Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 371: Help, Work Sucks | Cal Newport

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

A lot of us right now would probably agree that the technologies meant to make our jobs easier are actually stressing us out. (Think: the email and Slack messages that never stop and with which you can never catch up.) The worst part is the dopamine hit that you can get hooked on that comes with getting new information, causing you to check your messages way too often. And all of this has been exacerbated by working remotely. In this episode, our guest Cal Newport says that these technologies have created what he calls “the hyperactive hive mind,” and he has a ton of thoughts about how to stop it. He’s a computer science professor at Georgetown University and a New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. He’s also the host of the popular Deep Questions podcast.  In this conversation, we talk about how to minimize the impact of the hyperactive hive mind, how the way we work is fundamentally broken, how we ended up in our current work situation where we're checking email and Slack all the time, and what this does to our brain. Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/install Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/cal-newport-371 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. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, welcome to the show. In what has been an extremely lucky and happy life for me, one of the worst and most annoying aspects of this extremely lucky and happy life is email and slack. The message is never stop and I never catch up. And the worst part is I'm also hooked on the dopamine hit that

comes from getting new information, however, intervening that information may be, and therefore I check my messages way too often. I suspect that I'm not alone in this psychology that I've just described. I would wager that a lot of us right now would probably agree that the technologies that were meant to make our jobs easier are actually stressing us out. And remote work has of course only exacerbated these problems. My guest today says these technologies have created what he calls the hyperactive hive

mind. And he has a ton of thoughts about how to stop it, both from a macro level and a micro level. So from a society wide level and also in your individual life. His name is Cal Newport. He's a computer science professor at Georgetown University. He's a New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including a world without email. That's the newest one, digital minimalism.

He came on a few years ago, actually, to talk about that one, and also deep work. Anushan mentioned he is the host of the popular Deep Questions podcast. In this conversation, we talk about his toolkit for minimizing the impact of the aforementioned hyperactive hive mind that toolkit contains such strategies as deferring, automating, and externalizing. How the way we work is fundamentally broken. How we ended up in our current work situation, where we're constantly checking our email and Slack. What this does to our brain, how to shift the culture so that email goes away entirely. And in the meantime, how we can all adapt through strategies such as deferring, automating, and externalizing those are his

three main strategies. One quick audio note, you may hear some rumblings during the interview that is a thunderstorm rolling through my neck of the woods. Before we dive in, one exciting order of business. You may remember earlier this year we ran a big listener survey, thousands of you responded to a whole series of questions about your experiences listening to the show. Thank you for doing that, by the way. And we in turn listen to you.

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Newport. Cal Newport, welcome back to the show. Well, thanks for having me back. Pleasure. What is the hyperactive hive mind? It is the central villain, I would say, and everything we dislike about office work in the 21st century. It's a term I came up with for an approach to work in which you figure out most things with unscheduled, back and forth ad hoc messaging. So you can use email, you can use Slack, whatever tool you want to use, but the idea with the hyperactive hive mind is we can just figure everything out with this ongoing constant stream of communication. It is the dominant way that most knowledge work positions actually implement their collaboration. So email, text, slack, do these all fit into what you're describing with hyperactive HyveMind?

Yeah, it all fits. What characterizes the hive mind is that is this constant back and forth digital messaging that's unscheduled and ad hoc. And so email was the original tool that made this possible slack though came along and said here is an even better interface for the hyperactive hive mind. You can do this with text messaging. You can do this with Microsoft Teams, I'm somewhat tool agnostic. What characterizes the actual workflow is this constant low friction back and forth chatter as the way that most collaboration actually unfolds. So what's the problem with it? Well, if it's a small number of people working on a small number of things, there's no problem with it because it's how we've always as humans naturally collaborate. So if there's two of us in the Paleolithic and

were whatever, Huntingham Ameth, we would use the hyperactive hive mind approach to collaboration. It would be unscheduled ad hoc back and forth. You know, Dan, you go that way, I'll go this way, watch out for the tiger. So it's a very natural way of collaborating with a small number of people working on, let's say, one thing. The issue is when you scale up to the dozens and dozens of different obligations on your plate and a typical knowledge worker position, you now have dozens and dozens of back and forth unscheduled asynchronous conversations happening. And so what you have to do then is check these channels constantly. Because if you don't, there's a lot of back and forth conversations that are going to

grind to a halt is going to be an issue. So a necessary side effect of the hyperactive high-binding in the office is constant checking of communication channels. And the constant checking of communication channels is a cognitive catastrophe. Because our brain cannot quickly switch its cognitive context from one thing to another. So when we have to glance at these inboxes or glance at Slack, we actually initiate this cascade of neurological changes in our brain. It's actually quite expensive and can really fatigue us and make it hard to think straight. So it's the constant contact shifting created by the hyperactive pipeline that causes all the trouble in the office environment.

So it seems like there might be two things, sitting this. One is the obligation to check that you reference today. If you don't check these communication streams, you're going to be the one who leads to paralysis. The other is addiction because I find if I'm tired of bored or whatever, I'm my hand is reaching for my phone or reaching toward my keyboard to check these things when I'm supposed to be doing something else. Well, it's human nature. We really queuing quite seriously to back and forth interactions with other humans where a social creature our brain is wired for this.

So if you know right over here, one click away is a lot of different people who need you. And there's conversations going and there's conversations have developed since the last time you clicked on that button or opened that app. That's incredibly compelling. We are wired to take that seriously and when we are not checking that, we just know these messages are piling up that is conversely quite stressful.

So I think it's absolutely right. And then there's this insiduous feedback cycle that all of the context switching of checking email or Slack all the time fatigues us cognitively. And then when we get fatigued, we don't have the energy to actually lock in on the harder deeper work we want to do and so we fall back to do more of the inbox check it in the fatigue even grows and this feedback loop spirals out of control

which is why by two or three o'clock most office workers are tapped out from a mental perspective. I feel like you're reporting live from inside my head. It's inside the head of a lot of knowledge workers. The scariest stat I saw when I was working on the book was the average knowledge worker is checking an inbox once every six minutes. That's basically constantly because you have to keep in mind. That's an average. So somewhere in there, you're in a one-on-one meeting or a lunch break where you can't check your inbox and that long gap gets worked into this average.

So probably what it means is during most periods, it's just a constant check. Or you're, you know, like now on remote work, I'm getting bored in a meet as Zoom meeting. So I pull up my inbox and put it right below my camera. So it looks like I'm looking at my camera, but I'm actually looking at my inbox. And so I'm not doing anything useful at that point. Because our brain can't actually do that well. And this is an idea that I knew was true. I mean, four or five years ago, I had a book where I mentioned

this was a problem. But then I went down to rabbit hole. If let me actually talk to neuroscientists, let me actually talk to psychologists, let me talk to management organizational psychologists who actually directly study the impact of switching your attention back and forth on workplace activities. And it was more of a disaster than I thought because when you glance from the Zoom meeting

or the thing you're writing, when you glance from that to Slack or you glance to that to an inbox, you're initiating a contact shift. And it's a contact shift in which you're starting to inhibit a lot of neural networks and you're starting to try to amplify other neural networks. This is a process that can take five or 10 minutes to complete, but you just glance at this for a minute and you come back to the thing you're doing so you abort that context shift.

Then you initiate a new one to try to go back to the original context. Our brain can't do that. It's disaster. It all collides with each other. All these changes and amplifications and inhibitions. What you get is you can't do that. It's disaster. It all collides with each other. All these changes and amplifications and inhibitions. And what you get is you can't think clearly and what you get is as fatigue. How did we get this system? Well, this is what's most interesting about it. No one actually thought it was a good idea. We're very quick today. They say, well, of course, this is what work is. It's

we do it all back and forth, and email them. Luckily, if I didn't have that, how else will we possibly work? We think it is natural, but if you go back and look at the history of it, it was unplanned. Essentially, email spread throughout offices in the first half of the 1990s, and it did so because it solves some very practical problems. It was replacing the fax machine. It was replacing voicemail, and it was replacing interoffice memos. And it did it well. It is a much better tool for those three purposes than those tools that preceded it. Once it arrived in offices, once people had access to low

friction digital communication and low friction CCs, we shifted naturally and without coordination towards this hyperactive, high-mind mode of working. So it was an unexpected, unplanned side effect of introducing these communication tools. So I think it's important to recognize that. There's nothing pre-planned, fundamental, or even that smart about this way of working. It's accidental. So we should feel completely empowered to take a very critical look at it and say, okay, is this what we really want to do? Do you sense that there's a movement of foot in the culture to take a critical look

at this and make fundamental changes? I think recently this is starting to happen. And when I say recently, I mean within the last year or two, we are getting to a point now where I think we recognize that fundamentally how we work is broken. This is important because the way we were thinking about this before, and we have been thinking about email overload, I really picked up the signal of email overload, I start picking up that signal right around the early 2000s. That's when you first really start to see this signal arise in popular media and discussion. We were dealing with this problem before by thinking,

oh, individuals have bad habits. You're checking your inbox too often, or you're not properly batching, or we have the wrong norms, you're writing the wrong subject lines, we try to solve this problem by just changing the way that we interact with an inbox full of all these messages. The big change in thinking that's happening now

that I'm trying to promote is that, no, the issue is the underlying workflows to put all those messages into the inbox in the first place. You don't solve the problem by having a better relationship with your inbox. You solve the problem by preventing most of these ad hoc unscheduled messages that require responses from showing up in the inbox in the first place. It's an issue of the underlying decision of how we collaborate. That's the issue, not our habits in terms of how often do I check email, what is my norm for writing subject line or any of these surface level tweaks? So what is, in your view, the route to this more fundamental systems level fix? So the hyperactive hive mind is just a terrible way to implement most of the collaboration

that actually has to happen in the office. So the solution is to replace the hive mind with alternatives that are better. And what it requires is that we think about work as a collection of different discrete, I call them processes. But here's things we do again and again on this team that produce value. We answer client calls, we do again and again on this team, the produce value. We answer client calls, we put together proposals, we prepare white papers, we produce and post podcast, whatever. There's here's the things we do again and again. Most of these type of processes right now

just implicitly are implemented with the hive. Let's just rock and roll back and forth, messages try to figure these out. What I'm arguing is, if you say, here is how we alternatively want to implement this. This is where the information goes. This is when and how we talk about this to make decisions.

This is the sequence of steps we go through. If we put in specific implementations that do not rely on just, let's go back and forth with messages as needed, you can get away from the high find. Now this is something that organizations can do. It's also something individuals can do. Just looking at their own work life,

the processes they're involved with, just thinking about it from this perspective, is there an alternative way that I can regularly do this regularly occurring work task that does not depend on messages that are sent and received at unscheduled times that require responses? So can you get more granular here? What would this look like in the life of your average worker?

So, the key here is that there's not going to be a single tool that's going to solve the problem. There's not going to be a single policy because each of these different processes looks very different. So, if you're an individual, so you're a worker, you're on a team, you want to start making some changes and maybe you're not ready yet to send my book to your whole management team and make a big thing. You just want to focus on what you can control to get started.

The very first thing to do is to recognize you're not just a general purpose computing block that just has tasks sent at it all day that you execute. No, no, you participate in a discrete number of discrete processes. Things you do again and again that's valuable for you and your company. Then you can start asking for each of these. Is there a better way, better set of systems or rules or guidelines for how I do each of these? That's going to really reduce these unscheduled messages. Now in some cases, this might just be there is a tool you can plug in.

You say, oh, I have to schedule lots of meetings. We've been just going back and forth. What if we used a scheduling tool instead? Great. Now there's many fewer unscheduled meetings. Sometimes it's externalizing all of the information relevant to a given problem. Like, well, we're trying to do this report for our client. Let's put all the information on a Trello board. We can have it all attached to cards and organized by status and have a very structured way that we meet the talk about this. Sometimes as

simple as saying, okay, there's a lot of quick questions I have to answer for people. I now have office hours. These times on these days, I'm always available. I can now defer quick questions to those office hours. These are all different ways to get to the same solution, which is ways of getting the work done that does not require a large number of unscheduled messages

that require responses. That's so interesting. So I could just say, look, don't email me randomly. If you have a question, call or text or email me, message me, reach out to me in some way during these discrete chunk of time. But the rest of the time, please don't email me. And I profiled the software company that did this because they had subject matter experts. And this is the guy that wrote the book on JavaScript.

So it was important that employees could talk to other employees and ask questions, but it was driving them literally to distraction, getting these messages all the time. Hey, what about this? What about this? And so they shifted the office hours. And I talked to the CEO about this and he said, they were worried that the employees want to put up with this, right? Like, wait, I have to wait CEO about this and he said, they were worried that the employees went up with this, right? Like wait, I have to wait in some cases a week Until the next office hours for this expert before I can ask them my question Turned out it wasn't a problem that people just need a clarity great

I just need to know how do I get the answer I need? Oh, I have to wait till next Tuesday at least okay I wait till next Tuesday, but that's when I get the answer great I have clarity. Let me move on to the next thing. People didn't really need accessibility. I didn't really need to be able to talk to the expert at any time. They needed a way to have an obligation that's just rattling around their mind and causing stress. Be handled.

Okay, I know what to do with this. Good. Let's move on. I have some skepticism about that as I think about my life as a improbably as a tech company co-founder because we are moving fast and ideas pop up, opportunities pop up and we need to get together quickly and schedule meeting, etc. So you understand why I might, where some people might hear this and say, yeah, that doesn't sound like it's going to work where I work. Well, yeah, that doesn't sound like it's gonna work where I work.

Well, yeah, and does come up often. People are pretty convinced that we need unstructured back and forth communication, but the thing to keep in mind is that again, it is devastating to your ability to actually think clearly and it causes all this fatigue. So let's think about like a small agile startup. If you're two or three people, then just being in the same room

or just being on a slack channel might be the best way to get going. Because again, that's the natural application of the high-fives. Small number of people working on a small number of things. But beyond that, some of the smaller agile startups I talked to, they had very structured every day. We all get together, boom, what's going on, highly structured. What are the things we're working on today? Who needs what do we work on? Good. And then there's another one of these quick status meetings a little bit later in the day, so they could they had these synchronization points. They could very quickly see what's going on and make sure who needs to do what. And then they use tools to make sure that every ongoing project had completely externalized the information. Here's all the information, everything that's going on,

it's status and who's working on what. They did not want this to exist just in transcripts of Slack conversations or messages buried in inboxes. And so then they have all these things clearly in these externalized these systems. And now it's twice a day, okay, what are we doing for the next few hours? I'm going to work on this. I need this from you. We got to do brainstorming. We typically do brainstorming the afternoon. Let's grab the next slot going on for that. I'm going to work on this for the next three hours. We all agree, great break. And then no contact shifting than the next thing, no contact shifting. So even when things are fast moving, even when things are agile, having clarity about

when do we discuss, where do we keep track of the information, getting away from it? Again, this is the killer unscheduled messages that require responses. So it doesn't mean they're not talking a lot. It doesn't mean that it might need to be a lot of meetings to discuss things and move quickly, but they don't want all this to unfold with messages that every six minutes they have to be checking or responding to. So is the rule that at these companies

just don't send an email, don't slack me, don't text me, you're gonna, we're gonna take something out of your paycheck. How does this get enforced? Well, it becomes a cultural shift. So it's not that email goes away, for example, is that email typically becomes more like the mailbox used to be at the office. It's a great way still to deliver files or broadcast information or send information to people.

It's much better than printing it and sending it out. But in these type of organizations, you would check your inbox, like you would check your old mail pigeonhole in the mail room. Yeah, maybe once a day you go in there, see what's there, what I need to take care of, but there's not collaboration happening on it. And this is what you really see. So it's not that you, it's not punitive. It is you have given alternatives.

So yes, we have to fall back to the hive mind. There's no other way for us to collaborate or make decisions or talk to each other. That's what we have to use. But when there's alternative, this is how it works. This is like when we get together, this is when we discuss, this is how we run projects, this is the process for doing this. You don't need the tools because you already know this is how we do this type of work, this is how we do that type of work.

And it's something I come back to is you can't, you don't induce people to change their behavior to get away from the hive mind by saying, stop doing that, you replace the hive mind with alternative so they don't need to do that. So hypothetically, your employer creates a better environment than what we've been relying on the hive mind. But I think a lot of us still are getting a ton of messages from our friends, setting up dinners,

or texting with our spouses or kids, randomly checking, looking for dopamine hits, or feasting on FOMO on Instagram. If your employer starts getting it right, doesn't mean you're not going to be task switching. And maybe that just comes back to personal agency too. Yeah, this is where it gets interesting because we have two magisteria here that have very similar effects on our life, but the underlying causes are different and therefore the underlying solutions are different. So, the one magisteria is the workplace. We're checking email, we're checking Slack all the time.

The other one is our consumer facing personal technology. So, we're on our phone all the time. We're looking at Instagram, we're looking at Twitter, whatever on our Slack all the time. The other one is our consumer facing personal technology. So we're on our phone all the time. We're looking at Instagram, we're looking at Twitter, whatever on our phone all the time. They feel very similar. Yeah, it's technological devices, communication-based that we're looking at all the time. I think the causes are quite different. So when I was last on your show a couple of years ago, we were talking about that consumer facing digital world. And over there, why do we look at these things all the time? Well, largely because they're engineered for that to be the effect. These are tools produced by attention, economy, conglomerates that are really aiming to monopolize

as much of your energy and time as possible. They're engineered to get a moderate behavior addiction. We look at TikTok all the time because TikTok has very carefully meters out views to your videos. So just when you think that you're getting bored with it, they'll show your video to a lot of people and you'll get this burst of, oh, maybe I'm about to become the next big thing. People like me and they're playing you just like a slot machine, right? Email Slack is very different. No one is engineering these tools to try to get you to use it more. Microsoft doesn't make more money if you send 50 messages versus 10 and outlook, they make money when you just install it in the first

place. And so over there, the reason why we check these things all the time is because the hyperactive pipeline workflow demands it. That's just how it operates. And it's a really interesting distinction because it means when you're dealing with consumer facing technology, this is really about you improving your relationship with the technology you're're in the driver seat, you have to have a more intentional skeptical relationship with these tools. Be very careful about it. When it comes over to your email and Slack, it's more complicated than just you need to have a better relationship with these tools.

You actually have to change the underlying way that you work. There's a much deeper, more complicated solution. It took me a while to prize these two things apart, because they're so superficially, they're quite congruent. It seems like this is more or less the same thing going on, but how we have to think about and respond to them can actually be quite different. I just want to say that back to you, because this is very interesting.

When we're dealing with workplace technologies which are not designed like slot machines, email, Slack, etc. It's a structural systemic fix, a rethink that is the way out individually or collectively. It sounds like probably better to have it be collective. When we're talking about consumer facing technologies like social media, that's where it's more about personal agency and having some sense of hygiene as you approach these technologies. Yeah, that is my read. And I will say, I actually got a fair amount of pushback on that being my read for consumer

facing technologies because this was a period where there was a lot of backlash against the companies themselves and the solutions really need to be legislative. The solutions need to be regulatory. We can solve this at a systemic level. My read was actually the most powerful, most effective move we can make with consumer facing technologies is what you can do right now with your relationship. And so, yeah, with consumer facing technologies, it's, well, maybe I don't need to be using Instagram or I don't need to be using TikTok or if I do need to use Instagram, I really need

to use it very little. In the world of work, it's not so simple. You can't just say, you know, maybe I should stop using email so much because I have a bad relationship with it. Well, you have to use email if that's how all your work is unfolding. So now what you have to do is say, oh, I need to really change the systems by which we collaborate so that checking email the time is not needed. So you have a lot more logistical homework to do in some sense to fix the workplace issue

where you have a lot more philosophical introspection, thinking about the good life and meaningful life needed to actually fix the consumer facing issue. And so I think they're quite different. And when we overlap, it could be some issues. I think one of the things we did in the early period of email overload is that we tried to graft the framework of personal addiction onto it. And this is why when the Blackberry first enabled the really hyperactive hive minds, we coined this term crackberry.

We really looked at it through the lens of people are using, people are using their Blackberry too much because they're addicted. We didn't really ask the right question, which is what changed about the nature of work that means they have to be doing this much communication. When we blend the two worlds, it can actually hold us back. So if we only think about the email issue as a personal addiction issue, we never get to the underlying issue. If we only look at the personal communication issue as well, these companies are doing something

wrong that we can fix with regulation, then we never actually get around the fixing the personal relationship that's going to make an issue. So when we confuse the two dynamics, we actually impede progress, at least in my opinion. Just as a point of personal interest, but when it comes to social media, you don't think legislation should be considered. It really should be about how we handle ourselves as individuals.

Well, I think there's a place for legislation and regulation, but I think we can't put our full hopes that that is what is going to solve the issue. I think we saw something very similar in the 1990s when we got very serious about the negative impacts of addictive tobacco products. There were legislative and also litigious approaches, right? So there was things we did in the court system

in terms of actually suing the tobacco companies. There were regulations that were put in place, things having to do, for example, with warning labels. However, we coupled that with a very aggressive focus on cultural change. We really focus, and by we, I just mean the way that our culture responded to it and the way that our government responded to it was investing a lot in advertisements, for example. And other approaches to change the culture around smoking.

So it was something that became less ubiquitous, it became something was much more appropriate not to do. We changed the way we actually thought about smoking. So we had to have both things. And I think this is what's happening with social media. I'm sure there are excesses here, especially when it comes to things like data privacy where we need to be very wary because these are very large companies. And I don't want us to not think about that. But I don't want us also to think that that's going to solve the problem of the 32-year-old

with their kids who can't help but look at Instagram all day long. It's not going to help the problem of the writer who's really stopping able to produce writing because they're so engaged on Twitter all day. There's no bill that's going to stop that. That's going to require a personal fix as well. So I'm not against looking at this through a legislative lens, but we're not going to stop that, that's going to require a personal fix as well. So I'm not against

looking at this through a legislative lens, but we're not going to completely solve the problem by any means if we just constrain our focus to those type of fixes. Both of my jobs at ABC News and I had to 10% happier. We use Google Documents or Google Docs a lot and that does allow us to kind of work on, we have it one place where we're all working on the same thing. However, in Google Docs, at least, you can message each other in the margins of the page, which can in and of itself become a sinkhole. Do you have any thoughts about that? Well, it's very natural for us to fall back

on asynchronous back and forth communication because again, that's how we naturally collaborate. It also explains, I think, why the hyperactive hive mine has persisted, even though it has all these productivity impacts, because in the moment it's convenient, the overhead is minimal. It is always easiest. If I can just grab people when I need them,

you've avoided the need to put in place more structure. You've also avoided the friction of that structure. You know, I really, if I could just get an answer from Dan right now, it'd make my life easy. If I said half the wait till later in the day when we do a Ness meeting, that's more friction and that's annoying, we're gonna fall back on that unless there is an external force that's pushing us

to a configuration that's gonna be more efficient. And so I think that's why you see, okay, if there's messaging available in Google Docs, you fall back to it. And the reason why there's not that external force, why companies don't more frequently say, look, we could be doing much better if we stop doing the hive mind, is that there is a culture of autonomy in knowledge work that I trace back and it goes back to the the very coining of the term knowledge work in the 1950s. This idea that you need to leave the knowledge worker alone to figure out how to do their own work.

So it's considered off limits in knowledge work to talk to people about how they organize their work. If you want to do that, that's personal. That's personal productivity. It's none of my business. Here's your objectives, hit your objectives. Let's all plug into this communication channel and rock and roll.

That culture of autonomy means that we're stuck essentially at this lowest common denominator of like, well, what's going to be the easiest, the most flexible, least overhead, least friction of all the ways we can collaborate? Because it's very difficult to move to a different configuration, right? Because that's going to require effort and who has the authority to do that. So I think we're stuck in this autonomy trap, where if it's up to everyone how they want to do their work, then the way we're going to collaborate is going to be in whatever the easiest, most convenient possible manner.

You've also said in your book that written communication is unnatural to humans? Yeah, we're bad at it. It is very difficult for us to do purely linguistic communication, where I'm just communicating with you using the written word. That's not natural. When humans interact, there's an incredibly rich information stream going back and forth, and it's things like our voice tone, our pacing of our words, our body language. All of this is part of a rich stream that is a part of what interaction means for humans. Purely written communication gets rid of most of that. So it's a very impoverished, unnatural form of communication. Novelists can do it well,

but they train for years and years to do it well. If you look back at the Republic of Letters period in the 18th century, you would see these letters are very flowery and they go on for pages before they really get to the meat of it. That's a very carefully trying to simulate some of these emotional connections. The stuff you would get real easy

if you're just talking to someone. So it's very difficult to accurately communicate with a written word. So when we're just shooting off messages on Slack and email, where wildly misunderstood, the information rarely comes through. There's a ton of stuff that we know about what we're trying to say that doesn't make it to the recipient. So it's very frustrating. Yes, I've found frustration on both sides of that, sending and receiving.

Much more of my conversation with Cal Newport right after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brownleur, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking.

Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon music or Wondery app. Between working on the book and Living through this pandemic and watching what it's done to people in the workplace. Where do you land on remote work?

So for remote work To work you have to move past the hyperactive hive mind. I mean, I think the last year gave a ton of office workers a crash course and just how bad the hyperactive hive mind can be. So if all the way you normally work as just this informal back and forth conversation, when we moved remote, that got even more hyperactive, it got even worse. When we begin to hear reports of people who are basically on Zoom without break for eight hours a day, I mean, I heard from readers that it would say, my biggest issue is finding

a time to go to the bathroom between nine to five. It's constant Zoom, and then you're doing your email simultaneously with the Zoom. And it's because at least when we're in the office, the hyperactive high bind is not a great way of collaborating, but there is these informal productivity heuristics. I can grab someone, I can see you in the hallway, I can, after a meeting, we can do five minutes conversation that saves 20 back and forth emails. When we got rid of all of that, the hyperactive high-bind got even more hyperactive. We were trying to simulate the surveillance of the office with more Zoom and more emails. So it was really terrible.

On the other hand, the companies that already had a more structured way of working, they had moved away from the hive mind, there's something more structured, they have no issue going remote. They can reap the benefits without that negatives. Now I'm just chained to a Zoom screen and an email inbox on my desk all day. We saw this with software companies, software companies, if you're a developer, you're probably using some sort of what they call agile project management methodology, which is like we're talking about with Trello, you have these cards about all the different features and their status

and you do a sprint on one feature at a time and it's really clear, we meet for 15 minutes every morning and this is how the meeting goes. For those workers, they've never had issue going remote because how they work is highly structured. I've been recently talking to some companies that use an approach to work called results only work environments, which is a way of working that depends only on the outcome. Where you work when you work is up to you. If someone needs to communicate with you about work, you kind of negotiate, well, when are we going to talk about this?

They had no trouble with the pandemic because they already had people. I'm in the office. I'm not in the office. So I think the lesson of the pandemic is that the way we're working doesn't really scale this hyperactive hive mind. We're on a tight rope here. It's just barely working when we're in the office. And I don't know if this will happen, but early in the pandemic, I wrote a New Yorker piece about remote work. And my hope was that the remote work during the pandemic would raise the pain of the hyperactive hive mind so much that it would force changes. We would have to structure our work

get away from the hive mind. It would be beneficial in the future, whether you're remote or not. A year later from that article coming out, I think the sad reality is that the first part was true. The pain got much higher, but the second part didn't come true. It didn't force people to make changes because during the pandemic year, everything was so

bad that we basically were just used to things being bad, and it didn't actually force us to say less seriously rethink how we work. So that's what I was hoping what happened, but I think that is to clear lesson. If you get away from the high-minus structure, how you work, you are suddenly way more nimble. You can change where people work, how they work, when they work without, without it being a big issue. So, your prognosis at the beginning of the pandemic was somewhat optimistic that, you know, obviously this is going to be terrible, but it might have one beneficial outcome.

That didn't come to pass what's your current prognosis. Do you see any signs that we're going to figure this out? I do because it's going to make a lot more money for the companies, right? So the hive mind is incredibly unproductive. You're getting a fraction of the capacity of your employees and it makes the employees miserable. So voluntary turnovers very high.

If you can move away from the hive mind, your company is going to be much more profitable because you're going to be producing much more higher quality stuff and the good people will stay. They're not going to burn out and they're not going to have voluntary turnover. That is the pressure pushing back against the hive mind that I think inevitably is going to break that proverbial dam. We've been stuck there for a while because of this autonomy notion, like we don't deal with as a company how people work this up to the individual. I think that's mistaken. I think autonomy and how we execute is very justified, but autonomy and how we organize and collaborate is not justified.

And so I would say in the last year or two, I've heard a lot more interest from the people I know in the investor class. I've heard a lot more interest from the C suite. I think this light bulb is going on, hey, it's going to be a huge pain to move away from the hive mind, but we might be five or 10x more productive and have five x less turnover if we do. And that is such a positive carrot that I think we will go through the short term pain of trying to completely change how it is we actually collaborating work. You've talked about this a little bit, but I want to put a fine point on it. I'm switching now from prognosis to diagnosis.

What is your current diagnosis of the state of mental health for your average worker in 2021? Well, obviously the pandemic exacerbated any of these negatives drastically and for obvious reasons, but if we isolate just the impact of work itself, I think the high-finding approach makes people miserable. It has a significantly negative impact on mental health. This has been documented.

I mean, you can see these very clear correlations I talked about some of these studies between communication technology usage and a company and the subjective well-being of the employees. The health goes down. And you can correct for all the variables you want to correct for, the more heavily communicative, the more communication back and forth you have to do, the less happier people get. You can measure this from stress. You know, there's studies where they put thermal cameras on top of people's monitors. And then they can correlate these thermal camera views with logging software on the computer.

And what they can see is, oh, when the email inbox opens, there is a heat bloom across the face that is indicative of stress. You can do the same thing with heart rate monitors. Look at the variable heart rate. Oh, when email opens, stress goes up, right? I mean, so we can measure this any sort of way we want, but a workplace in which we are constantly communicating, we can't keep up with that communication. The communication is fraught. It has all sorts of obligations. It's more worked and we can even conceive in our mind. How are we even

going to get this all done completely, frying the circuits we have in our brain to try to push us towards making plans and execution. When you design a workplace with all of these variables, we're all miserable. And it was the signature thing I would detect when I talked to people in companies that moved away from the hive mind was relief. It just this happiness and relief of, I don't have an inbox, I have to check. There is no slack channel I need to be on. My work is so much clear, so much more structured, it's slower paced, and just the sense of relief, I would say, is the dominant, the dominant trait I pick up when I talk to workers who no longer have to be chained to the hive mine. In your writings, you talk about chronic overload for workers. Do you think that is mostly,

if not all, related to hyperactive hive mind or are there other factors at play? Yeah, I think chronic overload is a public health epidemic that we're not talking about enough. Our brain is wired to reward setting up a plan in executing and completing it. That's very important for humans. It's how we overcome the natural animal instinct to conserve energy and actually go out there and it's the source of all innovation. It's why we invented fires, why we invented tools.

It's why boredom is so strong. It's such a negative emotion for humans in a way that a cat doesn't care about being bored. They'll lay in the sun all day. Humans feel bored. It's just an important drive we have to make plans and execute. The issue is if you put too much on your plate, then you can easily conceive how you're

going to get it done, you short-circuit that drive. Because the flip side of feeling satisfaction of executing a plan you made is feeling dissatisfaction when you don't. And so chronic overload, I think, subverts that goal rewards system for making plans in our brain, just like highly processed food, subverts are hunger drive, and ends up making us less healthy. And we want sugar, and then we eat the Snickers bar, and you do that enough times, you actually feel much worse. So I think chronic overload it really plays with our human psychology in a way that makes

us really miserable, and we really underestimate that. And you're asking the right question. I think the hyperactive high find does play a big role in it. I think when you reduce the friction involved and reaching out to someone and asking to do something or asking them a question or in six seconds you send an email that says

thoughts question mark and you just added 60 minutes of work to their plate. That I think did drastically increase the average number of obligations on the normal knowledge workers plate. Now, there's other factors involved because we're overloaded outside of work as well. There's cultural factors involved, but I think that's a really key point is that, and I document some examples about this, as we shifted to this, let's just figure things out on the fly.

The number of things we began stacking on our plate, the obligations we have to keep track of, went from the reasonable amount to an overload level. That is a huge background source of stress. Back to personal agency here. What do you think any of us can do if we're stuck in an environment where our bosses are relying too much on the hyperactive hive mind or have expectations that are out of line with

human capacity. Is there anything we can do other than quit? Yeah, there are things you can do. So there's a couple things. One, it is a useful exercise to actually just record, write it down somewhere. These are the processes I'm regularly involved with at my company. And you can use your email inbox to help this. Just every time you get an email, choose one day. Every time you get an email, what's the underlying process this email is involved with? What's the goal this is trying to get to that did I do again and again? So you get this big list of like, here's the things I regularly do. And then you can start asking, okay, for each of these things, given just what I can control. So I can't control other people in this scenario. How can I change how I for each of these things, given just what I can control. So I can't control other people in this scenario. How can I change how I approach each of these processes

to at least reduce unscheduled messages, being a part of it? And I think this is optimistic. There is often a lot you can do, even if no one else is involved. Now, from a psychology perspective, I suggest not advertising you're doing this. Don't put on an auto responder that explains in great detail the people exactly what your

email habits are and why they're your email habits. They don't care that much. It's just going to annoy them. Don't explain that you read Cal Newport's book and because of that, you're trying to reduce cognitive context switching. Just implement. You know, and sometimes you can be stealthily recruiting people into these more structure processes.

You just don't call it that. You just say, like, hey, Dan, we have to get this report out. Here's what I suggest. I'll work on this Monday and in this shared drive, this Google drive, I'll have my draft in there by the end of business. Then you can take it to say, if you have any questions, I have office hours I'm doing at noon, so just pop in there and ask me any questions. And then put your draft in there by the end of business on Tuesday. And then I have the production designer, C.C. here. So, you know, Bob, Wednesday morning, you grab whatever's in that Google Doc, and it's ready for you to format and post.

I've secretly just recruited you all into an implementation of this process that requires no unscheduled messages. But I didn't call it that. I didn't give a sermon about it. I didn't explain why. And Dan and Bob in this experiment, this case study, are just excited that, okay, good, there's a plan here I don't have to worry about it

and they're moving on with their day. And so you start re-engineering these processes to get away from unscheduled messages. You don't advertise it, you don't make a big deal about it. That alone can begin to have a significant impact on how many of these unscheduled messages are showing up and demanding your responses. And when those reduce, all of the stresses of the hyperactive high-mine reduce.

I get that, and I think that's very attractive. It doesn't necessarily answer part of what I ask, which is about having bosses who expect more than is humanly possible. Okay, so here's the second part. And this is where it starts to get subtle because now we have to deal with power dynamics and human psychology and it can get subtle. So now we get down to the art of how do you basically say no or push back without pushing back and saying no? And once you recognize what you're trying, especially when it comes to chronic overload, there's some things you can do.

So one thing you can do is introduce friction into the quick question. So this is a big offender, is that a boss or someone will just hit you with something that took them seven seconds to write. And they haven't even really thought it through. And it's going to take you an hour or two, you know, to try to even figure out and get a response. And I was just answering just yesterday, I was recording an episode of my podcast where a reader was asking about exactly this question.

She was in a law firm. Okay, what you can do there is introduce friction. Like, great, I want to do this. Let's get an answer to this. Let's talk. So I can really work out what you're looking for here. And you make sure I really understand what your issue is. I can get you a really good answer.

So come grab me any of my office hours or tell me when're, or here's all the times I'm available or whatever. You throw this friction in. We're now they're going to have to maybe come put aside some time, talk with you, synchronously figure out what they're really looking for when they really need to get it done. Half the time it'll basically be forget it. And the other half the time it'll be significantly easier to execute because now you've had a chance to really interact. The other thing you can do is the stealth quota system where essentially you figure out for different types of work and the secret strategy here is talk to your boss about this. What is the right quota of this type of request I should handle in a typical quarter? What's the right number of these?

I should do. I want to make sure that I'm balancing the different things that I'm supposed to do so that like everything that needs me, I'm giving it a good amount of attention. In academia, we do this with like journal review request and committee request, et cetera. And then once you have these quotas, if you fill the quota and someone's like, hey, can you do this for me?

You can say, yeah, you know, we have this quota if I do like seven of these a month or no more and I've already have seven on the plate, so I can't do it this month. Now you've shifted the conversation from, I can't do it this month. Now you've shifted the conversation from, why aren't you doing this thing I want? Like why are you making my life harder? You're shifting the conversation to, does your quota make sense?

And now for the person asking, the only real argument they have is your quota is wrong. You should do eight of these. You should do eight of these a month or what have you. And especially if you establish these quotas with your supervisor, it really makes it much easier to keep your overload levels reasonable without feeling that it's as deeply personal. I'm saying no to you about this thing and it feels like a personal rejection. So yeah, we have to start getting subtle, especially when it comes to preventing overload. But we do need to start thinking through those strategies.

So those are two that work well. I believe you have a like a Troika or triumvirate of recommendations when it comes to sort of working smarter in the environment in which we find ourselves. And those three strategies are defer, automate, and externalize. Yeah, that's the three main categories of implementations of processes that's not the high-practic five-mind. Right., yeah, defer, we've covered some examples. That's where you can basically take the conversation that was going to happen with unscheduled messages and defer it somewhere that doesn't require that. So, let's go to scheduling software, talk to me on my office hours.

So, there's two examples. You'd deferring asynchronous back forth conversation to another form that doesn't require asynchronous back and forth. Externalize is like we talked about with Trello. Okay, instead of just having all of the information and communication about this happen, ad hoc back and forth messages, let's put all the information into base camp or Trello or in the flow and let's have a really structured schedule for how we collaborate on this. We meet these days for these times and here's the structure of the meeting. You've externalized that out of your inbox, out of Slack and into another system.

Automate, we didn't talk about this as much, but this is where if you have a work process where it's the same steps in the same order every time, so like producing a podcast episode, you can figure out how do we get from A to B to C to D without just someone having to wait around for a message to arrive. Then I'll message you, you figure out how to automate it. The file goes into this directory by this point.

The producer takes it. And by this point, it gets moved to this Dropbox and it's spreadsheet is updated. So the editor can take it. Whatever, the point is you figure out a way for those type of processes, A follows B follows C follows D, a way to do that without having

to have unscheduled messages. So most of the alternatives to the hive mind will fall into one of those three categories. Incredible, useful. And just a mechulpe, I left from strategies for dealing with overwhelm to strategies for dealing with hyperactive hive mind. I know they're connected, but I was kind of jumping between two concepts. So thank you for being nimble. I'm curious, you know, I asked you this the last time you were on the show, we were talking more about interacting with consumer facing technology, social media, et cetera, et cetera. I was asking you then to practice what you preach,

how good are you practicing what you preach? Let me ask you in this context, you know, how is your relationship to technology be it consumer or employee or work-based technology these days? It's much harder. So the high-prank of high-mine issues are, I find it much harder than I do the consumer facial issues because for the consumer-facing issue, because it's so much personal agency, it's pretty easy to come up with your own solutions. You don't need approval from anyone.

It doesn't really affect anyone else. No one really cares. And so, as we talked about before, I have no social media accounts. I can just make that decision. It's not a big deal. There's no boss who's going to get mad at me. When it comes to media, with a hyperactive hive mind, I'm constantly having to work on this because,

hey, I have multiple different jobs. You know, I'm a professor and I'm an author and then I have the media company, not unlike, you know, the situation you find yourself in. There's these different hats and each of these hats have a lot of different stakeholders who need to work with you. And so what I find myself doing is having to constantly go through this exercise of what are the actual processes

I come back to again and again? How do I want to implement these? And then that'll work for a while, but because my job role shift a lot, being an author during a book launch, for example, is very different than being an author during the writing phase. It'll break. And then I'll have to come back and say,

okay, let me put in this new process. So for example, at the height of this book launch, which was right around March when I was doing the bulk of this, I very carefully created a process with my publicist about how we were going to schedule interviews when we used to share document. And she would put, you know, into document, here's the different opportunities that are coming up.

And here's the links for how they would schedule it or the days they do it. And then I would check this document about once a day and I would go in and say, great, let's do it. I'll do this time. Okay, I just scheduled this one. Okay. And what it prevented was her just emailing me one off for everything that was happening and then having to have three or four back and four of the emails about each thing because that adds up.

And now you have 20 or 30 emails a week and you have to keep checking because the conversation's going on. And so like that was very effective that reduced a lot of unscheduled messages to organize interviews. But then as the publicity to her wound down, that process sort of fell apart. I don't think I use that process when we schedule this interview. And so it's a constant thing. I feel your pain. I want to ask this just because it's this maybe a fun question to ask given how small sea, Catholic, your interests are and you know, what an interesting person

you are. Is there anything else on your mind these days that will be worth discussing while I have you? Well, there's always things going on. The overload question is one that I'm very interested in. As often happens to me, I talk about a little bit in the last book and the thing I talk about a little bit in one book becomes a huge topic of thought I elaborate going forward. So that's something I've been thinking a lot about. There's a distinction that I've been trying to unpack, so I'll try it on for size here, between fast and slow productivity.

I think when it comes to productivity, and this is a space I'm in, I'm known for quote-unquote productivity, fast productivity is about, okay, you have all this stuff on your plate. How do you organize it and try to get it all done? What's your planner, where's your bullet, journal, where's your time, what time, like, how are you trying to organize all the stuff that you have on your plate? Where slow productivity is about, how do you control what is on your plate such that it's small enough and meaningful enough that you don't even really have to think about the fast productivity stuff like it's just it's a reasonable amount of work that you really care about and you can really get into. I don't think we've thought a lot about slow productivity enough and I think that's a big revolution that I hope is coming I think in work.

We need to be drastically more specialized if we just think about human brains was the right way to get value out of human brains and prevent those human brains from quitting. just think about human brains, what's the right way to get value out of human brains and prevent those human brains from quitting. We should really be working on two or three things at a time and that's it. This crazy world we're in now where we have 700 item to do list that work and 600 emails a week makes no sense. In our home life, and I think a lot of people felt this during the pandemic, we need to drastically probably reduce what's on our plate. We're not meant to have more things going on on our brain

to know what to do with. Now, I don't know quite how this is going to happen. Some of this is work culture change. Some of this is technology change. One of the biggest impacts AI is going to have in the workplace is not automating the direct work that produces value in the office, but taking off the plate, all the stuff that gets

in the way of that. And I don't think we've really unpacked what the impact of that's going to be. When it comes to our life out of work, switching towards slow productivity, I think is a massive cultural change. This idea of space and slowness and non-optimization and not too many activities. So this, I think, is an emerging distinction. I'm hearing a lot about the underlying issues here. A lot of pushback overload, a lot of pushback on busyness, a lot of pushback on productivity, but I think that really means an exclusive focus on fast productivity.

There is something here that I think is very important, and I think the pandemic may have just double clicked on this topic. In a way, it was bubbling over the last five years. The pandemic just double clicked on this topic and made it the main page we're looking at here in our metaphorical browser. I really agree. I mean, it resonates with me. And one of the big obstacles for me

and slow productivity, which you might call prioritization on the big issues. You know, not how am I going to prioritize what I'm going to do today, per se, but like, what are my big priorities? What am I working on? What do I want to do with my life for the next chunk of time?

One of the big issues for me is this kind of voraciousness having eyes that are bigger than my stomach. I'm a curious person. There are a million things I'd like to do. And maybe I'm a little fear-based ambitious as well. Does that land for you as a concern? Well, it's my exact problem, too.

I mean, the biggest, accelerant to overload is success Because you have options and they're all interesting. And I'm fighting this, I mean, this is maybe one of the reasons why I'm so interested in this. I'm fighting the same battle. And I drastically go back and forth to on one hand, I'm very excited about my initiatives. Let's go. I got my book. I got my show. I've got these ideas in the moment. It's very exciting.

And then I, I drastically go back the other way. And I say, man, look at these, these ideas. In the moment, it's very exciting. Then I drastically go back the other way. I say, man, look at these writers I sometimes profile who have these houses in the middle of nowhere. They just disappear for a year at a time and just think big thoughts and walk on the beach. Then that's really appealing. It's like two parts of your mind. It's like the fast part of my mind is this is exciting. Let's get into it.

And there's a slow part of my mind that says being diligently focused on a small number of things is great. And I have this exact problem. And I think this is probably writ large, a culture of opportunity, especially a culture of opportunities that are going to give you positive affect or highly aspirational and vicious, whether we're talking about opportunity of what I can watch on Netflix or at the other extreme opportunity on what massive business move I can make. That's a difficult buffet, I think, for a mind that's focused on going reward to actually navigate in a moderate way. And so, yes, I think that's a huge problem.

I am really struggling with it. And I think that's why I'm starting to try to clarify intellectually what's going on here. Yeah, I was winsing as you were talking because it was, once again, it was like you were doing a live news report from inside of my brain. And maybe it's a high-class problem. I'm almost certainly it is a high-class problem. But for me, at least there are a lot of things I want to do and I have a lot of trouble pairing them down because I mean, as I said before maybe there are a bunch of contributors

so ego thinking that every idea I have is so awesome that the world needs to see it manifested or fear because if I don't say yes to everything, you know, I'm going to live under a bridge. I think there are a lot of tributaries feeding into this rushing river, but it is, for me, personally, very hard to manage. And I do think it has echoes in all sorts of different situations. Another place I see this issue show up a lot

is college students. So you see students, I'm at Georgetown, I see students, these are very talented students, lots of options. It can be paralyzing. I wanna do this, in this club in that major, and then I need to add a third major, and I wanna do this, and it's this idea of, here's a craft I'm gonna hone over time,

is something that we've lost, or it's uncomfortable, and for all the reasons you're talking about, yeah, I have the same fear, like I worry about money, I worry about ego, ego plays a big role, I worried about misopportunity, What if there's something really cool that could be done? One of the issues here, I think, is we have all these tributaries leading to the river of this issue and we don't have a good paddle, we don't have a good raft. I mean, culturally speaking, right now, we don't have a pretty consistent cultural story about here is the hero's journey in our modern world. Here is a path for

identifying and working with your talents and ethics and aspirations in this complicated stew and creating a journey that is a value and meaningful. Different times in different places, there was more consistent cultural stories about what this means. We don't have any of those stories. And so our whole life is having the infinite netflix scroll in all the different aspects of our life. And it's incredibly confusing and can be incredibly stressful. I think maybe we need to rediscover or rebuild some shared cultural stories about what the life well lived has to put in the place because I think in the hurry to dismantle the things we think was getting in the way of that, we dismantled everything. And I mean, I see this with young people in particular, I have this issue.

It then becomes very difficult when it's just on you to say, the world is your oyster, and you got to figure out from scratch what you're going to do and how you're going to do it. That's a hard question to answer from scratch every time. Do you have a sense of how for you at least you will find a paddle in the aforementioned Russian River? Thinking about it a lot these days, I found myself, this was actually a surprise, that early in the pandemic I started a podcast where I answered questions from readers and I sort of expected, like, yes, this would be you. Some of the stuff that work and technology and productivity, the stuff I'm sort of known for. Almost immediately, a large portion of this podcast discussion became on what I call the

deep life, trying to figure out these questions, how to build a life that is stable and resilient and meaningful and how we do it. And it was like a natural, cultural immune response. It's like, as soon as I opened up this dialogue with my readers, that's where we went. And it's not something I've been writing about before then. It's not something that's been a big, a huge part of my thinking. So I've really spent the last year thinking deeply about how to live more deeply. And I'm far from answers now, but I am for sure convinced that this is a very important

thread to pull on. And so I'm continuing to try to understand,. There's a huge amount of wisdom on this. I mean, from the very beginning of humans writing down stories, this was a big topic. How do we build the right life? How do we live? How do we deal with it? This is the human story told again and again, and I'm becoming more acquainted with it. It's a topic I am increasingly fascinated with. And I think I'm going to be making some big changes in my life. I don't know exactly what they're going to be. But I think I'm like a lot of people coming out of the disruption of the pandemic thinking,

what do I really want my life to look like? What doesn't feel good about what I'm doing now? How do I get from there to here? When you figure this stuff out, consider yourself invited back on this program. I want to hear it. I'm sure we all do. Cal, before we go, can you just remind people of the name of the book where they can find you on the internet, maybe some of your other books, just please plug away.

Exactly. It would be ironic if I said, well, email me. Send me emails. Yeah, so this book is called a World Without Email. It's really the follow up to my 2016 book Deep Work. The book about consumer facing technology or phone that came in between those was called Digital Minimalism. CalNuPort.com, you can find out about all that. The podcast where I talk about all this stuff every week is called Deep Questions. Great to see you again, Cal.

I learned a lot. So thank you. Well see you again, Cal. I learned a lot. So thank you. Well, thank you, Dan. I enjoyed it. Thanks again to Cal. Always great to see him. This show is made by Samuel Johns, DJ Cashmere, Kim Baikamar, Maria Wartell,

and Jen Poit Poit, Poient with audio engineering from ultraviolet audio. As always, a big shout out to my ABC News colleagues, Ryan Kessler, and Josh Cohen. I'm going to see you all on Wednesday for a rerun of a popular episode on improving relationships Buddhist style. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.

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