Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 9: Habit Tune-Up: Dumbing Down Smartphones, Deep Habits, Progress on Non-Urgent Projects and Training Focus

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

In this mini-episode, I take "calls" from listeners asking for advice about how best to tune-up their productivity and work habits in a moment of increased distraction and disruption.Here are the topics we cover: [1:30] Making an iPhone less distracting.[9:08] Keystone habits to help deep work stick.[12:45] Making progress on a non-urgent big project.[17:29] Training your ability to focus.Thanks to listener 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.

How can I practice and develop that skill to focus for longer and be less distracted? I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep question's habit tune-up mini-episode. As you might remember from last week, in the Habit-Tune-up mini-episode format, I focus exclusively on trying to stay productive in an unusually disrupted and distracted times. I will take recorded calls from my listeners and then do my best to give advice to them. Two very quick administrative notes. The normal full-length episode of deep questions should be released on Monday as normal.

The only reason I use the word should there is that I am going on vacation. My plan is to pre-record this episode and have it scheduled to release. But you know the saying about best laid plan. So I'm sort of giving a little bit of a caveat. out there. Second, based on popular demand from listeners, I will now be adding to the show description in addition to listing the questions that I tackle in this episode. I'll put timestamps so that you will be able to jump directly to a particular question that might catch your attention. All right, enough administrative details. Let's get right into this week's mini episode. We'll start

with a question from Kian. Hello, Kat. I'm Kian, a business business. consultant from Iran. Thank you for your great books. They are very popular in Iran. My question is, I tried to eliminate iPhone from my lifestyle, but I can't neglect the role of camera and GPS map. What's the alternative?

And how do you use your smartphone? Kian, that's a good question. Now, the reason why I'm including this question in a podcast, the episode focusing on the world of work is that I think for a lot of people, having an iPhone in their pocket or in their bag right there near their desk where they're working becomes a source of constant distraction, constant potential entertainment or diversion that can really affect their ability to maintain the unbroken focus that in the context of work is actually going to help them get a lot more done and add a lot higher level of quality. So even though we might think

about an iPhone as a non-work tool, its impact on the world of work is profound. So, Ken, what do I advise when it comes to a smartphone distraction? Well, I wrote an op-ed about this for the New York Times. I believe it was earlier this year, though it all kind of blends together for me these days. But I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times where I went back and talked about Steve Jobs' original vision for the iPhone. I mean, I went back and watched the keynote address, 2000. where Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world. I also went back and interviewed the lead designer for the original iPhone. Now, these stories are also told in my book,

Digital Minimalism, but I sort of elaborated them and focused them in this op-ed. And the main point I made is that Steve Jobs' philosophy as a technologist was to find things that people really valued already and then make that experience better. He was not about introducing new behaviors. He didn't want to change how people spent their time. He certainly did not want to capture people's time to take their time away from things of true quality and put them towards things that were of lower quality.

This is why he had a real obsession with things like typography and the Mac's ability to do bitmap font so that you could have elegant typography. It's why he was so interested in music. Music was really important to his life. And he was interested in Macs and in later iPods and later iPhones that could make that experience more elegant. So this is what was happening with the iPhone.

He said, I'm going to solve two problems. problems with this device. One, he was insulted by the interfaces on the quote unquote smartphones of that era, a genre that was dominated by Blackberry, but there was like the sidekick was another popular phone at the time. He thought the interfaces where you had to press these plastic buttons and go through these menus was completely non-intuitive, completely ugly. He hated that. He said, if people want to make phone calls, phone calls are important, we should be able to take this thing that people care about and do it better. The other goal of the original iPhone was to integrate an iPod.

We forget about it now, but in 2006, if you were a tech conscious person, you had to have your iPod and your Nokia razor both in your pocket. And you sort of had the fumble, which device do I need here? Okay, I got to turn off the phone and then I have to, or turn on the phone maybe and turn off the iPod, and I have to switch the devices. And that seemed really ineligent. People thought music was important. People thought phones were important.

And he said, why can't we combine them? into one device. And that's what he emphasized with the original iPhone. It's really 30 minutes or more into that keynote where he even talks about the web browsing or the email or the text messaging capabilities of the iPhone. Up until then, he's really focused on the music interface and the phone interface. So he thought this was a beautiful phone, a beautiful music player, integrated into one device, which he thought was just a better way of participating in these activities that people already love, just taking something people love making the experience better. You know, as I've talked about in that book and elsewhere, this experience of looking at our smartphones all the time.

That's actually a lot more recent. I traced that to roughly the 2010 to 2012 time periods where that got its start. It was led by the social media companies. I've talked about this before, so I won't belabor the point. But essentially, Facebook took the lead in reinventing the Facebook mobile app that tried to get people to use it a lot more. Other social media companies followed a lot of their ideas, such as to move to the endlessly scrolling algorithmically generated news feeds, the use of attention engineering, to try to capture you on the interface more when you turned on, and the hijacking of our social centers with social approval indicators like like, so that it became very irresistible to go back and check. What are people thinking about me? So Facebook followed by other social media companies in this 2010 to 2012 period unleashed a lot of innovations to basically retrain people to look at their phone all the time. And this is where we find ourselves today.

So we have two separate periods. We have the original Steve Jobs' iPhone vision, which it does a small number of things very elegantly and very well. Then we have the post-Facebook transformation period in which the phone became a portal through which some giant attention economy conglomerates through very careful engineering could basically retrain us like Pavlov's dogs to look at the phone all the time.

So my advice is you don't have to get rid of your iPhone. You don't have to get rid of the convenience of GPS or of being able to listen to a podcast. And if a call comes in, it'll pause. You can take the call and go back to the podcast. You don't have to get rid of these elegant features to get rid of a digital lifestyle which are constantly distracted.

What you have to do is what I recommended in that New York Times op-ed, which is basically to dumb down your smartphone, to bring your smartphone back much closer to the way people use them in 2007 or 2008 versus post 2012. So do that. Take off of the phone, any application where someone makes money off of your time, attention, or data when you click on that app.

So get rid of all social media applications off your phone, get rid of online news applications, be very wary, especially of video games, as those are often the most addictively engineered tools in the smartphone. ecosystem. So what do you leave on there? You have your music playing app. You have your Iplod playing app. You have the phone. You have text messaging. You have GPS. You have your browser. Now, this is a contentious point. Some people who are coming off of a real social media addiction find that they have to go through special efforts to remove the browser from their phone because they will load the browser and manually type in the URLs for social media sites to get that hit.

So if that's you, remove the browser. If it's not, leave it on there because it's useful. when you need to look up, for example, hey, what are the hours of this store because I'm already out and I want to know if I should swing by there or if they're closed or not. And that should be good. These are beautifully engineered pieces of technology.

You should enjoy them. You should enjoy that night's multi-touch interface or that very high-resolution screen on which you can see your GPS directions. Just don't give in to this model of the phone as a portal to distraction. and I think you'll find keeping on task, keeping focus will become a lot easier. So that was a good question.

All right, let's move on to another call. This one is from Andrew. Hi, Cal. My name is Andrew, and I'm currently a law student in Minnesota. The productivity issue I'm facing is this. I've been reading your books and following your work for a couple of years now, but I've had a lot of trouble applying the suggestions. The typical cycle for me goes something like this.

I try to change everything about my life. to make it deeper and more productive, get overwhelmed after a couple of weeks, and then everything goes back to normal. I repeat this cycle a couple of times. Do you have any tips on implementing these lifestyle changes in waves or better? What's the keystone habit that gets all of this clicking?

Thanks for any help and stay deep. So, Andrew, if we're talking about the workplace, to me, the keystone habit for making deep work a regular part of your routine is to begin a deep work hour tally. So a simple hash mark tally of how many hours of deep work you actually do each day. It's a very simple habit because it takes 10 seconds.

You know, at the end of each workday, have a convenient notebook. Maybe it's in your briefcase or I keep mine by my desk and my home study. On the end of each workday, one of the things you do is you just write, I write DW colon, and then just hash down how many hours I did that day. That's a very simple habit. I've been talking about it even before I wrote deep work.

You can find pictures of my deep work hour tallies that go back even farther on my website. But it's something that I've done for years and years and years. Now, why is this important? Why is this a keystone habit? Well, when you're tracking deep work, now you know the reality. Are you doing deep work or are you not? And if you're not, it's unavoidable. and you have to record that reality every day.

Zero hours, one hour, zero hours. And that feedback can be quite motivating. You say, you know, this is crazy. I'm working 40, 50 hours a week. I'm not doing any deep work. And I'm recording this in black and white every day. And so what that leads to, I call it a meta-productivity habit because that's then going to push you to put in place

many smaller concrete productivity habits that's going to get that hour tally up because you are tired of putting down zero hours. You're tired of putting down one hour day after day. It's just embarrassing or depressing or alarming or however you want to see it. And then you start to innovate and these innovations might be really specific to your type of work, right? Like the concrete productivity habits that would get a grad student to do more deep work time are going to look completely different than the concrete productivity habits to, let's say, a C-suite executive at a public company would put in place to get more deep work hours. But the point is to have that motivation to actually make those changes. The tally is that motivation. And it's such a simple habit,

since it only takes about 10 seconds. It's very easy to instill as a keystone habit. Very easy just to get used to doing it. You can just leave that notebook, you know, next to your desk. And it's so easy to do that it's hard to talk yourself out of it. Why am I not just riding down the hour tally? It's literally just going to take five seconds. It's right here next to my computer. I do it every day. It really does ingrain,

and it's just something you start to do automatically. So that's my recommendation. Of all the different things you can do to make sure the deep work has a good presence in your workday, starting by actually keeping track of what you're actually doing can be the foundation, the keystone, on which everything else is supported. All right, that's a good question.

Let's go to another call. This one is from Jessica. Hi, Cal. My name is Jessica. I'm a PhD student in English literature, and I'm also working a nine to five job. So I try to work on my dissertation daily. I don't always meet that daily goal, but I try to get an hour or two and per day. But my problem is that I keep moving my own goalposts.

I keep moving my own deadlines. I was hoping to finish this dissertation a year and a half ago, even two years ago. my advisor is completely hands off so all the deadlines are up to me if i want to extend a deadline he's always fine with it so the the problem is i don't really have any true sense of accountability i can set up you know accountability systems with friends or other people but in my own mind i know that I can always change that if I want. So I'm always doing more reading, doing more researching, fiddling with my outline, tinkering with my drafts, and never actually getting this darn thing done.

Jessica, I think your conception of this project right now is too high level and too abstract. You have this real big picture idea that at some point I want to finish a dissertation, but there's no actual constraints on when that happens. And then at the very small scale, you say, well, I should probably try to do work every day. Now, it can be difficult to do the work every day when your mind doesn't really trust that there is like an urgency for it or that there's something that you need to get done

or this effort is building towards a concrete accomplishment that you can see in the near future. And so you end up with this combination of really big picture and really small scale that hasn't been that effective for you. So let me give you some advice about how, for example, I approach book writing. The book being done, that's too big of a scale to get my arms around. I don't think about like, okay, my goal is to write a book this year, so let's make progress

towards it. It's too amorphous. I have the exact same problem that you have with your dissertation. The proper scale, this sweet spot, seems to be roughly the chapter. So I think a dissertation chapter is roughly equivalent to a book chapter. Now, that's something you can wrap your mind around. I'm going to finish this chapter in one month. I tell my advisor, here's what I want to do.

This month is about this chapter. I have the time to do it. My schedule is normal this month. That's what I'm going to get done. Now you work backwards. How am I going to make that happen? Well, yeah, you're probably going to be doing work every day, but also because you have this more proximate,

concrete deadline motivating you. And not an arbitrary one. You actually want to get this chapter done. Get a full chapter done. Fill in the blanks in the reading, write, go back, fill in the blanks with reading, write some more. this is for example how I write book chapters. You're not going to work every day,

but you're probably going to have to put in some big pushes. Like, hey, I'm getting close. I'm going to take all day Saturday and really crunch through this book and add that element I need to my chapter. So you have this urgency that will motivate you to do the bigger pushes in addition to just the daily work. You'll get innovative.

You know, like, okay, I'm going to have to do some evenings or I'm going to arrange for an entire weekend away to really push this through. You know, those type of, those innovative skills. schedule changes, those big pushes that you're not going to do if you're just working on my dissertation, hoping to make a little progress every day. The things you're not going to do when it's that amorphous, but you will do when it's

concrete. Like this chapter, I want to get it done. I want to get it done in July. I promise my advisor. And then when you're done, you say, okay, what's my next goal going to be? It's going to be the next chapter. Maybe I want to take a week off. All right, now I have one month until I finish the next chapter.

Tell my advisor, expect it. This is what I'm going to get it for you. Maybe even put a meeting on the books. All right. Here it is. I'm going to put the meeting on the books. we can talk through what I wrote, and then you put your head down to get to work again. I think that scale is going to work well for you. A lot of writers work with that scale,

roughly one month, roughly one chapter at a time. Do that long enough. I can tell you through experience, through six or seven books, through a dissertation. Actually, a dissertation, I'll say, by the way, Jessica, I wrote while also simultaneously writing a book. I can tell you it works. You look up one day and you say, huh, I'm done with this, and I'm actually pretty proud of how it turned out. All right. So that's a good question. I think a lot of people who are working on big writing projects have similar questions. So focus on roughly the one month time scale, focus roughly on the one chapter granularity and progress will be made. Okay, I think we have time for one more call. The final call of this Habitunet mini episode will come from

Angela. Hi, Cal. So I would like to learn about outside of my time when I'm doing deep work, how can I practice and develop that skill to focus for longer and be less distracted? Angela, this is a question I get a lot. When I talk to professionals about how to improve their capacity for intense focus, I usually use a fitness analogy. So imagine, for example, that you want to get better at the triathlon.

You want to improve your triathlon times. There's generally speaking two types of training directions that you have to pursue. The first is general fitness. You need to eat well. You need to sleep well. You need to hydrate well. You need, in general, to be healthy, right? That's a foundation if you're going to do any intense athletic training.

The second direction here would be actually focusing on the course. skills relevant to the triathlon, so you'll get on your bike a lot, you'll run a lot, you'll swim a lot. General fitness, specific skill training. The same holds if you want to become a cognitive athlete. If you want to have a way above average ability to lock in your concentration on your work and therefore be able to produce much faster and at much higher levels of quality. So what's the cognitive equivalent of just being healthy? Well, from a training perspective, think one of the things you need to do here is have a brain, for example, that is used to boredom. This is something I recommend in my book, Deep Work. I say your brain should be used to the idea

that sometimes it's bored, sometimes it craves novel stimuli, and yet you do not give in. So it just acknowledges, yes, sometimes I'm bored and that's okay. Why is this important? Because deep work lacks a lot of novel stimuli because you're doing the same thing for a long period of time. if your brain has been trained that boredom means stimuli, boredom means stimuli, then it's not going to tolerate deep work. So you need a brain that is used to boredom. And the best way to do that is just to do one or two things every day in which you do not have something in your ear and you do not have something in your hand, that you just go

and do a task, maybe boring, maybe an errand, maybe something in your yard, maybe a little piece of housework, you just do it and is boring and you let it be boring. That breaks the Pavlovian connection between boredom and stimuli. your brain is going to be much more happy with the idea that sometimes you concentrate on the same thing for a long period of time without a lot of novel stimuli. Another thing you can do that just in general helps the fitness of your brain is long form content consumption. In particular, reading books, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, reading books gives your brain this sort of general all-around workout. gets it in shape for doing critical thinking,

for holding information, for building structures and putting information into that structures, for making empathetic connections. Like I roughly think about reading long books, long-form books is sort of like doing pull-ups every day. Regardless of whatever athletic endeavor you're in, this is going to sort of put your body into a pretty good shape. Hey, I'm pretty strong.

You have muscles that work, they're used to lifting heavy things. So when it comes to the cognitive equivalent of just getting healthy, that's what I would recommend. give yourself regular doses of bored of not all the time but just something that you're not scared of read things long form content consumption all right so now let's switch over in this analogy what's the cognitive equivalent of actually training specific skills the the cognitive equivalent of getting in the pool and doing your laps to prepare for the triathlon well i have two things to recommend

here two particular things you can do to specifically train your ability to hold your concentration The first is what I call productive meditation. The idea is very simple. You go for a walk. While you're walking, you have a single professional problem that you are going to try to make progress on just inside your head. Walking is important. If you're sitting still, this is harder.

For whatever reason, engaging your limbs and motion does something to your brain it allows it to have a slightly easier time actually holding abstract thoughts. I don't know why that's true, but it just seems to be true. So go for a walk, have a professional problem, try to make progress on your head. So you could be working on a business strategy. You could be, let's say, working on an algorithm if you're a computer coder. If you're a writer, maybe you're trying to work out a complicated section or understanding how you're going to structure like an introduction to an article, etc.

Now, just like in mindfulness meditation, when you notice that your attention wandered, from the problem to think about something else, like an email you have to ride or a TV show you saw recently, you just notice that drifting and bring your attention back to the problem. It'll drift again. You notice that drifting. You bring the attention back to the problem. Now, if you're new to this,

you will experience it as very difficult to actually hold something just in your head to keep it there, to keep all the variables in place, and then to try to push a little deeper, then hold that new progress in place, and then push a little deeper. This is actually really hard to do if you're not used to it. But here's the thing.

If you persist, you'll get better. So productive meditation, it's a pretty intense training regimen, but it really gives good results. If you do this a few times a week for a month or two, your ability to hold information in your head and then make cognitive or conceptual progress on that information just in your head will significantly improve. I really swear by this exercise

It's something I would recommend. The other training technique is what I sometimes call Roosevelt dashes based off of Teddy Roosevelt's famed approach to reading or taking in information or doing schoolwork doing his Harvard days where when he turned to something, he would do it with incredible intensity.

And because of this, he could get through a lot of intellectual material in a short amount of time. Famously, he would read at least one book a day even during he. his years in the White House. So what are Roosevelt dashes? Well, you try to replicate that for short time periods.

And then as you consistently hit those time periods, you increase the time. So get a timer. Say, okay, here's a hard intellectual problem. I'm going to work on it 20 minutes. I can set the timer, but really it's going to be an intense 20 minutes. So not only am I not going to look at my inbox or look at my phone, the normal rules that keep a work block, technically a deep work block. you're actually going to try to keep your attention really focused.

Almost like with productive meditation, you don't really want to let your attention wander. You're going to say, I'm just going to do this hardcore. 20 minutes might be all you can do at first. And if you slip up and glance at something or let your mind seriously wander for a non-trivial amount of time, you stopped a timer and say that session doesn't count. When you can consistently hit the time of a given length,

your session's time consistently, right? So you hit the 20 minutes again and again, up at the 30. Once you can hit those with no problem, up at the 40 and so on. What you really want to get to eventually would be probably 90 minutes. That's about a limit.

It's going to get pretty hard after that to keep attention really intensely focused. Also, your schedule is probably not going to have enough blocks of greater than 90 minutes to even make that worthwhile. So your goal here with the Roosevelt dashes is like a sprinter doing interval training to increase your sprint endurance

so you can get up to this case about 90 minutes. So once you can lock in for 90 minutes and give something really unbroken concentration, well, now, you know, you're putting up metaphorical triathlon times that are going to be pretty impressive to your friends and family. Right. So that's what I'd recommend there. So let me just quickly summarize here, Angela. You have two classes of training, the sort of general cognitive fitness.

Over there, I recommend expose yourself to boredom and read books. Then you have the second class of training, which, is working on the particular skill of focus, and there I'm telling you productive meditation and Roosevelt dashes, if you actually do these, in a one-the-two-month period, you will have a significant improvement in your ability to concentrate. More importantly, the key thing is you're asking this question you're thinking about these issues, because it underscores a point that I make again and again. The ability to focus is not a habit like flossing your teeth. Something you know how to do, the only issue is you don't do it enough, and you probably should do it more often.

it's not like that. It is instead a skill like playing the guitar. If you are not training, if you are not practicing, you're not going to do it well, no matter what your intention is. So if you're one of the few people that recognized that and actually trains your ability to focus,

it would be like in a world of guitar players where no one knew about practice. In that world, even someone without a lot of musical talent is going to be out playing Jimmy Hendricks, because Hendricks doesn't know about how you work through your pentatonic scales to get your flat picking working. So that's the advantage here. If Angela, you're one of the few people who was actually training this ability, you're going to find yourself in relatively speaking an elite

class of concentrators. And as I've been arguing for years, that is going to give you multiple huge advantages in our increasingly competitive and complicated knowledge economy. So good question, and I'm glad you asked it. All right. So that's all the time we have. have for this Habit tune-up mini episode. As always, if you want to submit your own questions, be them by text or voice, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. If you like to podcast, subscribe. And until next time, stay deep.