The One You Feed - Cal Newport on Digital Minimalism

Episode Date: December 17, 2019

Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to his academic research, he writes about the intersection of digital technology and culture. He is the author of 6 books, his most recent being the New York Times bestseller, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. In this interview, Eric and Cal discuss how to optimize the role of tech in our lives so that it supports us in the life we want to live., rather than depleting us and causing us to feel like we are giving it too much of our time and energy.Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Cal Newport and I Discuss Digital Minimalism and…His book, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy WorldThe concerns about our digital lifestyleThe mixture of harm and benefit with social mediaThe costs of our digital lifestyleDigital Maximalist vs Digital MinimalistStarting with your values as a guide to decide what tech you use to maximize the time you can spend on things you valueHow to think about the role of tech in your lifeDeploying tech to support you in living life according to your valuesHaving a philosophy surrounding the use of tech in your lifeHow clutter is costlyAdding up the cost and value of somethingThe importance of optimization in addition to the role of tech in our livesIntentionality is satisfyingThe 3 step process for implementing digital minimalismCal Newport Links:calnewport.comDaily Harvest – Delivers absolutely delicious organic, carefully sourced, chef-created fruit and veggie smoothies, soups, overnight oats, bowls and more. To get $25 off your first box go to www.dailyharvest.com and enter promo code FEEDThe Great Courses Plus: Are you a life long learner? A perpetually curious person? The Great Courses Plus is an on-demand streaming service that offers courses taught by professors on a whole host of topics such as Human Behavior, Money Management Skills, Astronomy, Cooking and so much more. Listeners of the show get a full month of unlimited access to their library for FREE by signing up at www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/wolfRemrise is a personalized sleep solution that uses natural, plant-based formulas to help calm the mind, relax the body and get your circadian rhythm back on track. It’s drug-free and has no groggy side effects in the morning. To get your first week FREE, go to www.getremrise.com/wolf and take their sleep quiz to determine which formulation is right for you. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's a huge opportunity cost hit that we get from this default constant companion mode usage of our phones. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions

matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. And we'll see you next time. Hey everybody, this is Chris. You know, I was just thinking about how difficult it can be to buy some people gifts.

Every once in a while you just wish they would tell you something they need and could really use as a holiday present. So instead of sending the One You Feed podcast pet store gift cards so we can go buy food to feed our good wolf, what we'd love to ask you for is to share the podcast with somebody that you think might like it and to go out and give us a review and a good rating. And of course, if you're not a Patreon member, we'd love it even more if you can go to oneufeed.net slash join. Thanks, everybody. Happy holidays. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to his academic research, he writes about the intersection of digital technology and culture. He's the author of six books, including the most recent one, the New York Times bestseller, Digital Minimalism, Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.

Hi, Cal. Welcome to the show. Eric, it's my pleasure. I'm excited to have you on. Your latest book is called Digital Minimalism, Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. And we will jump into the book in a moment, but let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter, and he says, in life life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle one is a good wolf which represents things like kindness and bravery and love and the other is a bad wolf which represents things like greed and hatred and fear and the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second looks up at her

grandfather she says well grandfather which one wins the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, there's an ancient foundation to that parable, and I'm assuming it probably has its roots back in Plato, and in particular in Plato's Phaedrus dialogue, where he has the character Socrates gives his metaphor for the human soul. He doesn't use wolves. He uses chariot drivers, or a chariot driver with two horses, I should say. There's the noble steed and the ignoble steed. And what is the soul is the chariot driver trying to control those steeds that are pulling them forward, but make sure that they're aimed in the right direction. And I'll be honest, I talked about this at least in one draft

of my book, and I'm a little embarrassed to admit, I can't remember. It's in there. It is in there. Okay. Cause I've been giving talks about it recently. Yeah, it's in there. Because this gets at the heart of a lot of the human condition, but certainly gives us an insight into what's happening, I think, with technology today. That it's not just that the sort of darker wolf has been fed. It's that we didn't realize it was happening. And I think this is a big part of the unease that once I started picking up a few years ago, realized that this general topic,

technology in our personal lives, this topic was something I had to write about and we can get into it. But I think this parable sets up what I think is the ground on which this unease grew, which is this, we downloaded these things, we signed up for these things, and we bought these things for innocent reasons. And then we went on with our life because we're busy. And the rules of engagement shifted when we weren't paying attention. And we looked up and that bad wolf, that ignoble steed had suddenly got a huge jolt of energy that we didn't realize we were delivering it. And we're looking around the same man, our chariots way off course. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think that's a great analogy for what we're talking about. So let's talk about what are the concerns with our digital I would say, before it seemed as if most people actually agreed. So there is a shift that occurred. I really picked it up right around early 2017, where there began to be this unease,

where before there used to just be puzzlement. You know, there's this TEDx talk I gave back in 2016, earlier in 2016, that was titled Quit Social Media. And, you know, the audience was polite. But as people pointed out afterwards, you can actually see in the video of the talk, two people on their phones, presumably using social media during my talk. But that was just how the world was. And I was sort of the strange guy. By 2017, that had all shifted. That video went on. By 2018, the video has 6 million views. So something shifted. And so I went out there to find out. That was the motivating premise of this most recent book was two questions. Why are people

suddenly uneasy about this? What do we do about it? Real simple, those two questions. And the answer to the first had a lot to do with, and this is to my surprise, autonomy. So it was not so much what people were doing when they were looking at their screens that was bothering them. It was how much time they were doing that. And I think that's an important point because it's a little bit different. It's different than what we hear today when we're looking, let's say, at major media coverage of the more recent social media backlash. That really focuses on what specifically are you doing when you look at your screen? What specifically are these companies doing with your data? And these are important issues, but it's not what my research seemed to indicate was driving the

widespread unease. To me, that was a lot more about, man, I am looking at this thing much more than I know is useful or healthy. It's steering that chariot in the wrong direction. I'm feeling like I'm losing control of my life. Yeah. I mean, as somebody who interacts with those technologies, that's the heart of it, really, for me, is the time and the extent to which I find myself back involved with something. I was like, I'm not going to do that so much. And then there I am. And so I think from my perspective, that's largely what it is. Although if I wanted to break down what I'm doing on the device is a fair amount of time, I probably would categorize it into the trivial. Right. I mean, a lot of what we do is trivial. A lot of what we do is nice,

but not necessary. And some of what we do is really important. And the argument that the social media companies in particular have been trying to make for a long time was, as long as we can identify anything useful that you do with our services, stop complaining. Right. a pushback I used to always get. They would, you know, I famously did this radio interview back a couple of years ago after I'd written this op-ed in the Times that was sort of critical on social media. And this was before the shift had happened in our culture. So people were aghast that, you know, it's like, wait a second, you're not supposed to say negative things about social media. And I went on this national radio show in Canada and it was an ambush. Like, and now joining us live is, you know, such and such artist who only is able to market and sell her work because of social media. And I think at the time, this was seen as a shutdown argument. Aha, it is not the case that social media is completely useless, so you could stop complaining

about it. But that, of course, is a straw man. This wasn't people's issue. The question was not, is this technology useless or have some use? The question is, do I really want to be looking at this five hours a day? And if not, then why am I doing it? Right. You say that our relationship is so complicated with these tools because they do mix harm with actual benefit. I talked to for the book was Facebook groups. They'd say, man, I waste so much time on Facebook, but I belong to this group and it's really important to me and they only organize on Facebook groups. So there's a thousand different examples like that, where there's some particular kernel of utility, I should say, that brings you into the ecosystem. But then once in there, Mark Zuckerberg kind of sneaks in behind you and slowly pushes that door shut. And then you're in there for the next three or four hours. Right. So let's circle back real quick before we move into solutions here with a little bit more on, you know, we mentioned that one of the big things people wrestle with is autonomy.

But what are the other costs of our current digital lifestyle? Well, essentially what happens when you overuse personal devices, which is this core issue here, is first of all, there's an opportunity cost calculation that has to happen, right? And this is something that goes all the way back. Thoreau in his own way wrote about this and Walden, this notion that it's not just what value do I get out of this time I'm spending right now staring at my phone, because the value is probably greater than zero. I mean, I don't know, you're probably getting a little bit more value reading Twitter than maybe you are just staring into the nothingness. But the real question is, what is the value I am missing from other activities that might be more important? So there's a huge opportunity cost hit that we get from this sort of default constant companion

mode usage of our phones. And then the other issue is when we take activities that we get from this sort of default constant companion mode usage of our phones. And then the other issue is when we take activities that we find meaningful and we do actually do them. So we sit down with a friend at dinner, we go into nature and the someplace that's soothing for the soul. We go to a community event that we feel is important. The tech has a way of fragmenting that experience because you have to keep glancing and you have to keep quick checking. And it takes you out of the experience. It fragments and reduces the positive affect that it gives you. So you have these two things, the opportunity cost, so the high value things you miss, plus the diminution of the value you get when you do

participate in these activities. And I think what we're experiencing is a non-trivial reduction of high meaning satisfying experiences in people's lives. And again, this whole thing snuck up on us all. And so we're sort of waking up in the last couple of years and saying, man, why do I feel a little bit just anxious and off and distracted and frenzied? And I think in part, it's because we have taken that sort of soul-affirming, high-quality, meaningful activity, and we've greatly reduced its role in our life. You quote the social critic Lawrence Scott describing our current digital existence is one in which a moment can feel strangely flat if it exists solely in itself. And the key point about that is that that reality is both new and contrived. So I'm a computer scientist. I'm a big tech nerd. I'm a huge internet booster. I think the ability to connect with people, find information and express yourself on a decentralized internet is a fantastic Gutenberg level innovation. But there's a difference between that and what we do today, which is looking at our phones all the time. And if you go back and you look at this history, you see it really is pretty new.

That's about six or seven years old. We didn't used to look at our smartphones all the time. We didn't used to use social media all the time. None of those benefits that I just outlined of the Internet require us to look at phones all the time. The reason we do that, to summarize a long story, is that the major social media companies re-engineered the experience of their app so that we would give it a lot more eyeball minutes. Why? Because they had to get their revenue numbers up for their IPOs about six or seven years ago. And so I always hammer home that point that we have to separate the miraculous opportunities of an age of a global internet from this very contrived and

recent behavior that's driving us crazy, which is this, I look at my phone all the time. And so your response to that is what you're calling digital minimalism. And before we go into what that is, why don't we contrast that with what most of us do, which is sort of a maximalist philosophy? Because I think that's a really useful contrast. Maximalist philosophies are common, especially in American culture, in many different aspects of lives.

And the basic idea of the maximalist philosophy is that if something could potentially offer you some value, then you should probably bring that thing into your life because otherwise you might be missing out on that value. So the maximalist is always looking for missed opportunities or missed pieces of value, looking for that proverbial quarter on the sidewalk that you might have otherwise walked right past. That's how we deal with a lot of things in our lives right now. It's how we end up with so much clutter, for example, in our households. But we also tend to do it in our digital life. You hear about an app that could be interesting, download it. You hear about a service,

oh, I could think of a scenario in which that might give a small boost to my business. You sign up for it. Hear about a device that has, let's say, three cameras on it now instead of two. You're like, I could imagine exactly a scenario when that might be interesting by the device. That's maximalism in our digital lives. I actually think it's a core of a lot of the issues we're having right now. And so what is minimalism? So minimalism, generally speaking, says, no, no, no, you don't want to try to bring into your life everything that might bring you some value. What you should do instead is carefully find the things that bring you really big value, double down on those things, and ignore everything else.

And the reason why that works is those costs I talked about before, because if you actually are doing like the mathematical calculations on total value, you're much better dedicating your time to high return activities than trying to take that same finite amount of time and spread it out over many, many low value activities, because you get much more return per your time for the high value activities. And the low value activities can diminish the benefit you get from the high value ones. So the minimalist, whether it be in their possessions or be in their digital life, says, let me figure out what the big wins are. Let me double down on the big wins and then ignore everything else. Even if those things might offer you some small bit of value or some

opportunity or connect you to something that one day might be useful, if you want to maximize the net value you receive from a particular part of your life, it's almost always better to focus really intensely on the small number of things that give you the biggest returns. Right. And you also described this in the book. I think in a sentence that is good, you say that it's a full-fledged philosophy of technology use that is rooted in our deep values. Yeah. So if you're going to apply minimalism to your digital life, you have to figure out, well, what are the digital activities to give me a lot of value? Which means you've got to know what your values are. And so you actually start, if you want to be a digital minimalist, you start with reflection and experimentation to try to figure out what do I actually care about? What do I actually want to spend my time doing? What are the activities that are worthwhile? And we're talking here primarily outside of work. Okay,

work is its own issue, but my life outside of work, what do I want to do? What's important? What's meaningful to me? Know those deep values. And then you work backwards from them and say, okay, well, what is the optimal biggest return way to deploy technology to help these small number of things I really care about? And then you let the answers to those questions basically define the tech you use. And let's go into how to do that process in a moment. But I think that what you're saying there is really important because in essence, that's the heart of any good life, really, right? Is to be able to think about what's important and then spend your time and energy in that direction. And I think we get lost in both those directions. Either we don't think about

what's important very often, we sort of choose by default, or we have a vague sense of what's important, but then our actions don't carry out those values. This is why this notion of minimalism is nothing new. It goes all the way back to the ancients. You can see Marcus Aurelius talking about this. You see it come up in the Eastern wisdom traditions. You see it in Thoreau. You see it in the radical simplicity movements. You see it in Wendell Berry. It comes up again and again. You see it in Thoreau. You see it in the radical simplicity movements. You see it in Wendell Berry. It comes up again and again. You see it in Marie Kondo. The reason why this idea keeps coming up again and again is because it seems to be touching on something true about the human condition, which is in almost every aspect of your life. Focusing intensely on the things that really matter to the exclusion of things that matter less is almost always better than trying to also squeeze

in all those low value things along with the big valuable things. I mean, that's really just at the core of a successful human life in almost all aspects. So in some sense to say, let's apply this to our digital life now that that's such a big part of our existence is a really obvious thing to do. Right. It makes me think of the old analogy. I use this one when it comes to planning time, but it speaks to everything, which is this idea that if you're planning time, the illustration that's often used is you've got a big bowl, right? And you drop a bunch of rocks in it, big rocks, and you say, is the bowl full? And it looks at it and goes, yeah. But then you pour in a bunch of gravel, and is the bowl full? It looks like, yeah, but then you pour in a bunch of gravel and is the bowl full? It

looks like it is, but now you pour in sand. And the idea is that you can always keep adding little things, but the key is you got to put the big rocks in first. The most important things have to go in first. And that's really what we're talking about here is those things are in place. Now, the problem in this case is that what's happening is we're filling the bowl up with the water before we put any of the big important rocks in. It's a fair analogy that almost completely fits, except for the minimalist might even say, well, you put in the big rocks and don't bother with the sand. Right, right.

You have the sand in there in between the big rocks, it's going to make it harder to get around and have access to those big rocks, if I can stretch this analogy. So yeah, the big rocks are what's important. And if you don't prioritize them, I think that's rocks, if I can stretch this analogy. So yeah, the big rocks are what's important. And if you don't prioritize them, I think that's the piece that I think is quite accurate there. If you don't make that the foundation of what you do, if you don't, as Covey says, do first things first, it's not going to happen. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to really, no, really.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign, Jason bobblehead. It's called really no, really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You've got a line in the book that I think says this very well. You say minimalists don't mind missing out on small things. What worries them much more is diminishing

the large things they already know for sure make a good life good. Well, I mean, I think that's exactly the divide between maximalist and minimalist. The maximalist looks around and says, oh my God, what if I miss out on some opportunity? Wouldn't that be terrible? Where the minimalist says, oh my God, what if in my search for these opportunities, I don't spend nearly enough time, whatever, being with my kids or working with this community group or exercise or doing these things that I already know for sure are really, really valuable. That really give me a lot of positive benefit. And so it's two different ways of looking at the same thing. But I think if you look at philosophy, if you look at psychology, even if you look at the sort of utilitarian calculus behind it, the minimalist almost certainly have

that right. Yep. I had an example in my own life of this this week that your book sort of helped with. And it was that idea of like, well, if something offers a little bit of benefit, I should do it. And it has to do with running and having an application on my phone that tells me how far and how fast I'm running, which occasionally is useful. But where I was going to run is around a loop that I know exactly how far it is. And I thought to myself, why am I carrying this thing along with me when I know how far I'm going? Yes, it'll tell me how fast I'm going, but I'm not really training for anything. And I suddenly realized like that was an example of me trying to maximize that moment. Let me know exactly how fast I'm going

versus what was really important was being running and being outdoors. And for me was being present to the outdoors. And so leaving the phone behind became an easy choice when I framed it that way. Well, I think this is one of the clear indicators that, at least in our digital lives, we've really fallen out of touch with what matters is this completely, to me, perplexing trend that really hit its peak a few years ago, where tech companies even stopped trying that hard to sell these new apps. They would just put them out there and essentially leave it to the user to figure out why it was useful. To me, this is peak maximalism, right? And so when you're talking about those apps like Strava, kind of think about that, right? A lot of runners just feel

vaguely obligated. I guess I should have this. I'm not really sure why, but like it exists. I guess I should have this. I'll figure it out. The peak of this was probably the Apple watch debut. When the Apple watch came out, they essentially didn't try to explain why you should buy an Apple watch. It was just, it was like, here's this thing. It looks cool. We'll talk about these different apps that are on it. And users were like, great. I can't wait to get this. I can't wait to start figuring out why this is useful. And after a couple of years, you're like, aha, maybe health is why it's useful. Okay. But they didn't know that right off the bat.

And to me, that's almost deranging, right? And what other aspects of our economy could you imagine a company putting out a product and their ad is basically, I don't really know why you need this, but what if there is some use? You better get it just to find out. I mean, at almost every aspect of our life, we'd be like, are you kidding me? I'm not going to spend money and time and attention on this. But the digital realm in the last, let's say, 10 years or so has had that type of deranging effect on us. I mean, this idea that it's just, it's maximalism that has been purified and refined and sort of, you know,

snorted directly beyond the brain barrier or something. We're just at this peak stage of just, my God, there might be some value to that gadget, app or service. What if I missed it? Okay, let's commit to this right now. I just think it's with any type of minimalist reflection, it really shows how far off the rails we've gotten. Yeah, it's why people end up with 200 apps on their phone. You know, like I said, for me was sort of looking at it through that lens to sort of

flipped it. The other thing that it did is that looking at it through that perspective, it just gave me a perspective that wasn't so much good and bad, but gave me a useful framework to think about it in a way that just gave me more visibility into it. This is what a lot of people report. It's why I ended up calling the first part of the book that gets into all these ideas, foundations. Because it just gives you a foundation for thinking about these things. I think essentially we were just driftless. We're like, I don't know, we're just, we're aimless, we're drifting. This seems kind of interesting. That seems kind of interesting.

This seems kind of high tech. And I think what's making everyone a little bit unhappy, a little bit anxious. I mean, that's just that feeling. That's why I keep going back to the word unease because that somehow seems to be the right adjective. It's not sickness. It's not anger. It's not necessarily outrage. It's not necessarily exhaustion. It's unease because you can't quite put your finger on it.

You just think something here is not right. As you download that 200th app before, before you go for the run and look at your Apple watch and realize you haven't used it in three days because you're not quite sure what it's for. It's that unease and you're right. This gives you some foundation. You can stand on something and say, what am I trying to do with my life? What am I all about? Great. Let me deploy tech to support those things I care about and get the rest of the stuff out of my face. I have life to live. It's almost empowering once you have that foundation under your feet. And it puts tech to great use. I mean, as far as a digital minimalist is concerned, they're better off today than they were 10 years ago because the tech they do deploy gives them big wins. But they're doing it on their

own terms and not just being sort of aimlessly pushed around by, let me try this, let me try that. I guess I have to do this. Let me look at my phone, and just waking up and feeling completely uneasy about the whole thing. And so one of the things that you say is that most of the writing in this space about this gives a lot of minor corrections or tips or a vague hack to do this. And you say that it's becoming increasingly clear that these do not seem to be sufficient to tame the ability of these new technologies. Well, I think a good analogy here is probably food and obesity. So let's say you're having trouble with food. Let's say your weight is not where you want it to be. You're not healthy because of that. You want to really turn around your health.

We know that one-off tips usually don't work. So if you come and say, well, here's what you should eat healthier, or, you know, here's the food pyramid, see, you know, use fat sparingly or whatever, right? This doesn't, this has never really turned anyone around. Who are the people that have dramatic turnarounds in their health and fitness? They almost always have some sort of internally consistent philosophy. They're vegan or paleo or primal. And this philosophy allows them to make consistent decisions day in and day out about what they do and make those decisions in the right direction. We're in the same place with tech. I mean, I mentioned before that we started looking at our phones all the time because the social media companies followed by other attention

economy companies re-engineered the experience so that we would do that. Well, the details of that re-engineering are such that it's very hard to resist looking at that phone all the time. And then you throw in the social pressures, the way that it's intertwined itself into people's social and community existence makes it doubly hard to just on your own say, I may stop looking at this more. I'll turn off some notifications. That should be enough. I'll do a detox every once in a while. That should be enough. Of course, it'sly hard to just on your own say, I'm going to stop looking at this more. I'll turn off some notifications. That should be enough.

I'll do a detox every once in a while. That should be enough. Of course, it's not going to be. The forces are too powerful. And so if you really want to solve this issue, you really do need a philosophy based on your values that allows you to consistently make the right decision. And you know why you're making the decision. And you can stand behind the decision and do it again and again and again until finally you see some real change.

Exactly. So you bring up three principles that sort of underlie this philosophy. Can we go through what those are real quickly before we move into the actual steps to implement this? Yeah, that's fine. So principle one, clutter is costly. So this is this opportunity cost notion that we talked about briefly before, which is when you bring lots of things into your life that have a small amount of value, it's incorrect to only just add up those small bits of value as the maximalist does. You have to, in true minimalist fashion, also add up their cost. And this is a point that I think Thoreau makes wonderfully in Walden, where he actually goes through this math. I mean, people think about Walden as a nature book. It really is not. It's an economics book, and it's a book about economic minimalism. And he goes through exactly how much, like in that book, we talk about economic minimalism. He goes through exactly and adds up, okay, what's the bare minimum cost? What's it

actually cost for me to sort of survive? That's what he's adding up. To be in this cabin in the woods in Walden, I spent this much on beans and this much on nails to build the cabin. I spent this much on coffee or whatever it was. And then he calculated and figured out, okay, that would take about one day per week of labor. If I rented myself out as a farm labor to one of the farmers who knew in Concord. And she's like, okay, that's the foundation. And so beyond that bare subsistence level, I have to think about the trade-off between how much additional stuff do I get by working more versus how much time do I give up? So he was sort of the first person to think about what are these costs and not just the value of the trinket you buy, how much

did that cost you to get it? And that is definitely a applicable idea to our digital world where here the cost is really in time and attention. So when you think about the value that you might get from downloading this one app or using the service, you also have to think about the cost of what's it going to do to my time and attention? That is how much time am I going to lose to it? What better things is that going to take me away from? And how is it going to degrade my experience of those better things? And when you do these types of calculuses, almost always what happens is when you throw a lot of things into your digital life that all give you a little bit of value, those costs of all that clutter usually adds up to something that's much worse than the sum of the value it gives you.

That there is just a cost to having so many different things pulling at your time and attention, fragmenting your time and attention. And so one of the reasons why minimalism works so good in this sphere is that by cutting down to a very small number of things, they're reducing a lot of those hidden costs and the minimalist ends up therefore much better. You talked in your previous book, Deep Work, a lot about this idea of attention switching cost, which I think applies here, right? There is for sure a really big cost to switching attention. I think it's something that we should emphasize more in both the professional and personal sphere. We've known this, that there's some cost to this all the way back to research.

I've been looking into this more recently. You go all the way back to psychology research from the 1920s when they first began documenting, oh, when you switch your attention, there's a cost to that switch. We now know a lot more about it, but the short version of it is it's not so much, let's say, if you're going to be distracted by something, it's not so much how much time you spend on the distraction that determines its impact, it's the cost of the actual switch itself. And so one of the things these phones brings into our life is this persistent background hum of attention switches, because I can glance at my text messages, I can glance at Twitter, I can glance at Instagram, I can glance at Facebook, whatever it is that you're using. Every one of those glances has a massive impact to your brain, which has to completely start

reorienting your attention towards this new target. And then when you come back to the original thing, which is the friend across from you at the table, it takes a long time to try to switch that back and it all gets jumbled up. And you're essentially only partially there for these activities that you otherwise think are important. So you're right. The cost is in the switching, not in the duration of the distraction. And smartphones are essentially switching machines. They get us doing that all day long, and that has a real cost. So not only are we paying for it in the actual minutes, which we are.

I mean, an hour spent on candy crush is an hour lost. It's the fact that we can go back and forth. And you mentioned it earlier, this sense of unease. And I've often said on the show, and I'm like, I know, you mentioned it earlier, this sense of unease. And I've often said on the show, and I'm like, I don't have the right word for it. I don't have the right way to explain it. But a day spent where I'm on the phone a lot, or I'm, you know, kind of doing a lot of different online activities, I end up strangely drained at the end of the day in a way that I can't quite articulate and I can't quite put into words. Yes. And this is what's important because if you're talking to, let's say, a social

media apologist, they would want to zoom right in to one particular thing you're doing during the day. Like, well, what are you doing at this moment when you're looking at your phone? And it's probably something that's not at all bad. Like, well, I guess I was leaving a comment on an Instagram post from my brother posted a picture of my nephew. And I was saying, this is like a nice looking picture. And there's nothing negative about that in isolation. In fact, you can go to the lab. There's experiments that say that we feel a little bit better when we comment on family

or close friends' Facebook pages, for example. And they say, so see, there's no problem. But when you zoom back out and say, yeah, but I was doing that again and again and again and again. And I did it all throughout the day. And I was kept away from multiple things that would have been more nourishing. And the small number of nourishing things I did, I frustratingly fragmented up and sort of sapped away my attention and value from it. You add it up and you get that draining feeling. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you

and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Oh, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever

you get your podcasts. Okay, so principle number two is optimization is important. So a piece I somewhat glossed over is that once you start thinking about technology from the perspective of values, that is, when you're saying, I use this particular technology because it supports this other thing that I really care about, that opens the door for what one of the most crucial pieces of minimalism is, which is optimizing. So once you know why you've decided to use a technology, you can actually optimize. You say, great, well, how can I use it in such a way that's going to help this thing I care about as much as possible and get rid of all other uses? And this is a sort of miraculous mindset shift. Once you start taking a sort of behemoth of a service like Instagram or Facebook, and instead of just saying, I use Facebook or I don't, but instead say, oh,

I use Facebook because this community group I care about organizes on Facebook and that's important to me. Now you have a lot of control in how Facebook shows up in your life. And this type of optimization, so optimizing tech for particular values, takes this cost-benefit ratio that we all grapple with and it puts it massively in your favor. So I give a bunch of examples in the book, for example, on those Facebook group type scenarios. And what quickly becomes apparent when you realize that that's the main reason

why you use Facebook is there's all sorts of ways to hack Facebook so that all you do is check on that group. And you don't see a news feed and it's not on your phone and you do it on your desktop and you do it once a week and it takes 15 minutes of your life. Completely different experience with Facebook. I also talked with a bunch of visual artists that did something similar with Instagram. They said, look, I have to see pictures of other people's artwork. That is the core fuel for my creative process. It's very, very important to me that artwork is on Instagram. I say, okay, great. You need to keep Instagram in your life. But once they realize why they need Instagram, they could greatly optimize their experience to get that benefit and get rid of the other costs. And so what a lot of these artists

did is they said, A, I'm going to curate who I follow. So it's just this handful of artists whose work really inspires me. B, I'm going to take it off my phone because it doesn't take me that long to see what they posted each week. There's no reason for me to have it on my phone and see, I'll have some schedule. And when I check, in fact, what I'm going to do is I'm going to check before my studio time on Saturday mornings. And they're getting 99% of the deep value that they were getting out of Instagram while cutting out about 99% of the cost, which really rears its head when it's just there as a passive distraction throughout all of their day. So once you know why you're using tech, you can optimize it. And once you can optimize it, it is advantage you decisively so.

Excellent. And principle number three, intentionality is satisfying. One of the concerns people have about minimalism, let's say in the digital realm, is that there will be more inconveniences. There will be some opportunities lost. I mean, there will be specific things that, you know, hey, this is kind of a pain that I don't always have my phone with me. There'll be cases where that's you know, hey, this is kind of a pain that I don't always have my phone with me. There'll be cases where that's a problem. I don't have Instagram on my phone. Oh, you're in a situation where it really would be nice if it was because you could take a picture on your phone and upload it directly. And now it's going to be a pain that you don't have your phone, right?

There's going to be inconveniences if you're minimalist. But you don't really have to worry about that because it turns out there's this sort of deep principle of human satisfaction, which says being very intentional gives you way more satisfaction than the conveniences that leads you to miss out on. And so the satisfaction you get out of being so intentional about your tack, I can almost guarantee you is going to far swamp the satisfactions you miss by having certain parts of your life be less convenient. And so I emphasize that point. Intention is satisfying in itself. Intention, as I sometimes say, can trump convenience. And it's really important to recognize that you're going to get a lot of satisfaction just out of that very human act of taking control of some part of your life. In the intro to this show, one of the lines is, it takes conscious, constant, and creative effort to make a life worth living. Sort of speaks to that idea.

Yeah, we're wired for that type of conscious effort. It makes us feel good. I can guarantee you that that's going to be more important to you than the fact that it was a real pain to get that photo on Instagram that one time. Excellent. So let's real quick walk through the three-step process here for implementing digital minimalism. When I was looking into minimalists, when I was looking into how do people become minimalist, it seemed to me that it's hard to do in a gradual

fashion. So this idea that let me just tweak this and tweak that, and maybe over the course of four or five months, I'll come out on the other end and things will be more minimalist. That tends not to work. This is why when you look at minimalism in the context of people's physical clutter, there's almost always a radical transformation, right? So, Marie Kondo says, don't just work on your closet a little bit, empty the whole thing. And then just put back in the stuff you really care about. Well, that's essentially what I preach for digital minimalism. So it's sort of inspired, I suppose, by that condo analogy. I call it the digital declutter and there are three steps to it, but the high level idea is that you actually clean out the proverbial closet. You sort of take out of your life temporarily

all of these optional personal digital technologies that have been cluttering your mind and pulling out your attention. And then you just put back in the ones that you really, really need. So I recommend sort of the TLDR summary is instead of trying from the top down to tweak your digital life, go from the bottom up, get rid of everything, start from scratch. But this time, when you choose what apps to have and services to sign up for and gadgets to buy, you do it with a lot of intention. And so this is sort of the define your technology rules? Yeah, exactly. So if you want to do this, I broke it down into three steps. So you can think about it this way. The first step is, and there's different ways to break it down, but the way I've been summarizing it recently is that the first step is figure out what are these optional

technologies? What are the things that you actually can walk away from, at least temporarily, without it causing trouble? So minimalism is really about your personal life. So we're not talking here about, let's say, your work email or your work Slack. Unfortunately, you can't use me as an excuse to stop answering your boss's email. That's a different issue. But for most people, these are things like social media, streaming videos, video games, online news, gossip, and entertainment. These are sort of what they would call optional digital entertainments. And then for some people, there's

an overlap. So there's some limited social media use they have to do for work. And in those cases, I say, we'll just build fences around it. So, okay, I use a lot of social media personally, but I also have to post once a day on Facebook for my company. We'll just put some fences around it and say, I'll still post once a day for my company. I'll do it from my desktop computer at work and no other social media use. So that's the first of the three steps is just figuring out what is on this metaphorical closet shelves that you are going to pull out. And so it's really just a question of definitions. That's step one. And you say that your general rule for what's optional is consider it optional unless it would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional and personal life, which you kind of discovered. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if, for example, text messaging is how your daughter tells you she's ready to be picked up from school, you probably don't want to take a break from text messaging because your daughter's never going to get home from school. three-step process we're talking about here briefly, I ran about 1,500 people through it as part of the research for the book. So I have a lot of feedback on how it actually unfolds for different people in different walks of life and different situations in life. And I can tell you

this list of what people walk away from and how they do it can really vary depending on who you are and what's going on in your life. Right. And that's the personal philosophy part of it. Yeah, exactly. So then once you've done that, so that's the personal philosophy part of it. Yeah, exactly. You know, so then once you've done that, so that's the first step you figure out what I recommend doing is actually spending an entire month away from these optional technologies. And here we're getting a little bit different than let's say physical clutter. When you clean out your closet with Mary Kondo's method, you do it, you know, in a weekend. And I'm saying you actually spend a month. And the reason why I say you spend a month is twofold. One, you actually do need a bit of a detox effect before you can make strong,

smart decisions about your digital life. And that can take one to two weeks. So this is what I learned from my experiment. It can take about one to two weeks before you lose that knee-jerk impulse. I have to look at this. I have to look at this. And if you can't clear that out, you're not going to be able to make very strong decisions about what's valuable. The second reason why I think you need a month is that it turns out that most people actually need that amount of time to figure out the values question. That's actually hard for a lot of people. They underestimate the degree to which just being able to look at this thing all the time has kept them away from any serious

self-reflection about what's important to them, what they're all about, what their values are. It's a way to paper that all over and just be distracted. And so people actually have to do a non-trivial amount of reflection and experimentation, trying things, joining things, going and doing things, re-exposing themselves to things. They have to do this for a while before they really have a good answer to the question, okay, what is it I really want to do with my time outside of work? So that's the second step is get away for a month. And during that month, experiment and reflect. I'm a recovering alcoholic and addict from substances. And that totally resonates and makes sense with me. That idea that it takes your brain a while to start

to even be able to see what's important again, because it's been so clouded for so long. And just as a quick aside about that, what I'm talking about in the substance abuse community is a sort of classical detox program in the sense that you have to first reduce the actual sort of physical connection, but then there's this very important sort of rebuilding of your life that also happens with it. But that term, in a way that's been frustrating to me, has really been co-opted and corrupted by the digital wellness movement. And they've taken this notion of detox, which plays such an important role in the substance abuse community, and it's been corrupted into just break for the sake of taking a break. The digital detox has become, oh oh we'll just take a week away from these things

that are causing you trouble and then go right back to them after that week is over that's the that's the the the opposite of what a detox originally was in the substance abuse context it's the first step towards a complete reinvention. Yeah. That word detox has been perverted in many different places besides just technology. But I agree 100%. And so then step three is reintroduce the technology after you've taken a 30-day break. So now that you know what you actually want to do, what you actually care about, for each of those things you've identified, say, what's the best way to use technology to support this? For each of the technologies that you bring in because it supports something you care about, put those optimization rules around it. So you say not

just how, but what. So you bring in, okay, I am going to use Instagram to support my creative art practice, but my optimization rules is not on my phone, curated list, check it once a week. So you bring back in the technologies that support the things that you identified as really caring about, you put rules around it to optimize the use. And then the crucial last piece of this is you ignore everything else. And there is, you walk away this month later with a brand new, very intentional, high return, minimalist digital life. Excellent. Well, I think that is a good place. We've kind of run out of time here. I think that's a good place for us to sort of wrap up now that we've gotten through all the basic parts of it. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post-show conversation,

specifically about the Amish and their relation to technology. And it's not often what people think. So we'll do that in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you're interested in that, you can go to oneufeed.net slash join and become a member of the community. Cal, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Well, thank you, Eric. Okay. Bye. please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500,

a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.