Something You Should Know - How Winning Streaks Work & Focused Success in a Distracted World

Episode Date: September 14, 2020

Who doesn’t like ketchup? It is one of the most universally loved American foods. Why? This episode begins with some interesting facts and history about ketchup that helps explain why there is a bottle of it in more than 97% of U.S. households. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/20/why-is-ketchup-so-delicious-science-answers-big-food-questions Have you ever had a winning streak? Maybe it was at work or in a game of tennis or chess – where you just could do no wrong. You often see winning streaks in professional sports. Interestingly, some people claim that winning streaks are a myth. However, my guest believes they are very real and that we can all learn how to do anything better by understanding how winning streaks work. Ben Cohen is a sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal and author of the book, The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks (https://amzn.to/32gobSl) and he joins me to offer some fascinating insight into winning and losing streaks. At some point in your education some teacher likely told you that you should never end a sentence with a preposition. However, anyone who writes knows that to follow that rule can be very awkward. So, is it really a rule? Listen as I explain where it came from and whether you should bother following it. Source: Patricia O’Connor author of “Woe Is I” (https://amzn.to/3igwWkT) We all have times when we really need to do work that requires real careful concentration. Yet in today’s world of distractions, it can be hard to find the time to do that kind of work without interruption. Cal Newport has researched this problem and come up with some great insight into how to get that important work done even when your life is pulling you in all different directions. Cal is a writer and an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University and host of the podcast Deep Questions. https://www.calnewport.com/podcast/. He is also author of the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (https://amzn.to/3heGXO9).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, why is it that almost everyone loves ketchup? Then winning streaks. Athletes have them. You've probably had them.

Where you're in the flow. There is something about being in that flow state that triggers our brain and creates this very pleasurable sensation. And I think there's a reason we remember them. I mean, I'm sure that you remember the hottest performances of your life, right? Then, is it really wrong to end a sentence with a preposition as some English teachers say and why it is so hard to get important work done with all the distractions you have like email with email you now have dozens and dozens of these ongoing dragged-out

conversations happening simultaneously so you have to keep checking back in intending these conversations and every one of those checks is like you're taking a dose of a gas that temporarily makes you dumber. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests,

but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named the Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts

a few years back. And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. It's probably not going too far out on a limb to suggest that you probably like ketchup.

There's a bottle of ketchup in virtually every American kitchen, over 97%. It's a condiment with a fascinating history. The word ketchup is believed to be from a Chinese word meaning brine of pickled fish. In fact, originally, ketchup had no tomatoes and was made from walnuts, anchovies, mushrooms, and kidney beans. During the 17th century, ketchup made its way to England and was called catsup, C-A-T-S-U-P. The English used it to pickle oysters. By the 19th century, there were several different types of ketchup, including tomato ketchup. It became so popular that tomato ketchup just became plain old ketchup. Ketchup is one of the few packaged foods that has no preservatives in it. One theory as to why ketchup is so popular with so many people is it contains all five taste sensations.

Salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. And when one food can push all our taste buttons, we like it. And that is something you should know. Have you ever had a winning streak? Maybe you were gambling, or just playing a game of tennis, or whatever it was, but you were on fire. You just couldn't lose. So what exactly causes that?

Can you make a winning streak happen? Or if you try to make it happen, do you sabotage the whole thing? Or could it be that winning streaks aren't actually real, as some people have claimed? Here to shed some light on this is Ben Cohen. He's a sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal and author of the book, The Hot Hand, The Mystery and Science of Streaks. Hi, Ben. Thank you for having me.

So what is a winning streak? How do you define it, first of all? What makes a streak a winning streak? That is an excellent question. To me, this idea of streaks and the hot hand is when success leads to more success. That's kind of the simplest way to put it. So in basketball, it's when you make one shot and then another shot and another shot, and you feel more likely to make your next shot because you've just made a few shots in a row.

You feel like you are in the zone. You're on fire. But the cool thing about this idea to me is that it is not simply limited to basketball. I think we all have this feeling of the streak or the hot hand in our own daily lives, and we can sort of take advantage of them sometimes. So what of the argument that winning streaks, hot hands are a myth? Well, this goes back to this seminal paper that was published in 1985 that is really a classic in the canon of behavioral economics that, you know, the highly counterintuitive conclusion of this paper is that there is no

such thing as the hot hand. And it is simply a matter of seeing patterns where they don't exist, misreading randomness. And there are many industries where that's true. And to me, the crucial distinction is the one of control. When we feel that we are in control of a situation, when we're on a basketball court, we think that the hot hand is possible. But when we recognize that we're not in control, when we're at the mercy of chance, the smarter thing to do is to believe that there is no such thing as the hot hand and that, you know, anything that happens is sort of

random. And you can't really assign agency to that situation. So investing is a pretty good example of that. And so is farming. Farming is sort of the exact opposite of basketball. Explain. What do you mean? Well, in farming, the single most influential determinant of success is out of your control. It's the weather. Like, so every year in farming is kind of different. And to believe that, you know, because you had a few good years in a row that is going to result in another good year is foolish and it can kind of cost you everything. Whereas in basketball, you do have a little bit more control. And, you know, there's a reason

why NBA players swear that there is such a thing as the hot hand. And anybody who has played basketball kind of relates to them because we have felt this for ourselves. And we've seen it happen on the biggest stages of the game. Other than just being interesting, a phenomenon in basketball, how does it, does it translate off the court? Well, yeah. I mean, the reason why these economists and the psychologists spent so much time thinking about this idea is because it applies widely beyond basketball. This is really a matter of how we make judgments and decisions and how the human mind works. And so if you are a money manager or, you know, probably more aptly for a lot of us, if you are giving your money to an investment professional, do you want to give your money to someone who claims to beat the market every year? Or do you

want to dump that money into an index fund? I think that's a question that a lot of us have, you know, in our daily lives. Is there a way for you to take advantage of the hot hand in your own career? And I think there probably is. And we've seen that, you know, in many cases throughout history. I mean, in this book, I write about Rob Reiner, the movie director, who was able to take advantage of the hot hand in his own career to make a whole bunch of movies that nobody wanted him to make. And the only reason he was able to make them was because he was able to parlay his success of a few hits in a row to create another hit. When I hear the phrase hot hand, though, that you've used several times, hot hand, I assume, refers to playing cards,

gambling. And there's a difference between gambling, which is much more chancy than Rob Reiner or an NBA basketball player, where there's real skill involved. Well, of course there is. And, you know, the corollary of the hot hand in many respects is this idea called the gambler's fallacy. And the difference between the hot hand and the gambler's fallacy can actually be seen every time you walk into a casino, as you just pointed out. If you walk into a basketball arena and you see someone like Steph Curry make three shots in a row, everybody in the arena thinks that he is making a fourth shot. If you walk into a casino and you go to the roulette wheel and you see the wheel

land on red three times in a row, what research shows is that most people actually bet on black the next time. They bet on the streak to end and not continue. And the question is why, right? We see three things in a row happen and in in basketball we bet on the streak to continue and in gambling we bet on the streak to end and it's because we're not in control right this goes back to that distinction of human agency and so I think you're exactly right to believe that that you can sort of beat the odds and roulette is silly because it's an independent event. You have no agency over that situation.

Basketball is not quite the same, and I think that life is much closer to basketball than it is the roulette wheel. When I think of somebody on a winning streak, I don't usually think of the third string, benchwarmer kind of player who is all of a sudden playing at a first string level. I don't think of that as a winning streak, although I guess it is, as much as I think of the elite player who's playing a little more elite than he normally plays, rather than the lousy player who's playing better. Well, the lousy guy doing really good is describing my own pathetic high school basketball career. But I see your point.

And I think that is what we remember because I do think that the hot hand at the right time can change everything. In fact, it kind of changed everything for Steph Curry, who is one of the greatest basketball players that the sport has ever seen. So the hottest game of Steph Curry's career came on a February night in 2013 when he was not yet the basketball superstar that everyone in the NBA sees him as today. He was fine. He was not an all-star. He was not a most valuable player or a champion. But on this one night, for reasons that he still can't quite understand, he got hot in Madison Square Garden. And he made 11 of his 13 three-pointers. He scored more points than he ever had in any game of his life. And it was a game that changed his fate, and it changed the future of the Golden State Warriors and the entire NBA because that was the game when he got hot

that sort of convinced everybody on his team that he should shoot more and he should be able to do things that nobody in the history of the NBA had ever done before. And that was a wildly profitable decision for the Warriors and for Steph Curry himself because in the few years since then, he was the MVP of the league two years in a row,

and the Golden State Warriors won three of the next five NBA championships. And the interesting thing to me about that night, that crazy, magical performance in Steph Curry's career, is that he had no idea that it was coming. In fact, if you were to ask him right before that game, are you going to play well tonight, he probably would have looked at you like you had eight heads because everything was lining up for it to be a horrible performance for Steph Curry that night.

He had played the night before. He had been fined $35,000 for getting into a fight in a game the night before. He had been fined $35,000 for getting into a fight in a game the night before. He missed the bus that he usually takes from the team hotel to the arena. And the bus that he did take got pulled over by cops on the way to Madison Square Garden. So he woke up poorer. He was late coming to the arena. He rushed his warmup routine, and then he had a game that would change everything for him. And I think it kind of speaks to this idea that we never quite know when a hot hand is coming. In fact, I asked Steph Curry about this. I said, do you know when you are going to get hot? And did you know in that one game that you would play well that night? And he said he

doesn't know when it's going to happen or where or why or how it's going to happen. But once it does happen, you have to embrace it. And I think that is a neat little piece of advice that I took away from writing this book. Once it does happen, you have to embrace it. So what's the difference, though, between a hot hand and just the ebbs and flows of talent? That's an interesting question and an interesting way to look at it. I think a hot hand is when you are able to take advantage and change something as a result of that performance. So there are games when Steph Curry, for example,

to keep this limited to basketball, plays well and makes a bunch of shots. But there is not a transformative effect. And when I think of a hot hand, I think of it as a streak that allows you to change your place in the world a little bit. And so from Steph Curry to Rob Reiner to Shakespeare himself, we've seen these streaks have profound effects. And those are really the ones that I think about when I think of The Hot Hand. We're talking about winning streaks, hot hands. And my guest is Ben Cohen, a sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal and author of the book, The Hot Hand, the mystery and science of streaks. Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine,

erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The heresies of Redolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives,

and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today.

Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So, Ben, we've been talking about hot streaks, but people also have, in fact, sometimes the very same people who have hot streaks also go on losing streaks. You know, the corollary of the hot hand in some ways is the gambler's fallacy, but it is also the cold streak. And, you know, I've talked to psychologists who have studied hot streaks. And when people ask them, how do I know if my hot streak is on the horizon or if it's already passed? They give a piece of advice that is somewhere between optimistic and maybe a little bit naive.

And what they say is that you actually don't know and you really can't know in that moment. And the way to achieve your hot hand in life is to keep going, to keep working. Because what you think of as your hot hand period when you are 25 might not be what it is when you are 50 or 75. And I think that's actually interesting advice if you have a cold hand as well. Because the only way to break that cold hand is to keep going. But there are plenty of people who don't get the opportunity to keep going and the cold hand dooms them. So a hot hand can change a career, but a cold hand might end it. And, you know, that's kind of depressing to think about. And I, you know, I don't think that we really know enough about the cold hand yet to make any, you know, huge sweeping conclusions

the way that we do the hot hand right now. But there is that general theory that when people have losing streaks, it's because they psych themselves out. And that when people have winning streaks, it's because they've psyched themselves up. Probably a simplistic way to look at it. But I think that's a well accepted theory. I do too. And it goes back to that idea of confidence that you mentioned, right? When you are hot, you have the confidence to do things that you wouldn't ordinarily feel comfortable doing. When you're cold, you feel like you can't do anything.

And so it's even harder to break out of that cold streak because you question everything that you do. And so some of this is regression to the mean in both respects, right? I mean, sometimes, you know, your hot streak can end because you will regress to your typical performance, but your cold streak will end too, because it also regresses up. And I think that's important to keep in mind when you are in the doldrums of a cold streak. Everybody in their work or when they or when they play tennis or when they do has that sense of being in the zone of, wow, I'm playing better. I'm doing a better interview. I'm doing whatever it is. I'm writing a better paper. Is that a hot streak?

I think so. You know, that is, to me, what makes this idea so universally appealing is that we have all sort of felt it in our daily lives, whether it is at work or in a pickup basketball game or on the tennis court. Now, it might not be the traditional hot hand because me playing well in a recreational tennis game is not going to really change anything about my life. But there have been times when I'm reporting a story or a series of stories for the Wall Street Journal when I do feel like I am hot. And words come a little bit easier and people sort of call me back quicker. And I do think there are transformative effects of those periods in our careers. And they're what we remember because they make us happy. There is something about being in that flow state that triggers our brain and creates this very pleasurable sensation. And I think there's a reason we remember them. I mean, I'm sure that you remember

the hottest performances of your career or of your life, right? Sure. And when you talk to professional athletes like Steph Curry, is it a good feeling to be on a winning streak? Does it feel like I'm in the zone or is it a lot of pressure? Because, God, I just made seven shots in a row. I hope I make the eighth. And what if I don't? And what's the feeling?

I think it's just about the most sublime feeling you can have as a professional athlete. It's really what you live for and what you play for. And not only are you happy, but you remember being happy. And that is why from the very beginning of this research field about the hot hand, since that first classic paper in 1985, when professional athletes are asked, is there such a thing as the hot hand? Almost all of them to a man say, yes, of course, there is such a thing as the hot hand. And it's important not only to believe in the hot

hand, but to behave as if you believe in the hot hand. So get the important not only to believe in the hot hand, but to behave as if you believe in the hot hand. So get the ball to the guy who is hot. And they continued to believe this even after they were told by some of the smartest folks on earth that they were wrong, that the hot hand was a myth. And, you know, maybe professionals and experts know something that the rest of us do not. And so this is one of those weird sort of quirky ideas in which our intuition may not have been wrong. And we were on to something even before the data caught up to it and proved that it really might exist. Is there any sense or has there been any research about some of the objective pieces of streaks? Like how long do they last? When are you likely in your career to get them? How many will

you have before you don't have them anymore? That kind of thing. There was one psychologist not too long ago, a statistical physicist at Northwestern named Dashen Wang, who looked at hot streaks in artists and scientists and movie directors. And what he found is that all three of those industries, and what he sensed is that anywhere he bothered to look, were subject to hot hand periods. And the cool thing about his research is that he was able to put objective measures to these very fuzzy, subjective notions of taste. And so for artists, he looked at auction prices. And for movie directors, he looked at IMDb ratings. And for scientists, he looked at Google Scholar citations. And what he found is that your best work is surrounded by your second

and third best work, which is to say that creative hits are clustered and your best work comes in bunches. And I think in terms of fields that go beyond basketball, that is the best, most solid research we have, that there is such a thing as a hot hand period in your own career. And it lasts for a few years when you are this elevated version of yourself. And that's clearly different from basketball, where a hot streak might last for a few minutes, right? Or a few games. I mean, movie directors unspool their careers over the course of years, not minutes or quarters. But when a hot streak ends, I don't think any of us can predict that, just as I don't know that we can really tell when it's going to start either.

And I wonder what happens if anyone has looked at this. If you try to have a hot streak, do you sabotage it or can you will yourself into it? That's a great question. I think that confidence-wise, you can kind of will yourself into it? That's a great question. I think that confidence wise, you can kind of will yourself into it, or you can put yourself in a position where you might get hot. I mean, I think if you were to ask Steph Curry, he would say, you know, I practiced a lot, I've put in millions of hours of work into the possibility that for a few fleeting minutes in a big game, I will get hot and I will reap the benefits. It sort of raises this question, though, of even though we have studied this idea for

about 35 years now, there have been hundreds of scholarly papers about the hot hand. There's still a lot that we don't know. One of the things that I would really like to know is what is happening in our brains when we get hot. Like it would be very cool to, you know, strap fMRI machines on our brains or be able to actually study the parts of our brains that are firing when we do feel this very pleasurable sensation of feeling hot. It would be nice to know like how our minds are actually working when we are chasing that streak. I thought it was really interesting what you said earlier about the gambler's fallacy that if somebody rolls red five times in a row on the roulette wheel,

that people will bet on black the next time because, well, it's been five times in a row, so things are going to even out. This happens in all different parts of life. It happens in asylum courts when judges have to figure out whether or not to grant asylum to refugees who want to come to the United States out of fear of persecution of living in their home countries. And so there were there not too long ago, there were a bunch of economists who looked at baseball pitches and balls and strikes and asylum court decisions. And what they found is actually quite crushing. They found that asylum judges are much less likely to grant asylum to a refugee

after granting asylum two or three times in a row, which is to say that the merits of that person's case almost didn't matter. They wanted to even the streak in their own minds, the judges. And the most important part about an asylum application is when that application is heard. So just by granting asylum to two or three people before one person, an asylum judge is less likely to do the same for the refugee in front of him. And, you know, that is not, you know, should I bet on red or black in a casino? It's really gambling with someone's life. And so that is one of the things that really appeals to me about this idea of the hot hand and of the gambler's fallacy is that there are human consequences here. And so when the dust all settles, what's the advice? My advice would be to

look around and try to figure out if you are in an environment that rewards or punishes the hot hand. And if you are in an environment that rewards the hot hand, then go for it, right? But you also have to recognize when believing in the hot hand might come back to bite you. It might burn you a little bit. So believe in the hot hand, but at your own peril. Well, there isn't a person alive, I don't think, who hasn't felt that feeling of they've got it, they're on fire, that they just can't seem to lose. And it's interesting to hear that there's some science behind this and what we can do to use that in our everyday lives.

My guest has been Ben Cohen. He is a sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and he's author of the book The Hot Hand, The Mystery and Science of Streaks. And there's a link to that book in the show notes for this episode. Hey, thanks, Ben. Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown.

I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed,

but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong?

Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you ever find that when you have really important work to do,

work that takes a lot of concentration and focus, that it's really hard to get your head in the game because there's just too many distractions, too many other things tugging at you for your attention. And consequently, that important work either gets put off or it gets done, but not necessarily to the best of your ability. Well, it doesn't have to be that way, according to Cal Newport. Cal is a writer and assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University.

He's author of a book called Deep Work Rules for Focus Success in a Distracted World. Hi, Cal. Welcome. Well, thanks for having me Success in a Distracted World. Hi, Cal. Welcome. Well, thanks for having me back, I guess I should say. So explain the problem and what you mean by deep work. Well, deep work is my term for pretty common activity, which is when you focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. So you have to have those two attributes for it to count as deep work in this etymology,

that you're doing something mentally taxing and you're doing it with no distractions, which means you're not glancing at an inbox. You're not glancing at a phone. Your attention stays fixed on that one activity. And basically my argument is deep work solves a different problem than what I call shallow work, which is logistical stuff. It's email, it's putting together PowerPoint and meetings, it's chatting with people, all of which is important. But deep work in a lot of knowledge fields is what really moves the needle. And my concern is that we've

accidentally engineered almost all deep work out of the typical knowledge work experience, and we're starting to pay the price for that. How did we engineer it out? I would say the main culprit is we introduced in the 1990s low-friction digital communication tools into the office because they solved obvious problems, things like email, and then subsequently things like Slack and instant messenger, etc. These seem like miracle tools from a productivity perspective, because it took things we were already doing, like sending faxes or memos, and it made it cheaper and it made it faster. But then there was this unintentional side effect. Once we had these tools in the office, it completely upended the way that we actually work. And soon people were communicating way more

than they ever did before. And now we face an office life in which our time is completely fragmented as we desperately try to keep up on dozens of dozens, unrelated, asynchronous, ongoing back and forth digital conversations. And the need to keep switching back to those conversations and then to what we're trying to do, then back to the conversations, then back to what we're trying to do, accidentally reduced our ability to actually do the core efforts that we were supposed to be doing in the office in the first place, which is using our brain to produce value. Well, one of the things that I've experienced, especially now that I'm at home and my kids are at home, is the experience of, okay okay so they come in and they they have a

question they disrupt my they interrupt my day they they want lunch they want a snack they need to know something and it isn't it isn't the few moments of discussing whatever they want with them that's the problem it's the disengagement from what I was doing and the re-engagement after I'm done attending to them that takes so much longer that nobody ever seems to really talk much about. I think this is the most important finding from neuroscience that we are ignoring in the workplace and to our peril. Because what you are witnessing is something that we've actually known exists as an effect as early as the 1920s. I can actually trace back the various research literatures to the 1920s, where we began to document what's known as a network switching

cost. And the way it works is our brain is not like a computer, right? I mean, we have analog circuits. There's these neurons that have to build up concentrations of neurotransmitters and potentials, and it does not easily switch over from one network focus to another. So what happens in our brain is when I'm locked in on writing, let's say, a really important business strategy memo, over time, the focusing centers in my frontal cortex are suppressing unrelated stimuli. They're exciting related stimuli. It's beginning to activate semantic networks that are relevant to what I'm writing so that we can more easily pull those ideas. And this all takes some time. And then once this all gets going, once we're in a state of deep work, our brain is able to function at a high level. When someone walks in, or equivalently,

if you look at an email about something unrelated, even if that glance or that conversation is only 30 seconds long, it initiates a switch of all of that. Okay, let's start inhibiting these semantic networks. Now we have to start firing up the networks relevant to this conversation with our boss. We have to start putting these stimuli. We need to inhibit these. We need to excite these other stimuli as relevant to the thing we're about to write. And so we begin to switch over to a new network. And then we wrench our attention back halfway through that switch to the original thing we're doing. And all of these switches collide. So it's like a cognitive pile up in our brain, which we experience from a qualitative perspective, like we're having a

hard time getting our focus back on what we're working like we're having a hard time getting our focus back on what we're working on. We have a hard time concentrating. We're not in the flow anymore. But at a neuronal level, that's what's happening. It's just you're causing a cognitive pileup. Our brain cannot do these type of rapid switches, especially if you're trying to do really intense cognitive work. It almost seems like, I mean, I find that when I'm going to do something that I think falls into the category of deep work, it's getting started that's always the hard part. And when you get distracted and go back to it, it's almost like you're starting over again, which is reintroducing the hard part.

It's like getting back in the game is taxing. And above and beyond the task you're doing, it's that process of getting back in the game is taxing and above and beyond the task you're doing. It's that process of getting back in the game that is so difficult that the interruption caused. That is, I think that is the whole game is we, we taught ourselves, we told ourselves a story in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We were very self-congratulatory because we figured out, based on research, that straight-up multitasking was bad. So there was that period where we thought, hey, maybe I can have my inbox open while I'm writing, while I'm listening to a conference call. And we learned through both experience and through

research that, okay, that doesn't work. If you try to do multiple things absolutely simultaneously, our brain is not good at that. So we stopped doing that and we congratulated ourselves and thought we had solved the main problem. But multitasking was not the only problem. Contact switching was just as damaging. And so now we think we've solved that problem because we say, I'm not keeping my inbox open at the same time that I'm writing in Microsoft Word. So I'm doing great. But what we didn't realize is it doesn't matter if the inbox is not open. If you go over and glance at it for 30 seconds every 10 minutes, the effect is the same. You never get your brain back to that fully focused, locked in deep work mode where it

can really do its efforts. And so we think we are working correctly. And it's because exactly this point, we really don't understand or we downplay the cost of context switching. We focus on is it simultaneous and we focus on duration of the distraction saying, well, I only glanced at the inbox because I want to see if my boss replied to that message. It was only 10 seconds. How can 10 seconds be a problem? But the cost is the context switch, not how long the context switch lasts. And this is why I think email accidentally ended up being a huge impediment to the growth of non-industrial productivity

is because with email, you now have dozens and dozens of these ongoing dragged out conversations happening simultaneously. So you have to keep checking back in and tending these conversations. And every one of those checks is like you're taking a dose of a gas that temporarily makes you dumber. And we end up basically all day significantly dumber than we actually are. And it's a self-imposed handicap. We accidentally brought our cognitive capacity down. Well, it also seems, and from talking to other people and just my own experience, that it's almost like you can't win. Because if what you're saying is so, if you look at your inbox or you check your phone for texts, you're disrupting your deep work and screwing everything up. On the other hand, if you turn it all off, a lot of people get very anxious and can't stop thinking about what they're missing.

And so it's almost as bad or maybe even worse than those things being on is worrying about what you're not seeing because they're off. Well, this is true. And we actually have research that backs it up. So there's interesting research that was studying the email behavior of people in an office setting and looking at stress reactions. They actually had different ways of measuring the stress reactions using a variable heart rate and thermal cameras. And what they, what they found is that in particular for people that test high on one of the big five psychological traits called neuroticism, which is a lot of people, you're kind of more

prone to anxiety. It has a few qualitative descriptions to go along with it. Having them batch email, like, why don't I wait, you know, a couple hours and then check email all at once, and then wait a couple hours, that sort of standard advice to reduce distractions, greatly increased their stress. And so we can see this in the lab. And this is, and I think this is, there's an even bigger problem here. Not only does it make people anxious, but that anxiety is well-founded, right? Because if your organization, if this is the way you basically run, we work things out on the fly with messages, we just rock and roll in our inbox, then you actually are probably causing a problem.

And I think that's the huge, this is the rock and the hard place that the knowledge sector finds itself into. You can't solve this problem by just looking at the individual and saying, hey, you got to have better inbox habits. You got to do inbox zero or whatever. Like this is just, you got to be more, have better batch or do better productivity habits. You have to actually fix the way the organizations run down into their deep DNA, because if your team depends on ad hoc unstructured communication, that's how things get done, then you really can't do a lot of deep work because every minute of deep work you're doing might be screwing the other person who's waiting for your response. And so I think

there's things you can do as an individual. But I have a new book I'm working on that's coming out in March that's basically talking about what organizations can do because I think you got to get down into the DNA of how do we work in an age of networks and rebuild that from the ground up. What about, because you had said, if you look away and dive into your inbox for 30 seconds, you've disrupted your flow. But what if you just glance over and say, oh, good, no emails, fine, five seconds. Am I okay? Or have I still screwed it up? Well, here's the risk there is email is like a cognitive trap because you see a subject line. That's enough to start the problem. You just, even if you don't read it, now you know there, Oh, here's a message. It's from this person.

You know, if you're an outlook or Gmail, maybe you see the first line because it previews it right there that's enough to start the context switch now your brain's like okay we got a the boss has a thing we're gonna have to answer that question at some point and now you've got your brain trying to switch over the networks to figure out what's the email we're going to send to the boss everyone has had this effect where you you whatever you're walking to lunch or you're driving home from work and you find yourself writing emails in your head right that's because your brain is like oh here's a social obligation that we have to that we have to answer here someone is asking us something and it is serious about it so of all the different distractions i think email is optimized to try to induce these these shifts in context of these these network switches they're it's optimized as sort of a cognitive resource

trap it 10 seconds is all it takes to start your brain going down a rabbit hole that's really going shifts in context of these network switches. It's optimized as sort of a cognitive resource trap. 10 seconds is all it takes to start your brain going down a rabbit hole that's really going to be hard to dig out of. So I want to get a little clearer and put a little more focus on what deep work is and what it isn't. Because my guess is it's a spectrum, that it isn't either yes or no. Some work is really important and requires a lot of concentration. Some work requires hardly any, but there's a lot of stuff in the middle. So at what point is it really deep work and what kind of things are they? Yeah, it's a loose spectrum. And so I tend to divide types of knowledge workers into three categories because I think what deep work means for them or what they need to do to optimize those effects really depends on the type of work. So if we're going to be needlessly alliterative, we can say there's makers.

And this matches our sort of intuitive, rarefied description of deep work. It's like computer programmers or people writing books or solving proofs where it's obvious that long unbroken concentration is directly tied to something you produce that's valuable. Then we have managers where what you're trying to do is help organize and lead a team of people that are doing that type of thing. But your goal is really to keep this team, make sure they have what they need and they're operating well. And then we have what we can call minders, which we can think of as support staff. So you're sort of directly supporting someone else, like an executive or a maker or something like this to help them in their efforts to directly create value with their brain. So I think those are the three categories. Now, this cognitive toll that you get from

switching networks and switching back again is relevant to all three categories. But I think it looks different depending on what category you're talking about. So as you say, deep work requires these long periods of focused work. But we have also heard a lot about the importance of taking breaks, that you can't stay focused for too long or the work starts to deteriorate. Well, there certainly are limits to how much really intense deep work you can do. I would say most people in an office setting who are doing deep work are probably at 40% of the possible intensity level that let's say a professional musician or test player or chess player athlete gets to or professional mathematician. I think we're just not very used to concentration. And so we're not really pushing

ourselves. Even when we think we are, we're not pushing ourselves to a limit where we probably have to worry too much about exhaustion. But I do think breaks are important. And I talk about it. You can only do so much in a day, but also in the middle of deep work, you can take non-context shifting breaks where you basically give your brain a breather, but you don't expose yourself to something that's going to start a really drastic network shift. So you don't check your email during the break. You go for a walk or refill your coffee cup or do something that allows your brain to rest without actually starting the cascade of switching context. So I think it is true. There's a limit of how much you can do. The most knowledge workers,

that's not really going to be an issue for them. But taking some breaks in the middle of deep work, I think, is also relevant. By far, the biggest governing factor on how much deep work you can do is just all the other demands you have on your time. So, yeah. And so it would seem that it's not just the work and trying to stay focused on it. It's also how you structure your time so that you have the time to stay focused on it without having to, you know, go fix this or do that or something else. Yeah, that's by far the bigger problem. You rarely hear a knowledge worker say, you know, I just, my big issue is I just burnt out. I've just been working deeply all day and I just don't have any

more energy. By far the biggest issue is I have a Zoom meeting and then there's another one and a half hour and then I have my email took me an hour, and then there's another Zoom meeting, and then I have to jump on a call, and then there's more email that was urgent, and then I have the, and they're looking at their day, and they say there's just no time. So I think that's by far the bigger issue, is how do you prioritize and fight for that time? It does seem so often that you spend the day putting out fires or running here to there, but not actually getting the work done. I mean, I think everyone's experienced that frustration of, I've got a lot

to do if everybody would just leave me alone. Well, so one thing I recommend, this was in my book, Deep Work, sort of briefly, but I would say in recent months, and I think this is no coincidence because of everyone working from home and the putting out fire problem getting amplified in my podcast, Deep Questions, where I take questions from my readers, this is coming up a lot. And what I've been talking about a lot on the podcast is a technique called time block planning. And basically what I'm arguing is you kind of have two ways you can approach your day from a scheduling perspective. The first is what you can think of as the sort of list-based reactive strategy, which is I have a list of things that I kind of want to make progress on. And so my day is going to be a mix of reacting to things that are coming in my inbox and then trying to get around to making progress on some of these things on my list. That 100% puts you in the mindset of, I'm just putting out fires

and almost nothing gets done that's deep and there's very little time for deep work. The time block approach is, no, no, I'm going to look at my time that's available in the day as a resource and I'm going to start blocking it off. From 9 to 9.30, I'm working on this. From 9.30 to 10.30, I'm on this call. Then I'm free until 12. Here's exactly what I'm doing during that 90 minutes where you actually give every minute of your day a job. So you're actually facing the reality. Here's how much time I actually have free. Like what do I want to do with it?

Do I want to work on this? When's the right time to do this? If I want to do something deep, where do I actually have time where I could do deep work? And people who do time block planning tend to feel a lot less like they're just running around with their hair on fire and feel a little bit more in control of what actually gets done. Yeah. Well, and I find too that even when you do that, you have to kind of be easy on yourself because no matter how good the plan is, it never seems to work out exactly the way you planned it. Right. Which is why I will say with time block planning, the format traditionally my readers use is a column based format.

So if you imagine you have a notebook and you're writing the hours down the left-hand margin, you know, nine, 10, 11, then you have like a pretty narrow column and you're blocking out times in that column. That's your schedule, but you have most of the page to the right is open. So the time block discipline is, okay, of course you're probably gonna get knocked off your schedule. That's fine. It's expected. So what do you do? Well, next time you get a moment, so like whatever it is that knocks you off your schedule, once you kind of get that done and you have a moment, you go to the next column over to the right and create a new time block schedule for the time that remains. And then if you get knocked off your schedule again, at some point,

you move over to the next column to the right and make a schedule for the time that remains. Because the goal is not you get a reward for sticking without deviation to the original schedule. What you're actually trying to accomplish is that at all times, I have an intentional plan for the time that remains. So it's the consistent intention, you know, never giving in to just, let's just fire up the inbox and, you know, look at our list and just kind of work. Like time block planning is all about just working for the sake of working, being busy for the sake of busy is never going to be the optimal allocation of your resources. And so the standard time block planners, time block schedule for a day looks sort of like one of those histogram decreasing graphs, because you see column

after column filled in as they keep as they keep fixing their schedule. Well, anyone, myself included, who has ever had to sit down and really do deep work can relate to what you're talking about, about all the distractions and all the tugs to go somewhere else. And this is really helpful. This is great advice. It's practical and usable, and I appreciate it. Cal Newport has been my guest. Cal is an assistant professor

of computer science at Georgetown University. He has a podcast called Deep Questions, and he is author of the book Deep Work, Rules for Focus Success in a Distracted World. And you'll find a link to his podcast as well as to his book in the show notes for this episode.

Thank you for coming on, Cal. All right, thanks. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you probably remember an English teacher telling you that you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition. It's not good English. Well, it used to be people had been ending sentences with prepositions in English for hundreds of years. People like Shakespeare and the writers of the King James Version of the Bible among them. But in the late 17th century, this rule showed up,

and it was created by people who had a strict background in Latin. In Latin, you cannot end a sentence with a preposition. So they decided that since it wasn't proper in Latin, it should not be proper to construct an English sentence that way. But according to grammar expert Patricia O'Connor, the rule is ridiculous because it makes constructing some sentences very awkward, and we probably shouldn't worry about it. Ending sentences with prepositions is perfectly normal English, and that is something you should know. This podcast continues to grow thanks to people like you,

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Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict.

And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run. 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again.

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