Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 188: Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport

Episode Date: May 22, 2019

It’s hard to deny our society’s increasing dependence on, if not addiction to, email, apps and social media. If we recognize it as a problem, then how do we fix it? Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University and the author of the New York Times bestseller: Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Newport writes about our growing dependency on technology and its negative consequences. From deleting apps on your phone to spending time alone with your thoughts, Newport provides valuable steps to break away from our increasing digital dependency. The Plug Zone Website: http://www.calnewport.com/ Digital Minimalism: http://www.calnewport.com/books/digital-minimalism/ ***VOICEMAILS*** Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail: 646-883-8326 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. For ABC, to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. There's a great quote from this new book, Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. It goes like this. It's short. We seem to have stumbled backwards into a digital life we didn't sign up for. We seem to have stumbled backwards into a digital life we didn't sign up for. I think that's a great quote and it perfectly encapsulates the human situation in the year 2019. As a prior guest on this show has said, we are essentially conducting a global unregulated science experiment.

We have no idea where we're going with this. You know, as we all cook our next to look into our phone all the time. And the consequences are massive in terms of our focus and productivity in terms of our relationships, our parenting, anxiety and depression. There is evidence to indicate that we are seeing record levels of this because of technology, specifically social media, loneliness. So that's why I wanted to talk to the aforementioned Cal Newport.

He's really quite impressive. He's a computer science professor at Georgetown University. He does a lot of academic research, but he also writes books about the intersection of technology and society. He's written six books. Digital minimalism is the latest. Here's the basic thesis, and in his words, the services delivered through our devices

are so alluring and addictive that they can erode the quality of your life and your sense of autonomy. So based on that thesis, he's come up with a whole philosophy called digital minimalism, the centerpiece of which is a 30-day digital declutter, which sounds pretty intense. You basically step away from all, quote unquote, optional technology for 30 days. Optional meaning, and you define what's optional, but you want you to pretty much give most of your digital life up for 30 days and then rebuild from there. So you get a sense of what is truly essential. We cover other topics as well, including what he calls productivity, meditation.

We talk about the misery of email and how to get out of it. And on a somewhat unrelated note, I wanted to talk to him about this because I read something he wrote about it. Why giving people the advice of follow your passion is wrong. That's all coming up quick notes before we dive in. If you want to explore this whole idea of what I call tech sanity, there are some resources on the 10% happier app. In the singles meditation tab, there's a meditation called Facebook intoxication from my friend

and recent podcast guest Jay Michaelson in the course section. There's a there's a video about having using your phone To meditate. It's from Alexis Santos It's it's in the on the go course if you go into the on the go course Look for the the video where he talks about how you can actually hold the phone in your hand and use that as a meditation. It's session number 10. There are also two new talks that are up on this subject in the talk section of our app. By the way, the talk section of the app is new and I love it. One of the talks is called tech sanity mindful phoning. The other is called tech sanity mindful speech online. Tech sanity is the little kind of catch-all term we use for.

As you might imagine, how to stay safe, sane rather in this era of techno ubiquity. Also, by the way, just related to this episode of the podcast, stick around till the end because there's a special and unusual voicemail this week. For now, though, here's Cal Newport. Great to meet you. Yeah. I'm excited to talk to you. I have so many questions.

Yeah, I'm excited. Let me just start at the beginning. How and why did you get interested in the idea of digital minimalism? Well, I've written a book back in 2016. It was really about the workplace. So I was talking about technology and the workplace and some of the unintended consequences of things like email or slack. This was deep work. This was deep work. Yeah. So then I'm on the road talking about that book and readers kept coming up to me and say, okay, maybe I buy this premise about some of these consequences of tech and work. But what about tech in our life outside of work, right? There's something going on there there that's distressing. And I kept hearing this drumbeat get louder and louder that there was something going on in terms of people's relationship with their devices outside of work. As it looked

deeper into it, I was realizing this is actually growing into like a culture-wide problem. So define the problem for us. I'll pick a quote from your book. You say, we seem to have stumbled backwards into a digital life we didn't sign up for. Yeah, I mean, well, this is the issue, right? So it's not utility. So if you ask someone, why do you feel distressed about your devices in your life? It's not because what they're doing

when they look at the screen is in itself bad, right? So in this way, it's different than let's say cigarettes or something where the cigarette smoker just says, I just wish I wasn't smoking I get no benefit It's not like that people are getting utility out of their devices what I was picking up on was concerns about autonomy That people felt like they were using this more than they wanted to more than they knew was healthy more than do with useful They were using this to the exclusive things that they knew were more meaningful to up And so it's subsets they felt like I am losing my autonomy here.

I'm losing my humanity. And for a lot of people, this was a surprise, right? They bought these phones, they signed up for these services for small reasons or arbitrary reasons. And then they looked up years later, and this whole experience had been reengineered to the point where they're looking at this thing all the time and say, well, I never signed up for this.

That wasn't my goal. And I think that's what people started noticing the last couple of years, is that they have somehow become enslaved with these devices in a way that they never had tended to be. You mentioned cigarettes. Do you think there's a fair comparison to be made to between our tech usage and smoking? Well, I think there's a weak analogy to pull. So, I want to talk to psychologists about this. Are we addicted to our phones? I wanted an answer to that question.

And it's different than what we have with substance addictions. So that is different. So a nicotine addiction or an alcohol or drug addiction is a different type of addiction. But what is the relationship we do with how with our phones? Well, the relevant term seems to be moderate behavioral addiction, which means you'll use it more than you know is healthy or useful if you have it around. But it's not the same strength that'll have you let's say sneak it out of the middle of the night to try to get into an internet cafe if you lose your phone.

So that seems to be where a lot of people are moderate behavioral addiction. If this thing is a route, which it almost always is, I'm probably going to use it more than I should. But the other side of the other way to look at it would be to look at the supply side. So with cigarettes, there was the user end, and I think very clearly there's an addiction issue there. But then we took a hard look at the providers of the cigarettes. Do we need to take a look at a hard look at the people who are prevailing this technology? We do. We do, because this whole experience was actually re-engineered, which is, I think, is one

of the more interesting findings I had researching this book. The way we used to use phones in social media is quite different than how we use them today. So what changed was actually an intentional move on the part of the social media companies. To take this experience away from I post things, my friends post things, I sort of check on what they're posting. They moved it away from that experience. And towards what were on your phone, you have this constant incoming stream of social approval indicators. So this is where we get likes and tags of photos and favorites and the retweets. A lot of this came later into history of social media.

The reason why it was emphasized is that it changed our relationship to these services. So now it's not about, I want to say things and I want to see what you have to say. It's about how many likes did I get? And so now you have a reason to keep going back to the phone again and again and again throughout the day because every time you hit the app, there could be more likes, there could be more reactions, there could be more people who tagged you in their photo.

And we think that's all just fundamental to the internet. But that was all added and spreaded because what did it do? It got us looking at the phone to next more times we were before. So they're tapping into a bottomless well of narcissism. It's psychological voter abilities being exploited. And the time of this

makes a lot of sense. It was essentially Facebook was one of the leaders because they're one of the earlier social media companies their IPO was looming. And so at some point you have to shift from just we want to get a lot of users to we have to show revenue.

Right. That's the big shift these venture back companies go through. And so they went through this re-engineering where they said, now we have to shift our focus from just, we want people to use Facebook site up for it. And we actually have to get a lot of data, we have to get a lot of revenue out of our users. And that's where you begin to see this reinvitch in where it used to be, I go on my computer a couple times a week,

to see like the relationship status of my high school friend. It went from that to 50 minutes a day, look at our Facebook products, which is where the average American user is today. Couldn't you say what they're doing is just good business, providing us with a service that we clearly like? Well, I mean, it's good business on their side. Facebook's valuation went up as high as $500 billion,

which is crazy. I mean, it's a huge valuation, so it's been incredibly successful for them. But for a lot of the users, the reason why they feel like something has been pulled over their eyes is that it shifted on them after they signed up. And that's a big source of distress I pick up today is that people remember signing up for Facebook for one reason 10 years ago. They look up today and they're staring at the photo all the time. And that's not how they originally thought about Facebook. That's not what they signed up to do. And so that's why I say

it's not just that we stumbled into this current world, but it's more like the technology companies pushed us when we weren't looking. We signed up, and then they changed the rules of the game after that. So do you think there needs to be some sort of government regulation of big tech? So I'm yet to see a proposal for regulation. That's really going to get at the core of the problem of people's unease. And actually, I think this is something that's interesting about the coverage right now of social media

and people's discontent with it, is that the coverage is pretty heavily on issues like privacy or censorship or data portability. These are also the issues interestingly enough that the social media companies are willing to engage on. So, we have Mark Zuckerberg out there talking about we should have data portability. We should have end-to-end encryption.

We should have maybe an independent sensor to help us figure out what content should be there. It should not be there. And I think in part, the reason why they're focusing on that is because those are problems that they can solve. But what I'm out there talking to everyday people about their discontent with their phones, they're not talking to me about into encryption or privacy or data

portability or the particular regulations for sensory data. They're upset because they're looking at it with their kids that they're looking at it with their friends that they're looking at it 150 times a day. It's the addictive compulsive use. It's how they make the feel is the subjective experience. This is what's getting people upset. But Mark Zuckerberg can't talk about that because if you, if you wide down the sort of addictive nature

of social media, that directly gets at your bottom line. Yeah, but can't you say this is individual responsibility? Well, that's why I wrote this book. Right. Because I think that's ultimately what's going to make the change. I mean, if you're, if you're Facebook, for example, it's actually a pretty precarious situation that there is because it's a free service that people use, but people aren't actually getting an indispensable value out of it for the most part. So if you're Exxon mobile selling

gas, there's something indispensable about gasoline. It powers your car, you have to have your car done. The run your business or get to work, but something like Facebook, you talk to most people, it's not really indispensable. It's not at the core of any element of their life. It's not a huge hardship if they had to walk away. So they're, they're grasp of this massive user base. It's really kind of precarious. And in fact, I don't think we've ever had a company probably in the history of sort of modern economics that has both been that valuable and also that despicable to its users. I don't think we've ever have those two things go together. And so this is why I'm more interested in like what I'm writing about in this book that I am in government regulation because I think you you changed the

cultural zeitgeist around the role that these technologies need to play in a life well lived and you can have massive transformations in terms of people's relationships with it. We're going to dive deeply into what you recommend, but would you describe yourself as anti-tech? Well, I would hope not because I'm a computer scientist. I would be pretty lonely in my profession if I was. I'm actually a huge internet booster, I'm one of those guys who was there in the mid 90s hand-coded HTML web pages being hosted on people's servers at the back of their house with the old lives in the internet. I'm an early internet guy. I'm a big internet guy. You're nerd bonafideas are strong. Yes, I'm my my MIT PhD. Come on. That's like it puts me in a rare etch a lot of nerds.

Okay, so so you call your process of memory serves and please correct me if I'm wrong here. It puts me in a rare etch a lot of nerds. Okay. So you call your process of memory serves and please correct me if I'm wrong here, the digital declutter. Yeah. Well, how does it work? Right. So concretely, the idea is you step away from optional technology in your personal life. So the stuff that you would be okay not not use it for 30 days like social media or

I hate to say to this Billy, but maybe online news or Video games, distributed media basically believe that part. You'll leave that part. Yeah, online news But for 30 days you step away from all of that you get a little bit of space from costly looking at your device Wait, let me just stop here for a second because Optional is a big word and you dive into this deeply. So, so, so, suss that out a little bit. Well, by optional, I mean, step it away from it for 30 days, won't cause major trouble, right? So, so for example, if your work requires you to do certain types of social media engagement, you still have

to do that engagement for your job. Email, for example, I can't get you out of answering your boss's emails. That's not optional. Or if your daughter text messages you, they'll let you know what you need to be picked up for practice. Okay, that's not optional. She's going to be stuck in that school for a month if you step away from it.

And so my optional I mean, the thing is that it wouldn't be that bad. Nothing would be no consequences, but that you could step away for 30 days and it wouldn't be that bad. But I'm just thinking about people who's boss has emailed them all the time. And I think there are a lot of people in that bucket. For them, they feel the need to check their phone all the time as a consequence of the fact that they're boss is emailing them all the time or slacking them all the time.

So how can you get out of this spiral if you're in that situation? Well, the email had worked. This is a whole other issue. That's a really important issue. The dynamics are actually a little bit different to the point where I'm actually working on a book now that's tentatively titled a world without email. So it's a big enough subject that is actually sort of worthy of its own book that dynamics that lead to this sort of over this hyper-communication

culture within modern knowledge work, which I think by the way has been a massive mistake, and as part of the reason why not industrial productivity, the economic metric of not industrial productivity is stagnated for the last decade, even though we've had massive advances in making communication as flexible and convenient as ever before. It's never been so easy in a professional context to communicate with each other, and it hasn't made us It's never been so easy in a professional context to communicate with each other. And it hasn't made us more productive. And so there is a bigger issue there. Now in terms of the digital declutter, like if you have to check your email all the time, you have to check your email all the time. But you still can take a break from social media.

You still can take a break from catching up on every latest breaking news. You can still take a break from the games. You can still take a break from the binge watching. And there's still going to be advantage to this process to do it. And by the way, one thing you can do is set an alert on the emails from really important people so that you get, you know, those you get an alert on your phone. So you're not just constantly checking it randomly. You know, because you've got an alert that, okay, an important email has just come in. Yeah.

Is there a ways to do this? Well, there's ways to do that. And you can also just try taking it off your phone, right? This sort of, let me accidentally delete the email app off my phone and then apologize. It consists of this really interesting effect with email, and not to diverge too much into the professional space, but there's this really interesting effect

where often the cultures of connectivity are not intentional, but are emergent. So there's this really interesting research that Leslie Perlau, a professor at the Harvard Business School did at the Bostic Consulting Group, where she studied what she called the cycle of response of this. This idea, there's always emails coming in that everyone has to respond quickly.

And she went back to the core and realized that no one ever decided that that was a good idea. In fact, no one liked it. It was actually emergent. It was this sort of unintentional consequence of these in the moment decisions that sent emails back and this culture kind of emerged in an ad hoc fashion and created this culture of responsibility

that no one actually wanted. The bosses didn't want it. The people below the bosses. No one actually liked it. But it just felt like, oh, this is part of the culture. This is what we have to do. And so that's why sometimes people try this experiment of, let me prepare to apologize.

They realize they don't actually have to apologize that much. So it's so interesting this idea of cultural shifts that were unintended as a consequence of the introduction of new and exciting technology. It feels like emails just one tiny example of that. You can point to dozens of these cultural shifts that, you know, when Steve Jobs took the stage in 2007 and introduced the iPhone, we couldn't have foreseen. Yeah, well, there's a lot of that going on.

And I think this is really important. So the underlying philosophy, the philosophy of technology that talks about these unintentional consequences is known as technological determinism. So if you actually get into the formal study of technology's impact on people, there's this notion of technological determinism, which says essentially, technology could have influences on people and culture that's not intended or planned by the people, but you can have massive unintentional consequences. And so the famous example of this idea was a book from the 1950s by Lin White Jr. I think it was called something like medieval technology and social change. And

he made this argument that the introduction of the horse sterile, the Western Europe, the medieval period accidentally created feudalism. Right? So there's one thing I have to do with the way that it allowed armored knights to be out horses, and this was an incredibly effective way of doing warfare, but it's actually very hard to support armored knights, and the feudalist economic structure turned out to be very effective, and so this one invention changed the entire economic system of an entire continent. I see these types of effects played out all the time in the modern internet age. So yeah, email comes into a workplace and a year later, it's completely changed some people work, but no one decided that's the best way to do it. Twitter comes out, someone discovers

the users discovered retweeted, right? Retweeted with something that was essentially invented by the users, it wasn't an original feature. Now you have this unintentional consequence where people want retweet counts to be higher because that hits some sort of primal nerve to see how this thing is spreading. Well, what spreads better, more outrageous content, more extreme content. And you look up, you know, whatever, five years later, and now Twitter is pushing people to extremes on both the left and the right and creating outrage and hate. All sorts of things are completely unplanned, unintentional. Jack Dorsey had no intention that this is what Twitter should be, but it was emergent. And so I think this happens a lot because human beings and human cultures is really complicated

dynamical system, very unpredictable, very complex. And when you put new forces into it, especially forces that play with our primal drives for boredom and sociality, for example, it creates these massive nonlinear unpredictable consequences, which take the form of our culture veering left and right and up and down and all sorts of ways that you would never plan. And with no attention behind them, and with no one sitting there and saying this is actually good for us or bad for us, which is why I think we're at a period now where we need to step back for all this exuberance, surrall the sort of mobile internet age and actually get our act together about what do we want to do and what's making

us worse off than was before. We have to actually start decluttering what's going on in this digital part of our lives. We have to actually embrace some minimalism. We have to have to get our values front and foremost. It did work backwards from that to say, how do I want to put these tools to use? I strongly agree. I think it's incredibly important. And I, you nicely brought us back to the point

after I derelige you so seemingly thoroughly, which is we were talking about the digital decluttering. You said the first step, 30 days, no optional technology. Right. We've gone from the digital declutter to a Lin-White junior, a technological determinator. Welcome to the mind of Caldwell for it. Yeah.

It's not a bad place to be. Yeah. Yeah. So back to the declutter. You're taking a break from the optional technologies and you do it for 30 days. And the idea is it's not just a detox. So I don't like to term detox in the context of digital devices. I think it's a bit of a

corruption of the original notion of the term of a detox, especially the substance abuse community, where usually a detox is supposed to be the foundation for a substantial positive change to how you live. It's not supposed to be a break. So, I think intermingling the word detox with break is sort of a corruption of the actual idea. So, I don't like to deter detox here. That's what I call a declutter. So, what do you try to do during this 30-day period?

Well, it's not just a break. It's where you really start through reflection and experimentation to get back in touch with, what do I actually want to do with my time, especially outside of work, and especially if you're young, and have always had this constant distraction for every moment of downtime. This is the period to say, what do I actually want to do? What matters to me? What are my values?

Let me go experiment with some things. Okay, these are the things I want to get after. What the three time I do have, so that with the 30 days or over what you can do is the whole Mary Coddo thing and say, I'm now going to put stuff back in the closet, but only the stuff that I really like. So now you can rebuild this digital life, like what's on your phone and what you're signed up for. You can rebuild this from scratch, but now you can do it with attention.

It's going to add a service back in my life if it really supports one of these things that I decided I really value. So you think there's a healthy dosage of Facebook? Well, it depends on who you are. So I Are you on Facebook? No, you're not on social media. I'm not a social media, but I ran 1600 people when I was working on the book. I had 1600 people go through this digital declutter process and Based on the reports I got back I would say about 50% of them, after they would do this whole thing, I figured out what they care about what their values are, about 50% did addbacks on social media, and about 50% did it. But I will say of the 50% who addbacks on social media, almost none of them kept it on their phone.

Because what's they had clarity about? Here's how I can use, you know, Instagram in a way that's really valuable to me. What's they had clarity about the value they're getting out of it? They realize, well, there's no reason for me to check it all the time. And so almost all of them took it off the phone and it became something they check on their computer maybe two or three times a week. I mean, that's what I do. I, we had on here, I guess, I don't know if you would call her a competitor or a

co-conspirator of yours, Catherine Price, who wrote a book, How to Break Up with Your Phone. And so she actually got in the weeds with me. And I basically, my current policy under her tutelage is I will post a picture on Instagram, but in order to do that, I downloaded to my phone, post it, delete the app again. Delete the app. And same with Twitter, if I want to post,

or if I want to check my replies, I will download it and then delete afterwards, or I'll just check it on a desktop. Yep, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of that going on, right? If you could, if you could, uh, I did take or just did take of yourself from this sort of generic ecosystem of, or I have this very particular reason to use Instagram because I need to post a picture of me with the author I just interviewed.

And they want that to pull you to this ecosystem. We say, well, Instagram's just a part of my life. And I check it all the time and it's on my phone. If you can break out of that, you can really push the sort of cost-to-benefit ratio decidedly in your advantage. And my book I used to term the attention resistance. To talk about people like Catherine who are really good, really careful about, okay, how do I come in like a surgical strike and get the value I need to get out of these

attention economy products and then get out of there under the cover of darkness before they're able to actually grab my mind and have me have me browse out of the store. I was really struck by that term, the attention resistance. It's like this asymmetrical warfare, where you're actually turning the tables and saying, I'm going to derive a bunch of value from these companies and these services and technologies, but I'm not going to let them use me as the product anymore. Yeah, and it's really fun to see the high-tech tools that this this informal movement we could call it turns and gets the people that they're striking. So browser plugins are big. So I met a lot of people in this attention resistance that use these browser plugins that allow us to let's say to go to YouTube because they want to look up a video on how

to change the oil in their car. Something like this that YouTube is really good for. And the plugin wipes clean the recommendations. So they go to the website, they search for what they're looking for, they find it. There's no auto play, there's no recommendations. Newsfeed eradicated for Facebook, that's another big tool. So there's a lot of people I met who use Facebook for like Facebook groups, like a student group, uses Facebook groups to organize, so they have to, they have to go on Facebook. So they use this newsfeed eradicated plug-in. So they go on there. The whole news feed is wiped off the street. And so all they see is, you know, when is the group

meeting this? Where do you find how, how would one get information on these browser? Google, yeah, yeah, or I should say read my book. But there's a lot of them out there. There's a lot of them out there. I even talked about so there's this tethered phone movement is another big one So people who have a reason to have a smartphone. I mean everyone has some reasons where they really need a smartphone I need maps in this particular case or a lot of people use them for fitness I learned to write this fitness apps you can put on the iPhone where it tracks your run or something like this

But they don't what the cost of distraction So there's this whole movement to have tethered phones where you have a simple essentially dumb phone that tetheres to your smart phone. And you can bring the tethered phone with you. If someone calls or texts your smart phone, it'll show up on this simple phone you have with you. And if you call somewhere or text someone from it, it'll show up as coming from your number, but there's no apps and no distraction. And so now without having to say that's a classic, a high tech, a Titch and Resistance type strategy right there. So you don't need two phones with two different numbers,

but you only have to have the fully distracted smartphone with you if you really need it. So, okay, so we've gone through the first step, which is this 30 day declutter, right? And you're at the first step of this. I don't know where our, we are on the steps. I kind of jumped to the end of, I did. I jumped to the punchline of 30 day declutter, right? And you're at the first step of the, I don't know where our, we're are on the steps. I kind of jump to the end of how you did. I jumped to the punchline of 30 day declutter, which is after the 30 days, you rebuild from scratch. And but there's, there was a step in the jumping that I think you, you touched on, but is, and maybe it's,

maybe actually you're about to dive into it. but it seems big and worthy of some discussion, which is asking yourself big questions about how you want to live your life and what value do you want to derive from this technology and how do you want to spend your time? Well, that's the key to it. And that was really the big differentiated factor with the 1600 people who did this. If you want to figure out what most predictably separated, those who succeeded with the 30 days and made substantial changes, and those who did not, that was the difference. So those who actually took the 30 days to reflect and experiment and really try to understand what do I want to do with my life, what's important. They were much,

much more likely to make substantial changes. And the other had the people who were just white-nuckling it. Like, I'm just, I use Instagram too much. I'm just going to get away from it for 30 days. I know that it's just, it's like I'm detoxing my body from it. They had a really hard time because the forces are so strong pulling you back to these screens that if you don't have a foundation of value, a vision of, I want to do this. This is really important to me. And using tech in that way, it's not serving this thing is really important to me. If you don't have that foundation,

it just weasels its way back in. If it's just I'm tired of looking at Instagram, okay, maybe you could stay away from it for a while. But then you do the check that one thing, and then it's there, and then you're having a bad day, and then it's a particularly hard day, and next thing you know, it's one or two hours a good. You recommend some specific practices

that I think it's worth discussing, that I think are worth discussing. One of them is, and I don't know at what phase we should be engaging with these practices, so I'll let you explain that. But the first of the ones that I've chosen to highlight here is spend time alone. What do you mean by that? Aside from the obvious.

Well, solitude. Solitude turns out to be really important. And so by solitude, I mean time alone with your own thoughts. And is this something one should do during the declutter or just all the time all the time? All the time. Right, so try to understand, so this is part of trying to understand what does a better, more flourishing life look like in a technological age? And also why are we feeling so unhappy right now? Try to understand both those things. Solitude shows up. And so basically, one of the things that smartphones ubiquitous wireless internet introduced

into the human condition was the ability to baddish every last moment where you could be alone with your thoughts. And that's really, really novel. I remember playing with an iPhone and an airport in 2008 or 2009, right in my first iPhone. And I remember thinking, I'll never be bored again. Oh, there'll be bored again. Yeah.

And so it seems, oh, that's good. But it's also incredibly novel in the history of human civilization. We've never been able to banish every moment of being alone with our own thoughts. It used to just be a completely unavoidable part of being a human that there's going to be large parts of your day where you weren't processing input from someone else's mind. So let's use that as the precise definition. Solitude means you're not processing something that was created by another mind. And so let's use that as the precise definition, right? Solitude means you're not processing something that was created by another mind. And so we've tried to last five or six years to say, well, what happens if we get rid of every last moment of that?

As soon as we wake up, any downtime in line in the back of the New York City cab, right? That used to be the time where you would see the city, but now you can look at the phone. What happens? They have TVs. Well, they have TVs if you don't have your phone, yeah. Bad things seem to happen. So it turns out we need time alone with our thoughts. So without it, among other things, we get anxious.

Because the brain is not meant to constantly be processing inputs. And if you try to make it do that, you're always processing inputs from other minds. So if the social media and the web and breaking news, it overloads it. We get anxious. We also miss out on important insights, so both personal insights, self development insights, what am I all about? What's going on in my life?

How am I going to tackle this hard thing? You miss out on these sort of personal insights. You also miss out on professional insights. It turns out your brain needs freedom from input processing to actually do thinking about these inputs that come up with interesting new ideas. And so we've accidentally stripped all these benefits out of our life. And so now we're unmoored and we're anxious. And our self development is studded the rate and which we're producing professional insights. That's also studded, that's diminished. And it's all because of an unintentional consequence of this radical

experiment we've tried, which is, hey, what would happen if we got rid of every less bit of solitude? But so, I was so interested that you picked that you honed in on this because I thought the mechanism by which the phone made us anxious to press down in many cases suicidal was that we were having, we weren't having enough genuine eye contact-based human interaction. We were comparing ourselves to other people's curated lives on Instagram. We were social animals who weren't getting our fix, et cetera, et cetera. But you're saying something that seems to be the opposite.

Well, they're both factors, right? So there's a few different factors of the triangle of phone anxiety production. So what is if you get rid of solitude, that makes us anxious. Two, if you start engaging in social stacking, which is replacing face-to-face or ad-a-log conversation with the digital equivalent, that makes us feel lonely and isolated. The three, the social comparison and online bullying, the actual specifics of the content that we're looking at on these specific platforms, that also could create anxiety. This is where we see the biggest jump in anxiety is among adolescent girls, social media users, and a lot of that is not just about badgy solitude, not just about losing face-to-face

contact, but very specifically what's happening with the interact on something like Snapchat or Instagram is that's also psychologically troubling. So it's like a triangle of anxiety that the smartphone is brought into our life. So we do all those elements. We need some time alone. We don't have any time alone. We get anxious. We also need time with other people. If we don't have real time with other people, we also get anxious. And we also are better off if we don't have this constant stream of social comparison and bullied and outrage that comes at us as well. So it's like a perfect storm that's making us unhappy from a lot of directions. Massively self-interested question here. So I'm highland. I'm signposting that. What do you think of these companies that co-opt the phone to get us to have time alone?

In other words, guided meditations through your phone. Yeah, it's interesting, right? This is digital wellness in general, I guess. Right. Using the phone to help solve some of the issues of the phone. I think there's examples that work and examples that don't so guided meditation seems to be a space that Is working and it part because what it's doing is leveraging not the ubiquity of the phone or necessarily the internet connection But just the fact that the phone is a a very useful portable computer And so you can have it you can download guided meditation It seems to be working really well with that where I get more suspicious with digital wellness

Where it's the actual purveyors of the content that are making us unwell in the first place, say, let's also give you tools to help you curate how you use us. So Apple's been doing this? Yeah, Apple's been doing this. So they're at an interesting position because they don't directly profit off of the attention economy. Their device is obviously core to the attention economy, but they don't have a service, for example. But they do now. Well, they're trying to.

Yes, yes. Because they're going to dabble TV and these subscription news services. The new subscription news, right. But they're not doing the attention harvesting, like you see with the major social media companies. And so I'm wondering, I don't know if this is true, this might sort of business speculation,

but perhaps one of the reasons why Apple made an aggressive move with their screen type features. Is it they do add people with those? Right. Well, as the features, you know, everyone with an iPhone now gets those reports. Screen time report. It's very common. You can use your phone this much. It's up or down this much. Add it gives you tools to block or control access to apps on the phone. I think in part, one of the reasons why Apple is doing this is because AdjoyedCamp. Adjoyed, I mean, the whole point of Adjoyed was Google said, we make all of our money

off of people's attention, we want to control the operating system through which we're doing this. And we can't have another company control it. So there's something interesting going on there. You know, Apple could do it. Adjoy probably can't be so aggressive, so it could be an interesting competitive.

So in some ways, it becomes a class issue because Android is less expensive. Oh, yeah. So it's the wealthier folks who have the Apple devices and therefore may have access to tools to allow themselves not to be so sucked into this problem in the first place. Oh, indeed. I mean, in general, our attention and autonomy over our attention is becoming a battlefield that is becoming more class segregated.

So Matthew Crawford has this interesting book, I believe it's called something like the world outside of your head, that he talks about this not just the context of foes, but it's this interesting example of traveling on airplanes. And if you're at the airport and you're traveling business class, you're able to be taken away from all these ads and everything that's trying to grab your Titch and all the billboards on the wall and he talks about those ads even in the trays of the security lights You go to this lounge or there's nothing pulling out your time to ditch it and everyone else has left outside Be barbed and left and right with this and that and things are bright and everything's grabbing out there Attention and that yes, it's interesting. These are said this is going to be sort of a battleground. A valuable battleground is those who are able to actually

exert autonomy over their attention. We're going to have a much different experience of the world than those who can't, especially as we get increasingly more aggressive. When you have a company like Facebook worth $500 billion, which is more than twice of ExxonMobiles valuation or around twice ExxonMobiles valuation, that shows how valuable

this resource is that we're now extracting to try to make profit off of. But one can be of any socioeconomic bracket I would imagine and do what you're describing here. Yeah, it's theory, yes, right? But this is some of the feedback I've gotten to meet on the road talking about that, which I think is interesting, is that you have to have the the type space and energy to say okay I'm gonna step back I have enough sort of emotional energy I have enough things aren't going things are going really really bad your things are really hard you might not have the emotional energy or space for example to say let me just step back and take a break and get in touch with what my values are what's

important to me. Right? There's this interesting split that I had a thought about, but I'm getting this feedback a lot. I think it's interesting. You have to have the luxury, but this is true of all self-development. If I have the luxury, the space, the emotional energy, the actual schedule space to work on these type of self-development is something that is not equally accessible. And the cruel irony is that those folks may need it the most.

Well, yeah, because this has become, I mean, for a lot of people, looking at the screen has become an escape, right? This is how you get, you could avoid having to confront hard things in your life, because it's an escape. It's always there. You don't have to confront your own thoughts. You don't have to confront difficulties. There's something here waiting for you to see. And algorithm selected it based off of a data vector built on your behavior to show you something exactly what you want to see. But we know in general that if you get stuck on an escape, be it a phone or be it a pill or be it whatever, as a way of getting away from hardship, that's where you get into a bad, that's where you get into a bad cycle.

Yeah, so I mean, if things are going bad, this is an escape to get help you get away from it. But if that's all you do, you use it indiscriminately, that can become something that's almost impossible to extricate yourself from. I'm curious about your phone use. I mean, I haven't gone through, I haven't gone through your decluttering process,

but I went through the process with the aforementioned Catherine Price. And I still, you know, first of all, there's been a certain amount of backsliding on my end after having been reasonably quote-unquote good for a minute. But I'm tired. It's a long day. I'm on a plane. I don't want to work anymore. I do want to watch a little bit of Netflix. Is there a problem with that in your point of view as it pertains how you manage your own attention? Probably not. I mean, for me, it'll probably be baseball. There's always baseball rumors to look at. Maybe that's why Netflix. When I'm tired, okay, let me pull that, let me look at that. That's not bad and isolation. I think it becomes problematic because when

it becomes the default. That's where people are having trouble with it, is that the default downtime activity is pull out the phone. If it's me and my wife maybe watch a Netflix show before bad or something, that's probably fine. If it's all I do is look at the phone at every downtime and now it's taking hours out of my life hours I should be with my kids or trying to do something some sort of high quality leisure activity

You're trying to develop a skill that's gonna be useful. That's what it becomes problematic And so that's why I would be proponent of minimalism is that minimalism is not about Extension for the sake of abstention. It's also not about labeling things as good or bad This is a bad technology. It's a good technology. It's all about just being a digital. So if you know what's important to you, and you're getting after those things, and you're using tech by the way to help you get after those things more effectively than what was possible 10 or 15 years ago,

which is almost always the case. I mean, tech can give you massive advantages and value-based pursuits. If you're doing that, then you're fine. And so then maybe, yeah, there's also some distracting uses you do. Maybe there's a little bit of web surfing or this or that. But if you're largely approaching these tools on your own terms,

it's a huge boot. If you're not, and you're allowing the tools just to sort of take away the board of, let the tools take away the hardship, let the tools become the default, that's what becomes problematic. Point well taken. Let me go back to some of the practices you recommend. Another is take long walks. And you've described this as, and this is my understanding, please correct me if I'm

wrong, as your meditation practice, because you don't have what we, I think we would describe as a formal meditation practice. Right. So I have this practice that, uh, mindfulness meditation practitioners get mad at me for calling it meditation. So my, my apologies in mindful this meditation practitioners get mad at me for calling it meditation So my apologies in advance, but definitely not mad at me be inaccurate, but it's yeah Well, it's it's certainly an accurate use of the word meditation, but it's been effective for me So I call it productive meditation and what you actually do in this practice is you go for a walk and you take a

single professional problem. So this is where I'm going to corrupt everything that's good about meditation. Yeah, well let me just stop here for a second. I mean the original term, if I hope I'm right about this, but I think I am in the ancient Indian language of Pali, I believe, is Bavana. And it really, the translation there is cultivation. And so meditation is a set of, as I understand it, is that you're cultivating a set of inner skills. And so I can see how what you're describing, what you're about to describe,

would be a sort of cultivation. You're not cultivating mindfulness per se, but you are cultivating a sort of focus to set of priorities Etc. Right. So what I do with this practice is I get a professional problem So maybe I'm working on a chapter in a book of trying to figure out How do I want to structures or a math proof? I'm a theoretical computer scientist. That's my day job I solve a lot of math proof So maybe I'm trying to solve a proof you go for a, you try to make progress on the problem just in your head.

And then what I borrowed from mindfulness meditation is that when your attention wanders from the problem onto something else, which it inevitably does, you notice that and you try to bring it back to the problem. And then it wanders to some email you're supposed to write, you notice that you bring it back to the problem. Now, what I originally introduced to this practice, it was for potentially pragmatic purpose, which is if you do this type of productive meditation, what are the big impacts of it is your ability to concentrate really skyrocket. It's like doing calisthenics for your cognitive performance. I did this pretty heavily during my postdoctoral fellowship years, whereas preparing to be a professor. I would do a few miles every day. And your ability to concentrate, if you do, bring your mind back to the problem and then push deeper, your attention watches, you bring it back to the problem. You hold the variables in your head,

you try to keep them there, you try to push deeper. But this is an end of one, right? I mean, this is you just, you're only, well at first it was, right? So that I wrote about this in Deep Work. That's what I wrote about. And there is incredibly pragmatic. It was, here's how you get better at concentrating because the whole point of that book is that concentration is like a superpower. We're undervaluing it.

Trade yourself to concentrate. You'll have a huge advantage. And so I did this. I had a huge effect. I put in this book, now lots of people do it. And they're also having that effect. But then there is this common side effect that I felt, lots of other people felt, which is some of the side effects that people get for more

traditional meditation practices. And so even though it wasn't pure mindfulness where you're actually trying to have not attached to it to any thoughts here, you're actually thinking about a particular thing, but something about focusing your attention on something really hard and practicing noticing and not following the axillary thoughts was giving people a sense of anxiety reduction, was giving them a sense of calmness that persisted even after they were doing the practice. And so, I don't know, maybe it's this sort of capitalist corruption. I buy it.

I buy it. I buy it. I mean, you're essentially cutting down on the what is is in my understanding a a major if not the major source of our anxiety, which is the wandering mind which tends to lead to sort of catastrophizing and comparing and all that stuff and you're actually focused on a wholesome issue. Yeah, and so what are things I found when I was working out that book is that issue. Yeah, and so one of the things I found out is working out that book is that craftsmen, so people who are still professional craftsmen, so I spent some time writing about a blacksmith who makes swords. As old-fashioned you can get using traditional methods,

see if they be less anxious, that everyone else. And so the argument I made in that book is that there's something about when you focus your attention on one thing and it's meaningful and it's hard and it requires skill that you're completely wrapped in that activity is something that we're wired for. It's called me it's anxiety reducing or probably the way to put it let's invert that that's more what we're used to doing as a species and so when you don't do that but you instead have to check the email inbox and then jump to social media the back to the inbox and check breaking news and then back to the inbox and over to social media. When you're having to bounce all around like that, that's the really unnatural state,

which is causing this backgroundho of anxiety. And so productive meditation at least helps you get you back temporarily to that old craftsman state, but it also means when it comes time to work later, when you're not to do the practice, but you're just at your computer screen trying to write a story. It also means when it comes time to work later, when you're not to do the practice, but you're just at your computer screen trying to write a story. You're able to concentrate longer. You feel less distracted. And when you cut down from this constant frenetic context switching, we feel better about it, but that has to be practiced.

I totally buy it. Why out of curiosity have you not embraced a more traditional meditation practice? I've done it off and on. So I've done traditional mindfulness meditation. I've had to practice off and on, not recently. I used John Cabin's in some of his guided meditations. Yeah, giant. Yes, yeah.

Also in my tea. So I suspect you like the pedigree there. We do, yes, I'm doing the types that connect together. Well, you could probably convince me that I should probably have it back. I would say it's probably kids at time. Like the standard excuses, right? That everyone always gives.

I'm not in the business of convincing. I wasn't asking that question as a way to sort of put the camel's nose under the tent to try to get into lecturing you. I was just more curious. It sounds like, and it sounds like, first of all, it sounds to my ears like a completely legit answer. You're a man with a two, four and 10 year olds,

you know, like that? That'd be easier. A one, one, four and six. Okay, one, four and six. So, oh man, okay, one, four and six. So, and you're writing, you've written like a ridiculous number of books and you have a very, four, and six. So, and you're writing, you've written a, like a ridiculous number of books, and you have a very, very busy day job.

I get it, time is as you know, it's a really finite resource. I would say, I'm definitely not wiping my finger at you. I would say you might wanna explore, you know, one to five minute meditations in a slot that is currently unoccupied that would fit nicely into your current schedule, but you're in the fat, you're in the sort of rush hour right now of life.

And I have a hard time, I have a hard time getting on a high horse and telling you you're a failure if you're not meditating. Yeah, though I think I'm an easy sell. You know what the example that's caught by a titular recently is you've all hurried the author and professor. There's a two hour daily practice. Yeah, I did for a while too. Yeah. What is not that is blooded his impact as a figure. Is he if kids? I don't know if he has kids. Well, he also does a two-month annual retreat. Is this true to the point that maybe he doesn't? Yes.

But the point is that it didn't blood his impact an influential thinker. I think what a two hour practice blots is your ability to be overly booked or busy all the time, but that's probably just better. Well, so I was doing it and I was overly booked. Yeah, and it was actually. It was, so I cut down to one hour, which actually seems ridiculously easy now because I was doing two hours for three years, but I'm also simultaneously working on being overbooked and working on my technology use and working on the fact that having so many cognitive demands was making me less happy and therefore less pleasant to be around. In terms of you being an easy sell, I would say the thing I would recommend

for you to investigate is shorter meditations. Yeah. Well, do you find I'm just curious because you have this practice. You do it at least an hour every day. Would you deal with technology issues like the allure of a food? Is it easier for you than other people you know? Just because it's easier for you to kind of notice the feeling of compulsion, and not necessarily have to attach to it.

I mean, it feels like any other thought you have. 10% easier. So I mean, I notice, I do notice like my arm moving like a zombie toward my pocket to retrieve the phone and often the zombie wins. But sometimes I'm like, what am I doing right now? Especially sort of in the immediate afterglow of my work with Catherine, and I suspect it will happen

for the next couple of weeks after having sat with you. Yeah. I will be a little bit more attuned to it. But one of the initial translations of the word mindfulness is recollection. Remembering, we are programmed for denial and forgetting and for not only forgetting

but also for getting stuff. And we are, you know, it's very easy to forget these important lessons that somebody like you can come along and impart. So I am more or less good at times, but I do suspect that my baseline ability to notice my urge and not be owned by it is vastly higher than sort of the average untrained mind. Yeah. That may or what I've just said may or may not be true, but what I can say that is 100%

true is that my baseline ability to do it now is vastly better than my baseline ability to do it before I started to meditate. That's interesting. Well, 10% could be very high leverage. Definitely. Definitely. That's the experiment I did years ago, is more surrounding the last book.

Where for whatever reason, I had a lot of people take Facebook off of their phone. And a time when Facebook use was really big before Instagram was as big. I talked to a lot of people who are very serious Facebook users at the time. And they said, look, I gotta use Facebook. I can't leave Facebook.

It's incredibly important. They said, that's fine. Just take it off your phone. Do an experiment for a month, just access it on your computer. I'm there at Convits, like, okay, I'm going to be on my computer all the time using Facebook because it's really crucial to what I do. It's such a huge fraction of these people never touched it was during the experiment. So that 10% of friction, I got to load up a browser and type in Facebook. The 10% of friction was enough for them to go

from cost to check-eat, to almost not check it at all. So 10% can make a difference with this stuff because a lot of it is automatic. I'll tell you another thing that made a huge difference for me was having a specific bed for the phone in my house. So my rule, and this thing I have not broken since Catherine literally came to my house, was my rule, and this thing I have not broken since Catherine literally came to my house, was my rule is when I'm at home, almost always, I mean, there are a few minor exceptions to this,

the phone is in my bedroom closet. That's where the charger is now. And so my son does not see me on the phone much as a consequence, and he's four. And that has been a huge plus for me. I turn the ring around, if there's an emergency, I hear the phone ring, and if I need to take a call for any reason, I'll go in the bedroom and take that call, or if I have the compulsion to check, I have a 40% friction because I go to a stand awkwardly in my closet to go check my phone.

And I found that to be really useful. I'm not just walking around with the thing all the time. Yeah, well, this is actually a common idea that I came across after the book came out. So I was talking to a lot of parrots about how do you deal with your kids at phone use and try to get them not to use the phone as much. And this idea that some people call it the

phone foyer method because they keep it in the foyer when you first walk into the house it goes you know next to the front door. This is really common among parents for exactly this reason. It's still there. You can still hear a call if you have the rigour out or if you need to look something up you can go look it up. But it's not with you as a companion in the house. And a lot of parents are using this to great success because it means their kids don't see them using the phone as a companion because it's really hard to give this message to your kids. You shouldn't be able to the phone all the time if that's what they see.

I've never once had my son say to me, daddy, get off the phone. That's huge. It's huge. And I am really grateful for that. Really grateful that I fall down all the time in lots of ways as a parent and as a human, but that avoiding that pitfall so far has been really awesome. I think it's really important.

I mean, I accidentally implement that because I lose my phone all the time. I don't use it very much, but it is a formal idea. You really don't use your phone that much? I don't use it that much. What does your phone usage look like? I mean, it's theory. My wife made me get a smartphone when I first kid was born because she needed to be able to text me or send me photos of

the kids. So it's theory. My phone usage is built around my wife can text me and when I get lost, which I always do because I don't think I need directions, but I do. So I get lost. I can find the map to figure out where I'm going. It's like, it's theory. That's what I use it for. But I missed most of the text messages anyway. It's going to bad about having my phone, and so my family just kind of knows this. What about email? No. I had Gmail out there a while ago. I accidentally deleted it, and it changed my life. How do you deal with email, like, when do you deal, answer your emails? Well, at the PIDs, I mean, I could, maybe see my publicist and the other room

taking her head down, you could take me a while sometimes, right? So for me, and I have to luxury do this because I'm a professor and I'm a writer, but at the PIDs what I'm doing, and so if I have a day of writing or working on a math proof or something, I might not look at email that day.

And then maybe another day I will look at email, so it could be a day or so before I see things. Like people do get mad at me quite a bit, but it's not I can always call you. They can always call me. And they do. And they've learned how to do it. But there's emergencies and that works pretty well. But I care a lot about my time in a Titch it. Essentially, like I feel that I make a living off of Transformie time in a Titch it into things like books and proofs that I make a living off of transforming time and attention into things like books and proofs that I can get paid for. So I care a lot about uninterrupted thought and concentration.

And so I go log periods without my phone, or if I have it with me, it's not on. And when I do a lot of media, I end up putting it into these modes where I can't read and do all these things. I don't know how to turn off those modes. So then like some days will go by and I don't get any calls from my family. Well, I could see how your wiping of unable to reach you in an emergency would be bad.

Yeah. So what she calls, that's what I know. And if you turn your phone off, then you can't. Yeah, it happens sometimes. But in the other hand, this used to be our life. Yes, it did. You know what, like 10 years ago? Yeah, we were thinking about that now when we were going out with a bit.

Well, our parents would go out and there'd be a babysitter. You would give them like the neighbors number. It's like, hey, you can't reach us. We're going out. We're going to be in the movie theater, you know, and it was okay. You know, we ended up okay. And so I tried to do my best to be accessible. I definitely want to hear from my family when they tried to reach me.

I fail at it a lot, but it has to be that big of a deal. And you said before your most common mindless use of it would be if you're at the end of the day, your frazzly, you don't want to think anymore, you might check baseball rumors. Yeah, so my rule is, this is what I do when I eat lunch. So I've consolidated it. So I'm usually tired by midday, especially if it's a day when I'm teaching. So I give myself 20 minutes while I'm eating a lot to Georgetown, baseball rumors. That's I'm tired. I'm going to look at these particularly because I don't want to think because I've just been thinking a lot and I have to go think a lot more. And so I've consolidated it into that period. More 10% happier after this. Like the short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean?

How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people

about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs. And sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times, but if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you,

what would be on it? Follow Life is Short, wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music, or Wondering app. I still have a lot of questions I want to ask you, but we're talking about email for a second, and I know you, this is this, you mentioned earlier, this is the subject of your next book. But I'm thinking about email a lot, not only in terms of, did you mind talking about the year of the subject, but you're making sure that you're okay to do it?

I'm thinking about email a lot, but not only personally in terms of my consumption of it and how it is, that's the thing when I'm, is it mindless? I don't know. I'm obsessed with inbox zero. I want to just get down, I want to deal with all these emails. So I find that when I'm waiting for elevators, when I'm having a mindless moment of checking in, I'm going right to email because I just have so much of it that I need to deal with. So that strikes me as not super healthy.

And then be, you know, now I'm in a, for the first time in my life, really in a kind of leadership position within an eight company because I work here at ABC News, but I also have a company called 10% Happier, which is a meditation app. And I want to think of ways, healthy ways to communicate with the employees and my co-founders and all that stuff in a way that if I send an email at 4 o'clock on a Sunday morning because I'm awake because I'm going to work, because I work early on Sunday mornings, they don't feel like they need to respond to that. It's just that I had the thought at that moment.

So what's the right way to communicate in all of this? What's the right way to manage your own email and what's the right way to communicate within a healthy organization are the things on my mind. So I'm just curious if that triggers any thoughts for you. Well, yeah, there's a lot, there's a book, a book's worth of thoughts. I guess this is what's different about email, let's say social media. When it comes to like an unhealthy relationship with social media, that's almost entirely on you and you could stop doing it, right?

You could stop away from Instagram and your life might be better. It's fine. But maybe some friends will be upset. You're not there. But it's okay. Email, if you say, I hate how much I check email, I guess, stop checking it. I know for personal experience, that's not going to work because people need you and your boss needs you.

If someone underneath needs you, it's something gets dropped. And so I think the issue with email is not the tool itself. It's the underlight approach to work that it secretly brought into the back door. Right. And so what we've done when email came along, it changed the way we worked without anyone's consent, without anyone's planning. It was one of these unpredictable, emergent changes like the horse stirrup leading the feudalism type of situations. And what I think happens when email came in, I gave us low friction, very easy communication ability, is that what we did was we took our natural instinct

about how we should coordinate. The way that we used to coordinate when there was groups of three of us on the savannah, we were hunting a mastodon, which is ad hoc and unstructured. Hey, you go that way, I'll go this way. Hey, did you see that saber tooth tiger coming from over there? It was unstructured ad hoc, the way that we're instinctually used to coordinate its small tribes, and we tried to scale it up to whole organizations.

We said we could have this ongoing unstructured conversation through low friction digital communication, be it email or something like Slack. So we tried to scale up this instinct we had of let's just have this ongoing conversation and figure things out on the fly. The thing about that is it's very flexible and it's very easy. It makes sense why it's spread. It's a very flexible, adaptive, and easy way to organize an organization. But on the other hand, it turns out to directly conflict with how our brain works. Because in order to take this tribal conversation, it haven't happened at the large scale.

You have to constantly be tending the conversation. So you have to constantly be tending the inbox on the Slack channels. And what happens is when you have to constantly tending these channels as you always have to contact switch. I'm working on this, I have to switch, look at the inbox, back to this switch. Huge problem for me.

And we know from psychology that contact switch, it has a huge price. So even if you think you're single-tasking, if you do these quick checks of an email inbox, there's a huge cognitive price this paid from doing the context switch to the inbox, even if you only looked at it for a minute. Now, that reduces our cognitive capacity. It birds us out. And then the other issue is that when we see an email into an inbox, the social, the primal social aspect of our brain sees that as a huge obligation.

Yes. It's like there's someone across from the fire and they're tapping you out the shoulder. And if you ignore them, you're gonna get a spear in the back. And so we feel the social anxiety. All these inboxes and those emails are in here. A braid cat say this is not that important. This is, we see it as it's people around the fire.

They're mad that we're not looking at them. And the rock spear is to come through the back. And so it's a huge mismatch with our neurotal hardware, this particular way of working. And so long after it's a short question, but what I think has to happen is we have to rethink from the ground up how we actually work in dollars work. And until you replace this idea that we just have unstructured ad hoc communication all day with something that's more structured and more in line with the way our brain actually works I think it's very hard to get away from having to do this all the time. There's only so much that personal habits could change

There's only so much that tips and tricks are going to get us to what would this new world look like Well, so I've been trying to find organizations that do things differently What are the places where you see innovation a software development? Because they're still pretty close to the industrial world, even though they're producing a knowledge product at software, it's still a knowledge work type organization, but they bring a lot of ideas from industrial manufacturing. And you'll see in some software development shops, for example, agile methodologies. We're now, tasks are kept in a public place where everyone knows who's working on what

and what stage it's at. And coordination is secretized. It's twice a day, it's three times a day. The meetings are usually standing up so they can't go too long and they're very focused. We do this at 10% happier. We have stand-ups. Stand-up meetings. That's where it came out of is agile, right? And so now who's working on what is not in inboxes? And the coordination is not ad hoc. It's every few hours.

You stand up, secretist. Who's working on what? Who needs what from whom, what happened to the commitments you made last time? And that gets people out of inboxes. And so I think ideas like that are going to mutate and spread and adapt. You have to adapt to the different industries, but I think we're going to see a huge chain of the next, I don't know, 10 or 15 years. That's going to get us away from unstructured ad hoc communication and towards much more structured ways of passing around information obligations that allows human braids to actually produce

much closer to their actual capacity. What would your advice be in the meantime for those of us who are dealing with a nonstop avalanche of emails? So the me time what you could do personally is try to batch more Think about context switching as be a huge cognitive price to pay and so would you try to do something to requires concentration? Do that thing to requires concentration. Shut your browser down completely. Let me shut your sorry.

So you shut your inbox down quick checks could be just asity to your cognitive performance as multitasking. Yeah. And so you have to start thinking that way. If I'm working out something hard, I want to work only on that thing. Every time I glance at an inbox, it's like you're taking a drug, just going to make you double for the next two to 15 minutes. Oh, man. I'm taking that drug a lot.

And I'm trying to write a book, and it's killing me. And so I got to stop doing that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the whole economy is, I mean, look at the metric I mentioned before, productivity. It took out the industrial sector. That's been stagnant. There's a lot of reasons why it might have been stagnant for the last 10 years, but we

had this massive investment to make communication as flexible and fast as possible. And it has it made us more productive in the actual economic sense of how much output is produced per hour of work. Yeah, never mind how happy we are. Yeah, yeah, we also happen to be miserable. Yeah, yeah. I'm at a moment where I'm sensitive to your time. I have a long list of questions and I'm definitely not going to get to. Let me just pick a few

and see if we can click through them. You mentioned before something like high quality leisure, which would give us sense as also low quality leisure, can you talk about the difference there and why thinking about this strategically is so important? Well, it seems that humans really crave doing leisure activities that have quality just intrinsically, that we do them just because we really enjoy the activity. And especially if it requires some sort of skill that we've developed or some appreciation that we've cultivated. So you learn how to cook and you're making a nice meal or there's a sport you play and you're pretty good at it and you can play the pickup basketball game. We get a lot of satisfaction out of that, and we crave it.

So this has been one of the casualties of odd demand, low quality distraction through the phone, is that we do a lot less of it. But you seem to be recommending, if I've got it right, that we really think strategically about, especially for people who've maybe grown up as digital natives, about what is the leisure, what are these high quality leisure skills

we want to develop, arts and crafts, et cetera, et cetera, and start to think about it, you know, how much time I'm going to dedicate, et cetera, et cetera. Am I reading you correctly, I'm not. Yeah. Well, especially for young people. So, so people who are old enough to remember a dealt life before ubiquitous mobile internet, it's like a rediscovery process. Like, oh, here's the things I used to do and they get back to them.

But if you're 23 years old, there is no use to, right? You've probably just filled every moment of downtime, look at that algorithmically optimized content. And so there is an actual process. And that's why I have to get into it in the book. And it seems a little, I don't know, pedantic, I guess, I'll actually get into for those readers in mind. How do you actually sit back and figure out

this is what I wanna do with my time? I'm gonna pick up the skill. I'm gonna learn to play the guitar. I'm gonna read this mini books or whatever it happens to be. But actually sitting there and thinking, what do I wanna do? This is one of the reasons why I put aside 30 days for that declutter process.

As opposed to just say, let's do this over the weekend. Is that for a lot of people, they did that much time just to figure out What they want to do like what's actually important to them they actually have to get out there and you know by the guitar Take a few lessons or whatever it is. Yeah, I mean it's in some ways this this declutter is And I mean this differently than you mean it deep work It is truly deep work. You are looking at what is matters to you. What kind of life do you want to live? And so this seemingly kind of superficial thing of how you're going to manage your relationship to technology is actually like how do you

want to live? Right. Well, it can be terrified too. I got that report a lot for people who said day one with the phone empty was terrified. Because for the first time it's like you're looking into the existential void. Okay, what is it I actually want to do? I just published an article recently talking about how I was surprised to see the pickup of this book in religious communities. But what I dive deeper in read these articles is because core to almost all religions is this notion of the contemplative life that turning inwards is where you have revelation, clarity, and courage, and sort of exploring the interior space is just crucial to developing, to getting intimations of the divide, transcendence, and all requires quiet interiority.

And so suddenly we introduce this device that badishes all of it. It's a religious community's receive this problem. They're looking at their fellow adherents and they're stumbling around and they're anxious and they're unmoored and it's because we we took for granted the importance of having this space. And so yeah, this 30 days it's deep work. But you got a lot that you need to do when you get to those 30 days. I mean, you're really trying to get to the core of yourself, which is why for a book that's kind of about technology, it's sort of surprising how much of this book is really not about technology. Yeah. Here's my last question.

It's kind of unrelated to a lot of the things. Well, maybe no, actually maybe it's related. I was struck in just sort of looking over the quite vast body of work that you've created in not that long a period of time, that one of the points you've made publicly runs counter to something that I've been saying for a long time, which is when young people come to me and say, what should I do with my life? I often say, well, think about the thing you would pay to do and see if you can get paid to do it. In other words, follow your passion. And you say, that's terrible advice. And you make a really good argument. And I'm compelled.

So I'd love for you to sort of say it here. Yeah. Well, I wrote a whole book about it back in 2012. So good they can't ignore you. So the premise of that book is I went back to try to understand how do people end up loving their work. And the idea that you should follow your passion is really prevalent out there, but it doesn't really match the research literature or my own research on how people end up in jobs that they really love. And so there's two issues.

What is it assumes that people, especially young people, have this pre-existing passion that they can clearly identify and use as the foundation of job choices. Whatever current configuration or current economy happens to be it, right? We don't have a lot of evidence that most people have clearly identifiable pre-existing passions. So right off the bat, when you say, hey, just follow your passion. Now they're really adrift because what are they supposed to do? Second, we don't have a lot of evidence that the match of your work to pre-existing inclinations is a significant source of motivation, mediator satisfaction. It seems self-evident. Like, well, if I like this thing,

then I do it for my work, then I should like my work. But we don't have a lot of evidence that that's true. We actually have evidence that we could have the contrapositive be true, which is I'm an amateur photographer. I love it. I become a professional photographer. I hate it. That's pretty common. So what we also have a lot of evidence for other things that do seem to matter.

So things like having autonomy over your work, what you work on, how you work on, that makes a lot of difference. Impact matters. If I do eat something that really is having an impact on the world, mastery matters. Just the sits, if I'm getting better at a skill that people value, connection matters. Am I connecting to other people in my building strong relationships? And none of this has to do with matching a pre-existing inclination to a job. And so the formula I ended up talking about in that book,

the formula that came up often, when I study people who love what they do, is that they usually started by building up rare valuable skills. They get good at something that's unobligiously valuable. Not something random, but I mean, something that seems interesting to them. So it's not a completely disconnected.

It's not completely disconnected, but you're lowering the bar from passion. You have a one-two passion. Yeah. And if you miss that target, you're going to be miserable. You're lowering it down to, there's bitty things which are interesting to you that you're probably well suited to pursue. All of those could be the source of passion.

That's not what, so make the choice. The choice is not that hard. Well, so we all have interests. We may not all have passions, but it seems what you're saying is if you follow a Strip with some strategy if you follow an interest with some strategy like Based on you know autonomy connection mastery, etc. You can develop a passion You develop passion so passionate follows that almost always what passionate follows is becoming so good you can't be ignored So that's where the title the book is actually a steep Martin quote, that was his advice to young entertainers is be so good that can't ignore you. But okay, so two things.

One is there are people with pre-existing passions. So for example, stand up comedy. There are people who are just, you know, Judd Apatow is super passionate about that. You know, did his 10,000 hours and like has done well. Very well. So you can, that's just one point I wanna make. You agree with me on that? Well, I do.

I mean, I do agree that there are people who do have strong pre-existing passions and they follow it, but I also think there's a much broader circle of people who are passionate about what they do, and when they self-report the advice, they say, well, you should follow your passion, but if you actually unpack it,

it turns out to be more complicated. And so like Judd Appetal, maybe, I mean, his original relationship with Stannup comedy was a little bit conflicted, so it might not have been a strong passion. I talk about Steve Jobs in that book, where he's often seen as this example or a follower of your passion, but you unpack his story, and I went back and interviewed people that, like, the guy who bought his original Apple One Circuit boards in the bite shop and mountain view, early Steve Jobs had no idea that he wanted to be a technology entrepreneur. He stumbled into it and then it ended up becoming the source of passion.

So there are people who are passionate in advance. There's also a lot of people who, I think, sort of incorrectly, retroactively, subscribe the current passion to something, to an axiom like I followed my passion. I'm trying to figure out if that's the case with me. So I mean, I was in college intrigued by television news. I thought it looked cool and really no much about it. Even though I did a bunch of internships, I can see my understanding was pretty surface. I mean, I just I thought it was cool and exciting and interesting and it was no good at math

and couldn't be a scientist like my parents. So I then got into TV news and it was awesome. And I don't know where the passion happened, but it definitely happened. And then I got interested in meditation 10 years ago, or eight, nine years ago, and I thought, okay, I should write a book about this because I think I might have a way to say this,

there would be different from others. Isn't that another example of following my passion? Or is it what you might have I just done what you described, which is I followed an incipient interest and it became passion. It became passionate as you as you got good at it. And as you did it well, right? And so like the theory would say if we go back to college age dad Harris, there might actually have been a dozen different paths you could have taken. All of which could have led you really Loving what you do. So it's really lowering the stakes of the choice. I choose something that's interesting and it seems like it has a lot of options

You're well suited for it, but don't sweat the choice. It's dead sweat the hard work of becoming really good because what tends to happen This is a theory I'd cover that book is that as you get better at things Well, first of all, you get a sense sense of passages from the mastery. But more importantly, skill is what leads to leverage. When you have leverage over your work, you're able to use, as I call it, career capital, the book. You're able to invest this career capital and start shaping your career in these subtle ways. Torch things that resonate away from things that don't. And it's like the currency, skill is the currency I wish people could construct remarkable careers. You've been a great guest. I've learned a ton.

So glad to meet you and be able to ask you all of these, well, not all of these questions, but most of these questions. Final, final question, which will be self-serving for you, which is please step into what we call the plug zone. Can you just plug all of your books where we cannot find you on social media because you don't exist there, but maybe you do have a website.

You give us everything, all the modalities by which we can reach you. Yeah, I think ironically my phone is rigged. It may be my phone or your phone. That's your phone. I feel less guilty. I don't think I silenced it. Well, you did silenced it. That was vibrating. That was vibrating. Yeah, see, I don't know the difference. Like, how did silence it. That was vibrating. That was vibrating. Yes.

You see, I don't know the difference. I think putting it on stun is like, because I never turn my phone off because if there's truly a breaking news emergency or my child has broken a bone, I want to know right now. So I don't think that was a huge party fell. Yeah. It's all ironic though, given what I talked about. Yes. All right. So where do you find me?

You're right, not on social media. I've never had social media count, which turns out it's allowed. By doing the website, calnewport.com. And I'm a big blogging nerd. I'm a big believer that's a cool use of the internet. I've been blogging there for over a decade. And so if you want to find out more about the weird and esoteric might as calnewport, there's a lot to read there read there and the books so digital minimalism is my new book

That that really gets on a lot of what we're talking about I wrote five others and you can you can find out about those at Caldute port.com as well deep work So good they can't ignore you the Zen valedictorian or so there's three books for students that I wrote as a student How to win a college, or as another graduate, how to become a straightaway student, wrote my first year of grad school, and how do we become a high school superstar, which was like a zany Malcolm Gladwell beats a for admission style book. I went out and found all these kids who were really interested in really low stress and yet were still doing well in college admission. So maybe it's relevant today. And I was like, he looked at this example.

It's possibly like a normal interested person and still go through college admissions without becoming stressed out. And then so good to ignore you, deep work. And most recently, digital minimalism. Thank you, sir. This is great. Thank you.

Okay, that was Kalonu Port. That was a great conversation. Really appreciate him coming on. Time for the voicemails. Actually, it should be voicemails, singular this week because as mentioned at the top of the show, we've got a special one. I got a tweet recently from some sixth graders

from Prairie Waters Elementary School in Alberta, Canada. Every year, the sixth graders there get to do a big nine-week project. The names of the girls who reached out to me were Angela, Ia and a new, and they're doing a project about minimalism. And they sent me a tweet. They wanted me to answer some questions or they wanted to call me up and ask me some questions. And I said, you know what? Call the voicemail and not line in. I'll answer the questions for everybody. So here's their voicemail. Here Mr. Harris, our name is R. I.S. and N.A. We are working on a project called

Exhibition where we research a certain topic. We choose Melalism as a topic. Questions 1. How does Melalism affect the life? Two, what is the easiest part of mineral water? Three, what is the hardest part of mineral water? Four, why is it so important? Five, how does mineral water affect your life? How does mineral water affect you and your family? Would you consider yourself a mineral water? Why are you interested in mineral water?

Nine, there's mineralism making more independent. Ten, how did you discover minimalism? Eleven, what inspired you to write pencil? Happy. Thank you again for your time. Thank you. All right, that's incredibly cute. Thank you for the question. It's a great question.

Let me just say, I don't, before I get more granular with you, I don't know that I would call myself a minimalist. I didn't even really know what minimalism was until shortly after I wrote 10% happier when I was saying yes to anybody who wanted to interview me. Now I'm a little bit more protective in my time. But at that point, there was, I got an interview put on my calendar from some, some guys called the minimalists. They didn't actually come to my office, but they said to camera crew to my office, they were working on a documentary about minimalism, meaning, you know, living with less, not being so focused on consumerism, et cetera, et cetera.

And they want to interview me. and I was open with the fact that I'm pretty much a maximalist, and they said, they didn't care they wanted to do the interview anyway. And I remember thinking as I was doing this interview, this will never see the light of day. I don't know why I'm doing this, but I did it. And there were interesting questions, and so I answered them.

Anyway, a couple of years later, they turned it into a documentary called Minimalism that went on Netflix. And I have a few friends who were interviewed in that documentary, including my friend and former guest on this podcast, Sam Harris. And both Sam and I believe that this is the piece of media. I don't know if Sam still feels this way, but I still feel this way. This is the piece of media I've done that has provoked the most people to stop me on the

street. This documentary got onto Netflix, it got sort of prominent placement, like pole position in their queue over the holidays a couple of years ago. And so it just seems to have been viewed by an incredible number of people, especially young people. So I heard from tons of people about seeing me

in this documentary, I think I'm actually the first voice you hear in the documentary, which I assume is why these kids were reaching out to ask me in this documentary. I think I'm actually the first voice you hear in the documentary, which I assume is why these kids were reaching out to ask me about minimalism. And so I feel compelled to admit from the jump that I'm not a huge minimalist, but I have subsequently become friends with the minimalists and have thought

a little bit about this stuff. So let me answer the questions. First one was, how does minimalism affect your life? So being the father of a four-year-old, I, there's not a ton of minimalism that goes on in my life. He's a maximalist when it comes to stickers and toys and other stuff in that genre.

So I wouldn't say it has a huge effect on my life, but recent podcast, yes, and good friend Gretchen Rubin recently wrote a book about decluttering, which is part of minimalism. And she came in and helped me declutter my office, which was massively cluttered. So she didn't actually just, to say, she didn't actually do the work of the decluttering. She just came in and gave me some overall thoughts about how to do it. And I then did the work of sorting out the stuff that I didn't really need or love. And that was just taking up space. And some of it was painful.

I actually had, and I thought it was very cool that I had an electronic drum set in my office. But it wasn't set up and I never used it. Sometimes my kid would bang on it for 30 seconds, but other than that, it was just an eye sore. And so I actually got rid of it. I gave it away. I gave away a lot of stuff from my office. And now I will say that when I walk into my office, it feels crisp and light and clean and clear, and it is more conducive to doing focused work. Second question, what's the easiest part of minimalism? I think it's some of what I just said that there is an ease that comes from having a physical environment or as as as Gretchen called her book, Outer Order Inner

Calm. There's an ease, a calm that comes from not having clutter all over the place or what she calls a visual noise. The third question, what is the hardest part of minimalism? I think it actually goes back to that problem I had with my drum set. It's letting go of things that you're attached to, even if it's irrational, even if you know it will help you to get the stuff out of the way. We get really attached to stuff and rethinking that, looking at it that closely could have, it can be hard, but can be really helpful, which leads to the next question. Why is minimalism so important?

I think there is a real power in renunciation. Joseph Goldstein, my meditation teacher, talks a lot about how renunciation doesn't have a real positive connotation in the Western world right now, but he says, you might want to frame it as kind of non-addiction, not being addicted to stuff. And we spend so much of our time in a consumer culture bombarded by these messages about acquisition and accumulation and not being so enchanted by that. To break that spell is really important because unchecked consumerism, by the way, I'm a capitalist, but unchecked consumerism, thoughtless consumerism can lead to financial problems for people.

It can lead to a sense of emptiness that no matter how much you get, you're never fully happy. You know, we are, you know, in this way, as I like to say, the pursuit of happiness that's enshrined in America's founding documents. I don't know if this applies in Canada, but it's true here. Pursuit of happiness can become the source of our unhappiness.

And of course, unchecked capitalism can also lead to all sorts of environmental degradation and mistreatment of workers. And again, I say this as a capitalist, but I think this is why minimalism is such an important thing to think about. Five, here's the fifth question. How does minimalism affect your stress? I'll just go back to, as I can keep this one super brief, just the effect, the effect

I feel every day, weeks after I decluttered my office, of walking into my office and seeing that there isn't that visual noise. I don't have distractions that create friction for me as I go about my work. Six, how does minimalism affect your family? Well my wife and I have done a lot of work with Alexander in terms to get him to give away and donate his toys. It's not always a smooth process, but I will say once he gets into it, he gets really into it. And we fill up bags and give him away. And so I actually that has given me a lot of secondhand pleasure to watch him be so interested in giving toys away.

He gets that not everybody has as many toys as he does. second hand pleasure to watch him be so interested in giving toys away. He gets that not everybody has as many toys as he does. So giving that stuff away his clothes, et cetera, et cetera. I think he gets that. Seven, would you consider yourself a minimalist? Why? I would say I'm minimalism curious, but don't know enough to really call myself a minimalist, but a lot of it appeals to me.

Eight, why are you interested in minimalism? Just seeing the effects that we've already discussed makes me interested. I'm gonna try to move quickly through the rest of these nine. Does minimalism make you more independent? I don't know. Good question. I don't know.

I guess maybe it does disentangle you from the consumer culture, which has some good parts to it, but it has a lot of parts that they just kind of wired to make us unhappy. The message from advertisement is often that you're not good enough, you are not enough unless you buy this product, and so not being so enchanted by that can create a kind of healthy independence. 10. How did you discover minimalism? I answered this. It was really because of that Netflix movie. 11. What inspired you to write 10% happier? This one's easy for me, which is that I got into meditation. A lot of listeners to this show will know this answer, but I got into meditation and it really helped me.

It didn't solve all of my problems. That's why I wrote the book, and I called it 10% happier. But it was obvious to me that this is a simple, scientifically validated form of mental exercise that really could help me be more focused, to, you know, stay on task in my creative work, and less yanked around by my emotions. And my critique of the popular literature around meditation at the time was that it lacked a sense of humor. So I wanted to write a book that included some words that your parents probably don't want you to say and also tells and told some embarrassing stories and talked about meditation in a way that would appeal to folks who might otherwise

reflectively reject it. Reflexively, unreflectively, and reflexively reject it. And so, yeah, that's when inspired me to write the book and do this podcast and have an app and all this other stuff that I've all of a sudden find myself doing. Thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it. Angela, Ia, and I knew.

Thank you very much to everybody who listens to this show. Really want to thank again the folks who are part of our podcast Insiders group who provide feedback, qualitative feedback every week on the work that we're doing here that has a huge impact on the way we proceed. I want to thank the producers who work so hard on this show, Samuel

Johns, Grace Livingston, and Ryan Ketzler, the boss here at ABC who's in charge of making sure this podcast gets out into the world. The brilliant Susie Lou is working the boards today. Thank you to her, and I will see you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey

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