Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 89: Do I Need a Dumb Phone?

Episode Date: April 19, 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.DEEP DIVE: What Does "Productivity" Actually Mean? [5:04]WORK QUESTIONS - How do I stay productive after the pandemic? [17:56] - How do I relearn how to think deeply? [22:51] - Can I build a world without email with non-knowledge workers? [31:38] - Are some people more aligned to some jobs than others? [34:47]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS - Do I need a dumb phone? [38:48] - How will the pandemic impact higher education? [42:28]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - Has my liberal arts education helped my CS career? [51:23] - How do the "deep life" buckets related to quarterly planning? [56:05]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 89. Let's start with quick announcements. The first announcement is a new milestone that we have reached with the Deep Questions podcast, and that is crossing the 2 million download threshold. I just went back and checked the numbers. We launched this in late May of 2020. We got 143 downloads in May.

in May. In June, we got 60,000 downloads. In July, we got 120,000 downloads. We now average somewhere north of 250,000 downloads a month. So thank you, all of you who have been here from the beginning. Thank you all of you who are new arrivals. And of course, I appreciate that many of you have been subscribing. I appreciate that many of you have been leaving reviews from what I understand. These reviews really help. The subscriptions really help. And it helps as podcast grow helps us continue to spread the word about the deep life. So thank you for that. Quick announcement number two, you should sign up for my email newsletter. A friend of mine noted that I don't talk about this enough on the podcast, but if you have come to the Cal Newport

universe just through this podcast, not through my existing website or books, you might not know about my weekly essay. When I have this newsletter, you can sign up for at Cal Newport. Newport.com every week I send out an essay on the type of topics we talk about on this show. I've been doing it since 2007, if you can believe it. And it's where I really lay out some of the core ideas that make up the foundations of my ideas, my thoughts, my framework. So look, if you like this podcast, you should probably be subscribed to that newsletter. It's also where I solicit questions for this show.

Only my newsletter subscribers get the link every two months. I send out a new link for them to submit questions for the show. I like to keep those questions quarantined, if you'll excuse the use of that term, given the current conditions. I like to keep that link quarantined to my newsletter readers because those are the people who really know not just the type of things I like to talk about, but the way I think about these topics. So we get much sharper questions than if I just opened this up to the public in general. It's also where I will occasionally talk about events or announce things that I don't want out on my public website. So you like this. You should sign up for my newsletter, Cal News.

Newport.com. All right, that's enough quick announcements. We've got a good show. The deep dive returns. So we got a good deep dive topic here, followed by a good collection of questions about work, technology, and as always, the deep life. To find out how to submit your own questions,

go to calnewport.com slash podcast. So before we get rolling with all that, let's take a brief moment to thank one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. I am talking about our good friends at Blinkist. You've heard me say it before. Ideas are currency in our current world. And where are you going to get up to speed on the smartest, most impactful ideas affecting our culture? It's not going to be tweets. It's not going to be TikTok videos. It's not going to be in

Instagram stories. It's going to be in books. Because books are experts who have thought about something for years carefully synthesize their knowledge, this sort of long form information format is incredibly effective for making you an expert on the things you need to know about. Here's the problem. Books are long and not all of them are worth reading. So how do you know which books to buy? Well, that is where I like to use Blinkist. The idea behind Blinkist is simple.

It's a subscription service, so you pay a subscription fee, and then you get unlimited access to summaries of thousands and thousands of best-selling non-fiction books. These are summaries that you can read or listen to. to in 15 minutes, allowing you to quickly triage which books are actually worth you then buying and digesting in detail, which ones are sufficiently just summarized down to 15 minutes. It is a great way to very quickly sort through a lot of big ideas and see what's worth spending time with. So right now for a limited time, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. If you go to Blinkist.com slash deep, you can try it free for seven days.

and save 25% off your new subscription. That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial, and you'll also save 25% off, but only when you sign up at blinkus.com slash deep. And with deep thoughts in mind, why don't we move on now to our deep dive segment? The topic of today's deep dive is the product.

productivity funnel. So let me give you some background to this idea. There is a lot of discussion of productivity going on right now. Of course, I talk about the topic a lot. We cover many aspects of it on this podcast. I cover it in my email newsletter. I cover it in my books. But there's also a broader cultural conversation happening about productivity, including a lot of reappraisals or critiques of the idea in general. I know some of my readers have expressed discomfort with the term productivity. They associate it roughly speaking with industrial output optimization and it feels dehumanizing. There's a whole cottage industry of writers that I've talked about before that have been trying to apply an economic materialist critique to productivity saying really what we see

is these sort of exploitative capitalist dynamics that are forcing us to do more and more in our work life and then we internalize these narratives and do too much in our private right. So there's a big interesting surging discussion, some technical, some social criticism on this topic. The issue, however, the issue I have noticed with all of this is that we are not at all precise about what we mean when we use the term productivity. It is this vague abstraction that depending on how you think can capture a lot of things or exclude a lot of things. And I thought it would be useful for all of these conversations. Again, whether we're talking about broad social critique, or really nitty-gritty techniques that we're trying to improve in our own lives,

it would help if we had a more structured definition of what we're talking about here. That brings us to the productivity funnel. All right, so here's the idea. At a 30,000 foot level, what do we mean when we're talking about productivity? Well, you have a space of potential things you could be doing. So imagine them floating out here. And eventually, at the bottom, we execute things. things are executed and have been completed.

Between the space of possible things we could do and actual executed task, I imagine that we have a three-part funnel that connects the top to the bottom. And it's this three-part funnel that we're actually referring to when we use the term productivity. So let's go through this funnel. The first part of this funnel is activity selection. What is your philosophy or strategies or rules for how you figure out which of these possible things out there that you actually do? This applies both to work. also applies to your life outside of work.

The next level, so as we contract and constrict in this funnel, is organization. Now we've narrowed down some of the things we could do to specific things we want to do. We have to organize these. We have to keep track of them. We have to make plans for how we're going to execute them. We have to know what their status is. We have them written down somewhere. This is where you get to the organization piece of the productivity funnel.

Finally, at the bottom, the narrowest part of the funnel is execution, where you actually, in the moment, are taking a particular thing that your organizational systems have told you you should be working on right now, and you go and you try to execute that. And you want to execute that in a way, presumably that is efficient. You don't want to waste time, and that is effective. You want to do a good job. And perhaps, if possible for some of this work, you might also want to have something built around this execution that makes it more satisfying, minimizes burnout, minimizes the energy that you have to expend. These three parts, activity selection, organization, execution gets you from this cloud of possible things to the actual things being accomplished. When you care about productivity, you care about each of these three parts. Now, all of these have been well covered.

I mean, we can give some examples. If you want to think about activity selection, there's books on this topic. This is where you might read essentialism. It's where you might read The One Thing. It's where you might read first things first. you might read the dip. It's where you might read digital minimalism. Of course, that's the one I will emphasize the most since I wrote it. A lot of thinking on activity selection. We get done that something like organization. Okay, how do we actually keep track of and organize the things

that we have decided to do? Well, that's where you get getting things done is suddenly relevant. That's where the bullet journal method is suddenly relevant. That is where the capture, configure control philosophy we talk about a lot on this podcast. That's where it fits in. These are all different ways of thinking about organization. And what about execution? Well, that's where books like My Deep Work becomes relevant. That's where Mason Curry's daily rituals becomes relevant. Or Anne Lamont's Bird by Bird or Stephen King's On Writing or Stephen Presfield's The War

of Art is where we think about how we actually structure the act of executing things, especially hard things using our brain. A lot of thinking there that could be relevant about how to do that properly. So there's a lot of thinking in all three parts. of the productivity funnel. Specifying that all of these make up productivity, they're all part of the definition,

and they all connect, I think really helps clarify the way we think about this topic. Like let's take, for example, the critiques of productivity that have become more prevalent. I've been involved in this discussion. I wrote an essay, my newsletter, and on my blog recently about this,

about the anti-business movement and slow productivity. This funnel helps us have a much more nuanced conversation about it, right? Because let's take, for example, the economic materialist critique, which says, well, in work, for example, we do too much. We're being exploited in the doing too much. And in our personal lives, we internalize that and do too much. What piece of productivity does that actually touch on? Well, if we look at the funnel, we say, well, this is really about activity selection.

It narrows in our focus. It's focusing on, okay, so how do we decide what enters into the funnel? And if you buy the economic materialist argument, it's, well, there's forces out there in the business world that are pushing people towards activity selection philosophies that bring too much stuff into the top of the funnel. So we have to think that that is a critique of the activity selection piece of the funnel. Now, as I've talked about before, I happen to think that though I agree with the issue that we bring too much into the top of the funnel and both our work life, and in our personal life, I don't think it is necessarily a direct result of a certain exploitative economic dynamics. As I lay out in my book, A World Without Email, when it comes to the world of work, I think we bring too much on our plate in part because it's very ambiguous exactly

what our job is. And we give workers a lot of autonomy to figure out how they do their own, how they figure out what to work on and how much they work on. And in this ambiguous slash autonomous environment, we just overload each other. The hyperactive hive mind arises. And we give even more work to each other, and the whole thing spirals out of control. It doesn't help anyone. No one likes it. The owner of the businesses don't like it. The executives don't like it. The employees don't like it. And in our personal life, of course, I argued in digital minimalism, we bring on too much. We're on our phone too much. We're too distracted. Not because we're necessarily internalizing these sort of bourgeois, fundamental economic opiates,

but because we are numbing, we're avoiding, we don't really know what we're all about. But whatever, we can focus this debate. It's a debate about activity. It's a debate about activity. selection. So now you can be involved in that debate and at the same time say, yeah, but I'm getting the organization level of my funnel tuned up, or I'm down here on the execution part of my funnel and I'm working on my time block planner because that's a different part of the funnel than where this debate is actually taking place. When productivity becomes one just amorphous all munged together topic, it's very hard to have this nuance. So if you're upset about the activity selection because you think it's whatever, this sort of materialist dynamic, you can then

transfer that upsetness to how I organize my tasks or how I time block out my day. Like, well, it's all seems sort of together and some general notion of productivity I don't like the term. But when you see the three-part system, you say, well, wait a second. It's self-evident that it's better to have some organization system than none. Having no organization system does nothing to stop the activity selection issue. It just means that you're going to be more stressed and have more anxiety to have a harder time keeping track of your work. And it's self-evident that thinking through how you execute is going to be better than not, regardless of how much stuff you're executing. Because if you have no thought about how you execute work, it's kind of go through your day

reactively, you'll be more stressed, you'll be more anxious. But it has no impact on the issue of how many things come into the top of the funnel. So by separating out these issues, we say, oh, I see. I can both, for example, be a vociferous critic of the capitalist ethic that tries to squeeze more hours out of workers while at the same time, say, I use a time block planner for the bottom of the funnel because whatever comes through here, in the end, that's going to be a better way to execute it. I'll get more out of my time. I'll be less stress. I'll be less anxious than having no plan at all. And I can fight a battle up here while also having a capture, configure control system here because I'm not actually, I'm not actually

change anything by being disorganized about where my tasks are kept. That's just going to make me again, stressed and anxious, I can still fight the battle up here about how much stuff is coming in the funnel, but regardless of how much comes in, I should still have a system here. So I think it's really useful to break out these pieces, because then we can focus our critiques, we can focus our optimizations on specific parts of the funnel. The other reason why I think is useful to actually define this concrete structure definition of productivity is that it helps you figure out where you might be dropping the ball. when productivity is just a very vague, again, amorphous type concept,

you can feel like you're productive because there's a few things you really spend a lot of time on. But when you zoom out at this whole structured picture, realize that those things you spend time on are relegated to maybe just one level. And you really have to have all three of these levels thought through to get the full benefit of the funnel because these things, these activities are going to come through the whole funnel. And it helps us realize, oh, there is more to my productivity than, let's say I'm a time block planner officinado and I'm really careful about my time block planning, but I don't really organize my stuff well. And I have no real philosophy about what I say yes to

or how much work comes in. You're not going to be that productive, right? You're leaving a lot on the table. Similarly, you might be a big Greg McEwen fan. You might be a big one thing fan. You know, you're very careful about what you decide to do. But then once you decide to do it, you're very disorganized. You don't keep track of where it is its status and how it gets done. And things don't really get accomplished. And so you're sort of minimizing the benefit you get out of that thinking, or maybe you're hardcore David Allen, right? Let me, I'm really interested, my task list. I'm really interested in this. I'm using Omnifocus. I have all these relational database-style list that I can quickly pull out, give me all the tasks that are in this context and this

context that are due soon. You have all these systems built. So your organization's really nailed, but you have way too much stuff coming in the top. And so no matter how much you organize your Omnifocus list, it's too much for you to ever get done, right? So you see the picture is when you recognize all three parts, you realize each of these parts needs attention. And that's where the magic happens. You have the right amount of work coming in. It's organized in a way that you know what you're working on, what its status is, what needs to be done, what your plan is, so you're not stressed about that. And then when you execute, you know, philosophy of execution that gets the stuff done well, emphasizes quality, emphasizes efficiency, emphasizes sustainability, emphasizes satisfiability,

emphasizes satisfiability that this feels good. I'm going for a walk. I'm doing this in a deep work, whatever, right? The pieces all come together. And then we get something closer to this vague notion of productivity that we aspire to. So anyways, the productivity funnel, I think is just a useful way to think about this topic. So if you're critiquing productivity or you're listening to a critique of productivity, stand back and say, well, what part of the funnel are you critiquing? Okay, good. Let's focus on that and not let that spill over to other aspects. And if you're trying to become more productive, now we can be a lot more specific about what that means. What level of the funnel are you working on?

That specificity, make sure that you get all the pieces in place to actually get the most out of your work life. Again, we have these activities, and we're going to do some things. It's going to have to pass through some sort of funnel. There's a ton of stuff up here, and a limited amount of time down here. Ignoring this funnel is not going to make things better.

Ignoring any piece of this funnel can make the other pieces not nearly as effective. So let's see the whole picture. More nuanced or structured approach to productivity, I think, is really going to help us deal with this topic. And with that, let's move on to some work questions. Our first work question comes from Brad. Brad says many of us are at peak efficiency right now because we are working from home. We have less meetings, less social engagements, no commute, etc.

This time is coming to an end soon, thankfully. But how should we plan for re-entering? world of in-person work and social obligations. I am looking forward to this, but I also think my productivity will decline as inevitable interruptions and perhaps more meetings will come up. How should we proactively plan for this to make sure we carry with us our hard-won productivity habits such as deep work and time blocking? Well, Brad, this is an interesting question. I partially agree and I partially disagree with your premise. So based on what I can tell, reporting on the impact of the pandemic, and in particular, knowledge workers moving to a remote environment, the impact of that

shift on productivity is that for many people, it has been a mixed bag at best and bad at worse. So yes, you save the commute, which a lot of people do appreciate, and there's more flexibility because you're not stuck in the office building. So that is also something that people appreciate, but switching to full remoteness seems to have taken the hyperactive hive mind workflow that I talk about in my book, A World Without Email, it takes that workflow and makes it more hyperactive, more emails, more Slack, and way more Zoom. There's a lot of people right now whose entire work hours have been taken up by Zoom meetings. They're checking their email during Zoom. Any actual work has to happen afterwards. Which is all to say, I think the return to

the office can actually be a plus from a productivity perspective, from a satisfaction perspective, if it is handled correctly. This is my optimistic take. So what might be important here? Well, first, Brad, I would suggest trying to institute fixed schedule productivity. This is where you start with declaring the hours when you want to work and then work backwards from that declaration to say, I will do what I need to do to make that happen. I will introduce new habits. I'll introduce new techniques, new rules, whatever it takes to actually hit that mark. And the fixed schedule productivity mark that I think we should all be trying to get back to is I will work when I'm at the office. My commute on the way to the office is psychologically a transition into work mode.

Schedule shutdown complete. At the end of the day, my commute back from the office is psychologically a transition away from work mode. That's going to be psychologically much more healthy than a blended reality, which you're always sort of working and always sort of not working, at least for some people. So that's the first thing I might recommend. Now, how are we actually going to fit our work back into the workday. Well, time block for sure. Like, let's make use of the time we actually have. Weekly plan for sure.

Wednesday's really busy. So let me get this thing due on Thursday, done on Tuesday. Look at the whole picture ahead. You have to move these pieces on your schedule around like pieces on a chess board. If you are going to succeed. Lean heavily on the in-person heuristics that can reduce unnecessary meetings and communications, have an open, closed door policy. Look, if my door's open, just grab me. If someone's like, why don't we set up a meeting and say, why don't you just stop by? Definitely take use of office hours.

I have office hours three days a week during these hours. Just come by. We'll just talk about it. We don't have to have a meeting. That's when I'm already just doing my emails anyways. Come by and chat then. You can really get these heuristic. You can grab people in the hallway. Every time you're in a meeting, you say, who's here? Who can I talk to right after this meeting for five minutes and save an email thread. So really lean into those in-person heuristics that we took for granted before we went remote and in whose absence have led to an explosion of back and forth unscheduled messaging, which has really been a harm through productivity. So I think all of that is going to be helpful when you're back in the actual office. And, you know, again, once we have this

clear separation from work and non-work, when you're working, let's just work. You know, no social media. don't web surf, don't look at the news, don't doom scroll, right? This has always been my attitude. When I'm working, I'm working. I'm time block plan. I'm trying to get things done. I've moved the pieces on the chess board. I know what's happening today.

Setting up when needs to happen on Thursday, what sets up Monday. You've done all that work. Fill the hours. When you're done, you're done. Commute is when you're going to psychologically release the work. A mindset, you come home, you'll be much more precedent at home. So I actually think for a lot of people who have to go back to the office, they've learned enough lessons now.

to know that they want to make a change. Also, there's a reset button being set. Get back at the office, things are going to feel a little different. Not everyone's going to be there. There will be an atmosphere, an atmosphere of experimentation. Take advantage of it. Now is the time to overhaul that whole productivity funnel we talked about in the deep dive. And so, Brad, I would not be worried about the return to work.

I would find things about it to look forward to. Our next question comes from Die. die asks, how can I get back into deep thinking in graduate school? I built a family and for quite a while I've been distracted by a couple of things and I'm working long hours and are not eating healthy. Now things have settled down and are back on track and I can get back to my work. However, I find it difficult to concentrate. I am not sure if the long-term distraction and pressure of my life has rewired my neural

system. And if yes, what is your suggestion to fix this issue? Well, Dye, I think this is a good topic, the intellectual life or the thinking life, a life in which you produce value at a high level using your brain, which many knowledge, work professions now require, including the graduate school situation where you are. This is a lifestyle that does require work. It's not just a switch you can flick and say, okay, now I want to be someone who does a lot of deep thinking because that might be nice. There's actually a lot of work that has to be done, just like if you wanted to be an athlete at a high level. It's not just a matter that you decide you want to go do high level athletic events. There's a whole lifestyle change that has to happen.

It's going to take some time. You're going to have to fix your nutrition. You're going to have to train. There's a whole thing that has to happen before you do that. So if you want to do high level cognitive athletics, you've got to get yourself back into that shape. Now I'll talk about how to do that here in a second, but let me just sit on this point for one moment because I think it's important. I talk about this a little bit in my book deep work, but it is critical that we realize a deep thinking lifestyle does require training. Why is that critical to realize is because when we don't realize that, we're too quick to abandon that goal. If we think about concentration and thinking as something that some people are just born able to do, then what happens when you've been

like I stressed out, you know, raising a young family, you have some work things, you're not eating well, you've been distracted, let's say there's a pandemic, you know, all this stuff's going on. You say, oh, let me try now working on my dissertation. And, oh, I'm terrible at. I can't think straight. I'm not coming up with good thoughts. It's not comfortable. You say, oh, I'm not a deep thinking type person and you give up. But when you recognize, oh, this is a lifestyle that has to be trained, then you say, oh, I'm out of shape. I'm not going to give up. I'm going to train. So there's a really important distinction. The deep thinking lifestyle has to be trained.

It's not something that you're either good at or not good at automatically. Okay, so how do we train this? There's a lot of things that can help. We need to slow things down. We got to slow down our brain. We got to slow down what we throw at our brain. If you want to get back to deep thinking, you've got to get back to a brain that is used to taking its time. So, Di, one of the big things that's going to mean is no more defaulting to this phone.

as what I do when I'm a little bit bored, what I do when I don't know what else to do, what I do when I'm anxious, what I do when I'm happy, what I do when I want a moment's relief. This information coming at you from this phone, which itself is being generated by these server farms with algorithms

that have reduced you down to this data vector and is picking out exactly the things to show you to capture your attention. That's too frenetic, that's too fast. That is the cognitive equivalent of junk food to an athlete. You cannot lay a foundation for a deep thinking lifestyle, if you're constantly consuming

frenetic, algorithmically optimized information. If you need to use social media, if you need to use online news, if you need to look things up on YouTube, do it on a desktop or laptop, do it on a schedule. I'm going to spend a half hour looking up news for the week on the pandemic,

on my computer, good. It's not something I do as default. I need to look up something on YouTube. I put aside some time, 15 minutes to do it on my computer. It's not something I'm just going to sit here and scroll on. So that, I think,

foundational. Two, coming along this theme of slowing things down, is let's do more solitude in your life. Now, I have a very specific definition of solitude. This comes from my book, Digital Minimalism. I borrowed it from a great book called Lead Yourself First, which says solitude is the absence of input from other minds. It's time where it says you alone with your own thoughts and observing the world around you. You need to do this on a regular braces to help get your brain in shape. think about this as the athletic equivalent of getting in those miles just to get your cardiovascular fitness improved. Go on long walks, nothing in your ear, nothing in your hand, thinking, looking at the world around you. You've got to get used to it.

Again, this is like lung capacity for the athlete. I can sit here with my own thoughts, look at the world around me, try to structure information without having to have stimuli, right? These are two sides of the same coin. Really reduced to frenetic, algorithmically optimized information. give yourself lots of experience, just slowing down your thinking. On top of this now, you can start to do some specific training. Begin reading books again, hard books.

Put aside time for this, take it seriously. Two chapters a day. Two chapters a day. I don't care what books they are at first, but just two chapters a day. If you can find a scenic place to do it, you should. If you do it outside, you should. If you can do it on a porch, you should.

If you can do it in the woods, even better. Long form content, two chapters a day. Okay, now I'm getting used to this. I'm getting back in shape. Consuming this content. Takes a long time. There's nothing to click. I start doing L quick skimming like people do when they read on the web.

I'm going to miss everything. So I just read this. I just read this. A good type of reading the build up to you, I think, is the secondary primary duels, right? So choose something. Let's say work of literature that you've always thought you should read, find a secondary source that is accessible that helps explain that literature and then read the actual piece of literature itself. Those primary secondary duels are a great way to actually

stretch your brain's ability to do more complex reading, to build up more complex structures, to take in information. All right. So I think that is a useful target for you to actually build up to in your reading. And then start filling in your free time. to the degree that it exists with higher quality leisure activities. Again, all of this comes back to the same thing. You got to slow down your brain if you want to do slow thinking. And slow think is what produces big insights. If you want to do the thinking life, we're slowing everything down.

So now when you're bored, instead of just jumping over the Netflix or looking at your phone, you're cooking, you're learning how to cook more elaborate meals, you're gardening, you're outside, you're in the soil, you're in the sun, you're watching things grow, you're grappling with things in the real world, pushing yourself up against the forces of nature, the forces of gravity, trying to actually make things work, your woodworking, whatever it is.

This is not just an affectation. It's about slowing and focusing one thing at a time, having an intention, giving it concentration, making your intentions then manifest concretely in the real world. All of this, I think,

comes together, and over time, you get back in thinking shape. Over time, you become more scholarly. Over time, you start to realize, okay, I'm working on my graduate student work. The connections are coming quicker. My writing's a little sharper.

I'm hitting points here that I wouldn't have been able to hit before. I'm seeing insights I wasn't able to see hit before. I'm on my walks and I'm having this idea. That's a really interesting angle. You feel that energy come back. This type of deep thinking life, the thinking life, the scholarly life is a really exciting life. It's not for everyone,

but it's a really exciting, fulfilling life. It takes this instrument that we have that Aristotle, so sagely pointed out, it can do something that no other animal can do, which is the sort of deep introspective constructive thinking, and it really pushes it to its limit. But you've got to train. So that's my suggestion. We've got to slow down the information landscape.

Do those things I recommend. Get away from the frenetic, more solitude, begin reading, build up the primary secondary duels if you need you to really get your brain back in that shape of looking for patterns and subtle structure to information. information and throw in higher quality, longer term, more complicated, slower leisure activities to fill in your free time. All of this will get you back to a play style where you're going to be humming again, but more

generally for anyone who would like to have a deeper thinking life, get away from the frenetic, highly distracted, emotionally tumultuous type life that so many of us live because of the technomedated world that we engage with. This advice will work for you as well. Our next question comes from Luciana, who asks, I'm a middle manager in a municipal setting. Some members of my team are knowledge workers and others are not. How best to approach the world without email principles

when they only seem to apply to a portion of my team? Luciana then elaborates that she works at a mid-sized public library, so the knowledge workers are supervisors and librarians, and the non-knowledge workers are those who do things like label and shelf books. Luciana notes there's already a divide in our workplace between white collar and blue collar positions, so I'm hesitant to apply concepts that would further fuel that dynamic. Well, Luciana, I actually think the ideas from a world without email are going to improve that dynamic. It's actually going to, in some sense, close the gap

between those knowledge and non-knowledge workers in your particular setting. The thing that really separates knowledge work from other type of work is that we have this really unusual hyperactive hive mind workflow in which we're just plugged in the computers all day and just sending messages back and forth and jumping in and out of meetings. And that does feel really different than let's say a non-knowledgework position, which tends to be more structured and more process oriented. We need to label these books. Okay, we need to shelve these books. Your goal this week is to we're removing the books from over here. We're going to deaccession a lot of it, go through through that process and resh shelved them over here. It's a lot more structured. There's a lot more

clear what you're trying to work on, whereas the knowledge work looks more just sort of frenetic, and people are sending messages back and forth, and there's just a lot of things going on. The principles from a world without email, add more structure, add more process to the knowledge work. It actually makes the knowledge work more like the non-knowledge workers in this setting. If you really apply those principles, suddenly it's much clear what you're working on, what you need to get it done. How you're going to get that information, how it's going. There's less things on your plate. Those things are clarified.

The processes by which you, again, get information and collaborate are more structured. That actually brings your world closer to what the other workers in the library are actually working on. Now the only difference is whether these activities require the physical manipulation of labels or the physical moving of books. We're seeing things now through a much more similar light. In fact, you might even be able to integrate the systems by which you're tracking work for all of these workers. once you start applying the principles from a world without email, because in the end, here's a transparent task system, here's what needs to be done,

here's who's working on what and how it's going and what they need, the fact that some of these tasks that we have in this transparent task board are digital or knowledge-based and some are physical. It doesn't really matter. Same principles apply. So actually, I would take this as an opportunity, Luciana, to close the gap between the different type of workers in your library.

I think everyone's going to work more effectively when it's more clear who's working on what and what they need from each other. It's also going to reduce a lot of the stress and anxiety that's caused by the hyperactive high mind for your knowledge workers. So see this as an opportunity to actually make that workplace more cohesive.

All right, let's do one more work question. This one comes from Ruslin, who asked, do you think certain people are better aligned with certain jobs than others? Now, in the elaboration, Russell talks about my books so good they can't ignore you, about my career capital theory which says that if you want to feel passionate about your work, you first have to get good at things that are rare and valuable and use that as leverage to make your job more meaningful,

that you don't identify the passion in advance and then reap all the benefits by matching your job to the passion. You actually cultivate passion, and that cultivation requires a lot of effort to get good at things. So what Ruslin is asking is so does it matter what job you pursue if you're going to apply this career capital approach, or is there some jobs that might be better suited for you than others? Well, Russell, that's a common question, and I think the latter is true. I think some jobs are better suited for people than others, and I think it's pretty clear to them. I think there can be natural affinities or skills, for example, that if your goal is to build up career capital, if you have a natural affinity and in particular a natural skill for

something, then that's going to help accelerate the pace at which you gather that capital, and therefore accelerate the pace at which you cultivate passion. So that's good. You're very creative. Maybe you want a more creative field. If you're really good with mathematics, then maybe you want a field that's going to reward that rare and valuable mathematics skill. I think that's completely fine. There's also other personality traits that we know exist. We can measure them really clearly with standard psychological tests that are going to dispose you towards some jobs more than others. If you're, you're very extroverted, you like being around people, you like the crush of people and meeting

people and activity. And that's going to really open up certain jobs for you that if you're very introverted and feel your energy drained by being around a lot of the people that would not fit for you. Right. So that could really matter. Some people like really high energy, for example. Here's another thing, right? You're really high energy, don't need much sleep, like activity. That might open up particular types of jobs like startups or whatever, that someone it's more of a slower living, lower energy, slower, deeper thinker. Different jobs might suit them better. All right, so I have no issue with this notion that your personality or other types of psychological

or physiological realities of you as a person make some jobs a better match than others. I think that's fine. Throw those instincts or observations into your selection process. But what I do argue is that you need to lower your bar for what you're looking for when you're looking for a career. You need to lower the bar from where we often set it today in our culture, which is you have a passion. You have to match a job to your one true passion or you will be miserable.

You have to lower it from finding your quote unquote one true passion to let's pick a job that seems well suited for the training I have already, my personality, my circumstances, and it looks like if I get better at it, we'll open up good opportunities. Here's the thing. When you lower your bar to that, it's not so hard to find something that satisfies those properties. So choosing a job is not arbitrary,

but it's not nearly as difficult as the one true passion type people make it out to be because ultimately, once you have a reasonably well-fit job to your circumstances, skills personality, there might be many that satisfy this.

All the hard work comes after. Okay, now I've got to build up rare and valuable skills that is leverage to make this job better and better and better, and the quicker you get the work at that, the better. So that's what I would say, Rosalind, you can't throw a dart at a job listing book and say, it doesn't really matter. But on the other hand,

you shouldn't be spending months after month really wringing your hands about what is my one job I need to have. Find something that makes sense for you. Don't worry if a lot of options satisfy this. That's just good news. And then get the work. And speaking of work, let's shut down our work questions there

and move on to some queries about technology. Our first technology question comes from Kiann. He says, hello, Dr. Newport. In one of the early episodes, I asked you about dumb phones, and you suggested just dumbing down my iPhone. It was a good progress, but sometimes I find myself stuck in the vicious loop of going back to screen addiction. Please suggest an alternative option with real dumb phone involved.

Well, Kian, you certainly can go to an actual dumb phone, something that really takes away the option altogether of distracting yourself with a phone. Officinados of this technique often call it the feature phones is what they call these type of phones. I have a feature phone. I was using it to test out Mint, was it Mint Mobile. One of our sponsors was like a low-cost wireless provider. And they sent me a SIM card and I bought a feature phone to test it with. It was a Nokia flip phone.

So you could definitely go that route. It's not a bad thing to do. it's a way of signaling to yourself that you take your concentration seriously and that you are really wary about your phone, a smartphone is a real source of distraction. I am also going to encourage you here to not approach this problem purely through the perspective of tools and restrictions to reduce something that you find negative. The key idea in my book, Digital Minimalism, is that if you want a better relationship with these tools, it's not enough to say, here's what I don't like and I want to do what I don't like less.

A lot of people struggle to have that be the foundation for sustainable change. It's certainly what I saw in my research. When you try to white knuckle technology use reduction, it doesn't take much. A particularly hard day, a particularly hard week, you're anxious, you're tired, you're bored, the phone is there. you say, why not just look at this Instagram feed. Fast forward three hours later. Now Instagram's back in your life.

By far the more successful way of building sustainable change is, and I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but it's a record I think we need to play again and again, given our current cultural circumstances, is that you have to start with a vision of the positive. This is what I want my life to be like. I can feel it in my bones. This is what a better life would be.

here is the technology use that's going to get me there. Why am I going to stick to this technology use? Because I want to get to that positive place. Why am I not going to look at Instagram? Because it's not in my plan, my technology use plan, for getting to this life I really want to get to and I really want to get to that life. I'm not willing to give up on that image of the positive life

so that I can look at more Instagram stories. This is what I lay out in digital minimalism. I've talked about how to do this enough that I won't go through it in detail again right here, Keon. So you might want to check out that book. But that's what I'm going to suggest you next is to go through the digital declutter process that I talk about in that book. It's going to involve you taking a break from technology for 30 days, activity, experimentation, reflection. During those 30 days is going to get you up to speed on what you really care about.

You're going to construct a more positive vision for what you want your life to be like. And then you're going to answer the question, what's the best way to use technology to support this vision? And that'll be the technology you use. And anything that doesn't fit into that plan you just don't do. And why? Because you want that positive vision and you feel it in your bones. That's where you are key on. I think we need to stop white knuckling.

We need to stop saying, I don't like cigarettes because, you know, it makes my breath smell bad and instead say, I'm not going to smoke because I'm having, you know, for my kids, right? You got to have the positive vision you're focusing on. So let's do some digital minimalism. And I think you're going to have a better shot

of having some more sustainable change. Our next question comes from John. John says, what do you expect to change in higher education moving forward, and what do you expect to stay the same after the COVID-19 pandemic? So roughly speaking, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted colleges and universities for roughly one year, give or take. It depends on the school.

So all schools basically closed down in-person learning last spring. Some schools came back this fall. other schools like my university Georgetown stayed closed and they're coming back in the upcoming fall. So it could be anywhere between a year to a few months

depending on what university you were at. What distinguishes which universities came back or not, it actually seems to be tied to the political leanings of the area.

So if you're a university in a more red state, you are more likely to come back. If you're a university in a blue state or a blue district like Georgetown, you are much more likely to say,

of course we can't come back. back. That's a whole other discussion, the melding of political partisanship and pandemic public health. But let's put that aside right now. So we have about a range of from a few months to a little more than a year of schools being remote. I don't think that's enough time to trigger major changes. I think we tend to underestimate the power of momentum. This is the way things have been done. and we overestimate the disruptive force of temporary changes. I don't know that we are going to see a lot of major changes coming out of this year. We found that, yes, you could teach remote at a large scale.

A lot of kids basically didn't like it. Professors didn't really like it. The universities lost a lot of money on it because they didn't feel that they could charge full tuition if they didn't have or tuition at all. You know, what can we do if we don't actually have students on campus and participating in a lot of these other activities that their money pays for. Most people aren't super happy about this one year or less

of having to run our universities in a suboptimal way. So I don't see a major rush in the years ahead to completely overhaul the university experience. I think there will obviously be some minor things that happen. For example, me as an individual professor will be a lot more comfortable now teaching a course remote on the fly,

like a particular lecture if, let's say, I'm not feeling well. I used to heroically come in and teach regardless. Multiple occasions have taught lectures and then have gone off and immediately after a lecture thrown up because I'm fighting the flu, but I was like, I can't miss this lecture, right? Now I realize, oh, the tech is not so hard and has been normalized enough that if I need to go on Zoom to teach this because I'm still feeling bad, that will be fine. I think as an individual faculty member, again, if it's cold and flu season, I'm not feeling

that well. There's a faculty meeting. we're going to have third of the faculty members joining remotely because like I feel I don't want to be making you guys sick. I want to be in the conference room. I can just listen to this remotely. We do some of that. I just think we'll be more comfortable with that. But these aren't major changes.

Now, there may be a few disruptor type models that emerge. So maybe we're going to see some innovation and online education. But here's the thing. We had major for-profit universities that are online that existed before the pandemic. So it's not like that technology was just broken. So I'm a bit of a pessimist on this. I think this basic format of gathering people together in a particular environment, having them come in and sit in a room and a professor talks to them.

We've been doing this since the medieval ages. If we look back to the original universities of Bologna or England, right? We've been doing this for a very long time. There's something sticky about it. This year of having to teach suboptimally on Zoom is probably not going to be enough to change that. So that's my pessimistic thought or optimistic depending on who you are and what your perspective is. There'll be some changes, but we're not going to see the Georgetown campus, for example, get replaced with a Georgetown virtual learning portal anytime soon.

Before we move on the questions about the deep life, I want to take a quick moment to talk about another one of the sponsors that makes this show possible, and that is grammarly. You've heard me say this. clearly expressing yourself in the written word is critical. It can really help you in your professional life. The emails you send, the reports you write, the pitches you put together. If you can express yourself very sharply and very clearly, people will take you more seriously, you'll get promoted faster, you'll get more deals, clients will be more happy with your work.

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so you know you're getting the highest quality coffee and mushrooms possible. So all of that is great. But what I really love about four-sigmatic coffee is that that ground mushroom gives it a unique physiological experience. That Lions Main Mushroom gives you this physiological signature in your brain that's different than a normal cup of coffee, which makes it great for using as a deep work hook. Here's what you do.

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to fuel your productivity with some delicious mushroom coffee. And now, let's do some questions about the Deep Life. Our first question comes from Hannah. Hannah asks, How is your art history minor and liberal arts undergraduate education influence your current CS research and work? Well, Hannah is right. I do have a liberal arts undergraduate education.

I have a BA, not a BS, if you can believe it, from Dartmouth College, a major in computer science, and a minor in art history. They don't do BS's at Dartmouth. So a BA was my only option. So I did have a traditional liberal arts undergraduate education. I don't know that it directly influenced my CS work. I would say most successful computer science researchers, go to technical schools as an undergrad, go to technical schools as a grad student,

get professorships at technical schools, and really don't do a lot other than CS. That's a completely normal route. I don't think I got some particular advantage or disadvantage by having a more broadened education when it came to my ability to produce computer science papers. Now, I think the liberal arts education probably had a positive impact on my writing. I have this academic flavor to my writing. What I try to do in my pragmatic nonfiction is bring in some of the concepts of an academic inquiry, multidisciplinary, structured thinking, building up frameworks of knowledge,

evidential-based argument. But I tone back the language a little bit to make it more accessible. I put in more story. So I want to have the elements that make good academic writing persuasive without the elements that make good academic writing hard for the outsider to read. And that's my signature style. Internally, we call it smart self-help because it's bringing that, again, that slightly more sophisticated approach to pragmatic nonfiction

type topics, and that's sort of my secret sauce. And so I think my liberal arts education there almost certainly helped. I mean, there's a lot of, I say, technical academics that maybe have come entirely up in technical circles and aren't that great at writing. And so that probably was an advantage. I did a lot of writing at Dartmouth. I wrote for the newspaper, which was called the Dartmouth. I was the editor of the humor magazine, the Dartmouth Jackalanta. So I did a lot of writing. And so I think that was helpful for my writing. More importantly, though, I think where the the broad liberal arts education was most useful was in just the general quest to live a deeper life. When you are exposed to many different fields of inquiry, interesting thinkers with interesting

thoughts about interesting things who lived interesting lives, it adds more richness to your own life. It's very easy in any field, for example, to get myopic. I just want to focus on my topic, and that's all I do. I want to do it as good as possible. And this myopia can work at first because you make progress. Well, I get in the graduate school. I get a professorship. I'm heading towards tenure.

But eventually you'll hit a plateau. All right, this is where I am. There's other people who are better or you hit a bad spell. Things aren't going well for me. And if all you have is I've been focusing on this one academic craft, that can be psychologically speaking, quite daunting. I've always had a lot of other things that I've been exposing my mind to. When I was at MIT, I would go and read the transcendentalist at the banks of the

Charles or on the Boston Commons. I would get the books out of the MIT library and I would bring them and go read them in scenic locations. As a postdoc, we lived on historic Beacon Hill. And I just love the aesthetics of the brick cobblestone streets and brick townhouses. And they had real honest of goodness gas powered lamps, you know, street lamps. And I would walk in the fog. I'd walk my dog and listen to interesting books. And I think all this stuff helped because it gives you a a richer appreciation of the world of ideas and life so that you don't have all of your attention just captured by this one thing that if it doesn't go well, then you're a drift. So I think more generally, that's typically my pitch for liberal arts education, is that if you

approach it with the mindset of, I want this to be the foundation of building a rich and interesting intellectual life, that will serve you well. Now, for those of you out there who are students and maybe feel as if your academic experience is a little more pre-professional than you might hope that you want to get some of that intellectual stimulation, you want to get some of that philosophical resilience. I would suggest you go to my website, calnewport.com, go to my blog. Google search for The Romantic Scholar. I had this whole series of blog post I wrote a decade ago,

even more than that now, I guess. That was really about how to craft your undergraduate experience into something that is broadly liberal arts and intellectually stimulating. So for those of you who are young, find those romantic scholar blog posts and it will help you to gain that benefit from this particular, that particular field of study. Alex asks, how does rooted productivity and the deep life buckets relate to quarterly and weekly planning? All right, Alex, I like this question because it's in the weeds.

it's also a chance for us to apply the productivity funnel metaphor that we introduced at the beginning of this episode, and it ties back to the question of the deep life. So this is the type of complex productivity topic that I do like disentangling. So here's my understanding of what you're probably asking about. The deep life buckets, of course, we talk about often on this show. It's my general approach for helping to cultivate a deeper life is that you identify a deeper life, is that you identify, the main buckets in your life, the things that really matter to you. I'm usually needlessly illiterative when I talk about these, so we get things like craft, community, constitution, contemplation, celebration we sometimes throw in there. And I argue that you need to identify

these buckets and then focus on each of them, right? And this is an effort you return to again and again to make sure that each of the areas of your life, each of the areas you think are important, are getting attention where overall you're trying to make sure that you're giving energy to the things that matter in each of these buckets and not wasting too much energy on things. They don't matter. All right. That's a deep life bucket approach. And I have a particular strategy I talk about for engaging with these buckets where you start

with a keystone habit in each. Then you take one bucket at a time. You spend four to six weeks per bucket and sort of overhaul that area of your life. And you return to this activity once or twice a year. It's a continual upgrade process. where does this work exist? This is what Alex is asking. Where is it written down?

Here are my buckets. Here's what I'm working on. Here's my keystone habit. Here's what I'm working on, you know, I'm working on this bucket, this month, and here's what I'm trying to do. In general, here are my general rules for each of these buckets or what I've done in my life. Like, where does this all exist? And it's a good question because the answer is in multiple places where the details depend on

specifically how you implement your own productivity funnel. So if we look at that metaphor, the metaphor, mind you, of the funnel, roughly speaking, the buckets are impacting activity selection, right? I mean, in some sense, knowing what matters to you and having a minimalist mindset of not wasting energy in each of these buckets, it's going to help you decide what you do and don't do. So it sort of exists there. Whereas something like quarterly and weekly planning that Alex mentions, that's down

at the organization level of the funnels, that's something that you make sense of the things that you've committed to do. But the information for the buckets can exist in multiple places. Probably you're going to have some sort of document that your rooted productivity system, so that was relevant.

You mentioned that too, Alex, that your rooted productivity system will point to because rooted productivity just says I have one document or one directory where everything relevant to my systems exist so I can kind of look it up and I don't have to remember it all. So you probably have some document

that it points to that maybe you keep track of your buckets. I've talked about this. I do this. I call it my values, not my buckets, but it's my values, but it's the same idea, and I list out these different roles

of my life and my vision for what's important there and what I'm trying to achieve. And you probably need something similar. And the root of your rooted productivity system can point to that document. So that's where that's captured. Somewhere you probably capture these keystone habits.

You could have a separate document for this. Here are my, you know, my habits. I track these. I use the metric space and my time block plan. planter perhaps to track these every day. That's where the keystone habits or related habits

for each of these buckets can live. And then there might be things you were doing within the given quarter that are inspired by the buckets. Okay, I've been focusing on the Constitution bucket. I'm trying to get in the better shape. I'm going to build out a gym in my garage. I'm going to clean it out. I'm going to build a gym in that garage. That's a plan that needs to exist on your quarterly plan because you need to see it each week and make sure that you're making progress on it. So again, that's relevant to your buckets, but now this exists in those planning documents. So the information about these buckets can exist in multiple different documents, documents that can span different levels of the productivity funnel.

In fact, I tend to take, so like the core of the habits, the keystone habits, the metrics I track, I put them in my strategic plans, roughly what I call my quarterly plans. I have them in there. I could have them in a separate document, and that's just, taste, right? So your information should be written down about these, but it could exist in multiple different forms and multiple different documents.

And some of these documents are at the organization level of the funnel, and some of these documents are pure activity selection. Like, these are the things I care about, and you look at that when you're trying to make decisions about what you select. What matters is if you're following a rooted productivity system, somewhere you have a list of here's the different things I do, and you can point to those documents and where this information exists,

and you don't have to worry about it. It's written down somewhere. So that's how I keep track of that information. It is a good question, though, because again, this blurs slightly the boundaries of the funnel. Buckets help you select activities, but buckets also influence what you're doing this month or doing this quarter. And so they also influence things that exist at the organizational level, et cetera. But at least this funnel helps us talk about these things more clearly. And so, Alex, I know that's a somewhat intricate answer, but it's a somewhat intricate question.

Let me just try to do a really quick summary. So I'm sort of doing this on the fly here. Somewhere you need to keep track of, here's the things I care about, my buckets or whatever you want to call them. Somewhere you need to keep track of the regular commitments that you've made to those buckets, be these keystone habits or rules or processes or codes or whatever. Where you keep track of this information is up to you. If you follow rooted productivity, you can just point to that information. Short-term things that you are doing to service these buckets exist in the standard types of quarterly plans, where you would put any sort of short-term project. All right. So Alex, I hope that clarifies things.

What this clarifies for me is that it's time to wrap up this week's episode. To find out how to ask your own questions, go to calnewport.com slash podcast. Remember to subscribe to my email newsletter to get my famed weekly essay at calnewport.com. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. Thank you.