Something You Should Know - The World of Government Secrets & The Problem with Productivity

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know. You know those coffee cups at the office that everyone uses? Don't use them. Then our government keeps lots of secrets. Top secrets. How secret is it all? When someone who's not part of this secret world

Starting point is 00:00:47 and allowed to know this national security information, typically the reaction is boredom and disappointment because they find out that a lot of this stuff that's supposed to be top secret is actually public knowledge. Also, why men tend to take more risks than women. And an interesting new approach to productivity that sounds like an oxymoron. It's called slow productivity.

Starting point is 00:01:10 Well, slow productivity is a lot more results oriented. Hey, what are you producing? Not how often have I seen you being active? How many emails have you responded to? How many Zoom meetings have you jumped into? Forget that. What are you producing? Slow productivity says hold me to account for that.

Starting point is 00:01:26 All this today on Something You Should Know. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. 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.

Starting point is 00:02:14 Oh, hey, hi. Welcome to Something You Should Know. If you work in an office or if you work anywhere outside the home, most workplaces have a kitchen area, and there's usually a coffee pot, and there are usually some communal coffee mugs that anyone is welcome to use to have a cup of coffee. However, you may not want to use those mugs. According to Dr. Charles Gerba, he's a microbiologist at the University of Arizona. Tests have been done in several workplaces and found that those communal mugs, even though somebody does wash them once in a while, they're covered with germs. 20% even tested positive for fecal matter. Ew. Most office kitchenettes don't have a dishwasher, so those mugs are washed by hand, and often with the community sponge that sits around that never gets washed either.

Starting point is 00:03:13 At work or at home, if a mug has traces of that coffee ring, you know, that gross coffee ring of old coffee, consider that a ring of bacteria. If you have a favorite mug, you should run it through the dishwasher every day. Bacteria thrives in dark, warm places, and rinsing it out just isn't enough. And that is something you should know. No one is surprised to hear that the government keeps secrets. Lots and lots of secrets. But what kind of secrets? Military secrets, certainly.

Starting point is 00:03:54 But what else? Does the government have secrets about you? Does the government know things about you you wish it didn't? And what might they do with that information? Well, why does the government keep so many secrets? And why does it seem to have trouble keeping secrets? You may have heard recently that President Biden and President Trump got into some hot water for having secret government documents in their possession, and perhaps not in a very secure location. But what is in these documents?

Starting point is 00:04:26 Why are they secret? Who says they should be secret? Who does have access, and why can those people see them, but you and I can't? It turns out that the world of government secrets is really kind of messy and chaotic, as you're about to hear from Matthew Connolly, professor of international and global, as you're about to hear from Matthew Connolly, professor of international and global history at Columbia University. He is author of a book called The Declassification Engine, What History Reveals About America's Top Secrets.

Starting point is 00:04:56 Hi, Matthew. Welcome to Something You Should Know. It's good to be with you. So, as I said, I think everyone is aware that the government keeps secrets. There are things going on in the government that we're not supposed to hear about. But has it always been that way? Has the U.S. government been very secretive from the beginning? Yeah, there was a really long time when the U.S. government kept very few secrets. In fact, you know, for almost 150 years, after, you know after the first generation of revolutionaries passed from the scene, the US was almost unique among even the middling powers to the world in having no centralized apparatus to surveil citizens. no foreign spies. Other countries would routinely intercept communications, American diplomats,

Starting point is 00:05:47 and American government officials just didn't seem to care. So that was the tradition for the United States, and it didn't change really until the Second World War. And was it a tradition just by neglect, or was it a tradition on purpose that we want the world to see that we're transparent and we want to be known as that? It was by design and really from the outset. When we're talking about people like George Washington, you know, they were revolutionaries and they understood how it is in wartime. You really do need to keep secrets. You know, and it's well known that Washington personally had his own network of spies.

Starting point is 00:06:30 But he also believed when he became president that the president had to be accountable to Congress. So the very first investigation, he turned over to Congress all the papers they asked for. And that continued. That was the American tradition. And Congress too, over and over again, they proactively took actions, not just to make sure that the government wasn't trying to hide the things it was doing, but proactively to share information, right? And I think the best example of that, it's from the time of the Civil War, because that's when Abraham Lincoln, once again, facing a kind of existential threat, he decided that the US government was

Starting point is 00:07:06 going to be better off if it allowed the American people, in fact, the whole world, to know what it was trying to achieve in fighting the Confederacy. And then one day something must have changed. Yeah, it did. Because it's not as if it didn't happen until the Second World War, but it was a wartime phenomenon. In the First World War, for example, this is when the US passed the Espionage Act. But shortly afterwards, the Supreme Court reined in the powers of the Espionage Act. What began the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, that too was forced to reign in what,

Starting point is 00:07:44 for a little time anyway, during the First World War was a pretty impressive surveillance campaign. But what changed in the Second World War is that what had been something the US only did in wartime, only when Soviet Union became the threat that it was during the Cold War, the U.S. had already begun to build up this permanent peacetime national security apparatus to the point where now, Michael, we have 18 different intelligence agencies. So this is really a phenomenon that began with the Second World War. And what was different about the earlier history of the Republic is that it never stopped, right? And it continues right up to the present day. So for the government to keep a secret document, what must happen? What is it, the content of the document is because whoever says it, says it,

Starting point is 00:08:40 and it's because of the person who says it? Or what determines the secret and then i've also heard about well there's top secret and then there's secret and then there's classified what what is all that one way to think about it michael is that it really goes all the way to the top so this is a power that presidents control almost exclusively you know and in this way anyway donald trump wasn't wrong you wrong when he said that presidents are sovereign over secrecy. There are very few limits on what presidents can do when they decide something is too sensitive, too dangerous for the American public to know.

Starting point is 00:09:15 But presidents then delegate this power, and they like to keep it to as few people as possible. In fact, there are only a few thousand people in Washington who have this, what's called original classification authority. And so this comes from president's orders, executive orders, where they codify who it is who's allowed to create these top secrets. And like you said, Michael, there are all kinds of secrets, right? There are top secrets, there's a secret level, there's confidential, even stuff that's not classified. Sometimes they call that sensitive, but unclassified information. So even that is not supposed to get out to the public, unless some government official decides, you know, that it's safe for that to happen.

Starting point is 00:09:56 Now, what makes the system so chaotic, you know, even though it's supposed to be top down, even though, you know, presidents try to control this and keep it under their own control, is that there are millions and millions of other people who also have security clearances. In fact, there are a million people who have top-secret security clearances, more people than live in the District of Columbia. And all of those people, whenever they're working on something that's supposed to be classified, then they're meant to classify that information at the same level. So the president has access to anything, no matter how secret it is, yes? In theory, but you know, if you go back into the archives and you see how the system actually

Starting point is 00:10:38 works, you know, during the Carter administration, for instance, officials in the White House complained that even then, even they did not know all the different special access programs that were, you know, just pervading the entire federal apparatus. And so that's an example where, yes, in theory, the president's supposed to know everything. But in fact, you know, they don't even know to ask because some of this information is being kept secret in ways that they're not even aware of it. I'll give you another example, Michael. You know, during the Second World War, Harry Truman, the vice president, was not allowed to know about the Manhattan Project. He wasn't told until after President Roosevelt had died. This was also kept secret for much of this period from the Navy, right? This was another example of this

Starting point is 00:11:25 compartmentalized information. It was an Army program, so the Navy wasn't allowed to know that they were building an atomic bomb. So if it goes all the way to the top, that the president can determine what's secret, can the president also determine what's no longer necessary to keep secret? Can he declassify things? They can, but they have to do it according to a set of rules. But those rules are ones that the president can write and rewrite themselves. Now, the rules we have right now, they go back to the Obama administration. So Barack Obama created, you know, executive order, like practically every president who came before going all the way back to Harry Truman. But because, you know, Donald Trump decided to

Starting point is 00:12:09 leave that executive order in place, and so did Joe Biden, we're still operating under those same rules. But anytime a president wants to change those rules, they have the power to do so. And so if you, and this is probably an impossible question to answer with any specificity but all these classified documents what do they tend to be do they tend to be governmental political foreign country kind of stuff are there documents about me are there documents about what one thing that's really striking is when someone who's not part of the secret world, you know, somebody who's for the first time, like, read in, as they say, and allowed to know this national security information,

Starting point is 00:12:54 typically the reaction is boredom and disappointment because they find out that a lot of this stuff that's supposed to be top secret is actually public knowledge. So why is it classified? Well, it's power, right? Secrecy is power. And there's been a lot of research to show, cognitive psychologists running studies have shown over and over again, that you could take two documents, if you put a secret stamp on one of them, but not the other, then in a controlled experiment, people will tell you that secret document is the one that was more believable and the one that's more valuable, right? So there's a kind of currency that comes from secrecy, both in terms of making information

Starting point is 00:13:34 seem more useful and also making the people who possess that information feel more important. So that's a somewhat cynical explanation, but it actually has a lot of truth to it. Now, that's not to deny that there is dangerous information. There really is. And some of that information leaks out. And it's not just like the kinds of leaks that I was talking about with WikiLeaks and whatnot. Sometimes they accidentally release information that I think nobody really wants out in the public. So there have been examples where, for example, the CIA created sniper manuals, assassination manuals. There are documents that showed how to build explosives with garden variety materials. Now, that information is pretty

Starting point is 00:14:17 dangerous. And sometimes it gets released by accident because so much information gets classified that sometimes things that really could kill people ends up getting released and becomes accessible to the public. We're discussing the mysterious world of government secrets. And my guest is Matthew Connolly. He is author of the book, The Declassification Engine, What History Reveals About America's Top Secrets. This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving and arts and crafts for creative thinking,

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Starting point is 00:15:22 Exclusions apply. So Matthew, if somebody has access to top-secret information and they see it, are they then bound for life, or at least until the information is declassified? They can't breathe a word of it, right? If they took the trouble of getting a security clearance, which is a very painstaking, prolonged process, then yes, they are duty bound to guard any information that they learned that was classified secret. And let's say they want to write about it. Well, they've got to submit that publication for review. They're not allowed to write about anything they learned that was classified unless somebody in government decides that it's safe for them to do so.

Starting point is 00:16:10 But, you know, in many cases, there are different rules for different people. It's well known, for example, that the more senior someone is and the more favorable the thing that they want to write about, whether it's about the CIA, the Pentagon or what have you, in many cases, they're allowed. You know, if it was a former CIA director, in many cases cases they get to make news by releasing secrets for the first time. But for most people at security clearances, you know, it's not only is it something that would put their jobs at risk, but more than that, it would mean they'd become unemployable, you know, at least in terms of getting work as somebody who's trusted with secret information. Do things stay classified forever until they're unclassified, or is it like a patent or a copyright? It runs out at some point. I wish, Michael. I wish there was a rule where after some set period of time, things would be available to the public, right? But it doesn't work that way. You know, something that has, that's been classified, there has to be a process to declassify it. It's a very, you know, painstaking process.

Starting point is 00:17:10 It's a multi-step process. And in some cases, it's a century, you know, before something finally gets released. A few years ago, the CIA released what they said was their oldest secret. It was dated all the way back to the first world war. You know what it was? It was a recipe for invisible ink. So it's not as if all this stuff that's locked up is necessarily explosive, but it's because it's such an elaborate process to review it before deciding it can be released that it just takes a long time. And you know what? This is not something that the government makes a priority. The government spends, by the last time they estimated this, they were spending over $18 billion a year in guarding national security information. And how much of that were they spending on reviewing and releasing that information? It was about half of 1%. And Michael, that number is from 2017. Since then, the government hasn't even tried to guesstimate how much money it's spending on secrecy. about me is there stuff in there about you or is it more about you know spy stuff and and governments

Starting point is 00:18:27 across the sea i mean what does it does it is there a tendency of what is secret well one one way to think about it is you could look at um in in the federal government you know what parts of our government are clandestine you know what parts of our government are clandestine, what parts of our government produce and retain the most data. So you have to look at, for example, the National Security Agency. This is the part of the government, it's one of our spy agencies that collects and decrypts communications and they have vast data farms. They're so big, you can't hide them.

Starting point is 00:19:03 Similarly, the National Reconnaissance Office collects information with satellites, not just like imagery, but also then too, like with communications that they intercept with their spy satellites. There again, they're producing enormous amounts of data. So if you just measured it in terms of like, who's got the most secret data, then you'd have to say a lot of it is held by the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office. And a lot of it consists not of paper documents. It instead just consists of vast data sets or imaging data. Now, you ask, do they have secrets about you and me? Absolutely. And there are all kinds of ways in which they can interpret the law to make it possible for them to intercept communications among Americans.

Starting point is 00:19:49 In principle, they're supposed to protect this. And even when they produce intelligence reports that have names of Americans in it, those names are supposed to be masked or redacted. And there are rules as to when and under what circumstances they can reveal those names. But there are so many exemptions. Just to give you one example, they're not supposed to be collecting communications among Americans without a warrant. But when those communications flow through foreign data centers, like when your Skype call or any ordinary internet, an email even, if it's passing through a foreign data center, it becomes fair game. The NSA can collect that along with everything else. That doesn't mean that they can then take their time pouring through those communications and

Starting point is 00:20:35 spying on you and me. I mean, they do have their rules, but they found over and over again that the NSA has been unable to comply with those rules. And there are many examples where NSA employees actually go snooping. Like in some cases, they really do spy on their girlfriends or their ex-wives. And the punishment typically is nothing more than losing the security clearance, right? These people don't actually get prosecuted. So we hear about the Freedom of Information Act and that journalists use that sometimes to try to get information. Is that an effective combatant to some of the potential abuse? It can be. It can be. I mean, there are landmark examples where enterprising journalists and private citizens have been able to use Freedom of Information Act.

Starting point is 00:21:24 I would never discourage somebody from filing a FOIA. And by the way, anyone can do it. You don't even have to be a citizen. You can submit this Freedom of Information Act request, and you can demand that a government department or agency produce information, or by law, they have to explain why they can't. Now, you might be waiting a while, and you may get nothing in the end, but by law, they at least have to hear your request and they have to provide an explanation for why they can't meet that request.

Starting point is 00:21:52 Darrell Bock I'm sure everyone has heard that the government is keeping classified information about the aliens and the Kennedy assassination and all the conspiracy theory things. What about that? Luckily, there have been a lot of documents declassified. In fact, many millions of them. And my colleagues and I at Columbia, we've been aggregating what we think is the world's largest database of declassified documents. And once you have millions of these documents, you can start to do data analysis to figure out, like, are there patterns here? And it wasn't our work, but there's a researcher named Hannah Wallach at Microsoft Research who did an experiment where she took about 120,000 of these declassified documents and she grouped them by subject.

Starting point is 00:22:41 So there is a group of, you know, many thousands of records are about UFOs. And there was a group of many thousands of records that were about UFOs, and there was also a group of many thousands of records that were about nuclear weapons. And then she calculated how long did it take before this information was released to the public. And what she found was that on average, it took 57 years before documents related to nuclear weapons were released. For UFOs, it was only 14 years, right? So, you know, you could do this kind of analysis as soon as you get like some number, at least of these declassified documents.

Starting point is 00:23:12 And sometimes the results you find are pretty surprising. They're not what the public thinks. You know, my theory here is that if the Air Force had really good information that showed we really are facing an alien threat, why the hell wouldn't they tell us? Over and over again, you know, the government has tried to get people scared, you know, of foreign threats. And so for the life of me, I couldn't understand why they would try to cover that up. Yeah, right. What would be the harm in telling us?

Starting point is 00:23:41 In fact, there would be a big upside. You know, instead of an $800 billion defense budget, we'd probably have an $8 trillion budget. Right, right. Well, I guess we'll never know really what all secrets are being kept by the government, but it's interesting to peek behind the curtain a little bit with you and find out why things are the way they are. I've been speaking with Matthew Connolly. He is a professor of international and global history at Columbia University, and the name of his book is The Declassification Engine, What History Reveals About America's Top Secrets. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Matthew. Appreciate your time. Thanks, Mike. It's been great. I really enjoyed it. At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're building. Built for Jane, who wants to break into the housing market.

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Starting point is 00:25:17 Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. Okay, now this is something I think you'll find interesting. When you think of the word productivity, what do you think of? I think of productivity as getting something done efficiently and in the least amount of time possible. That's being productive. And most of us have had that or some similar message drilled into us, that being productive means we need to be efficient with our time and get things done quickly.

Starting point is 00:25:56 Perhaps, though, that idea doesn't really work a lot of the time, or at least perhaps it's out of date. Maybe we need to look at this differently, which is why Cal Newport is here. Cal's always an interesting guest. He's been here before, and he is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He's written several best-selling books. His latest is called Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Hey, Cal, welcome back to Something You Should Know. It's a pleasure to be back talking with you again. So when I saw the title of your book, I thought, well, slow productivity seems like an oxymoron because productivity is about getting things done efficiently and quickly.

Starting point is 00:26:36 Slow productivity don't quite get. So explain what the term means. Well, I think the fact that that term slow productivity hits you as an oxymoron sort of underlines the term means. Well, I think the fact that that term, slow productivity, hits you as an oxymoron, sort of underlines the whole problem. The issue is we don't have a good definition of productivity when it comes to the world of knowledge. So people who go to offices and work on computer screens for a living, we don't have a good definition of what this means. And this has been the case for maybe 70 years or so, basically since knowledge work emerged as a major economic sector. So without a really good definition of what productivity means, we had fallen back on a heuristic, a rule of thumb that I call pseudo productivity. And this says, look, visible

Starting point is 00:27:22 activity is going to be a proxy for effective action. So like the more we see you doing the better, let's just use this as like a rough rule of thumb. More is better than less activities, better than less activity. So this was just the general rule of thumb we were using when we started to get computers and networks and smartphones and laptops and email and Slack, this rule spiraled out of control. And in the effort to constantly be demonstrating that we were, quote unquote, doing work, things got faster. We got more overloaded. We got more burnt out.

Starting point is 00:27:54 That is why we associate the word productivity with fast. But that's really a bad definition of how do we get things done. Slow productivity is an alternative. It's an alternative way of thinking about how do I do impactful work in an industry that requires me to apply my mind to information that produce value. And it looks very different

Starting point is 00:28:14 than pseudo productivity. It focuses on doing less, having a more natural pace, but then countering that with an obsession over the quality of what you produce. It's a whole different recipe for producing effective results. Well, I hadn't really thought about this before,

Starting point is 00:28:30 but I would imagine that the whole concept of productivity came out of maybe like factories, like how many widgets can we get out the door in the least amount of time or how many cars can we make and get out the door in the least amount of time, that that was what productivity was about? Yes. Right. Well, actually, even earlier, it comes from how many bushels of crops can we get per acre of land? And then when we got factories that adopted real nicely.

Starting point is 00:28:58 All right. How many model T's do we produce per labor hour tended to be the right metrics, not just time, but labor hour. Then we get office work rising in the 1950s. That doesn't work anymore. There's no widgets to count. There's no bushels of corn that we can look at. It becomes way more fuzzy and messy what works means, and that's when we get into trouble. So if slow productivity is the better way to go, how slow is slow? Who's to say, and can't you just use that as an excuse to say, well, I'm being productive, but, you know, Cal said to go at a slower pace here. So, you know, it's going to take another year. Well, slow productivity is a lot more results oriented.

Starting point is 00:29:40 Hey, what are you producing? Not what have I seen you being active? How often have I seen being active? How many emails have you responded to? How many zoom meetings have you jumped into? How many times have you volunteered for a non core task? That's just sort of generally useful. Forget that. What are you producing? Slow productivity says, hold me to account for that. I'm going to obsess over the quality of what I produce, so hold me to it. But I'm going to work on less things at a time. And I'm going to move away from this invisible factory model that says, eight hours a day, I somehow need to be at the same level of peak intensity day after day, week after week, month after month.

Starting point is 00:30:19 This is a little tough to grasp in this sense. If you're slowing down and you're doing fewer things, how can you produce more? Because the math doesn't add up. You've got fewer things on your desk to do and you're doing them slower. How in the world are you going to end up producing more? Well, first of all, keep in mind, you will be producing finished results at a faster rate if you begin slowing down in the ways I talk about. So again, I want to start from this assumption. I'm going to push back on this assumption that slow just means taking what you're doing now and doing it at a slower pace. Because one of the core arguments is that

Starting point is 00:31:02 pseudo productivity is very inefficient. It's fast not in the results it puts out. It's fast in terms of your activity in the moment. So pseudo productivity has you jumping around frenetically, moment to moment, Slack over an email on the Zoom, let's jump on a call, let's go back to this, let's go get a call. You're constantly moving. But you zoom out a little bit more and say, yeah, but what did you produce this month? Let me see the finished things that were actually hard and valuable. You didn't actually do much because so much of your time was jumping around, trying to service all these different commitments you have.

Starting point is 00:31:31 So when you switch to slowness, the first thing you do is actually reduce the number of concurrent commitments that you're tackling. This alone is going to speed up the pace at which you finish things. It doesn't take long as you begin to put into place the practices of slow productivity that your bosses will begin to say, hey, wait a second, what's going on with Mike? This is shipping stuff. This is good. Oh, this was good too. Hey, I'm really enjoying what's going on over here. So it's not, let me take what I'm already doing and slow it down. It's let me rethink how I even consider what I'm doing. You produce more when you actually slow down all that frenetic energy.

Starting point is 00:32:10 So can you put an example on top of this to explain it rather than, well, I mean, I get it, but I think an example would help when you talk about concurrent commitments, like what? What do you mean? Give me somebody's job and walk me through it. Yeah. I mean, let's get concrete about this, right? So imagine you have a job, you work in an office, ill-defined in the sense that anyone can email you at any time and say, hey, can you handle this? So you begin saying yes to things, what most people do. So I'm writing a report. I also agreed to help serve on this committee for hiring. I'm going to be involved in updating.

Starting point is 00:32:49 So sure, I'll get new testimonials from clients for the website that we're doing. I can also jump in on this other internal review that we're doing. It's saying, yes, the projects, right? Everyone just sort of says yes to projects. What happens, however, is that every one of these commitments brings with it its own fixed

Starting point is 00:33:04 and persistent amount of administrative overhead. So every one of those things I just mentioned there, there's emails you're going to have to send about them, there's meetings you're going to have to attend about them, and there's bits of your cognitive real estate that's just going to sit there in your brain thinking about it, like, hey, we got this thing we're working on. So what happens is when you say yes to too many things, is that they are each bringing with them their own overhead tax here of administrative duties. Those begin to add up. Now, more and more of your day is spent servicing your commitments, taking more time away from actually accomplishing those commitments. Eventually, so much of your day

Starting point is 00:33:41 is spent in meetings and emails and Slack or trying to recover from the distraction of email and actually do your work that you begin to fall behind on what you agreed to. And then more and more things pile up. And this is what eventually pushes people to try to desperately actually finish that report or get that website updated in the evening after work is over on the weekends or early in the morning. So the more stuff we pile up at the same time, the less time we actually spend working. I'll say instead, I said more, no more often. Hey, let me do this report. Let me just get this done. That's the only thing, this is an extreme example, but if that's the only thing I'm working on, very little of my day is wasted on administrative overhead because I only have one thing I'm doing. So maybe I finished that report in one day instead of four. And now I move on to the next thing. Hey, let me do this for you. I can get that done in three

Starting point is 00:34:24 hours because I'm not jumping from meeting to meeting. We zoom out and those five things I mentioned get done in five days. Whereas if I said yes to them all at once, it might take three or four weeks. So we want to keep our concurrent commitment smaller, actually allows us to complete what's on our plate better and faster while avoiding that sense of frustration, almost nihilistic frustration of all of my time is spent on administrative overhead. So as you're talking, there's something else going on that I experience, and I have a hard time explaining it to other people. But when you have a lot of concurrent commitments, like when I sit down to do an episode of this podcast and I get interrupted and have to go do something else for

Starting point is 00:35:13 20 minutes and come back, I didn't lose 20 minutes. I've probably lost about 40 minutes because I've got to get my head back into the game where I was, get back up to speed. Whereas if I had just stayed on task, I wouldn't have lost all that time. It isn't just the time it takes to walk the dog. It's the time it takes to come back and get back to where I was after walking the dog. So it's extremely inefficient. This is absolutely true. And it's a problem that's even worse than your outline there, because you don't even have to go do a 20 minute task to pay that 20 minute tax of trying to get back to what you're doing before. Two or three minutes is enough to be

Starting point is 00:36:00 the trigger that impact. And what do we do that takes two or three minutes all the time in a typical office? We check our email and we check Slack. Every time we jump over to email just to see, hey, did I get a message back? I'm waiting to hear from something. Our mind sees 20 or 30 messages. Many of them are highly salient from people we know who need things from us, all of them unrelated to what I'm doing. That immediately triggers a switch in our cognitive context. Neural networks begin to become inhibited. Other relevant neural networks become excited and activated. It's a messy neurological process.

Starting point is 00:36:36 So we trigger this whole change in our neurological context. But before that change can finish, we wrench our attention back to the hard thing we're working on. So now we have to put the brakes on that change and then try to reactivate what's relevant to the original project. There's a term for this in organizational psychology. It's called attention residue. And it does exactly have a 10 to 20 minute period of cognitive disruption. So, yeah, this is the real cost of this overhead tax. It's not just

Starting point is 00:37:06 the time. Well, but there's also the advice, if you work in long stretches, that you become less efficient and your quality suffers, that you need to take frequent breaks. But nobody tells you what to do in those breaks. So you say, okay, well, you know, every half hour I'll take a break and I'm going to engage in something else. You're back to the same problem. And also every half hour is too frequent, right? I mean, we got to get familiar. You're going to make a living using your brain. We have to get familiar with how to actually get real value out of your brain. 30 minutes is way too early to take a break. It takes 20 minutes, as we just talked value out of your brain. 30 minutes is way too early to take a break. It takes 20 minutes, as we just talked about, for your brain to fully get in the proper

Starting point is 00:37:50 cognitive context. That's that feeling you have when you do something hard, right? It's always difficult for the first 15 or 20 minutes, and then you sort of feel like you're getting into the flow. If you take a break after 30 minutes, you're only enjoying about 10 minutes of full capacity work. So 90 minutes is really what we should be thinking about. If you're doing something hard, let's go 90 minutes before we step away. That should be your target. And then when you take that break, if you're going to go back to something hard, make sure that your break is avoiding two things. A, it needs to be avoiding relevant work, but on different projects. So if I go and look at email in that break and see something urgent that's unrelated to what I'm working on, but is part of my same job, I'm gonna create a huge clash of neural networks,

Starting point is 00:38:36 and that's bad. Also avoid highly emotionally arousing distractions as that can also mess up our cognitive context. So no social media. Don't go use anything on your phone where someone makes money the more time you look at it because they are going to engineer that service to try to capture your emotions and attention that will also throw you off. So you need to do something boring, like go get coffee and have a conversation with who's ever there or go for a walk around the block. So yeah, we have to get smart about how to actually do smart things with our brain.

Starting point is 00:39:08 It certainly seems that one of the enemies to doing what you're talking about is email. Because if you're involved in knowledge work with other people, it's hard not to keep checking to see what's come in since you last checked? The default way that most people collaborate in modern knowledge work is through unscheduled back-and-forth messaging. This is how we get things done with other people, is I send you a message, you respond, I respond to that. We do this sort of drawn-out back-and-forth email exchange. It might also take place on Slack if you use that tool.

Starting point is 00:39:45 The details don't matter so much as it's digital messaging, unscheduled, back and forth. That's how we tend to figure things out. So the reason why people have a hard time staying away from their inbox is because when they stay away from their inbox, work is not happening. All of these collaborations that need to unfold with these back and forth messages are on hold the longer you're avoiding your inbox. So what we really have to do here is move more of these collaborations out of your inbox. We have to reduce the amount of things that are being figured out with back and forth messaging. And there's two things you can do.

Starting point is 00:40:18 One, reduce the number of things you're working on at the same time, right? So now there's less back and forth conversations that you might worry about that you have to be a part of. Two, take the back and forth conversations that still need to happen, the things you're still doing, and get them out of your inbox. Get them out of Slack. Do something instead like office hours. Every day, this hour, my office door is open, my phone's on, I have a Zoom waiting room

Starting point is 00:40:44 activated. If we have something we need to go back and forth about to figure out, don't send me an email and we're going to do five emails back and forth. Swing by my next office hours. We'll knock it out in two minutes. So you talk about working at a natural pace and I know people, and I think I'm one of these people that does better work if, not that I have to be up against a deadline, but I work better quickly. If I take too long, I think the work suffers. So this is one of the key ideas of what is a natural pace of work. And I meant this literally. I mean, I go all the way back to the Paleolithic. What do we know about for the first 300,000 years of our species existence? What do we know about work? What was it like? And the answer

Starting point is 00:41:29 was highly varied. There would be very intense moments. We're in the middle of a stock of a, of a elk. It's incredibly intense. Uh, that would be balanced out by moments that are incredibly not intense, you know, but for the three hours before that, during the heat of the midday sun, we all just were resting in the shade, so we didn't burn off energy. So we're used to work varying in intensity at different time scales. The thing that is unnatural, so what's an unnatural pace? It's what we did in the mid-20th century for knowledge work, where we borrowed the factory model and said, here's work hours.

Starting point is 00:42:04 You should be just intensely working throughout all of those hours. And this is just every work day, every week, every month of the year. That was the unnatural thing. That was an idea that was created for factory labor. It was so unnatural and unappealing that we had to create labor unions and entire regulatory frameworks to try to stop people from being physically and psychologically destroyed by this type of work. We did the Fair Labor Standards Act. We had to have huge reform. It's a really unnatural thing to do, to try to work intensely without break every day, no variation. KnowledgeWorks said, hey, let's just do that too. So what I'm pushing for is we need a lot more variation in intensity. It is not natural to try to say, I should just be getting after it all day long, day after day.

Starting point is 00:42:49 That burns us out. And in the end, we just fake it anyways. Like I'll just answer a lot of emails. That's very exhausting as well. Let's have variation. But I would imagine part of the reason that that structure existed as well is if you're going to vary your work as your boss, can I vary your pay? If you're not going to work sometimes, well, then I'm not going to pay you something. Well, that's never going to work. So if I'm paying you to be there from nine to five,

Starting point is 00:43:14 I expect you to be working from nine to five. Well, that's pseudo productivity at work, right? So it's this notion, the only way we have to assess productivity is literally seeing activity. And that was this compromise that we put in place because we didn't want to deal with actual measures of productivity, like what are you producing and how good is what are you producing and how useful is it to what we're doing here? of for cognitive work and again cognitive work is not optimized by saying just do this for eight hours a day you can't do cognitive work for eight hours a day you can't produce good stuff for eight hours a day so you have to fill most of your day doing performances email and slack and jumping around and trying to actually match the dictates of pseudo productivity is not a reasonable way to try to produce value from your brain so this was one of the core ideas for my book is I said, well, let's go back and study what I call traditional knowledge workers, people who historically also produced value from their brain, but didn't work in offices. It's like artists and scientists and philosophers, et cetera. I said, let's see what they gravitated towards.

Starting point is 00:44:19 These are like super productive, sort of famous thinkers. How did they with complete flexibility approach the task of, I want to produce. How did they, with complete flexibility, approach the task of, I want to produce a lot of valuable stuff with my brain? And what you see when you study them is it certainly wasn't, let me work eight hours a day without variation. They're all over intense, balanced by non-intense, recharged by application of energy, seeking inspiration past applying the inspiration. And in the end, they were measured on what they produced, which in most of these cases was actually world-changing. In a factory, all that matters is that you're turning that crank. So the more you're turning the crank, the better. And I'm going to get you to turn the crank as much as I can until labor

Starting point is 00:44:57 unions or regulatory frameworks stop me from doing it too much. This does not apply to cognitive work. That's not the optimal way to get value out of the human brain. We are taking, for convenience's sake, this very specific and artificial way of structuring work that only made sense in human history once we had mills and factories, and we're trying to bring it over to another human economic endeavor where it really doesn't fit. And as a result, we're burning out, people are getting exhausted. We're seeing the sort of growing misery in the knowledge sector. Well, I would imagine that most people who have worked at knowledge work or worked in offices have sensed this, that just being there nine to five isn't the best way to do it. But it is so ingrained in people to

Starting point is 00:45:43 the point of you almost feel guilty if you aren't putting in your eight hours, even though clearly, as you've described, it's just not the best way to do it. Cal Newport has been my guest. He is a computer science professor at Georgetown University, and his latest book is called Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Cal. Good to talk to you again. Well, thank you.

Starting point is 00:46:11 I always enjoy chatting with you. If a man is willing to lie, cheat, and steal for the woman he loves, it may be evolution's fault. A study from the Journal of Risk Research explains that today's men tend to be natural-born risk-takers where romance is concerned. And the reason that we are is because many of our ancient male ancestors had to take big risks to find food, shelter, and romantic partners. And those who took those risks were much more likely to survive long enough to procreate and thrive. The men who were not risk-takers and were more inclined to sit back and hope for the best were less likely to survive and less likely to have offspring to carry on that non-risk-taking trait.

Starting point is 00:47:04 The study found that those inherited traits are still brewing in men today. While modern males may have already found food and shelter, they are still far more likely to show off risky behavior in the forms of gambling, driving fast, and unprotected sex when a woman is involved. And that is something you should know. Often I invite you to share episodes with people you know to help spread the word about this podcast. And you may not know, but sharing an episode is really easy.

Starting point is 00:47:36 Let's say on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, if you look at the screen, there's like three little dots. And if you click on the three dots, one of the options is to share. Push share and you can text the episode or email the episode, whatever you like. It's really easy and we would really appreciate it. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

Starting point is 00:47:58 Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa D. Ms for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up for hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and, you know, possibly enrage you. In Don't Blame Me, we dive deep into listeners' questions, offering advice that's funny, relatable, and real. Whether you're dealing with relationship drama or you just need a friend's perspective, we've got you. Then switch gears with But Am I Wrong, which is for listeners who didn't take our advice and want to know if they are the villains in the situation. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events and present situations that we might even be wrong in our lives.

Starting point is 00:48:37 Spoiler alert, we are actually quite literally never wrong. But wait, there's more. Check out See You Next Tuesday, where we reveal the juicy results from our listener polls from But Am I Wrong? And don't miss Fisting Friday, where we catch up, chat about pop culture, TV and movies. It's the perfect way to kick off your weekend. So if you're looking for a podcast that feels like a chat with your besties, 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. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network.

Starting point is 00:49:11 At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness,

Starting point is 00:49:41 friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Something You Should Know - The World of Government Secrets & The Problem with Productivity

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