

control over my life. I do get value out of being focused on a small number of things. What do I want to do next? The momentum will start to build. So basically what I'm trying to do here, Ruman, is break down this challenge of transitioning your life and say, let's get focused. Build a foundation with these simple commit mix, the unplugging, the long-form content consumption, and have a small number of projects, one professional, one personal, that you're relentlessly returning to. Do that for six months. The six months that follow will feel significantly different. The six months that follow that, if you keep up with this type of commitment, will feel even deeper. So I have full confidence that you can get to a deeper place.

It's just a matter of figuring out the right places to put your energy when you're trying to get started. All right, let's go here with our last question. of the episode. Rahul says, what you do when people refuse to accept the premise of the deep life? Well, there's two things going on here, Rahul. One, yes, it can be frustrating if you are in on these

principles and the people that you know, the people you care about are not. I hear this a lot. My husband won't stop looking at his phone. My girlfriend is stuck looking at Instagram all the time when we're trying to do things together.

My, you know, kids. or obsessed with social media or my boss really just cares about email. I get it. It's very hard to change other people's behavior through preaching. Trust me, it's what I do for a living. It's not easy. The best thing to do if you want to change someone's behavior is demonstrate the change you want to see in the world.

You live the deepest possible life. Let them see it. Let them on their own come to the conclusion that it's appealing. let them come to you and ask, how do you do it? That's where real change will come. There's a deeper problem here, though. There's a deeper problem here. These questions of how do you live a deeper life

are questions that a lot of people are avoiding, in part because it's scary. You have to confront what's not deep about your current life. You have to confront what you don't like about your current life. Two, it's hard. I mean, I want to just comment. and get lost in a

bath of numbing distraction delivered through a glowing glass screen. There's comfort in it. Just like there was comfort in other hard periods in our country's history, for example, where alcohol consumption was massive. Like, we look back at prohibition and they're like, ah, those prudes,

what a weird random bit of restriction that we misguidedly placed on this country. but what we forget is what is the context for the prudes trying to put prohibition into place. It was that we were drinking a lot. This is how we were dealing with the dislocation and the disruption of both the industrial revolution and the rise of the huge inequities that came to be known as the Gilded Age. People just drunk all the time and it was a problem. Because it's easier to numb yourself from what's hard than to try to understand what it is

and what your possibilities are for making things better. We do the same thing today. We just do it with screens. Which is all to say, if you really want people to get serious about developing a deep life, we have to get them to accept the premise that that is even a goal that is in their control,

that that's even a goal that is possible or desirable. We have to get people away from the numbing, looking for the quick chemical hits. looking for the highly simplistic and superficially pleasing worlds built online, where you can jump in and at least feel something strong, maybe excitement, maybe outrage, maybe confusion, maybe humor, whatever. You can feel something kind of strong temporarily. We need to say there's more to life than that, that you really should be seeking.

What do I want to do with my life? I have the ability and autonomy to shape a life of me in satisfaction. It's going to take hard work, but I can do it. I'm going to move away from the superficial numbing and actually think that it's possible to build something deeper. So anyways, I think, in other words, for people that you know, just be the change, let them see you, let them ask, hey, that looks great, how do you do it? But more broadly, I think we do have as a culture this broader problem where we've kind of

given up on this idea that life is something that you should shape into something good and that requires hard work. We don't really talk about that much anymore. Our universities train us to do jobs. They don't train our soul. Young people are much less religious than they used to be. We don't have the same type of thick community connections we used to where some of these lessons about what makes a good life good and the importance of doing hard, useful things is not passed down. It's not in the air all around us. We're all sort of just discreetly in our house. looking at our screens, wondering what school will get into or what job we might land. So there's a cultural issue here.

People aren't going to accept the deep life until they accept the deep commitment that these type of changes are possible. Now, I think we're getting there. I think we have a culture that's hungry. I definitely get this from my readers. I definitely get this from my listeners. People want more. I think the lockdown has only added fuel.

to this fire. I think it gave people enough disruption and enough breathing room to realize that maybe they don't want to just go back to what life was like before. It's made them realize that this little glass screen is making things worse, not better. It's making them realize I could be doing a lot more with this life. I need to confront where I'm not. I start getting serious about what I want to do about it.

So I am optimistic. We all need our own definitions of the deep life. We all need to be struggling to get there. I have some thoughts. Other people have other thoughts. There is no one right answer. But I think we all can agree that it is a goal worth pursuing. So Rahul, you keep doing it.

You keep being a demonstration to the people around you of what a deeper, less frenetic, more meaningful life looks like. Start the ripples of change happening around you. Hopefully my other listeners here will be doing the same thing. You put enough ripples into a pond and eventually you get some pretty serious waves. All right. So that's all the time we have for this episode. Remember if you want to submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. Until the next time, stay deep.