Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - A World Without Email? | Cal Newport

Episode Date: March 10, 2021

This week’s conversation is with Cal Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he specializes in the theory of distributed systems.Cal is also a New York Times bestselling author who writes about the intersection of technology and culture. He’s the author of seven books, including Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, which have been published in over thirty languages. In his latest book titled, A World Without Email, he makes the case that our current approach to work is broken, then lays out a series of principles and concrete instructions for fixing it.And that sets the tone for this conversation.We discuss how the modern work ecosystem has created the hyperactive hivemind… where everyone just grabs anyone as needed.As Cal puts it, it’s convenient and flexible, but it's melting our brains and it's burning us out._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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good cardiovascular health. It's like crucial to what you do, but we just think of it as like a, so for some reason we think of focus as this like intrinsic trait that some people are just good at and other people aren't. And you're like, oh, I guess I'm not a focus person. That's like if I went out and ran a mile, if I've never done any running, it would be wrong for me to conclude, oh, I'm not a running person. It would be, no, I'm not trained to run. I got to lace up the shoes. Okay, welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I am a sport and performance psychologist. And the whole idea

behind these conversations is to learn from people who have committed their life efforts towards mastery. And we want to understand the psychological components that have helped them become. How do they make sense of themselves? How do they make sense of the world around them? And how do they use their mind to build their skills required to perform and live well in modern life? And if you want to learn more about how you can train your mind, this is just a quick reminder to check out the online course that I created with head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, life. And if you want to learn more about how you can train your mind, this is just a quick reminder

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Now this week's conversation is with Cal Newport. He's an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he specializes in the theory of distributed systems. So Cal is also a New York Times best selling author who writes about the intersection of technology and culture, and is the author of seven books, including two that I bet you've heard of, Digital Minimalism, and then the other one, Deep Work, which have been published in over 30 languages. And his latest book is titled A World Without Email. And when I first read that title, I was like, oh my God, what are we doing here? And so, because I would love a world without email. I feel inundated by it. I struggle with my email. And so I have a

good system for it now, but sometimes it just gets a little wild. And so he makes the case that our current approach to work is broken. And then he lays out a series of principles and concrete instructions for fixing what's broken. And that sets the tone for this conversation. We discuss how the modern work ecosystem has created the hyperactive hive mind, where everyone just grabs anyone as needed. And that's part and parcel of some of the, you know, the technology features that are in place where you can just ping somebody at will. But also it's this anxiety that sits underneath that I need to get something done now. And then the entitlement or narcissism that sits

with that, which is like, well, I don't care what you're doing. I need that. And my needs are more important than anyone else's. And so as Cal puts it, it's convenient and flexible, but it's melting our brains and it's burning us out. So I highly recommend checking out Cal's new book and any of his other books for that matter. And now let's jump right into this conversation with the legend Cal Newport. Cal, how are you? I'm doing great. I'm excited to be on the show. Thank you. You're a pretty intense person. I can tell already. You are a serious human. You think deeply, evidenced by one of your books, Deep Work. But when I double

click under there, like, how are you? What does that mean to you when you think, like, how really am I? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, is all cylinders of your life firing properly? It's probably the way I think about it. Not is it all going well, but in the different areas of your life firing properly is probably the way I think about it. Not is it all going well, but in the different areas of your life that are important, are you getting after it in those areas in ways that you're happy about? And because for me, not doing well, if the answer is not so well or overwhelmed or the dreaded busy, that usually means one of those areas is getting neglected. One of the areas I'm getting slammed in and that's when I'm not okay. Is that off the cuff response or is that something you've thought about that? That's what

I'm doing well means. You know, I've started thinking about it in more explicit terms since the pandemic started. So I started a podcast during the pandemic and I thought I would be talking mainly about the sort of world of business type advice I'm known for with like deep work or with a world without email. And just because of the nature of the day, the nature of the world, I found myself developing and talking a lot. We called it on the show, the buckets that make up the deep life. And I found myself talking about this term, the deep life a lot and talking about the different areas of your life and how you, you service each of these areas of your life. I hadn't been writing about that before. It's not in my books. It just felt like a natural reaction to what was going on into the world so in some sense yeah

it is something i've thought through but it's something i've thought through since march and you go before that i don't think i had the vocabulary for it yeah i think that is true for anyone who's on the innovation kind of um i don't want to say frontier but in that space of trying to figure things out and then there's a forcing function where it's environmental or cultural or political or performance-based. And there's a forcing function. It goes, okay, how do I think about life or myself or others or my craft? And it sounds like for contemplative, introspective human that you are, that you said, yeah, what

are the big buckets? When we strip this back, what are the big buckets? And so your work is really about being present. And actually, that's what I take your work to be about. And I'm going to share that with you because that is my life purpose, to help others live in the present moment more often. That is my entire life purpose, dude. So your work is eloquent to that purpose and passion. So I'm excited for the conversation. I'm excited to meet you and better understand some of the insights and practices that have been important for you and understand where you learned them as well. So can I start kind of right out the gate on your new book? And email is a problem for me. Okay. I'm not the first person to say that to you. I know that, you know, it was probably a problem for you too. So I want to set a little bit of context, Cal, is that our company is a mindful company. Finding Mastery is a mindful company.

We meditate once a week together. Everybody's got their practices that we're supporting because we understand the value of both insight and wisdom and being fully present so that you can express your craft, your genius, whatever it might be. Okay. Now I got text pinging. We got emails flying. We got communication platforms that are zipping and binging and the whole thing, you know, teams and Slack and whatever. And we're trying to solve things as fast as we possibly can with each other. We need each other. It's a full-on ecosystem that we're in. Now I read your work and I go, how I get, I, I, I want you to say, I want you to say, okay, Mike, here's best practices to solve what it is that you and people just like you, just about everyone in the business world is trying to figure out.

So I'm sharing with you. I'm, I'm, I'm in it, dude. And I'm stoked to have this conversation with you. I'm going to stop talking. Let her rip. It's time for me to solve all your email problems. Well, that's the idea. I mean, but let me say it goes all the way back to 2016. This book goes all the way back to 2016. So I had just published deep work at that point. Then, you know, deep work was really much more about, let's not forget the value of focused effort, right? When you're concentrating

on something intensely without switching your attention and looking at email and looking at the internet, looking at your phone, you produce much more value, the type of value that moves the needle. We've kind of forgotten this, we're too busy and distracted, but that book just basically said, you know, we're distracted because of things like email. Like you should make sure that you're not too distracted by it. Now let's get into why. And let's talk about how to train your ability to focus. Almost immediately after that book came out, I'm really talking to people.

They're asking the question. I'm asking the question, like, but why are we so distracted? Like, why do we work this way? Why is it so hard when people read a book like Deep Work? Like, oh yeah, we should have much more unbroken time. And then they fail to get it. Like what's going on? And that created this four-year quest to try to understand why do we work this way? And is something else possible? And the sort of the high-level bit I want to give, the bit that sort of is the foundation for the rest of any conversation on this topic is that the key to all of these issues is you have to go below the level of behavior and down to workflow. I think the biggest problem people have when they look at their life

right now and say, Slack owns my life. My inbox owns my life. As they see a book like A World Without Email, they just think, without changing anything else, if I just stopped using email and Slack, it would be a disaster. This is how all of this work happens. This is how we coordinate. This is how we talk to clients. I can't not use it. This is how we use it. And the whole point of this book is like, yes, because underneath that, you've implicitly chosen a workflow that I call the hyperactive hive mind, but a workflow based on unstructured ad hoc back and forth conversations, the main organizing principle. There's an underlying workflow that's been implicitly decided on that makes all that email and Slack use unavoidable. And if you want to solve it, you can't stay at the surface.

Let's change our norms and our etiquette and have some rules and have better expectations about responses and have email free Fridays. And that's at the surface. It's not going to fix the problem. Eventually you have to go down and look at the underlying workflow and say this hyperactive hive mind where everyone just grabs anyone as needed is convenient and it's flexible, but it's melting our brains and it's burning us out. We're probably going to have to replace this with other workflows that still get the work done, but in a way that much more respects how our brain actually operates. So we have to kind of drill deep and we have to get below the level of hacks. We have to get below the level of norms and etiquette and get down to the basic question of what are the core processes of your business?

How does information come in and out of them? Can we optimize it? I love the phraseology. You know, uninterrupted authors like the importance of deliberate focused deep work is well understood but hard to create the space to do it because what you're just saying is the hyperactive what did you call it? Hyperactive? Hive mind. That's my company. That's it. It's actually how sport works too. So there is deep work, but when an athlete or a group of athletes are doing something, best coaching, gold standard coaching is to get feedback loops as tight as possible. So when you see something that's good,

if you can give a feedback, if you see something in an error or tweak, you give it as fast as possible. And sometimes you don't give any feedback because that's appropriate too. But as a general gold standard is a bit of that hyper focused interruption at some point. So I noticed that now for the first time that that is something that spreads into my business culture as well. All right. Brilliant. So you've got an audience that says, I understand the theory you're working from. I understand why it's a best practice because, and maybe I'll stop talking, but you talk about why it's a best practice. And then I want to double click like, all right, you got me on workflow, workflow, workflow, work streams, probably.

What are some solutions that you found to be valuable? But can you talk about why? Let's start with the underlying principle, why deep work is so important, because that sits at the center, I think, of, you know, a world with imagining a world without emails. Right. I mean, this is the the first part of the book. It's part one, part two, part two solutions. Part one is I call it the case against email.

Let's get our hands dirty in all of the scientific literature. I think it's the first time that anyone has pulled together all of these different threads into one place where, first of all, I looked at all of the information we have about how do we use tools like email and Slack? What's the reality? What does the data show? How often are we looking at it? What is the context switching rate? Then I got into the neuroscience and the performance psychology of what happens to the brain when you have to check

channels that much. Both of the answers are grim. The answer to the first question is it's all the time. It's all the time. There's a ton of different data sources. The one I like the best comes from a company called Rescue Time because they have software that tracks all of your apps on your computer. And they had all this data coming in from tens of thousands of knowledge workers about what they were doing on their computer. And so they hired some serious data scientists and say, have at it. It's a beautiful data set.

In fact, I ended up actually connecting them with some pretty famous scientists I was interviewing because those scientists were salivating about, I want that data set. They found on average, their users were checking an inbox. So Slack or email once every six minutes. And that includes, they were not trying to take out like other ethnographic studies where they actually would put observers in the office to watch you at your computer screen. They would take out like meetings or lunch or times where you couldn't check it. This includes periods where like you're talking to someone and you couldn't check it once every six minutes.

Look at the research on what that does. It's devastating for the human mind. The human mind cannot context switch efficiently. There's a lot of work that happens when you take your semantic networks that are all primed to be thinking about a memo, and then you shift over to an email inbox and expose yourself to the worst case scenario from a context switching perspective to dozens and dozens of unresolved socially charged obligations. This person, people who need things from you, completely different things to when you're working on, expectations being set, you see it all

without resolving most of it. You try to turn your attention back to the memo. Your mind is now in a complete cognitive gridlock. It tried to start switching over to this and you tried to wrench it back and your performance drops, your ability to think drops. It makes you anxious.

It exhausts you from a cognitive perspective. We cannot do those type of fast shifts. So the biggest problem with the hive mind is that it requires you to do parallel processing, that your main work and monitoring all these ongoing asynchronous ad hoc unstructured conversations, you have to keep monitoring back and forth because if you don't, it all falls apart. This is how coordination happens. And it just devastates our mind. And so I'm not surprised that the hive mind is very popular because it's incredibly natural. When you don't have a lot of objectives and you don't have a lot of people, it's how we naturally coordinate, right? So if there is five of us on a basketball

court or we're an offensive line in a football field, there's a group of us working on one objective. There's not that many of us. You know, we are going to coordinate ad hoc unstructured on the fly. You go there, watch for that, watch their point in audible, whatever. In the Paleolithic, this is how we would hunt a mammoth. You go that way, I'll go this way. It's how humans do it. But when you scale this up to, well, there's 15 or 16 different types of things happening

with our company. And now I'm trying to switch back and forth and service all of these. And there's 20 people now who are connected to the same email system, not just three. It doesn't scale. And so it's incredibly natural. There's a reason why it became the default. But it just simply doesn't scale when you get to the level, the number of objectives and the number of people involved in knowledge work, it just melts our brains. It's not a tenable way to coordinate brains to produce value.

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it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FINDINGMASTERY20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. One of the upsides of the hive mind is that we are able to get something quickly when we need it. And it's a bit dismissive to the other person's genius or accessing their genius, right? You're saying, Hey, I know you might be in the middle of something that's deep and rich and could be a game changing whatever, but I need this document now. But sometimes you need the document now. And so how do you solve that? Well, all of my solutions go back to this fundamental idea that you have to replace the hive mind. You have to say, what do we do instead? If you don't say what we're going to do instead, you're going to have a problem. So you have to identify what are the different

processes that are relevant to our organization. Like we have a process here about servicing client inquiries. We have a process here that's about production, right? Making sure that the podcast episodes, you know, the Finding Mastery podcast episodes get produced and on there in time, we have a process about dealing with sponsors. We have a process about contracts and this and that. You might not have named them. You may have never thought about them, but they all exist. And right now, most processes in most organizations, especially small to mid-sized ones, just unfold in the hive mind. Like, we'll just work it out on the fly. I'll grab you as I need you. You grab me. We'll just rock and roll, right? If you don't want to do that, you actually

have to think through each of these processes. And I give endless case studies in the book. You do. And they're great. You're very concrete. And it's one of the things I appreciate about your work is that you are a systemic thinker. You think across systems. So you're a systems thinker, not systemic systems thinker, but then you dive down into practical solutions. So you found that unique blend that is hard for many. And I'm guessing you're an introvert, but I don't know that. Yeah, I think I am in the sense that I don't, I don't crave being, I get exhausted, I guess, like if I'm, if I'm at a conference and having to talk to a lot of people,

but on the other hand, I'm kind of realizing this pandemic, I miss people. I like being around people. So I don't know. I thought I was normally characterize myself as an introvert, but an introvert who just really likes people, if that's possible. Oh, no, no, no. Yeah. Let's double click on that because I think it's a misnomer a bit. Introversion, extroversion. And so in the worst case, we tend to think that an introvert is shy. That's not true. And an extrovert is just gregarious, the outgoing, likable. That's not true. You can be an extrovert and not like people. It's a bit of a crisis. But introversion is how do you gather energy? Do you gather from thinking and feeling and mulling something and grokking with something? Is that how you gather energy? And you can get that from one-on-one conversations, one-on-two conversations. And then when an introvert speaks, pay attention, because I thought about it. They don't change their mind on the whim like us crazy extroverts.

So extroverts will be in a conversation, and how do you know that they're thinking? Because they're moving their lips. And they'll change their mind three times and the introvert goes well you just what what are you doing like you just said this 30 seconds ago the exact you know so there's the crazy making tension but really intro and extroversion is about how do you gather energy and so hopefully you're an introvert that likes people it makes for you know nice eq you know social i IQ, whatever that can blend together. It sounds like that because the reason I say that, Cal, is because you're waving the flag that all the introverts on my team wave, but they don't have the solution that you have, and nor do I have the solution that you have. And so open office spaces is actually like the worst thing you could do for

an introvert. And it's actually, in your mind, probably one of the greatest constrictors to deep work and deep output. Yeah, it's a weird, it was a weird movement. I mean, the best research I saw on it, I think this was Alex Pentland's lab at MIT, is they put these meters on people. So you could actually detect quantitatively, are you talking to someone? And the paradox of open offices, they're bad for extroverts too, because the amount of person-to-person interaction goes down. And it goes down because people are worried about bothering other people. It's this weird paradox of open office, like, oh, if we're all in the same space, we'll like grab each other and have all these ideas and it'll be serendipitous.

People send more emails and talk to each other less because they think it's rude. Because now if I'm talking, I'm interrupting 20 people who are nearby. So it's just a disaster for everybody. So yeah, no, I'm not a big, I understand why they do it. But the reason why we did open offices, it's a signaling thing. It signals to investors and employees that you're disruptive and that shouldn't be dismissed because you need good employees and you need investment. So it's not like they were irrational, but they don't have the, they're not in any way

about making employees more productive or more creative or more effective. Yeah, for sure. Okay. Cal, why'd you get into this work? You know, were you frustrated? Were you the frustrated introvert that couldn't get shit done? Of all the things that you could research, why did you go down this path? I was frustrated. It was a convergence of my frustration plus a trajectory of writing that had started years earlier. So I wrote a book in 2012 called So Good They Can't Ignore You.

And I wrote this when I was in my 20s. And it was about career advice. And it had this premise about, well, whatever, we put too much emphasis on pre-existing passion and not enough emphasis on building rare and valuable skills. And there was this natural follow-up question to that, which was, well, how do I build rare and valuable skills? And, you know, at this point, I had been training at the theory group at

MIT and I was now a young professor and I'm a theoretician. So in my world, I'm very familiar with focus as like a tier one skill people talk about. And, and so that led to deep work. I was like, well, now that I really think about it, focusing without distraction, that's really valuable. If you want to get really good at something, you want to learn hard things. I mean, every athlete knows this, you're going to have to deliberately practice. You got to focus. Focus is good. We don't value focus enough. That was deep work. And then deep work comes out and people are like, I can't do it. It's crazy. All I'm doing is email. All I'm doing is Slack. It's like the unsolvable problem. And I was starting to feel the same

thing because now I'm no longer a grad student at MIT that's just staring at whiteboards all day. And it's awesome. I'm a faculty member and I'm getting emailed by grad student at MIT that's just staring at whiteboards all day. And it's awesome. I'm a faculty member and I'm getting emailed by deans and by assistants and by students. And so I was feeling that pain too. And so those came together and I was like, well, what is going on here? Why are we doing this? Who decided that this was, is this the only way to work? Like it has to be constant ongoing conversation.

Where did that come from? Those two interests came together and it was like, you know like explosion. Like, okay, this is a huge topic. It affects an entire sector of our economy. It affects hundreds of billions of dollars of GDP. It affects millions of people's satisfaction with their everyday life. It just was one of those things where once I realized how big of a topic this was, I was on it for years after that. Got it. Makes sense. I think you could take the word deep work just for a moment and call it meditation. Because in many respects, meditation is deep work, like what it stands for, like deep emotional work, but it's also deeply focused work. And I don't know if you meditate or have mindfulness practice, but the idea of working with internal stimulus and external stimulus as well, and working with those two to be able to come back

to the central thing that you're focusing on, to eventually get to insight, to eventually get to wisdom, to eventually get to some sort of freedom that you can play in present moments, as opposed to be beholden by the whips end of what stimulus is actually driving your attention. And do you have a mindfulness practice? I have off and on, and I'm pretty familiar with it and do find it to be very intertwined, very intertwined with professional focus depth. Yeah.

And I'm not suggesting that your book is about that, but just as a corollary, an easy corollary that jumps right out at the brilliant title that you have. And then the double click underneath that for me is that there are so many ways to train focus. And the way that I think about it is actually, I want to sharpen this concept just a little bit, and I want to give space for you to add here, is that we're actually not training focus, we're training refocus. So focusing is a decision. And once your attention is grabbed and a weak mind, I'm going to be almost, what's the word? I'm going to be obtuse here, but maybe disrespectful to the complexity of how complicated this is. But if your mind is

really undisciplined and the shiny bell rings and you can't help yourself, but to be attracted to the shiny bell, then entertain the shiny bell when you know you've got something else you should be entertaining or that would be more useful to entertain. Let's call it weak for just a moment. I understand that I'm not being kind to the way that the mind works. That being said, the idea that we train refocus is actually at the heart of it. Like once your mind wanders, how do you bring it back? And that for me is a game changing concept. I'd love if you could share some of your insights on how to help people be more focused.

And maybe if you use that word by training refocus. Well, I think refocus is at the core of being good at focused. And in fact, one of the methods back in my book, Deep Work, one of the methods I talked about took the main mechanisms. And I almost feel blasphemous doing this, like the Dalai Lama is going to come yell at me. I just had that same thing in my mind the last 30 seconds. So you and I are in the same place, like trying to oversimplify something that's beautiful and complicated. Yeah, there's a monk crying somewhere as they listen to this. Yes. Because I have had mindfulness practices off and on.

I'm familiar with it. I'm familiar with, you know, I was a real sort of follower of Jon Kabat-Zinn for a while, for example. And I took the core mechanism of mindfulness meditation, the noticing, the noticing of the attention wandering and without judgment, bringing it back. And then I melded it with a professional training exercise that I called a productive meditation, but it's very, very effective. And what you do is you go for a walk because walking, you know, for whatever reason, it silences some parts of your brain. It makes certain things better. And in this exercise, you have one professional problem. I want to make progress on this professional thing.

And of course, your mind's going to wander. It's going to be all over the place. It's going to think about emails you have to write. It's going to think about what's coming up. And you deploy the mindfulness meditation thing again and again. You notice it, bring it back to the problem. Notice it, bring it back to the problem. That particular exercise turns out to be very, very effective for rapidly increasing the people's

ability to focus on professional tasks. And if you think about it, what is that exercise is refocus training. All you're doing is I want to practice refocusing, but in the very specific context of I'm thinking about something relevant to my work. And so I'm getting refocus practice exactly in the setting in which I'm going to want to apply it. And maybe for that reason, it's very effective for people. Okay. So if we put it into some sort of steps, you would, you make a commitment to go for a walk and would you time bound that?

Because there is some thoughts that, you know, our cognitive load benefits from breaks, but I'll see if you put a time bound on it. But so you go for a walk and then you establish a challenge or a problem that you're trying to sort out. And then while you're walking, your mind is wandering, jumping over to all the different stimulus or internal ideas. And then you say, Oh wait, I caught it. Come on back, solve this problem. And then wanders again, solve that. Wait, i caught it come on back solve this problem and then wonders again solve wait hold on come back and solve the problem while you're walking yeah yeah yep and then would you put a time um would you time bound it uh not usually usually i would have and when i did i would have a route so i i did this for two years daily it It was during the two years when I was a postdoc also at MIT. During that period, I lived one mile from campus. And so I would walk to campus at a very scenic, you know, Boston over the Longfellow Bridge across the Charles or whatever. I'd walk to campus, I'd walk back. And so I used one of those walks. So that would have been, you know, 20 minutes or something like this, depending on, on the route I, on the route I took. And yeah, and that would be that. And so it'd be

10 to 20 minutes and it's very, very hard at first. You just like with a new mindfulness meditation practice, you go all over the place, you get better at it and you get really good. I mean, by the time I was done with this, I could, I can write book chapters in my head. I do a lot of work on mathematical proofs in my head. All of this stuff is trainable. The crazy thing is that almost no one trains it. Like in athletics would be crazy if you're like, oh, I know it's important to have good lungs, right?

I'm playing basketball or something, but I don't train cardio, you know, like I don't, I don't try to do anything to make it better. And if you're a knowledge worker or you're creative worker, I mean, concentrating on one thing is like your, your equivalent of having good cardiovascular health. It's like crucial to what you do, but we just think of it as like a, so for some reason we think of focus as this like intrinsic trait that some people are just good at and other people aren't. And you're like, oh, I guess I'm not a focus person.

That's like, if I went out and ran a mile, if I've never done any running, it would be wrong for me to conclude, oh, I'm not a running person. It would be, no, I'm not trained to run. I got to lace up the shoes. I think there's probably two things, and I'll share a sport analogy in a second, is that ADD, ADHD, there's a biological component to it, best we think. And so there are some people that use the running analogy for a minute. Maybe they've got smaller lungs or less efficient kind of lungs, you know, and maybe it's true that that person from a genetic standpoint is not best served for anything distance. I've raised my hand. That is me.

I'm more of a sprinter than a long distance person from a genetic standpoint. And I say that because I've had that tested, you know, and so that's a fun dialogue if you haven't done it. And then so there's that. But then there's the other is that it's intangible. It's hard to put your arms around how to focus and how to train it. To our conversation here, it's so important because I've heard for years coaches say, ah, he just lost his focus. Or they'll walk over to an athlete before they're going on the field and say, hey, hey,

focus in now. How? What do you mean? Yeah, I'm trying my best. But it's not a capability that's been developed or purposely developed. So this is the pushback I get when I talk in similar ways that you and I are talking about the importance of focus and they say, wait, what do you think practice is? When we're practicing and we're practicing at full speed, the athlete has to be focused. So we're getting deep focused work for 20 minutes at a time, 10 minutes at a time for four hours a day. Like Mike, that's pretty, pretty good. Don't you think? And then for me to build a case otherwise becomes a longer discussion. And so how would, how would you initially have that knee jerk

response when they say, listen, try to catch a ball with someone trying to knock your head off at, you know, 22 miles an hour in the open field. Like you have to be focused, Mike, that's what practices, how would you respond to that? Yeah. So like, if I'm, you're talking about athletes in particular here, I am. Yeah. So, which is very interesting because one of the groups that I have quite a bit of interaction with is professional athletics. I mean, without giving away specific names, I've talked with general managers. I've talked with head coaches. I've talked with front and back office people. I've talked with athletes from the NBA, from MLB, from rugby, the main rugby league over in the UK, the PGA. I mean, Rory McIlroy at the masters two years ago at his press conference was talking about my books as, you know, this was part of the training he was doing to prepare.

So they care a lot about this. They care a lot about focus. They know it's really important. And one of the things they're realizing, and there's a lesson for all of us, is one of the things they're realizing is that like other parts of health, your general behavior matters. And so let's say you're in a sport where the athletes are young, like the NBA. Like, yeah, when I'm on the court, I'm super focused, right? But if you're young, that means you've grown up with a smartphone in your hand. And you're on that phone every minute that you're not in practice. You're on that phone in the

locker room. And I've talked with GMs that after, you know, have gone through and banned phones from the locker room for exactly this purpose, just to help, you know, people get their phone in the locker room. And I've talked with GMs that after, you know, have gone through and banned phones from the locker room for exactly this purpose, just to help people get their head in the game. You're on it late at night. You're constantly on there. You're constantly interacting. We're starting to realize that's the equivalent of an athlete that says, hey, man, I run those wind sprints hard when I'm in practice. But yeah, yeah.

After practice, I smoke, you know? Yeah. I eat some junk food. No, your whole health matters, I smoke, you know? Yeah. I eat some junk food. Like, no, your, your whole health matters. Even when you're not in practice, that's the thing I'm starting to see come into professional athletics is your cognitive health matters. Those Epsilons make all of the difference at the elite level. And so how you treat your mind outside of just being in practice or in the games really

matters. If you're on your phone all the time, you're going to be having a weaker focus muscle when it's time to be on the court. And so I think this type of awareness is just starting to percolate up that like, we don't know a lot about mental focus and training it, but I think we're, we're just starting to realize in athletics and in business, I mean, high stakes business, they already know this, uh, fund managers who, who, who were mistakes can be millions, millions of dollars. They trained their ability to focus like athletes train their muscles. So it's starting to percolate, but it's like a new frontier in performance. You're right on the cusp of it.

That's right on, dude. And you used an interesting word, epsilon as opposed to delta. Most of the times we talk about delta, but you didn't. So can you explain why you chose that word well now this may just be my math geek showing right so i'm a theoretical i'm a theoretical computer scientist and i work with optimization algorithms sometimes and it's the terminology we often use when there's like a very small gap away from a particular function or a particular value, we tend to use epsilon. And so when I say epsilon, what I'm capturing is that like, okay, it's a small gap off optimal is how we think about in computer science. But obviously if you're doing athletics at an elite level,

it's all in the small gaps. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most

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conditioner, and a hair serum. With Caldera Lab, it's not about adding more. It's about choosing better. And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. Okay. And I want to just hit this note because I think you and I, I almost feel like are two nerds about something deep and intangible. And I want to make it even as tangible as we possibly can, that this thing about focus, again, I'm going to say it again, it's really about refocus, but there is a physiological cost to multitasking. There is a cognitive load cost. And so when we're splitting

our attention, we know that doesn't actually happen. It's to your point earlier, we're shifting from A to B. And in that shift, there's a cost. And it's expensive. And at the end of the day, or the end of the 40 minutes, or the end of the 10 minutes with lots of shifting, we become tired. And so you can use the kind of more colloquial willpower thing, but that's kind of what it feels like at the end of the day when there's a load, a cognitive load that has been heavier, that's been heavier than your ability or your capability, and that's taken place for an extended period of time, we kind of can call that chronic stress. And under chronic stress, there's an overall underwhelming or overwhelming subpar performance.

So I just want to ground it. And maybe I made it more confusing, Cal. Wave me off if that seemed too esoteric. No, I think that's right in it. And in fact, the, the only adjustment I would make just to make the message land even stronger is that I would, I would get rid of the word multitasking because I think people misunderstand that or it's misapplied. I think when people think about multitasking, they think about literally doing the thing simultaneously, right. I'm on the phone while I'm writing. And the problem with that, there's no such, no one does that. Yeah.'m writing. And the problem with that, no one does that. Yeah, no one does. But also no one does that anymore. Like no one keeps the two windows open. And so they think they're doing a good job. And like what I like to emphasize, the way I summarize

what you just said is the cost is in the context switch. The cost is in the switch, right? When you do a switch and then you switch back, that's what generates this cognitive drag. That's what puts in all the friction. So a lot of people more recently thought, I'm great. I don't multitask. I just have Microsoft Word open. I don't have other things open at the same time. They're like, well, yeah, every 10 or 15 minutes I glance at Outlook, but only for a minute. And then I close it and I've turned off my notifications.

I don't have notifications. I'm great. I have no notifications, not multitasking. What they don't realize is looking over at Outlook, even for a minute, and then coming back to it, you have caused a calamity in your brain, right? It's why everyone has this experience of if you're working on something and I run in and just say a nonsense word and then run out of the room. Your attention has shifted, but there was nothing there to hook onto. There's no open loops.

You weren't being exposed to new obligations. You weren't really switching your contact. You can get right back into what you're doing. But if you read through an inbox and you see 20 new messages, most of which you can't answer, everyone has that experience of coming away from that, just dragging.

It's because you have just siphoned off so much mental energy that's like, oh, we gotta worry about that. We gotta worry about that. We gotta worry about that. When you try to turn your attention back, you have these parts of your brain that are like, hey, hey, hey, wait a second, wait a second.

Like someone here was asking us something. We can't ignore people, right? We're gonna starve if we don't have good dyadic relationships with our tribe members. And this person needs something. We gotta get, let's get going. And you know it's true because you're trying to get back to word and you find yourself daydreaming writing email responses how many

times have you just written email responses in your head for no reason that is poison for cognitive performance is exposing yourself switching your context to something that is unresolved involves people needing things it's diverse it's different from what you're working on and then it trying to switch back. And I think that I'm very glad you hammered on it. That's like in a world without email, that's the whole case for why, no matter how convenient it is and no matter how cheap and flexible it is to just put people on the common email server and rock and roll. It's very simple. You don't have to train anyone. You don't have to make processes. There's no hard edges. It's very convenient. And I get that, but it is such a drain and disaster for people's brains that it can't possibly be the right way to work. Amen. And you might have your finger on this

statistic. There was some research that I found that folks that the average folk of cognitive that engages in cognitive shifting X number of times per second or minute, uh, or minute that they, you can calculate the amount of time that's been wasted. Have you, is that on the tip of your tongue by any chance? Those, that number of minutes per 16 hour days. Uh, so, you know, I don't have the exact number, but I can tell you there's a research trajectory that goes all the way back, I uncovered, to the 1920s, where they first started doing these experiments where they have you do one task, and they time it, and you do another task, and you time it, and then they have you interleave the tasks. That's the one. And they both take longer, and they obsessively measured this.

There's all sorts of numbers. Now, they were doing this originally just to try to – they were trying to figure out how the brain worked because they didn't have imagery or anything back then in the 1920s, but we just have decades of data and they, and they, they got pretty obsessive about it. Like, well, what if the task is like this, it slows you down by this many seconds and you could really get pretty nitpicky about it, but, but you can do the experiment yourself. I mean, even just counting and going backwards in the alphabet and then trying to interleave those two things, like counting the evens plus ones and then going backwards in the alphabet. Like there's some things you can do very fast on its own. Try to interleave those. And you just immediately feel, oh God, my brain is just collided. And now I can't

do either of them as well. So you've got a podcast and your book, A World Without Emails. I get this all the time. So I did an Audible original with head coach Pete Carroll. So it's a book, but in audio form only at this point. And I got a bunch of emails that would say, love it. Is it weird that I'm actually riding my bike and listening? Should I not be like listening to your podcast while I'm, you know, exercising? And so how do you answer that kind of efficiency stack that many people are trying to do? I think this is one of the great advantages of podcast is that I think what you're doing is you're reclaiming what would have historically been lost cognitive cycles. Like when you're doing manual labor, when you're transiting from one

point to another point, you're mowing the yard, you're commuting, you're waiting in line at the pharmacy. Those were often lost cognitive time. And this gives you something to do with it. The only caveat I give people, and this came from another book I wrote, is you just want to make sure on a regular basis, you get some time alone with just your own thoughts. Our brain needs it. I think of it like a vitamin. You don't want to take vitamin D all day long. You're going to get sick, but you don't want to have no vitamin D. So I call it vitamin solitude. You need to have a little bit of time every day where you do something where it's just you alone with your own thoughts. And at least once a week, I prescribe do a significant thing, just you alone reflecting

a long walk or a bike ride or something like that. But outside of those doses of vitamin, whatever we want to call it, solitude, if you have a mindfulness practice, you're on top of it, right? You're getting that. As long as you're getting that, I'm a big believer. Like, yeah, so now I'm doing the dishes. Yeah, what a great time. Like, yeah, so now I'm doing the dishes. Yeah, what a great time. Like, might as well, right?

It's either this or I'm listening to music or whatever we used to do. And I was like, I'd kind of rather listen to someone interesting. So I'm on board with people listening to it. They should be listening to Finding Mastery at every moment possible. That's my, how about that for a prescription? Yeah, good. And then plug yours as well. It's too fun, man.

I love this. Yeah, good. And then plug yours as well. It's too fun, man. I love this. Yeah. Or mine is deep questions and it's my, my readers send in questions and I just rock and roll. Like it's, it's rarely do I have guests on, I just go hour, hour and a half at a time, do a mini episode each week where there are people call in. So it's, you can actually hear them talking and we, we get into work and productivity. We get into focus, we get into technology, we get into deep life. It's just, uh, just uh that's been fun it's it's a way of just covering a lot more material than i'm able i can talk faster than i write uh me too and you know i've um sometimes i just want to add this note and then i'm going to come back to to deep questions

is that sometimes when you're washing the dishes, just wash the dishes, right? Sometimes just wash the dishes. And three things that I outline in my book is like, there's three ways people say all the time, like, okay, how did you get to these first principles that you talk about your core philosophy in life? How do you get to your purpose and understand like that self-discovery stuff that is at the core of becoming. I say, okay, there's three ways that I know about, and I go into detail about it, but I think you might appreciate this because it laps right into your vitamin solitude. Is that how you called it?

Yeah. Is mindfulness, writing, and conversations with wise people. And if you have some sort of that rhythm and each day you're hitting some sort of that, one of those three processes, you're going to get there. You know, like eventually it's going to become more clear to you. And I think that you're saying the same thing, like, hey, just build in some vitamin solitude every day. Not too much, but get some in just like vitamin D it's necessary. Well, and not to interject, I just think it's a really important point. I mean,

I'm someone who does ideas for a living. I think a lot of people underestimate the degree to which reflection is crucial to structure your experience and draw insight out of it. It's like the downtime your computer needs. You have to sit alone with your own thoughts and think about things, or you extract almost no value out of what's happening in your life. I mean, the amount of hours I have to spend to be a professional idea person thinking that's like my wind sprints. That's like my drills is I have to walk and think, walk and think just hours and hours and hours. Cause there's no way I can get to the insights on which books are built or this is built. There's only one way to get there. And it's thought hours, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, you got to structure your experience,

build a structure on what you know, take things that you've just learned, place them in the structure, see the structure doesn't quite work, adjust the structure, repeat, do that hundreds of hours. At the other end of that equation, you get wisdom. I love it. So simple. And you know what? You're stacking in an interesting way. You're using simulcasting to do some of your deep work. I imagine, I don't know, maybe you write before you do your podcast, but I'm actually imagining that your thoughts are pretty clear at this point about many of these topics. And so when someone fields a question to you, you look at them, you probably think about them over a walk. And then at some point you turn on the mic and you go, okay. And you probably liked a little bit of the dopamine, serotonin, cortisol, adrenaline rush that you get of trying to find it and figure it out on the fly. Am I getting you right so far? Yeah. Yeah. The stuff I'm talking about, it's okay. Yeah. I've thought about that for 100 hours yeah that was that one yeah yeah there you go yeah yeah that's cool for you and that's in one respect why i maybe both of us fired up a podcast is because it gives that white space to be deeply

immersed in a idea or a person or a concept yeah okay Cal, I appreciate you. And I love how your mind works. It's simple. It's clear. It's thoughtful. And you're not looking for shortcuts and hacks and tricks. You know, it's none of that BS. And so I really appreciate the conscientiousness that you have towards making lives better, and the way that you think about systems. And I want to ask a couple kind of final hits here. Knowing what you know, we could go two ways on this, Cal, we could go kind of more pessimistic or optimistic, but knowing what you know, what scares you about what is going to happen to us if we keep following the email fly-in, zinging, texting, and the whole thing? If we keep following the trajectory that we are on now, what do you think about our future? What scares you? Concerns you? Yeah, I do have a few fears. One fear is the younger generation, because I think the technologies that impede any ability to get exposure to early exposure to focus, early exposure to time alone with your own

thoughts, the technologies that impede that, like smartphones and all the software that comes with them. When you have a generation younger than me, I'm not too old, but I'm old enough. I didn't have any of this stuff before. I didn't have it in college. I didn't have it as a kid. I am worried about their fundamental foundation of concentration ability.

And our economy, the knowledge sector of our economy, which is up to 50% of the US economy is really dependent on brains. Eventually brains have to transform information into value. And it's as if we were an ancient Sparta where warfare was at the very core of our culture's success. And we had a generation coming up that was very core of our culture's success. And we had a generation coming up that was very out of shape. So I sometimes get worried about that.

I don't think we talk or prioritize the ability to focus much. The other fear I have, and I don't think this is going to be borne out. I mean, one of the big ideas in the book is that this is all going to change because there's a profit imperative. It's a difficult phase change to get rid of the hive mind and replace with other processes, but people are working on it. And there are CEOs who think this is it. This is the big thing of the next 20 years. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars of increase in GDP. The changes are going to happen because there's too much money at stake. But if they don't happen fast enough, one thing I'm worried about as well is we're not seeing one of the potential consequences of AI, which is we like to think about automating work and the people whose work is being automated losing their jobs.

Creative workers or high-level knowledge workers say, well, I'm safe from that because what I do can't be replaced by AI. And that might be true. But this hyperactive hive mind is so inefficient that we are leaving huge capacity on the table and if we don't gradually move away from this ai is fighting to get to a place where it can do it all at once there's a huge amount of investment going into ai that basically means we would no longer have to have these email inboxes we can each have our own digital chief of staff that talks to your chief of staff and it figures out what we need to be working on. It takes care of things for us. And it just isolates

the stuff that humans do really well, right? Like here, just think about this, write about this, make this decision. I've gathered the information. You don't have to be on email. You don't have to be on Slack. This sounds great because it means you're going to get back all this capacity. The problem is if that happens all at once, we're not going to need nearly as many knowledge workers. If essentially overnight, we make all creative workers 50, 60, 70% more productive. The flip side of that is we might need 50, 60% less creatives. We might need less knowledge workers. If one professor can do the research that used to take three because they're not on email all day, maybe that department is as third as big.

If a lawyer can write many more better briefs because they're not doing emails and billing emails on six-minute increments, maybe you need one instead of three lawyers to handle a particular subspecialty. So that's another thing that worries me is that if we don't start changing those gradually so we can reassign these resources and grow our economy really large, I'm worried that AI could unexpectedly disrupt the knowledge or creative sectors in ways that we weren't waiting for or weren't really aware of. That's cool. Okay. And if you had a magic wand, would you remove emails and Slack and those types of communication, text functions, would you remove them? Or would you

say, no, we need to do better working with them? What I would do is I would remove them temporarily. I would want everyone to have the experience of the character who opens up a world without email. And there's this opening story about someone who arrives in DC, they're a political appointee, they have this big group, and a computer virus hits their computers. The department of Homeland security comes in and says, we're taking all your computers, right? We have to take them. We have to investigate them. Oh, and by the way, security laws say you can't use personal email. You can't use your personal computers. And they for six weeks had to exist without email. And they learned so much, right? About like, okay, what would you do

if you didn't have email? What would you do if you didn't have Slack? You would create new processes. You'd have more white space. There'd be a lot of things to be a lot better. Some things would be a huge pain. That was exactly the experience of this group. And then when it came back, you could say,

oh, we can keep these processes in place. We can do it this way. We can keep email and Slack just for this. I think there'd be a ton of insight if I could wave a wand and everyone had to spend one month every year without the digital communication tools. I just think we would be so much more, our mind would be blown about the possibilities for how you could structure work, what workflows are possible, different ways of moving information

around this, not just sending emails. I just think it would be great if we could all take a temporary break. And then when we bring it back, just bring it back in a much more intentional way, servicing much more optimized processes. It's such a mind bender. Like I, I'm that person that if you put an apple pie and an apple in front of me, I know which one is more healthy. And I choose the apple pie more often. Um, I want the apple, you know, not, not literally in my diet. I choose apples, but I'm choosing in, in your analogy, I'm choosing the apple pie. I'm choosing kind of the chaos of how I'm organizing things. So I, I'm taking away from this, like, okay, I need, I need, um, I'm gonna make some fundamental changes. You know, I'm not sure I know exactly how to get there. So I'm going to take another pass

at some of the solutions in your book. And, um, I appreciate you like, thank you. Yeah. Well, thank you. Uh, yeah, I hope, hopefully, uh, we're making apple pie a little bit less fundamental in this metaphor. I don't know where we just went. I love it. Okay. So where, where do you want people to follow your work and check out your books and like, where's the best place to send folks? Yeah. So I, I don't have any social media accounts because I'm a sort of a deep work zealot. Um, but I have a website calnewport.com where you can find out about me and the books and get my, I write an article every week for a newsletter. And then there's my podcast. If you want to hear this type of stuff in your ear each week, and that is called deep questions. So good. Okay. Brilliant. And,. And I want to encourage people to go check out

the book, check out the podcast, check out Deep Work as well, the previous book that you wrote. So I hope you're enjoying what you're doing. You're making a difference and look forward to connecting with you soon. Yeah. Well, thank you. I enjoyed it. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify.

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