Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 69: How Do I Find Joy in Leisure?

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.WORK QUESTIONS - How do I finish my day strong when time blocking? [5:09] - What should I do to succeed as a new professor? [9:48] - How do I protect deep work even as I become more recognized? [14:38] - What are strategies for handling large ambiguous work tasks? [19:37] - How do I stay productive in a one-bedroom apartment? [24:06]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - Can ASMR support deep work? [32:44] - Do audiobooks count as long-form reading? [40:21] - Should families use shared task lists? [40:45] - How how I use YouTube while avoiding entertainment black holes? [46:29]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - How does one find joy in deep leisure? [50:00] - It Eisenhower Box useful for constructing a deep life? [58:05]  - How do I escape the social media bubble the pandemic trapped me inside? [1:03:44]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 69. Quick announcements. First, there is no deep dive in this week's episode, but this is the first week in which I'm going to start filming select questions, sort of highlighted questions from the episode. So when my video page goes live, which should be in the next week or two, In addition to seeing video versions of all of the deep dives I've done so far,

you will begin to see weekly uploads of video highlights of particular questions I thought were particularly interesting. So I will give more details about this video page once it's live, but the wheels are in motion there, so I'm excited about that. Announcement number two, the most important announcement, of course, of all is the fact that my new book, a world without email, reimagining work in an age, of communication overload is coming out on March 2nd here in the U.S., March 4th in the UK territories, and later for other countries as those translations get completed.

Later this week, I will be announcing the details of my pre-order promotion, but I will give you a sneak preview right now, since you are loyal listeners of this podcast. I have created an online course called the Email Academy, just for people who pre-order this book. If you pre-order, you will get access to that course. We've also set it up so that if you pre-order the book, once you enter your information, you will immediately get a long excerpt that lays out a lot of the big ideas of the book and explains what the book talks about so that you can immediately dive into some of the concepts. The form in which you can enter this information, the details of this course, the excerpt, etc., that all is going online

later this week. I will announce it on my blog and email newsletter at calnewport.com. I'll announce all the details on the next episode of this podcast as well. But I'm telling you, if you like this podcast, you were going to love this book. It's my magnum opus on working in a meaningful, satisfying way in a distracted age. So if you are thinking about buying this book, pre-ordering this book makes a big difference. And I just want to let you know, thanks is coming. And if you've already pro-to the book, that's fine. When we put up the form, all you have to do is enter your order confirmation number from the email you got from wherever you bought the book from.

So stand by when you get these instructions, you too will be able to reap the benefits of the pre-ordering. All right, so more on that later. We've got a great group of questions to answer today. Of course, if you want to submit your own questions, go to calnewport.com slash podcast to learn how. Before we dive into these questions, of course, we would be remiss if we didn't first talk about one of our favorite sponsors

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use our promo code Cal at checkout and you will save $5 off your order. They are so confident in their product that it is backed with a 100% happiness guarantee, which means if you don't like it, they will refund your money. They're also 100% sure that if this cereal doesn't make you happy, nothing will. So remember, you can get your next delicious bowl of guilt-free cereal at magic spoon.com slash cowl and use that promo code Cal to save $5. All right, with that in mind, let's get started with our show, and we will start as we always do with work questions. Kevin asks, I have been time blocking now for a few months and using your time block planner. My mornings typically go well, but I am having trouble in the afternoon and almost always miss my shutdown complete ritual.

Uh-oh. Any advice on finishing strong with time blocking? Well, Kevin, I have three things to suggest here. and to help you stick with your schedule better, especially in the afternoon. One, change your schedules. One of the great things about time blocking is that when you are being very specific,

this is what I want to do at this point. This is what I want to do at this point. Here's how I want to make the most out of my day. When you're being very specific, you get very specific feedback about what doesn't work. So if you find your energy just falls through the floor, and you're failing with the fundamental block commitment, which as expert time blockers know,

the whole idea with time blocking is that the main thing you're committing to is to follow your blocks no matter where they lead you. So you don't have to convince yourself with each task you do. You don't have to convince yourself, oh, I should do this task, or this is what I should work on next, or I should take a break or not take a break.

One of the great advantages of time blocking is the only commitment you have to make is stick to the blocks. So if you're having a hard time with that commitment in the afternoon, what you're scheduling in the afternoon probably is not working. Maybe your energy is lower and you're putting deep things in the afternoon.

Maybe your energy or willpower is lower and you have a very complicated block sequence in the afternoon. Like this has to get done in a half hour, then one hour for this and a half hour for this where you have to hit everything just right and it takes a lot of concentration and you just don't have it. That's important feedback.

Based on that feedback, you might stack deeper work or intricate sequences earlier in the day. You might move more meetings later into the day. You might put a shutdown, a pseudo shutdown block where you're sort of cleaning your inbox and taking care of a lot of tasks maybe at midday. And then you have a few things to work on at the end of the day that you can be a little bit more lax on or have your energy sort of peter off until you get towards that shutdown complete period. So I think that will help. I think it will also help that nutrition, sleep, et cetera, are you,

moving, are you eating well, are you eating stuff that gives you energy? You know, are you having, do you have breaks? Are you scheduling breaks? Like, I'm going to take a half hour to go for a walk after I eat lunch, then I'm going to have a real big sprint, and then I'm going to take a half hour break, and then it's a one hour shutdown. That type of stuff matters, stuff that's going to keep your energy high, it's going to keep you refreshed. If you're just, you know, in a one-bedroom apartment somewhere working from home, and it's, I'm going to just power through from nine to five, probably going to lose steam around one or two. So make sure you're eating well, you're taking time for breaks, you're taking times to reset. Yet without that, you are going to have a hard time

sustaining that energy. And then three, you have to make the shutdown ritual sacrosanct. Until you cross that shutdown complete checkbox in your planner, your day is not done. You might need to have some sort of hard stop thing you do to sort of shut down, just dragging yourself through work. If you find yourself like, I'm just an email and the day just kind of drags on and the next thing I know it's late and I'm just going to bed without a shutdown complete, have a hard stop ritual. Like there's an alarm that goes off at whenever the final block ends like 530, you know, you get up and you go for a run or something that's different. You come back 10 minutes, shutdown complete. Get the things off your mind. So you got to make that a sacrosan.

You don't skip the shutdown. It takes 10 minutes. Even if you didn't get done what you wanted to get Even if you had to stop in the middle of a block, even if you blew past some blocks, do the shutdown. Shutdown ritual is not limited to days where you hit everything just right. All right, so Kevin, I hope those three things help. Change what you put into your afternoon to be a little bit less demanding as the day goes on. Work with nutrition, work with breaks, et cetera, to keep your energy higher to prevent yourself from flagging. And make that shutdown ritual, like sacrosan thing you do, no matter what happens with your schedule before, then. those three things should make a difference.

Of course, I would be remiss. He mentioned the time block planner. If you want to find out more about that planner, it turns out there's a website for that. Timeblockplanner.com. You can watch a nice video of me explaining exactly how time blocking works. Next up, we have Han, who asks,

what is your general advice for a new assistant professor starting out at an R1 university? Well, Han, I would start by focusing all of my energy on the goal of how do I publish papers in good venues that get cited. And you figure out what I need to do that, what time I need, what strategies I need, and this could be something that you evolve, but this is your number one question. How do I do that? Once you have that answer in place, you give that plan whatever time it needs, and then you say,

okay, I now have to squeeze everything else into the time it remains. I have to squeeze teaching. I have to squeeze service. I have to squeeze the administrative overhead of managing grants or just being an employee at a large organization into the time that remains and still do that well. But the constraints of how much time I have for that is set by what is required to publish good papers and good venues that get cited. And in order to not get overwhelmed or to be terrible at service or terrible at teaching,

that's where you're going to want to deploy the type of sophisticated productivity techniques I talk about on this podcast. You want capture, configure, control productivity going on so that you don't have things in your brain. You're very organized. You make progress on things in advance. The website for the course gets up in advance. The problem set gets written here, so you don't have to do it there. This service obligation, you get the applications reviewed one hour a day over three weeks instead of having to stay up late. Whatever, right?

You want to be very, very organized so that this other component of your life as a professor, it gets done well and doesn't metastasize in terms of its schedule footprint. But the key thing here is that you prioritize the research. Make sure that has what it needs. And then you fight to make the other things fit into what remains. And if you're very organized and you're an assistant professor at an R1 university where you will likely be protected from having too much responsibilities beyond research, it's very much of attractable thing.

So be very productive about that stuff. but start with the research question. The issue that a lot of professors have in the circumstance is the research is not something to anyone is saying to them, this needs to be done by Friday. It's not something where their dean is asking them, hey, Han, can you get this to me? It's not something where the students are there in the classroom, and they need the lecture delivered, right? So instinctually, our instinct is let that fall down the list of priorities because no one is urgently asking for it.

And then what happens is, especially if you're not very structured in terms of your organization techniques, the stuff that is being urgently asked, the service and the teacher-related task, that just fills up all your time. You say, well, I don't really have much time left to do research. And then the problem is, it's like, sure, maybe you're a great teacher, and you get that service stuff done, you're very reliable, and that goes on for about six years, and then you don't get tenure, and then you're done with that job. And that's not helping anyone either.

If they hired you, they want you to get 10 years. That's not helping them either. So that's why I say start with the research and say, I have to figure out what that needs and what my schedules and how I do that. And then I figure out how to fit everything else into the time that remains. That is a much better pattern because you have to basically short circuit our instinct to prioritize things based on the urgency and interpersonal obligation to get that work done. You can be an incredibly good teacher and on top of your reasonable service requirements in that smaller footprint. organized. This is not advocating being bad at those elements of professorial life. It's just saying Parkinson's principle will be at play here, that if you just let those fill the time available,

before you think about research, there won't be enough time left. Now, how do you do research really well? Well, that's really hard. I would say collaborators matter, work with the best people, work with senior people who already produce really good work so that you can learn from them about how they tackle things, how they tackle this type of work. Find important but hard questions. as opposed to non-important but tractable questions. So there's a real tendency to say, let me work on something I know how to do, and it might not take much time,

then maybe I can convince people it's important. That is appealing because I know how to do this work, but you need to find the questions that this would be important if I can make progress on it, but I don't really know how to make progress on it, and then really, really grind on that question of how to make progress, because those are the questions that are going to earn you 10-year in the end.

All right, so Han, I hope you find that helpful. Good luck with your research. And you know what? Have some gratitude for the reality that being a professor in Arwen University in the end is a really, really cool job. So, you know, congratulations on that. Our next question comes from Adi, who asks, once I've started gaining recognition, how do I keep up with the new responsibilities that generates without being distracted from? my deep work. Well, Adi, I think this is a good question.

My friend Ryan Holiday once said, and I think this is really savvy, that one of the cool ironies of being a writer is that the better you get at writing, the more people want to take your time away from actually doing writing. And so to make my own situation doubly cursed, the same is true of academia. famously the better you get as a researcher, the more people want to take your attention away from research, review, sitting on panels, editing journals, sitting on committees, etc. So I'm kind of getting screwed from both of my professional objectives

that as I get better in both, more and more people want to keep me away from those core things that help me gain recognition in the first place. So what is my strategy here? well, I would say I am hard to reach and lazy. And that is sort of my deep work protective shield. This is particularly true in the world of writing where I have a lot more autonomy. Obviously, I have obligations in the university that need to be handled.

But in the world of writing in particular, I'm hard to reach and I'm lazy. I'm not on social media. So you can't hit me up there. I don't see tweets. I don't see DMs. I don't know what a TikTok is, some sort of clock-related application. I'm not sure, but I'm not on there, so I can't be reached there. I don't have a single general purpose email address.

I have multiple email addresses, each for specific purposes, each with rules around it. I have an interesting at calnewport.com address that says very clearly, hey, I like to hear about interesting things and articles, etc., but I'm not going to answer. I don't have time to answer. Don't expect an answer. Publicity stuff goes to publicist, speaking stuff goes to speaking people. this is all by design. The emails that do get to me, I'm bad at responding. I can go days, especially if I'm really locked into a writing or research project.

I can go days with basically not sending or replying to emails. And it does annoy people I know, and I do apologize for this, but it's also a key part of how I protect deep work, even as an onslaught of potential opportunities and new responsibilities are coming my way through email, it's just hard for them to get to me. I'm not very responsive once they do get in. Second, I am lazy.

I don't want to do new things. I want to solve proofs. I want to write articles. I want to write books. I'm only now, 69 episodes in and over a million and a half downloads later, only now starting to come around to maybe podcasting is something that I want to do on a regular basis.

I'm very, very cautious and slow to bring something into my world. unlike a lot of people I know, I am not quick to build up a large infrastructure around the things I do. I edit my own podcast episodes. Why? Because I don't want the overhead

of having someone else involved. I have a format that is much less time consuming than other formats because I'm very cautious. I don't want to be overloaded. I just want to write, I want to record, I want to solve.

I'm very, very slow to do anything else of bringing employees, to bring in infrastructure, to bring on new projects, to bring in new partnerships. I just have a default bias towards saying no. I am a lazy person within my professions. But because of that, because of these two things, I'm hard to reach and I'm very lazy. I don't like to take on new things.

I don't like to grow things. I don't like to bring on new people and new obligations. I do not get fired up jumping on Zoom calls with my team to talk about what we're doing for the marketing efforts in Q3. I just want to do my thing and my DeepWork HQ. the same things as well as I can again and again and again. I found that works well if you just keep returning to the same value producing deep endeavors again and again and again

and do your best to basically keep at bay everything else, even though in the short term you're missing opportunities, even though in the short term you're occasionally annoying people. Your ability grows, your products increase, the value that you bring into the world is, amplified and you end up not just happier, but also more successful and hopefully with a bigger impact on the world. So that's my advice. I think this could apply to other people as well. Hard to reach, be lazy, stubbornly stick to the things that really matter. Make that your core.

Be very slow to bring anything else in. Be very slow to bring another complication. Be willing to let small bad things happen or to generate small annoyances with people. Just wish you could get back to them or just come to their event or just do their talk. It is worth it in the long. run. All right, our next question comes from Mark. Mark asks, what are some strategies for handling large, ambiguous work tasks? I am able to focus on and churn through concrete problems, but given something ambiguous, say a software design task, I struggle. Prior to COVID, I would generally rely on social pressure to get through this type of problem, but social pressure just doesn't mean much to me in a remote environment. Well, Mark, I'm going to give you a little

gentle, tough love here, but it sounds like to me that if you had been relying on social pressure to actually make progress on difficult, ambiguous tasks, a little bit suffering

from amateur hour here. If you are a professional in a knowledge work sector, the very thing they are paying you to do is to take large ambiguous tasks, figure out how to make progress, and then actually make progress and complete them

even without a clear-cut structure, even without someone saying, get this specific thing done by tomorrow, even without people surrounding you in your office looking over your shoulder and saying, hey, Mark, you should be working. Knowledge work is fundamentally a very autonomous endeavor in a lot of these positions. You have to learn how to thrive under that autonomy. All right. So that is my tough love chastisement. Let's talk about how you do it. You got to throw the professional productivity techniques at your work that I talk about a lot on this podcast. First of all, you should be weekly planning. During your weekly plan, you will be confronting what you call ambiguous large tasks that you

need to make progress on and saying, what progress do I want to make this week? Then you look at the landscape of your week, which days are busy, which days or not, when do I have a lot of meetings, when are things open, and say, how do I want this progress to translate into this week? Do I want to work one hour every morning. Do I want to have one day where I do nothing but work on this project? Do I want to spend the end of Tuesday and Thursday working on this? Whatever kind of makes sense. But for the big important ambiguous projects, figure out, when am I making progress? Two, figure out what does progress mean this week? Given the time I have available to work on this project, this ambiguous task, what does progress mean? Is it getting a spec together? Is it mastering that algorithm I need?

trying to figure out how to get this data structure, time complexity down, whatever it is, you get more concrete. I'm working on this or that. These are the things I want to get done this week. It'll help me make progress on this much larger ambiguous task. Then when you get to an individual day, your time block planning. You look at your weekly plan. You build a time block schedule for that day.

Every hour has a job. You figure out in advance what you want to do with every minute of your day. and then when you go through your day, you are just executing what block you're currently in. That plan you made during your weekly plan gets translated into concrete blocks when you're doing your daily time block plan. It's from 2 to 4, from 9 to 1030 is when I'm working on exactly this.

You have now gone from an amorphous thing, like add this feature to the software, to, all right, today, during this exact time, I am working on this exact piece. and then you get to that block and you do the work. Why? Because you're a professional. When you time block, you execute the blocks. You don't web surf. You don't get lost on email.

You don't get lost on a YouTube rabbit hole. You figure out what you want to do with your time. You execute what you said. When you're done, you're done. You shut down your work and you move on and do other things in your life. That's what it looks like to be a real professional in the knowledge work sector. And Mark, I think you can get there. I think you're just getting started. Once you move past this sort of, let me just,

feel inspired before I do work, let me just feel pressure before I do work, and you get to something where you're in control your time, you're figuring out what's the best thing to do with it, you're going to jump ahead in your career, and you're going to feel a lot better about your work days too, because it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good to sort of wander reactively through your day, waiting for pressure to make you do things and allowing distraction to pull you away from things. When you actually take control, work actually feels a lot more fulfilling. And when you shut down, after work time feels all the more relaxed and recharging. So Mark, you've got a lot of really good improvements in your career ahead of you.

I think it's time to go pro. These type of sophisticated, more professional level productivity techniques is the foundation on which that transition is going to happen. All right, let's do one more work question here. There's an interesting query from Franklin, who asks, I'm having a tough time staying productive after around the middle of the week because I'm working from home. I live in a one-bedroom apartment with my wife and large dog. Now, Franklin, are you saying that your wife is a large dog or that you are sharing this one-bedroom apartment with your wife and in addition with a large dog? Both would be interesting. I think the first one might present some bigger problems that are outside of my scope, so let's just assume it's the second one.

All right, I cannot stay on task with multiple tab distraction and feeling a bit stuffy with so many months working from home. Any suggestions on how to get better at this? All right, Franklin clarifies that he lives in New York City and they are also, and this is real helpful, doing construction outside of his window. All right, Franklin. First of all, I empathize. You know, if I was married to a large dog and living in a small apartment with construction going on outside of my window, In New York City, working from home, I too would be exhausted. And I want you to accept that that's okay.

It's a dumpster fire year. We're not trying to be optimal. So one of the things you can do right off the bat is say, look, if I don't really have the energy to get through a whole week because of these difficult circumstances and my bad life choices and marrying an animal instead of a human, I got let this dog thing go, don't I? But you know what I mean. If it's because of the dumpster fire situation, if I can't knock out nine hours a day full energy, then you know what? Cut back on what you do. Front load the front of the week. Do what I call stealth part-time working during the end of the week where you're not working full hours.

Because you recognize I can't do this. I mean, people are doing stealth part-time work all the time right now for a lot of different reasons. Like if you have your kids at home because your schools refuse to open, you probably, you probably, probably are doing stealth part-time work because those kids have to be watched. If you have stress because of a relative who's sick or, you know, in danger of being sick or you're sick yourself, like you can't get the same amount of work done, right? There's a lot of reasons right now why people can't get the same amount of work done. And a lot of people aren't talking about it. They're just sort of stealthily doing less work. And I think that's okay because, again, it's a dumpster

fire of a year and you are allowed a little bit of leeway in such years. So get your productivity game completely locked in, capture configure control, weekly planning, time block planning, do the type of stuff that's in my new book. So not to be too self-promotional here, but in a world without email, I really go through how individuals, right? So I mean, I talk about executives, entrepreneurs, and employees. So for someone like you who's an employee, I really get into how to go through all of these processes that make up what you do that are implicit. Like you've never really specified them, but you know, I guess I produce this type of thing and I do this type of thing.

do that type of thing. You go through and you make them explicit and you optimize them to try to minimize back and forth emailing and waste it overhead. And suddenly, you know, you can gain back a lot of time. So you're organized on a weekly matter. You're time blocking your day. So you're very intense when you work. You're optimizing your processes like I talk about in a world without email, right? You're doing all these things. You're going to free up a lot of time and you can reclaim that time. And so, you know, honestly, Thursday and Friday, I kind of don't do anything after one. I think that's okay right now.

It's not the path to become CEO long term, but it could be the path to get through this current situation. Two, you've got to get out of the apartment. You got to get out of the apartment, right? As you have to make it a thing to get out of that apartment as much as possible, both while working and while not working.

So if you follow my advice and you get very productive and you free up Thursday and Friday afternoons without telling anyone, go do things during Thursday and Friday afternoons. Get out of the apartment. Go to Central Post. park, rent a car and get across the bridge, get out, go up county, you know, like, whatever you need to do, go do something interesting, go to the, I don't know, the beaches, the Rockaways,

like wherever there's, you know, the beaches you can get to. But get out of the apartment and do things, do things. I know it's cold in New York, but, you know, get a jacket and find places you can eat outside and drink outside and meet friends outside and have some drinks in a safe way. you got to be over the top about getting out of the apartment. Go to Central Park. Walk more. You can walk all over the place in New York,

walk all over the place, have long walks you do, have interesting places you go to. I mean, I don't care what it is. You got to get out of that apartment. Now, if you have any financial resources here, if you were lucky enough to have a good job, and you probably do,

if you can afford to live in New York City, and I don't know how much money the large dog you married make, so you're probably doing pretty well yourself. If you have flexibility where you can cut down on your expenses one in one place. Like I don't go out, I'm not, you know, eating out as much. I'm not going on vacation. If you can take that money right now and temporarily invest it to have another option,

like let's go rent a house, man. We're all remote anyways. Let's go rent a house in the cat skills. Do it for a month. Do it for the winter. Like just someplace different where we have some space and some breathing room and it's different. Everything is on the table because we're in a dumpster fire of a year. you know, I spent the month last May, we were on 60 acres.

With a kind of a weird property, there was like a grass air strip and a river that overlooked a bay. Like it was, but it was cool and it was different. There's actually where the first episodes of this podcast was recorded. It's kind of a crazy thing to do, but crazy things are on the table. So if you can afford it, find a pretty cheap rental because it's off season and no one wants to be there and go spend two months out there. Like you and your wife go out there, as long as it has reasonable internet, who knows, a difference. Like take advantage of the fact, take advantage of the fact that everything is remote. Like what I'm trying to do here is twofold, right? So I'm going to summarize my response here to you

right now, Franklin, it's twofold. One is trying to get yourself to give yourself a break. So yeah, maybe I should just work less and maybe I should let my weak peter out. If I'm really productive, I can actually gain back a lot of time without anybody noticing. And that's fine. I'm not trying to become CEO this year. I'm trying not to become psychotic, right? I don't want to be CEO, I just don't want, you know, COVID psychoses, right? We're being more modest this year. Next year we're going to get after it. Next year in my podcast will be, we'll really be getting after it. This year we're trying to survive. And then two, just to generalize what I'm saying here, do grand gestures, invest the money you have to like go do something different, to be somewhere

different, to get out of the city temporarily, to go to a cabin that's not quite heated enough into Catskills, but it's kind of cool because there's a pond on it and you can be like the row and write things about the pond ice. Now is the time to do that. type of thing. Have a habit. I'm going to walk five miles a day throughout New York City. I'm going to walk. I live on the Upper West Side. I'm going to walk cross town to the East River every day. Like have some over-the-top type things you do. Scenic places in the city you go to, outdoor restaurants that you make a point of going to to meet people. Like now is the time to actually really put a lot of energy into doing interesting things that get you out of your apartment.

Do not just get locked in there. In the way that you might do in a normal period or you just kind of busy, you kind of work and you're at home and you don't really have much free time. Don't get into a habit where you're just in your apartment all the time. You're like, this is just easier. And that energy starts to fade and your fight starts to fade and the world becomes a little bit gray. Don't settle for that. Get out of the apartment. Do weird things.

Do radical things. And if that all fails, move to Florida. I was just talking to James Altzuller, who wrote the New York City as dead, that viral article. He moved down to Florida. They seem pretty relaxed down there. He didn't pretty relaxed on there. He says, as long as you don't mind potentially getting eaten by an alligator,

you can be fine, but it's warm down there and, you know, I don't know, people are pretty relaxed, though. So if all this else fails, become James's neighbor down in Florida, you'll have a lot more, you'll have a lot more room, a lot more breathing room down there. Just watch out. Watch out for the alligators. They like, they like to eat. eat large dogs.

All right, all right. Enough of that. Let's move on now to some technology questions. All right, let's start with a question from Barak. No, not the Barak that you're thinking of.

It's spelled differently. This Barack asks, could you talk more about ASMR and deep work? Well, ASMR, all right, this is one of these topics I'm really interested in. Quick background.

Let's get our terminology straight. ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response. And what ASMR is referring to is this particular reaction that some people get to certain types of sounds or touch that creates a like a tingling feeling down the like the back of your head, like in your head and kind of down the back of your neck. Some people never feel this. Some people, they do have this. I get ASMR reactions. I'm pretty susceptible to them. I can get them like when I'm getting haircut.

So sometimes like particular manipulations of the scalp can create them. And I definitely have that. Also sounds can trigger them. All right. So how do we draw a connection from this to deep work? Well, so here's what happened. People started making YouTube videos, these ASMR YouTube videos,

which was all about triggering that tingling down the back of your neck feeling. Lots of them. They're weird, right? Because the sounds or whatever, it's like whispering. and scraping sounds that can create this effect. So there are these very weird, weird videos that have a ton of views in which, you know, it'll be people like whispering and then they'll have a mortar and pestle with like dried paint. They have really big mic like right there, like really and just scraping, scraping that,

like kind of grinding that up a little bit and then whispering, trying to create this sensation. So people like, oh, I want the ASMR and you can watch these videos. Okay. That gave way to a different phenomenon called ASMR Rooms. And so now what people were doing was creating YouTube videos typically of a sort of scenic location. And they would do the 3D audio, right? Stereo audio in a good 3D way. And there would be sounds that were, these are reminiscent of the sounds that might create an ASMR response.

But now they're starting to drift farther away. it's like a fireplace crackling you might hear the crackling in both ears and really good 3D audio. Now what's interesting about ASMR rooms is that their purpose, the purpose of these videos has gotten away from creating this physical reaction and are more about just putting people

into a state of undistracted presence or concentration. Now we're getting closer to deep work territory and things are getting interesting. So some of these like a popular thing theme for ASMR rooms, for example, is Harry Potter locations. You can have, like, the Gryffindor Common Room, and it's just a rendering of the Griffin Door Common Room, and there's a fire crackling in the fireplace, and you hear it in your earphones kind of all around you, or like where the fire is located in the room, and, you know, there might be like an owl on a

perch that kind of moves occasionally, or you're in the library at Hogwarts or what have you, and there's lanterns that kind of sway a little bit. Occasionally breezes come by. It's supposed to be this immersive experience of you are in a place that's very conducive for reflection and thought. People put these ASMR Room videos full screen on their computer. They put on very nice headphones.

And it helps them sort of calm down and get lost. And a lot of people find that it's helpful for them to start thinking and being more creative. Well, I've written about ASMR rooms multiple occasions on my blog and newsletter at Calnewport.com. because I think there's something really interesting here. I'm really interested in this idea of using technologically constructed environments to help induce states of concentration, low distraction,

low anxiety, in which both creativity and high-powered thinking is enhanced. Given how much of our economy now depends on basically high-level elite, creative, cognitive thinking, anything that could enhance that might be really good for the bottom line. Also, if you're in one of these mediated environments, you are now, you've ritualistically broken yourself off from the normal sources of distraction like email or slack that might otherwise draw your attention away.

To me, the final step here that makes this interesting is virtual reality. ASMR rooms are moving over into virtual reality. I think this is going to be, it could be, potentially a killer productivity application of virtual reality. to be able to put on one of these helmets, it has a good wide field of view, and you're in the Gryffindor Common Room,

or the, I've seen one for like the dining hall at Christ College at Oxford, or one that was like Charles Dickens' Victorian study, right? You're in this thing. It's visually all around you. The 3D audio puts the sounds all around you. I am really convinced that, A, because this cuts you

off from standard distraction, but B, because it actually puts you into a place that's so awe-inspiring or over the top and the audio is in this certain ASM-R-E-type way, that it really does put your brain into a different state. That might be more conducive for then figuring out the business strategy, for writing the really good chapter, for solving the proof. The only thing missing from this is what's the right way to actually capture work product if you're in one of these virtual environments, because obviously you don't have, you can't see your hands, you don't have paper in front of you, and that's the missing link. Last time I wrote about this, A lot of people came back and said voice recognition.

So now you're in the Griffin door common room. You take five minutes. It's all around you. The sounds are there. You're away from email. You're away from Slack. Your mind is kind of inspired if you're a Harry Potter fan, I guess. And now it's, okay, let's get these thoughts down.

Voice recognition could do it. I mean, imagine you start talking. And there in the environment is, I don't know, I mean, look, I'm not a super Harry Potter expert, but there's like a book and there's like a quill and like what you're saying is writing down there and in this environment you're able to capture information, right? Or if you're solving a proof, like you use your just your Oculus controller and there's like a floating, you know, blackboard, you can write on it and you're doing math equations. You can kind of save that and move to a next one, right? I think that's what we need to get. There might be a resolution issue.

You need enough resolution that you can write sufficiently small and a. is still legible, but I think we're almost there. Anyways, I think these type of immersive single-tasking experiences could be a really cool way to break out more productivity, but also make work more enjoyable. Okay, there's such a clear delineation. When I am in the dining hall at Christchurch, is I'm working on math proofs.

And when I'm not, and I'm at my laptop, I'm doing email. And it's really clear and really separate and really fun. So I'm big on that. I've talked to a few people about it. hey, if you're a developer that works in VR and you want to work on something like this, I will be your guinea pig. I will buy whatever rig or set you think I need to test it

because I just think this idea is cool. And also I want to go to the Gryffindore Common Room. All right, so thanks, Brock. Good question. An excuse for me to geek out of my dreams of having these type of VR mediated experiences. All right, let's do a short one here. Chris asks, can long form reading

include listening to audiobooks. Yeah, I think that's fine. Whether you're consuming the books through an audiobook, reading out a Kindle, reading in a real book, it's all roughly in the same family in terms of the encounter with complex structured ideas.

So yeah, audiobooks are great. All right, Rich asked, do you use an app to share family and household tasks with your wife? Well, Rich, more generally, in my experience, shared calendars are much more important and more consistently useful for family than shared task lists. Shared calendars are incredibly valuable because you need to see what's on everybody's plate.

It's very, very useful to see what my wife has on her schedule for tomorrow. It's very useful for her to see what I have on my schedule. It's very useful for us to be able to put things we're doing together on a calendar. and we both see it. We all use Google Calendar, which makes it very easy. So in like one view, I have my work calendar, which my wife sees. I have, I call it like my logistical calendar. These are more like scheduling notes for myself, right?

It's not appointments with other people, but it's, you know, I'm recording my podcast here or I'll use it as an all-day event as a reminder that this thing is due soon. I've made that into its own calendar because I don't need my wife to see all those. That would just clutter her view. And so I don't share that one with her. Then she has a calendar that I see. There's a family calendar. Georgetown has a departmental calendar.

So things like faculty meetings or this or that, they all show up on the same calendar for me. It's great. So shared calendars are magic from a technologically enhanced productivity perspective. Shared task lists, you know, they're fine, but not so fundamental. Typically, the reality is most people already have their own individual systems for maintaining tasks. So having an additional shared system, though not a bad. thing is often not necessary. I think just having some sort of weekly meeting, what's going on this week, what are you getting

done, the stuff that's time sensitive goes onto the shared calendar, the stuff that is not tied to a particular time just goes on to the individuals in the family's task list and then they execute off their own list. Again, there's nothing wrong with shared lists. In my experience, I've found, to have an additional list in addition to your system you already have, if you already have a good system, is somewhat superfluous. Well, I'll tell you what is not superfluous, and that is Four Sigmaics, delicious mushroom coffee with Lyons Main mushroom. You know I'm a fan of Four Sigma. This coffee has a smooth,

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This sale ends on the 23rd, so you need to hurry now to stock up on that smooth, tasting, deep work-initiating mushroom coffee, up to 50% off sales price with an additional 10% off for my listeners if you go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. I also want to talk about my friend Adam Gilbert's online fitness company, My Body, Tudor, January is maybe traditionally where you have your New Year's resolutions happen, but there's a lot going on this January. Not going on this January. So maybe you got a little bit delayed and kicking off your restart and it's going to become a February resolution. So the time is right.

To finally get in shape and my body tutor is the way to do it. Adam's company, his model is brilliant. You have a coach, 100% online, but a coach that is dedicated to you. Here's your meal. plan, here's your workout plan, and then, and this is the secret sauce, they hold you accountable. You got to talk to this coach online on a regular basis and say, this is what I did and this is what I did not do. Knowing that there's someone that you trust and respect that you are going to have to talk

to about your fitness goals gets the job done. That's why Adams Company has really been killing it for years before the pandemic came along, but obviously right now it is the perfect company to have. have if you are looking in a socially distanced pandemic to get in shape. So go to MyBodytutor.com. That's M-Y-B-O-D-Y-D-Y-T-Y-T-U-R-M-B-D-Tudor.com to learn more about this online fitness coaching product. Tell them that you came because of Cal.

Tell them you came because of deep questions and they will give you $50 off. Say hi to Adam for me if you. do sign up, I miss the old days when he used to be the health calmness for my study hacks blog. So pass along my greetings as you sign up and kickstart your journey into incredible health. All right, let's do a question here from Jane, who asks, how do I use tools such as YouTube in a productive way without being sucked into entertainment black holes? that certainly is an occupational hazard of making use of YouTube on a regular basis. Those auto recommendation algorithms have a way of just taking you from one video to another video to another video, and then you look up, and you are a QAnon-Chiefdom, right?

So you have to be very careful with YouTube to not lose a lot of time to distraction. My general advice on YouTube is that you should treat it like a library and not a channel. So what I mean by that is if there is a particular thing you want to learn about or see, YouTube is a fantastic technology platform. If you need to know how to change the oil in your Honda Odyssey minivan, YouTube can deliver you a video that shows you exactly how to do it. It's like a fantastic library. If there's a particular author that you are interested in a speech they did or a talk they did,

or let's say questions they're answering like I'm doing right now on topics that are interesting to you, YouTube is a great platform to go look up that author, see the event you care about, see the podcast episode they recorded that you're interested in the guests, see the questions they're answering. It's a fantastic library. If you instead use YouTube like a channel, hey, I'm bored, let me turn this on and entertain me, you're going to lose hours. You're going to lose hours.

It could probably be put to use on things that are going to make your life much more richer. So just have that mindset, Jane, have that mindset of I go to YouTube to look up a particular thing that I know about, want to learn about, or no exist on there. Just like getting a book out of the library, I will watch it, then I'm done. It is not a source of entertainment. So what that means is don't click the recommendations. Don't click the recommendations.

That's channel behavior. Oh, let me just see what comes up next. Let me see what comes up next. No, it is not a good source of distraction. If you're bored and you want to be entertained, find a high quality way to gain entertainment to read a good book go for a walk exercise, build something, be with friends

push yourself in an interesting way do not let YouTube be the entertainment. Now if you struggle, if you really struggle because you know you see that video and it's being auto-reconded and it just looks really interesting because that panda is going down the snow slope like a sled and God you got to watch that get a plugin such as distraction-free tube

You can find these plugins readily available that just get rid of the autoplay, get rid of the recommendations. All you can do is search for the thing you're looking for. You can wash it when you're done, you're done. So Jane, if you have an issue right now with falling down entertainment black holes with YouTube, use the plugin, only access it on your computer,

only access it like a library to look up particular things. After a while, you will lose your taste of YouTube as a source of entertainment, and then you might not have to worry so much about accidentally seeing a recommendation are getting sucked in the black holes. It takes a little bit of training, but you'll get there. Library, not channel, library not channel.

That gets you a ton of value out of YouTube while losing most of those negative side effects. All right, let's do some questions now about the deep life. Caitlin asks, how does one begin to find joy in deep leisure? I am a PhD candidate and my deep hobby candidates are playing guitar, learning languages, writing fiction. All are sufficiently unrelated and unuseful to my work that they shouldn't feel like work and I enjoy all of them in small doses, but only when I've had an easy day. I want to make them a regular part of my life, but I worry they'll just make me feel like I'm working all of the time and I'll burn out. Well, first of all, Caitlin, I'm glad you're asking about deep leisure.

I think this is a really important topic and one that maybe will become more relevant as we begin with perhaps too much optimism beginning to think ahead to life after the pandemic being a major part of our day-to-day existence when our anxiety is going to be lower, when our schedules are going to be less disrupted, when the dumpster fire is going to be largely put out. a lot of people are thinking about creating this life that is richer, something that is more meaningful, something they enjoy more because we all have this mindset of, I don't necessarily want to just go back to exactly how things were before. And so deep leisure plays a big role into this. It's a topic I want to come back to. So I can assure you, you're not going to burn out. You're not going to burn out by having, let's say, demanding non-work-related activities with the caveat of if you put these things into your life properly. A few things to recommend to you here. One, you need a clear separation between your work life and non-work life. You need to be doing

weekly planning. You need to be time blocking every day. You need to have a clear final block with a shutdown complete ritual that occurs. If you use my time block planner, check off that shutdown complete block every night. Because you're a PhD candidate, I want you to be thinking that your average number of working hours should be less than nine to five. And the way this should actually play out is that maybe some days you do full work days, but other days you do like a half day. And maybe once a month or so, you take a whole day off. You know, and you go on a hike and you go to a movie. I used to do this. I would go maybe once a semester. I had a whole ritual. I'd get a coffee. I'd go for a walk. I would go to a used bookstore in downtown Silver Spring

and buy a stupid novel, go have lunch, go see a movie. all within the working hours when my kids were at school and my wife was working. You have flexibility in academia take advantage of it. So don't overwork yourself. If you're really efficient as a PhD candidate,

you can work on average less than 9 to 5. So you have plenty of freedom from work. So work itself should not be burning you out. Two, when you're thinking about activities outside of work, there's a few different categories here. Like deep leisure, what you call deep leisure, the sort of aggressively, I'm going to build up a skill, I'm going to learn how to play

guitar, I'm going to learn how to speak a language. That's just one category of things you can do with your time outside of work. That's like the cultivation category. Like I'm trying to cultivate new skills. That requires a lot of concentration. But there's other categories that are important. There's a connoisseurship category, which is I want to enjoy things that I appreciate. you know, a nice bottle of wine, a beautiful sunset, if you're a cinephile watching a movie,

just things that you, it's not pure pleasure, but gracious appreciation. That's another type of activity, much less intense because now you're just enjoying something that you know enough about sports fall into this, you know, you follow baseball just to sit down and listen to a game on the radio and see how it unfolds, that sort of connoisseurship. You have sort of community activities. I want to be with friends. I want to be with family. I want to be with people in my academic community,

sacrificing non-trivial time and intention on behalf of them. I'm taking time out of my day to go spend time with you or to go do something useful for you. That's incredibly enriching. Makes you feel connected. Makes you feel part of some sort of community. And then there's just self-care, general productivity outside of work. I need to get my car, oil change.

I need to exercise these type of things. You've got to balance all of these activities. So you have the cultivation activities, like trying to play that guitar, but that same day, maybe you do a little bit of connoisseurship, and this day it's just about community. I'm going to be with my family member all evening or all Saturday. And then there's like, you're mixing in. I need to get my oil change in the car and I have my exercise.

You need to balance all these different types of leisure activities. That rich, diverse portfolio is definitely going to be protection against burnout. If you're trying to just hammer the cultivation like a second job, then maybe you are going to be in some issue of burning out because it's going to feel like a job. but if it's one of three or four types of activities that you balance well in your life, it will be a rich contribution. The final thing I want to recommend here is ease into it. Don't do guitar, language learning, and writing all at the same time.

Do one. And the thing that you ease into, you want to kind of make it a part of your life. Maybe you use the leisure plan idea from digital minimalism, my book, Digital Minimalism, where you have a bit of a rough schedule about here's when I want. work on this and how I work on it with a intermediate goal that you're aiming towards actually accomplishing. I want to learn how to play this song. I want to learn to get to this level of conversationalists. I want to get this short story completed, whatever it is, right? A bit of a schedule of how you're making progress for it. But make the goal completely autonomous and optional.

No one's waiting for it. There's no pressure on it so that you just get in the rhythm of working on some of these cultivation, deep leisure activities on a regular basis and eventually accomplish a goal and you come up with another one and it becomes a part of your image. Oh, I enjoy I'm someone who makes progress on my writing or my guitar playing. That's something that's a part of me. And you'll build up more of an interest and a motivation for it as you get better at it, as you see more progress. Bonus tip to add on to that final one, create, if possible, ritual or environment around these cultivation, deep leisure activities that in itself is motivating and attractive. Go somewhere really scenic to do your writing.

Have a glass of French wine as you finish your language learning. Put music on. Change the atmosphere. Go out of your way to actually build around this thing you're doing. Pretty enjoyable, a pretty enjoyable environment and ritual. You know, take the shed in your backyard and turn it into a writing studio, completely over the top. But you do it because, you know what?

it's going to make this whole ritual of going out there and working on my short stories it's going to make that all the more interesting and meaningful and something I'm looking forward to do.

You know, have a typewriter for some reason instead of using a word processor, invest in Scrivenor instead of using Word, do the Hemingway thing and have a little bit of, you know,

whiskey on the rocks for as you finish and you can stare out, you know, through the window of your garden shed to the fence of your next door neighbor, whatever. But you know what I mean.

Be over the top with ritual. Be over top with environment because why not? It really indicates this is something that's fun and interesting and meaningful and not just like a task like you would do at work in front of your computer screen with your email open. All right? So I love thinking about leisure. Let's talk some more about it. Hopefully these two these things are useful to you. So I gave you a distinction between different types of leisure. You need to balance them all. I said don't go. I said to have clear shutdown between work and nonwork and don't work too much. You're a PhD candidate. You can get away with that.

And then I said, don't do too much. in this cultivation category and build up over the top rituals and environments around it. Do all of this and I think you will find a lot more enjoyment in your non-work life. Next up is Alune who says the Eisenhower box is something that Stephen Covey used in his book, First things first. Do you think it is a useful tool for deciding what to put into a time block? Do you think it should apply to all parts of your life? Well, Alune, I'm glad you bring up the Eisenhower box because I do think it is useful.

Let's talk about it briefly here. So if you're not familiar with this box, it's a two by two box, two rows, two columns. You have a column for urgent and a column for not urgent. You have a row for important. You have a row for not important. So this gives you four combinations of urgent, not urgent, important, not important. Eisenhower, and Covey talks about this in his book, but Eisenhower famously talked about

most of the stuff on your plate falls into one of these boxes. Stephen Covey called them quads and labeled them quad one, quad two, quad three, and quad four, same idea. And he said, once you understand which box a potential activity or obligation falls into,

you have a better understanding of what to do with it. So, for example, if something falls into the urgent but not important box, Eisenhower's instinct was to delegate it. All right? This has to get done, but it's not something that's crucial or that uses my skills.

So like, let's figure out a way to automate this or have someone else do it. If it falls into the not urgent and not important box, just get rid of it. I don't want to spend much time on things that are not urgent

or not important. Just find a way to get those things out of your life. On the other hand, if something is urgent, and important, well, we all do those. That's the thing that we most easily do because, like, man, this thing is really important

is do right away, let's go. Then you get through this final crucial box. It's what Stephen Covey called quad two, which is the combination of important but not urgent. And this is where you've got to put attention and make sure that the things that are important and not urgent that you really think about them and that there's things in that box

that you are scheduling and getting done, even though no one is forcing you to do it. consistently prioritizing quad 2s to use the terminology of Stephen Covey is often the key to a successful and sustainable life. So, Loon, I think this general Eisenhower-Bach framework is useful way more than just professional endeavors, but for your life in general. Now, the place where this is relevant when we're thinking about professional endeavors is not when you're building your time block plan, but when you're building your weekly plan. And you're trying to figure out what do I want to work on this week? what do I generally want to make progress on? This is the place where you're going to bring in quad 2s.

You're going to bring in, hey, here's non-urgent, important things that I want to make progress on. How do you know about these things? Well, when you look at your strategic slash quarterly plans, whatever you call them, when you look at those in preparation for your weekly plan, that's where you have notes on this type of thing. That's where you've clarified what's important to you. That's where you've identified quad 2 style projects you want to make progress on. You see that when you do your weekly plan,

and that's when you remind yourself, okay, Friday morning, let's block it off. We're working on this Quad 2 important but not urgent project. Or however, project, however, it ends up being scheduled into your week. So your weekly plan is where those quad 2s get put in. But just in general, when you're trying to make sense

of all the stuff on your plate, so when you're doing what we would call the configure step of capture configure control, that's where that not important row really gets handled. where you really say, this thing here, you know, I'm processing my to-do list, I'm getting stuff out of my inbox,

I'm doing configure stuff. This is not important. This is not urgent. I'm just going to get rid of it. I'm going to get out of this responsibility. I'm just not going to do it. I'm going to tell the people, I'm sorry, I don't have time.

I'm going to ignore it, whatever. This is also during that configure step where you might say, this is urgent, but it's not really best for me to do. It's not important to me. Let me automate this. Let me give it to someone else. Let me hire someone to do this.

me delegate it. All right. So those are the places where I think you integrate the Eisenhower block into planning your days is weekly plans is where you make sure that the non-urgent, important,

get coverage. And whenever you're doing configuring is where you're going and deleting and delegating these different things that fall into that not important row. Now, stepping back a step, I think this is a good way

to think about all aspects of your life, a good way to think about all buckets. of the deep life. I keep coming back to this point. Putting energy into the important, minimizing energy on the not important is the key of getting the best return on the limited time energy and attention you have available. This gives some terminology to how to do that. You should have a core quad two endeavor going on in each of the big buckets in your life. You should also be very aggressively trying to get rid of those quad four, not important,

urgent things to try to delegate or automate those as much as possible. You should be trying to just take out of your life as many not important, not urgent things as possible as well. So you have more time to, of course, do the urgent important, but also to make steady progress on the non-urgent, important. It's a lot of different combinations, but it's a useful way to think about it. But I think we see the big picture picture here. Not all tasks are made equal. Not all tasks need to be done by you. Not all tasks need to be done. Not all tasks are going to get done without special attention to make sure that they do in the Eisenhower block and help you make sense of all those different categories.

All right, let's do one more question here. Venethe asks, how do you come out of the social media bubble into which I entered this lockdown and now cannot come out? That's a good question. Good question. I mean, typically I almost always push back first in these questions and say, don't use the term lockdown there. Say pandemic.

During this pandemic, depending on where you've lived, there have been different times in which there have been lockdowns in place where you were basically needing to stay at home, but most of the time and most of the places you have not been in a lockdown. And the reason why I make that distinction is that it's easy to fall into a lockdown mindset. The fall into a mindset of until things are back

to complete normal, things are completely locked down and not normal. And I think when you're in that mindset, you avoid a lot you could be doing. That would be good for your soul and be good for your mental health and be good for your mind and be good for your life in general.

That's just a nitpick, but I pushed down. Don't say we've been in a quarantine or a lockdown since last March. We have been suffering a pandemic since last March, which has generated many disruptions, including occasional periods of lockdown. So semantic, I think important for your mindset. All right, so what about the social media bubble? A lot of people, Venetia, have had this exact same problem, where essentially the anxiety of the pandemic,

the all the different news that's being generated and the curtailment of the normal things you would do to distract yourself or spend your time, push you into an engagement with social media that becomes all-encompassing, and now you're using these things way more than you should be. What I'm going to recommend is that it's probably time for a digital declutter.

Right? You do not need to be monitoring news on a day-to-day basis. In fact, you could just get the barest bone news right now, you would be okay. What's going on around me where I live right now? When do I get a sign up for a vaccine? Can I go into restaurants or not? Like, there's not that much that's changing, right?

Okay, great, I know what I need to know. Let me get away from the news for a while. Let me get away from doom scrolling for a while. Let me get away from TikTok for a while. So I'm going to suggest that you do a declutter in the way I talked about in my book, digital minimalism. 30 days, maybe start mid-February and go to mid-March. When you're done with it, it'll be the spring,

depending on where you live, it'll be beautiful. So that's a bonus, a bonus to this timing. Take a break from optional personal digital technologies during these 30 days. Taking a break from social media, you're taking a break from online news, you're taking a break from streaming videos, you're taking a break from video games,

if that is a vice that you have. News consumption should be minimal, get the information you need, but otherwise you're free from that noise for 30 days. during this period you will experience a bit of a detox type sensation where that urge to constantly check your phone will subside, but that is not the point of these 30 days. It's not a detox. It is instead a period for you to do what I think you need to do right now, which is get back in touch through reflection and experimentation what you care about. What do you value? What do you want to

spend your time doing? What is your vision of the deep life? It might be useful here to actually go through my standard deep life exercises, get keystone habits in place. do overhauls one bucket at a time, however you want to do this. When the 30 days are over, it is time to start from scratch with your digital life. You got knocked off course by the pandemic. Let's get back on the road. And the way you get back on the road after those 30 days is you say, now that I know what I want to do with my time, what I value, my image of a good life,

what's the best way to deploy technologies, to support and amplify these things I care about? The answer to those questions will specify what technology you bring back into your life, everything else, it's out. If there is not a thing in your life that you really value and think that TikTok is the very best way to support this thing you value,

there is no TikTok in your life. If there is not a thing in your life that you really value and having Twitter on your phone is the best way to support this value, Twitter's gone. Now here's the thing. Not only does this make you more selective about what technologies you use,

but because you know why you are using each technology that remains in your life, it's to support this thing, you can start to optimize. If I know that I am an artist and I'm using Instagram because I need visual inspiration to help motivate my own creative work,

if you know that's the reason you use Instagram, then you take it off your phone and you put on your computer. And you unfollow all of those influencers because that has nothing to do with this value. You only follow 12 artists whose work you really admire. And like Friday night with a good glass of wine,

you sign on on your desktop, you type the password in manually, you get it on a Post-it note that's in the other room, you spend 30 minutes, you look at what they've posted that week. It takes 30 minutes. You get the inspiration. You're done with Instagram for the week.

When you know why you're using a technology, you can optimize how you use the technology, and the cost-to-benefit ratio goes substantially into your favor. This stuff works, Fineshe. When I was working on digital minimalism, I had 1,600 people go through this exercise. They sent me reports. I know a lot about it.

It works. You have to do it again and again. That's just life. A pandemic happens. Guess what? You're going to have to redo your declutter. A pandemic ends. And a lot of things change about your life and working life.

Guess what? You might have to do this again. You might have to reconfigure. That's fine. But you're remaining intentional. So you can and you should do this, finish. Take a month away from this stuff.

Right? I mean, unless you're literally working on like a polyclonal antibody treatment right now, in which case like, hey, do what you need to do. You are not needed on the front line. You don't need to know minute to minute what's going on. You don't need to be like a breaking news producer. You don't need to be commenting on people's Twitter post. You will be okay. The world will go on for 30 minutes.

Get a little bit of news just so you know like literally what's happening. Your town's not about to be hit by an avalanche or what happens. you so you know literally the urgent stuff you need to know this is just for 30 days you'll be okay we're not going to miss you reflection experimentation get out of your house get outside do inspiring things talk to people see people feed your soul figure out what you care about rebuild your technological life you'll be out of the bubble and if events push you back in do it again and if events change your technology such a way that you fall into a new bubble do this exercise again it is worth it technology can be the foundation of a fantastic life but only

Only when you deploy it for things you really care about. And that takes some work to figure out what those are. It takes some work to keep that focus sustained as well. Right. So, Venet, I hope I've inspired you or other people out here who are similar feeling between a pandemic and the U.S. election and all the stuff that was going on. That phone is now glued into their hands. Now is a perfect time to declutter and restart.

Do it now. You'll finish right before spring starts. and like, you know, well suited to that season, you'll be able to emerge much more meaningful, much more gracious, much more satisfying, effective, resilient life. So let's all think about that. I think we all probably could use a declutter. So, Denise, thank you for spurring the conversation.

And with that, let's spur the end of this episode. If you want to submit your own questions, go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how. Remember my new book, A World Without Email is available now. It's coming out on March 2nd, but if you pre-order, there are really cool things I will give you. So please pre-order if you are considering buying the book. I'll be announcing those cool things soon. Otherwise, I will be back on Thursday with our next Habit Tune Up mini episode.

Until then, as always, stay deep.