Eliminate Distraction: How To Take Back Control Of Your Focus | Cal Newport

Cal Newport 0:00 So today I'm gonna argue that we misunderstand the impact of how we obtain information on the overall quality of our lives. So I'll start by explaining this current model and why it's broken. I'll then introduce a new philosophy that I call intentional information that I think promises to improve the quality and depth of your life almost right away. All right, so I wanna start by explaining our, uh, our current understanding of information and how we use it. I'm gonna try to draw this. For those who are watching instead of just listening, God help you, because I, I'm about to try to illustrate a very complicated topic with a pretty simple picture. So what I'm drawing here, I'll, I'll narrate this for people who are listening. I'm drawing, uh, a representation of you or me, a person, right? So, um, for those who are watching, you can see the picture. For those who are listening, Jesse, would we say that this picture reminds you sort of like, uh, like a Caravaggio painting?

Speaker 1:00 Van Gogh.

Cal Newport 1:01 Van Gogh. It's-

Speaker 1:01 'Cause I'm not familiar with Caravaggio. [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:03 Well, I'm just talking about like, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm being pretty subtle in my use of chiaroscuro, which is the use of light and, light and dark contrast-

Speaker 1:11 Oh

Cal Newport 1:11 ... that try to give volume and shape. For those who are listening, they don't really realize what I've drawn here. All right, so here's us. I've drawn a picture of us. Over here, I'm drawing a picture of the world. Expertly drawn circle, everyone agrees. So there's like land in the world. Okay, so here's the, here's the world, and it, and this picture of the world, I, I want it to stand in for, um, uh, an objective reality. This is our current model of our say information. We have us, and we have this objective reality, the world, that has people, and events, and things, and theories that explain what's going on. So there's sort of this like objective world that's out there. The way we like to think about information is that what it does is it just gives us samples. So I'm drawing like an arrow from this world over towards the person. It gives us sort of a sampling of what's happening in this objective world, and this is a thought bubble I've just drawn here, and inside this thought bubble, we sort of have constructed our own sort of lower quality model of what's happening in the world. So like, you know, as we get sort of samples of information, as I'm representing by these arrows, uh, we learn things about the world. We use that to make our internal model of the world, people, places, things, and the theories that help explain how they, uh, all interact. It helps make that model fuller, right? And so then how does technology enter this, this picture? It is the, uh, the medium by which this information gets to us. So like maybe we have like a newspaper expertly drawn, right? So the newspaper is sort of, uh, mediating some samples about what's happening in the world. Our image of the world gets more detailed. When we move on to more modern technology, sort of the, the standard techno-optimist sort of perspective, I'm drawing here an expertly drawn smartphone. Uh, the idea is like, "Oh, this just gets more information available." So now that we have something like smartphones, and we can have social media, and the internet behind this all, we can get a lot more samples of this world. And so our internal understanding of the world becomes, uh, even more detailed. This internal understanding of the world then shapes how we... not just how we understand the world, but how we feel and, uh, we use as the foundation for our actions. So we act based on the conceptions in our mind. The conceptions in our mind are, uh, built up by getting these samples of information about what's actually happening. This is the model we currently have, right? So in this model, the, the sort of the techno-optimist philosophy here is, well, more information is better than less. Because more information just gives you a, a more realistic and detailed understanding of what's actually going on in the world, and the more detailed understanding you have, then sort of like the more your actions can be based in reality. Why would you ever want a lower fidelity understanding of the world? Uh, more information can only be strictly better. This is like a standard sort of techno-optimist or even like an enlightenment mindset. So in this, in this idea, yeah, new technology that expose you to more information, great. You get more detailed to understand the world, can only help you make more nuanced, or correct, or appropriate decisions about how to, uh, understand, feel, and act. All right. So I'm gonna argue that this model, uh, is quite broken. This is not actually the way information works. So it turns out that one of the most commonly occurring and deepest ideas in techno-criticism is the notion that the tools we use to take in information impact the information itself, how we receive it, and how we understand what it means. The tools are not just a neutral gateway that allows more samples from some objective world to get to us. The tools themselves shape how we understand the information that the tools deliver. So I wanna sort of sample the world of techno critics that have talked about this before, so you have a deeper sense of where this comes from. Uh, a really cool, very f- old example of this comes from a book I'm reading right now by Jonathan Sacks, the late Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom. He wrote this really cool book in 2012 called The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning. And in this book, he has a great example of exactly this idea that technology itself shapes the information, uh, shapes the way you understand the information that it delivers. So he talks about in this book the very first alphabetic languages. So of course, the first, uh, languages, that written languages were, were ideogramic. Y- y- you have pictures that represent what they are. Um, but we get the very first, uh, alphabetic languages where you have symbols standing in for sounds, right? That's what we think of as a modern language. You have the, the very first is Proto-Sinaitic, which basically evolves pretty quickly into ancient Hebrew. It's like sort of one of the first, uh- Uh, phonic alphabetic languages. The interesting thing about Hebrew, Sacks points out, is in ancient Hebrew there's no vowels. Okay? So you have to use the, uh, the context of the writing to figure out a particular word, right? So it would be like if in English, if we think about, like, our alphabet without vowels, if you see H-T, there's a lot of different words that could be depending on what vowels you fill in. It could be hat, it could be hut, it could be hate, it could be hit, uh, right, hot. So depending... H-T by itself doesn't tell you what the word is, but if you, if you look at the, the full sentence or the full context, you can figure out, oh, this must be the vowels meant for this word. Now, Sacks points out, um, at the same time, Hebrew is also read right to left, which engages your, your right hemisphere of your brain, which makes sense because you have to take in context of all, uh, the context of the writing to try to figure out what's being said. It's a very, uh, holistic, contextual way of taking in information. And Sacks points out this is the mode of thought that's then captured in ancient Hebrew, uh, wisdom traditions, in particular in Torah, uh, and then later when you look at, like, Mishnah, the sort of commentary on the Torah. It's... Th- all of this writing is written in a way that's very much based on context. It's not breaking things down, here's, here's a, a six-part understanding of this. It's stories, multiple stories about the same thing. The meaning of a particular story doesn't necessarily make sense unless you understand the broader context to which that story is made. So he's arguing that the mode of thought you get in the Abrahamic faiths is dictated in part by the structure of the language technology. So then let's compare this to what happens as the Phoenicians bring the, this alphabet over to Greece. It goes to ancient Greece, where it evolves. And when this alphabet gets to Greece, they do two things. First, they introduce vowels to it, so now there's no guessing. You know exactly what a word is because you have all the vowels, just like in English. And then they shift from left to right. Now, this is gonna be, as Sacks points out, engaging the left hemisphere of the brain, which is much more analytical. So in, in Greek writing, like our modern languages, like, you know exactly what each word is as you finish it, so you have this sort of, like, precise building up of understanding as you move left to right across the text. You don't need to sort of take in the whole context and then try to figure out what it means. Sacks argues this is exactly a technology that gave way to philosophy, uh, and abstract reasoning, logic, and eventually science. So the way the language works impacted the way that we understood, went about understanding the world. So putting in vowels and going left to right made things like philosophy and logic very natural. Reading right to left without vowels made a more sort of holistic narrative, contextual understanding of the world more natural. The technology through which you were getting the information dictated how you understood the world or made sense of the world. A very ancient example of this. Uh, in more modern times, we have, you know, Neil Postman is a great proponent of this perspective. He basically took this idea from his mentor, Marshall McLuhan, and he evolved it. His book from 1985, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, is sort of one of the classic publicly accessible guides to this idea that technology shapes the way that we actually understand information. The terminology he introduced was epistemic environment. So the tech- information technology defines the epistemic environment, which in turn impacts how we understand the world. So in this book, he was talking a lot about television, since that was the major information technology of the 1980s. But here's a couple quotes from Postman. He says, "Each medium..." So he's talking about communication information mediums. "Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility." So mode of discourse is, like, how we actually think and engage with the world is affected by the medium. Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos. You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're gonna like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. He goes on to say, "We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as it, uh, as it is, but only as our languages are, and our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture." Right? So he's directly pushing back against the picture I drew earlier, the picture that had this common understanding of there's an objective world, and we're just getting samples of that world, and the more samples we get, the more we understand the objective world. But, uh, Postman's saying, "No, no, no. There is no it." And he puts it in quotation marks. So we can't see things as it is. Right? What we see is very much shaped by the media that we're using to actually get this information. So the it, uh, what it is actually changes depending on the media through which we're getting this information. Your recording, your writing about the world in ancient Hebrew is gonna be a completely different conception of how to approach reality than if you're writing about the world using ancient Greek. Another interesting book, it's from 2009, that gives us sort of a neurological explanation for some of this is Winifred Gallagher's book, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. I write about Rapt in Deep Work, I believe. Uh, it's an interesting book. It was influential for me. Uh, a lot of people struggle with it because it's more, uh, essayistic, not as Greek. [laughs] Let's say it's more Hebrew than Greek if we're gonna... more Jerusalem than Athens if we're gonna use our previous metaphors here. Um, so it's more like essays and a little more flowerly, flowery and, um, literary. than, you know, a lot of people are used to, but there's some fantastic ideas, including some pretty serious neuroscience. So a big argument Gallagher is saying in here is that, uh, your brain constructs its internal understanding of the world based on what it's paying attention to. So depending on what you pay attention to, your brain's actual internally constructed idea of what the world is like and how you should feel about it changes. So it's not like here's the, here's the objective world, and we're just getting higher and higher fidelity pictures of it. We construct the specific world, neurologically speaking, based on what we pay attention to. So here's a quote from her book. "All day long, you are selectively paying attention to something, and much more often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this process to good effect. Indeed, your ability to focus on this and suppress this, that is the key to controlling your experience and ultimately your well-being." So now she's getting down to the mechanisms here. What you're paying attention to, uh, impacts how your mind understands what's happening to you in the world, and that directly impacts your well-being. Okay. So we put these ideas together, we get a completely different understanding. I'm gonna draw a new picture here, again, with great trepidation. So going back, I'm gonna... You know, let's draw our person again over here. All right. There's our person. This is the reality, is there's lots of different conceptual worlds that we potentially... that exist out here, and the specific world, the specific world that you're building an internal representation of in your mind, uh, depends on the technology you're using. So if we're using a particular technology down here, we get one world. If we use a different technology, the... our understanding of the world is different. There is no objective world. We sort of construct our understanding of the world and therefore our subjective sense of self, beliefs, and actions based on what information we're getting, and as we learned from Postman and Sax, the technology through which we're getting that information is what really matters in terms of the type of world that it constructs for us. So that's the reality here. And so this case, this person is looking at the world through, like, a smartphone and, and perhaps, you know, this world is one. I'm putting, like, a nuclear explosion, and it's like a... and I'm putting devil ears on it. It might be, like, a really bad world. You know, like, oh my God, right? So it affects... It kinda looks like the monster from Monsters Inc.

Speaker 14:48 [laughs]

Cal Newport 14:49 The Billy Crystal. Anyways, that's the reality. So tech- that matters. All right. So if we take this all into consideration, the conclusion is if your goal is to build a deep life in this current distracted high-tech world, you have to care a lot about the information you take in and through what tool you're taking in that information. Right? If our tools are not just these, like, neutral portals that just give us samples of the real world as it is, and so just the more samples, the better, so why not use as many tools as possible? We have to care. We have to care about how we take in information. I have a name for this philosophy, a tentative name. I call it intentional information. Intentional information is a philosophy that having intention about what information you take in and how you take it in is really important on the quality of your life. So I wrote down some potential principles here for intentional information. This is all just... This is tentative, right? I'm just writing down a few ideas here. Uh, we can expand this as needed. But just to give you a sense of the type of ideas you might put in place if you adopt an intentional information philosophy. All right. Number one, get non-local news typographically as boring as possible and sparingly. All right? So if you wanna know about the world, be very careful about how you do this. Don't just be on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok and see what comes through. Uh, you have no control over the world that that's gonna create in your head. It's probably not gonna be a world that's gonna be beneficial to you. So typographically, that's a technology that's gonna give you a much, uh, I'm not gonna say accurate, but it's gonna give you a much less manipulated or charged understanding of the world. Uh, boring news, just what's going on, bullet points of things that are happening. I just sort of wanna know what's going on, but I don't want it to be appealing, trying to get me to, to click or follow or subscribe to something. Um, and you don't probably need as much news about the world outside of your local environment as you might think. In your local environment, you do wanna know what's going on, but you can actually get this information largely from actual people. Um, spend much more... This goes with that idea too. Spend much more time paying attention to what's going on in the worlds in which you have agency. We're much more wired for this. The communities in which you are a part and actually have a say, your town, your school, your employer, your religious institution, that should be actually, like, the bulk of the information you're taking in about what's going on because these are the worlds in which you have agency. Our mind is better able to deal with that information because that's what information was until, what, three hundred years ago. It was just about the worlds in which we have agency, right? Um, we have a really hard time hearing about the world beyond where we have agency because our mind is used to if something bad is happening that affects us, we need to be worried or we need to be a part of it. And when the information is coming in from the entire billion, many billion person world, like, we can't actually do that, but our mind doesn't make that distinction. So focus more on the, the, the, the notion of the world our brain is used to, which is the world in which you live and the people are in it that you know and you can make a difference and you can, you can be involved. And less time, not no time, but the bulk of your consumption should not be, "I just wanna hear about things that I have no agency or impact or control on." Prioritize real people over characters, right? So again, I think social media does this. YouTube does this. You have to be careful that you kinda get these characters, these avatars of people designed to be interesting. Uh, and it, it- ... messes with how we understand what people are like and wh- or what we should be like. So spend more time with real people that you actually talk to and know and can see and touch. Especially if you're young, this is important. Being around real people gives you a better grounding in the reality of the human experience than paying, you know, spending most of your time with these, uh, avatars online. Prioritize real action over watching action of others. So again, it's, there's weird, crazy stuff going on online of people doing these things on TikTok videos, and it's sort of a simulacrum of interesting activity, and ag- it can play weird things with our minds. Prioritize, like, I wanna go do something myself. I wanna be a part of this trail maintenance club. I'm part of the running club. I'm volunteering at this thing here. I'm writing in this writing group where we get together in a real place. Prioritize real action over just, let me get a thrill out of watching, vicariously over watching the actions of others. Try to have... I think of this like medicine. When you get exposed, despite your best efforts, to material that is very emotionally engaging, especially if the material gets you outraged about something, the medicine you wanna try to take right away to, to dull the more insidious effects of this emotion that could really creep in and, uh, I mean, nothing really shapes that world in our heads stronger than a sense of, of, of injustice or outrage, uh, which injustice is important, but you wanna make sure that if you're getting this through a format that is meant to amplify those a- feelings, that you put a, a sort of, a dampener on it, and the best dampener is steel manning. Okay, I've, I've encountered this thing that's really making me upset. Let me go seek out and encounter the beth- best faith sort of presentation of this from the other side of it. And what you get here is not like, oh, it's gonna trick you, or it's gonna, it's gonna trick you into not caring about what's important, or it's going to, to dull your sense of needing to take action, things are... That's not at all what's gonna happen. What this actually ends up doing is when you put the, the, the best steel man, that's what they call it, sort of a straw man, like the best, a good faith argument from the other side, is it, it sands off the, the, the really sharp edges that actually can make any reasonable action difficult and allows you to actually work with what's going on in this particular instance in a much more productive way. So take this dose of steel manning for everything that outrages you, everything that really gets you going. It just changes the temperature of your internal world and makes you, uh, gives you more options, gives you, gives you more agency. That one scares people. Interestingly, though, when I talk about this, it doesn't scare individuals thinking about themselves. Like, like, "Yeah, that's fine. I can see a, a good faith argument about something, and it'll be good to know. It's not gonna change what I think about." But they get worried about other people. They'll be tricked. It's important that they don't see the other side because they could be tricked into believing the wrong thing. Doesn't happen. You believe in something, steel manning it just gives you a more nuanced, less, uh, emotionally charged understanding of it. That is the foundation for real action. When you really just peak up the outrage, that's the foundation for sending more tweets and doing more TikTok videos. You're basically serving the social media companies. You're not actually serving the world. Be wary about using social media for entertainment. You'll find, uh, instead s- what I call slow entertainment, consumption of information that's slower and builds more richer, more rewarding worlds, books, good movies, seeing, uh, music in person, being around artists or creatives or seeing something awe-inspiring in nature in person. Slow entertainment is gonna be much richer for the brain and give us probably a better construction of a world than using social media for entertainment. If you do use social media for entertainment, be very focused. Like, this particular thing I get from social media. It's not just a, "I'm bored, let me start scrolling." So it could be, "I like to look at these baseball commentators during baseball game. They have, like, interesting comments about what's going on," and that's fine, but, "I'm gonna scroll TikTok when I'm just waiting at a red light," that's a whole different type of thing. Um, finally, seek a regular drip of content that's optimistic, exciting, or inspiring. So if the information we take in shapes our understanding of the world, then why don't we take in information that's gonna shape an understanding of an immediate world that is a little bit more positive, inspiring? Because we will feel better. So if this is what matters, then let's, let's, uh, be careful about the information we choose. All right, so those are just some principles off the top of my head. But the bigger point here with intentional information is this notion that information is not neutral. The tool shapes what the information means to you, and a lot of the tools that exist out there now, these internet-based attention economy tools, tend to shape a version of the world that is, uh, not in our best interest. It's distracting. It's emotionally draining. It makes us feel bad. It cuts off our options for actually taking meaningful action. So a deep life is careful about its information, what information it takes in, and critically, through what medium or tool it takes in that information. Intentional sl- uh, intentional information is one in where you're probably actually taking in a lot less digital information than you are now. You're putting more of that attention towards slower or in-person type of, uh, of information. This is an immediate positive change to your understanding of the world. Intentional information can have you, as, as one listener said to me, feel like you're going from black and white to Technicolor. It changes the world that you live in. It changes what Postman would call your epistemic environment in a way that can be profound and almost immediately. So we have to care about the information we intake just as much as we care about the other aspects of our life. So there we go, Jesse, intentional information. Not just two words now, but alliteration, so we're really rock and rolling.

Speaker 24:08 Reading right to left is, like, blowing my mind. I never even knew about that.

Cal Newport 24:12 Yeah. Yeah. Well, if, if you, if you ever picked up, uh, a book in Hebrew, you, you start from the other end.

Speaker 24:19 I've, I've never picked up a book in Hebrew.

Cal Newport 24:21 Yeah.

Speaker 24:21 I need to do that.

Cal Newport 24:22 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is really, um... It's a cool book. I like Sachs. I've been reading a lot of Sachs recently. He's one of these, uh- ... scholars who's very broadly read, but is very good at writing for popular audiences. He doesn't dumb it down, but he also doesn't, like, trip up over, like, his own complexity. Like, he's not proud-

Speaker 24:40 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 24:40 ... of like, "Look how smart I am." And somehow he's just able to pull all these different things together, be really clear about it, summarize what matters, know that this is a simplification, make that clear, and keep moving. A really good, really smart thinker.

Speaker 24:53 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 24:54 Rabbi Sacks. All right. Um, anyways, we got some good questions now vaguely about these topics, deep life topics, information, et cetera. But first, let's hear from a sponsor. [whooshing sound] Uh, speaking of information, I think it's a good time to talk about our friends at Notion. So you should know about Notion already. It's a tool that combines your notes and documents into one space that's simple and beautifully designed. Uh, it also allows you to create these sort of custom information spaces. We have used Notion-based tools here, uh, at the Deep Work HQ for various reasons. We had, for example, I believe we were using it to, to keep track of, um, with our a- advertising agency, all the different advertisers and when the reads were. And Notion makes it... You can build these beautiful interfaces and view the data in different ways and zoom in here. If you deal with a lot of information in what you do professionally, Notion is a tool for building these fantastic custom interfaces into that information. All right, so we've talked about Notion before on the show. One of the problems, of course, in general, is as information gets more voluminous for whatever operation you're running, it's more and more difficult to find what you need. So this is where I want to talk about this new tool that Notion has built right into its product, an AI tool built right into the product that makes it very easy to find whatever you're looking for. It's really cool. We've been messing around with this. Uh, it's a fantastic idea. Um, you can use the, the Notion's AI-powered workspace, um, to ask, "Where is this document on whatever? Where was it that we had y- the, the summary from the last meeting?" Uh, it can also act on your behalf 'cause Notion, these tools get you a place to interface with and mess with your, your, uh, information, so it can help you with this. "Hey, can you, uh, summarize the notes from this meeting? I've, I've, I put in these meeting notes. Summarize those for me. Can you generate action items based off this, this transcript of a chat that I just pasted right into our Notion i- interface?" Asking questions. "What did we say last week in the meeting about what we were going to do?" Uh, if you can, uh... The AI-powered tools in Notion [laughs] can help you with all of these different things, right? So I love this idea that Notion has evolved from, like, the tool to build custom interfaces to deal with all the information you need to do what you or your organization does, and now with AI integrated deep in it, it's all the more easier to find what you need, to create the information you need, to summarize the stuff that you have in there. So it's made this tool all the more powerful. So here's the good news. You can try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/cal. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com/cal, and start turning ideas into action. And when you use this link, you will be supporting our show. So go to notion.com/cal. Another cool sponsor I wanna talk about, a relatively new sponsor to the show, is Listening. So Listening is a, is this fantastic tool that allows you to take, uh, I use it with academic articles, but, but basically written text, and Listening is a tool that uses, um, AI-generated voices so that you can listen to, uh, written material. So now you can take in this material like you would a podcast or an audiobook. Um, here, for example, is an academic article I wanna read about whatever. I'm busy. Listen can now read this article for me while I'm doing the dishes, while I'm mowing the yard. So it's a way to take things that weren't originally recorded to be audio and allow you to actually consume them, uh, in an audio format. So you can listen to papers, books, PDF, websites, email newsletters, et cetera. Um, and the Listening app does this really well. Uh, one of the cool things about this is it has the ability to... Uh, it sounds like a real human, but one of the things I like about it is a one-click note-taking function. So like, "Oh, I, I need to jot something down about this," that you're listening to. You press one button, boom, and you can throw in a note, and it will remember, uh, take the last things it read and put it, copy it over into this sort of notepad-type feature. I don't know what they call it. So th- these notes are there. So, like, if I'm listening to an academic article or, like, a long-form, you know, New Yorker piece while I'm doing the dishes, if there's something in that article like, "Ooh, that's a key part," hit the button. It grabs the last few sentences, throws it in my notepad, and then later I can go in and like, "Oh, here's the things I, I sort of audio highlighted from this thing I was listening to." So they know, the Listening app knows that, like, you wanna actually take notes or keep information or remember good stuff about what you were listening to. Uh, it's also really good about skipping through sections, so it understands, like, if, if you've digested a academic paper, what the sections are. So you can jump ahead, jump ahead to conclusions, jump ahead to results, and it'll start reading that to you. And I like the voices. I think they're... The AI voice technology, I don't know. I feel like in the last six months, it feels like this has really changed, where it, you know, it sounds like someone is actually reading it. So your life just got a lot easier. Normally, you'd get a two-week free trial, but my listeners are gonna get a whole month free if they go to listening.com/deep or use the code deep at checkout. So go to listening.com/deep. For a limited time, you can get a whole month free. All right, Jessie, let's, uh, do some questions. [whooshing sound] That listening comes in handy, especially if you're driving too. Oh, yes. That's a fantastic use story. 'Cause there's so many times where I need to, and you can't write while you drive. Yeah. That's fantastic, actually, right? Like, okay, I, I wanna read this article that might be relevant for something I'm working on. Use the listening app, and you can listen to it while you drive, and you can hit the note-taking button. Yeah. Mm. I, I agree with that. Yeah. All right. First question's from Mark. "Do you have any book recomiz- recommendations aside from your own that will complement cultivating a deep life outside of work? So far from the

Cal Newport 31:04 past, I've heard you talk about Walden and designing your life. I'd love to hear more you consider good reading before you release your next book, which is the deep life book." Um, so Mark, I want you to read nothing until my book on the deep life comes out. Everything else compared to my book is garbage. No. Um, there's a lot of good books. So I'm gonna zig here, right? There's two ways of thinking about books about the deep life. There's books you can imagine to be actually instructive, right? So, like, Designing Your Life or, uh, Tim Ferriss', like, The 4-Hour Workweek, right? Um, what's the Arthur Brooks book? We, we had Arthur on. His book with Oprah, you know, Building the Life You Want. So you, you have straight-up instructive books. My book on the deep life will fall into that instructive bucket. Like, here's the way to think about this, here's what to do, try this out. But I'm gonna recommend something different for you now. So the other piece about reading about the deep life is not the instructions about how you construct a deep life, but instead your internal exploration to understand what the deep life means to you. Like, what is depth? This is actually the big question that people have. Now, you know, on the show, we say, uh, first of all, life is too ambiguous of a term. Break your life into the different areas that are important to you. We sometimes call these buckets. Let's do that first. And, you know, so you might have craft and community and constitution and contemplation, celebration. Uh, different ways we talk about this, but the areas of your life that's important to you. So now life is something more general. Then what you wanna do is, uh, seek out in each of these areas of your life examples that resonate. So it could be something you read about. It could be something you, you hear on a podcast or something you see in a movie or a documentary or read in a magazine article, but you're trusting your own body's intuition. You're using your body as a depth detector. It knows. Like, if it sees something that feels right in some way to me, I'm gonna feel that. And so you start, you start to capture these examples. And then once you have these examples and you're categorizing them, like the different parts of your life, once you have these examples, then you can distill them into properties. Oh, so what are the properties that these examples have? Let me distill those. These are the properties I'm looking for in the working part of my life. These are what resonate to me. I've distilled at the properties. Here's the properties I'm looking for in the community aspect of my life. I had these sort of examples of people and things and, uh, these books I read that really spoke to me. What are the properties they all shared that I want in the community part of my life? Once you have those properties, now you have a portrait of your own goal as a deep life that you can start working on pursuing. And that's gonna be sort of fundamental to the book I'm writing on the deep life, the sort of lifestyle-centric planning. So with this in mind, though, this means this is another way to think about books, is you're looking for things that resonate. Then you're recording the things that resonate under the right categories, and then later you try to distill pro- uh, properties out of them. So you don't necessarily need to just be looking for instructions, but instead the raw material you'll later need to construct a deep life. So Mark, that's what I might recommend. Read things that speak to you, and when you get that feeling of like I, I... Whatever this person is doing, why... I'm reading a book about Lincoln, and something about Lincoln is resonating with me of what's happening with the way he's dealing with X. Let me write that down. I'm watching a documentary about Laird Hamilton, you know, big wave surfing on the North Shore of Maui. I don't know what about this is resonating, but something is. I'm gonna write this down. So think about books in that way, as a, a source of intuition into what matters to you. And then of course, we can later use that information to help construct a life that has those properties in it. And that's the whole lifestyle-centric planning. It's its own thing. But anyways, I wanted to make that distinction. Books and the deep life is not just about how do I build this, but it's what do I wanna build, discovering what it is you wanna build. All right, what do we got next? Next question's from Scott.

Cal Newport 35:01 "Do you think handwriting has a positive effect on cultivating a deep life?" He provides a link that we'll take a look at. He also goes on to say, "You use your remarkable tablet, and that implies that you like hand- writing by hand. Do you use it for reasons suggested in the article?" All right, Scott. So we loaded up the article you sent to us. Uh, I'll put it on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. So the article that Scott sent us is titled Why Handwriting Is Good For Your Brain. There's a picture of someone writing at some sort of, like, colonial-looking desk. All right. Analysis. Research over the years has pointed out that there are many advantages and benefits to writing by hand. All right. So there's some cool pictures in here. I'm just, I'm just kinda scrolling through this thing. Look at that thing. This is, like, a writing device, Jesse, this weird thing here. Yeah. It's a writing device that Nietzsche used. Okay. Um, in a study carried out almost two decades ago, subjects were presented with words carrying a positive connotation, such as sweet, or negative, such as rubbish. Subjects had to indicate whether a word was good or bad by moving a joystick. Half the subjects were told to indicate that a word was good by pulling the joystick towards their body, and the other half were told to indicate good by pushing it away. Uh, to indicate that a word was bad, they made the opposite movement to good. A consistent correlation was observed between meaning and movement. The quickest responses were produced by the subjects who were told to indicate good by pulling the joystick towards themselves and indicate bad by pushing it away. The direct involvement of the body and senses in mental processes can explain how writing by hand helps us learn letters and words. This is backed up by the results of various studies, which they then go on to summarize. All right. Well, it's a good question. Um, do I use a remarkable notebook specifically to get benefits of handwriting? Um, not really. Not really. I, there, there's two advantages I like to it. Portability. So handwriting is, uh, portable. You just need a surface, right? Uh, keyboards take space and it's, it's a g- I pr- I can type much faster than I can write. I mean, I, I, I take a lot of notes on my computer typing 'cause I can type much faster than I can write, but it's not portable. So I like portability of handwriting. Um, I also like flexibility of formatting. So in my remarkable, I underline things, I draw boxes, I draw arrows. There's a lot of information that can be captured diagrammatically, right? Like I can draw things, captures information. I can underline things, box things, connect things with arrows. There's a lot of extra information you can add with drawing in addition to just pure text. So I like both those things about handwriting. Um, I don't know that I understand or remember information better when I write. I'm frustrated that I'm s- my writing is slow compared to my typing. My handwriting tends to get sloppy. Um, usually when I'm typing, just because my speed is better, I can get out more ideas, I can develop them better. I mean, I actually like, uh, typed thinking. I feel like it's more flexible for me than writing f- speaking. Uh, but there's advantages to the handwriting, the portability and the, uh, the ability to add diagrams. So, you know, I'm not a, a big booster of these notions that it, it will change my understanding if I write it as opposed to type it. Uh, in my book, I talked about this. I'm remembering this now. I talked about this in my, my Straight A Student book from years ago about, you know, how to be a student. And I argued in that book like, "Hey, if you're able to bring a laptop, if you have a laptop and are able to bring a laptop in the class to take notes, that's probably better because you can type faster." Like to me, it was all about keeping up, getting the information down that you could then later study from. And, and so I think from, if I'm thinking back, even from my early days, I was a big fan of, uh, speed, speed and efficiency. So I, I like typing, but I do hand write because it has its advantages. And if I had better handwriting, Jesse, I would do it more. Like some people have beautiful handwriting and there's like a, they draw. It's really nice. They have these bullet journals that look very artistic. Um, my notebooks, if you looked at them, sort of look like you're, you're capturing someone having a stroke in real time.

Speaker 39:01 [laughs]

Cal Newport 39:01 Just in terms of like the handwriting and the... 'Cause I get frustrated, like I wanna go faster.

Speaker 39:06 Other than your $50 notebook back in the day.

Cal Newport 39:08 That one I wrote carefully in. That one slowed me down. Um-

Speaker 39:11 That was in the book.

Cal Newport 39:11 I get frustrated I can't type faster. I type myself off of my keyboard. I go so fast, I like type myself off my... I wanna go faster. My thoughts move so much quicker, uh, than I can get information down. But that's true. So in my high quality notebook, which I talk about in Slow Productivity, I spent a lot of money on this notebook when I was a postdoc, so I would take my thoughts more seriously. My handwriting is very neat in there. So I did go slower in that notebook, and I did produce better ideas, so maybe there's something in that.

Speaker 39:36 How's your keyboard holding up that you bought over the holiday season?

Cal Newport 39:39 I like it, my mechanical?

Speaker 39:41 Yeah.

Cal Newport 39:41 Yeah, so it, it, by bouncing up the fingers, I'm faster, is I can type faster, but I still type myself off that keyboard. I go faster than I can actually keep up.

Speaker 39:50 So you still use it all the time?

Cal Newport 39:52 All the time.

Speaker 39:52 Yeah. That's cool.

Cal Newport 39:52 Even in the, in, even in the HQ, uh, when I use our new sort of beastly studio s- computer setup, I'll, I'll bring my mechanical and plug it in. Yeah. I, I really do like writing on it.

Speaker 40:03 That's cool. All right. Next question is from Josh. "I've struggled with learning

Speaker 40:09 in school and work my whole life. I struggle with comprehension, and my analytical and communic- communication skills are terrible. I'm 33, and this inability to move up in life and grow is affecting every aspect of my life. I feel like I'm always working hard to no avail. Should I get a brain scan to prove I have a low IQ?"

Cal Newport 40:28 Uh, no. I, I... No. I don't think you need to measure your IQ. I don't think you need, um, a brain scan. You know, I, I think what we need to do here is, uh, lifestyle-centric planning, right? So this, this is like my key idea about the deep life is instead of fixating on particular specific goals that are appealing to you and hoping that those goals, if accomplished, will bring in their wake an appealing lifestyle, focus directly on the lifestyle that's appealing to you and see, how do I engineer it? When you focus on the aspects of your lifestyle that are appealing to you first and work backwards, it opens up many more ways forward. You have a huge, uh, diversity of ways forward, and most importantly, you can mix and match your ways forward towards this desirable lifestyle to actually, uh, conform to your opportunities and obstacles, which are very specific to you. So I think lifestyle-centric planning is what's gonna be good here, because I think in your mind, you, you, it sounds like you probably have these, like, particular goals. I don't know, I wanna be higher up in this job, or I wanna make this much money in this role, and there's obstacles to it, and you're like, "I'm having a hard time getting there." Whereas in lifestyle-cen- centric planning, you say, "Well, what do I want? What do I actually want in the different parts of my life? It's not the specific job. It's that I wanna have, you know, this type of security and live this type of place and have this sort of engagement with my, with the community and spend this type of time do..." You, you, you build this image of your life, and now you can say, "What are my best ways to get there?" So if, like, this particular type of work you're in, it, maybe it's involving certain types of, like, very stylized business communication and lots of, like, fast analytical thinking about analyzing things, and if, if that is not fitting well with your skills, okay, let's find a different way to get towards what you're looking for. The other thing you'll get out of lifestyle-centric planning is now, uh, you're working with your opportunities and obstacles, you can sort of work systematically to expand opportunities and reduce the obstacles. So if you're having difficulty with, you know, reading comprehension, for example, there are things you can do to make that better. Uh, typically reading, building up a reading habit, starting with books that are incredibly appealing and easy, and then sort of slowly pushing yourself on the complexity. That changes your mind. As your mind becomes a reading mind, it changes it. Spending a lot less time with really high distraction, high salient attention economy tools, like things on your phone. Spend a lot less time with that and more time with slow information and slow entertainment, like books, like watching full movies. That'll rewire your brain in a way that will help Uh, if there's particular analytical skills, practicing those skills will help. I wanna actually practice doing this type of analysis, getting feedback, doing it better next time. So you could actually reduce obstacles and increase opportunities, but all of this, I think, should be in the context of what is-- what do I want out of my life? Okay, what do I have available? What opportunities do I have available? What are my obstacles? How can I expand those, reduce those? Fine. But let me work with what I do, I can do well, and figure out how to get closer and closer to these properties in the various parts of my life that appeal to me. So I, I think the flexibility of lifestyle-centric planning is critical here, uh, because otherwise you might lock in on, "This is what I need to do, this job and this position and this job," and if that's not working for you, all you're gonna feel is frustration. So that's what I would suggest there. Lifestyle-centric planning, LCP. You know me, LCP. That's a good question. All right, what else do we got?

Speaker 43:58 All right, next question's from Esteban:

Speaker 44:00 Do you recommend using ChatGPT for reading recommendations?

Cal Newport 44:04 No. I, I mean, Ch-ChatGPT has just digested a lot of information from people, and then it is going to be remixing that in sort of arbitrary s- uh, arbitrary ways, unpredictable ways, to try to produce a simulation of how, like, real people it encountered online would be recommending books. I think it's better just to go straight to the source material that ChatGPT trained on. People whose taste you find interesting or congruent, what type of books are they recommending? Trusting your own intuition, right? Like, what am I interested in right now? What are the parts of my life I wanna understand better? What are the parts of the world that seem interesting to me that I wanna know more about? What are good books there? I feel like choosing nonfiction books, it's like this-- especially nonfiction, it's this really subtle act. You know, I'm, I'm constantly... It's, it's a very subtle act when I'm choosing what I wanna read next, and a lot of different things in my life come together to choose this book versus that book, and it, it's really enriching to me, and even the selection process itself is a, is an act of self-development, self-definition. So there's certain things like, yeah, this is great, we can use a language model to make faster. This is not something we need to make faster. The more you have to define and understand what you wanna read and why you wanna read it, as you get better at finding and making these selections, you are gonna improve your own understanding of yourself. So th- do not fall back on ChatGPT for this, because again, you're just getting... Right, it's a token generator. So it's like, what would people that I've seen talking about books, what are the types of things they would say here? That's not gonna be better than just actually going to people who talk about books and seeing what they're saying. 'Cause there you have a real mind with coherent agency on the other end of it that you can actually relate to as a human being and figure out how to place the recommendations into some sort of larger sociocultural context. It's a very human thing. I think it's something that's worth keeping more human. All right. Let's see. Oh, we got another one.

Cal Newport 45:59 Who else do we have here?

Speaker 46:00 Next question's from Anna: How should I plan my gap year to ensure I don't waste a year? I want to experience the world, but fear I'll waste this opportunity.

Cal Newport 46:09 Well, Anna, first of all, I just wanna give you, uh, a little bit of reassurance. I think relative to y- the length that you've been alive so far, the gap year feels like a large, a large portion of time. Like, this will be like one-nineteenth of my life so far, right? So I understand when you, when it seems like such a, a big part of your life, you don't wanna waste it. But from another perspective, I'm looking at this from the other side of 40, that year is actually a much smaller piece of your life when you're looking backwards from mid-age back to it. So this idea that if I waste this, I'm wasting a big part of my life, you're not. This is a, a, a relatively small part of your life during sort of your, your earlier years. So I just wanna take the pressure off a little bit. Like, you can enjoy yourself. You can, uh, you can embrace serendipity, kinda discover yourself, but also just sort of catch your breath, get a little bit older before you, you, you start the next part of your life. And that you will do no matter what, so you're not gonna waste this. Don't worry so much about it. Now, getting a little bit more specific, to me, what's important during a gap year, uh, I think it's about better understanding yourself and what's important to you and what you're looking for in life. Now, these answers are very contingent, and they'll change. Uh, what you come up with when you're 18 will be different than when you're 22, which will be different than when you're thir- 25, different than when you're 35, but you have to begin, uh, asking these questions. Gap year is great for that because when you're in high school, especially in the American context, it's not a time for self-reflection. It's, you know, school is my job. I don't have a ton of autonomy because I still live at home under the, the care of my parents, and I'm just trying to, like, do well and get into college. So your gap year might be your first real exposure to, I wanna seek out information and experiences. I wanna process them and use them to better understand who I am and what it is I wanna do in the world. That's really what's important about the gap year. Going to novel places in this context are important largely because it helps you have, uh, more fresh insight. You're out of normal routines and rhythms so that, like, you're more likely to take the whatever Hemingway you're reading, uh, John Williams you're reading and, and see it fresh because you're in a completely new context and your brain is not in some sort of just standard pattern. But, like, what matters to me is the information you encounter during your gap year. Trying to understand who you are, how the world works, and what you wanna do in it. That's what you wanna come away with. So you want journals with you. You wanna take notes. You wanna refine these notes. You wanna have a lot of time alone with your own thoughts to make sense of this information. Wherever you go, walk a lot. Do not have your earbuds in all the time. Maybe don't use social media for this year. Like, so you really want your mind to be kinda starved of inputs except for what's going on around it and inside your own head. It's a time of an process, process, process, process so that when you go to college the next year I kind of have a sense of identity. I kind of have a sense of what I'm about, what I'm, what's important, what's not. So what am I doing here at college to get towards those things or to make sure my life at college reflects those things? That's what you want out of your gap year. So it's really gonna be about taking in information, experiences, and thinking about them, and processing and taking notes. You should go through a bunch of notebooks on your gap year, and they're gonna be embarrassing because they need to be, because you're trying to work through these sort of deep thoughts, and so maybe you wanna hide them [chuckles] when you're done. But you should be writing and thinking all the time. So a gap year to me is about cognition much more than it is about location or specific places you are. It's cognition that matters, having time for self-reflection, learning what the interior cognitive contemplative life actually feels like. Jump-starting that early in your adulthood so you can draw from that deposit throughout the years that follow. It'll be fun. Gap years weren't as big when we were young. Were they? Did you take a gap year?

Speaker 50:01 No, I did not. I, I had a opport- I got accepted to Middlebury, but it wasn't until the February or the second semester.

Cal Newport 50:08 Right.

Speaker 50:08 But I didn't wanna do that 'cause I would've had to stick around for a semester at home and-

Cal Newport 50:12 Yeah, you're like, "Let's get out of here."

Speaker 50:13 And I wanted to play lacrosse, and I went like, "I'm gonna be at a disadvantage when I get there in the spring and they've all been playing."

Cal Newport 50:17 If you missed a fall, yeah.

Speaker 50:18 So.

Cal Newport 50:19 Interesting.

Speaker 50:19 That was the only thing that was somewhat similar.

Cal Newport 50:21 Interesting. Uh, so we might have been nearby if you had actually taken that because Dartmouth is not far.

Speaker 50:26 [laughs] That's a good point.

Cal Newport 50:27 It's not far from, from Middlebury, though I didn't play lacrosse. Yeah, I was the same way. My... I was like, I wanted to get out of that hou- I mean, my house was great, but I just was, I wanted to be on my own.

Speaker 50:36 Yeah.

Cal Newport 50:36 Like, I was so like, "I am ready to be on my own." And then when I got to college, I like, pretty soon, I was like, "Okay, I'm ready to be done with college." You know, I was just prematurely, like, a 37-year-old.

Speaker 50:48 My parents also owned a store, so I would've had to work the whole fall, and-

Cal Newport 50:51 Yeah

Speaker 50:51 ... I wasn't really appealed to that. [laughs]

Cal Newport 50:54 Yeah, I know. That's, I was, I worked a lot.

Speaker 50:56 Yeah.

Cal Newport 50:56 I had my own company. I, I was doing computer programming. Like, I worked a lot, you know. And, uh, yeah, I was excited to... And I went to a school on the quarter system, uh, which means you don't start till, like, pretty late in September. So even that, I was like, "I'm the only one here."

Speaker 51:10 Yeah.

Cal Newport 51:11 Everyone had gotten to college and were, like, telling me these stories and yeah, so I, I was... A gap year would've been okay. I just wanted to, like, be an adult.

Speaker 51:19 Yeah.

Cal Newport 51:19 So I don't think I even wanted a gap year. Um, all right. Do we have... Oh, we have a call.

Speaker 51:24 Yep.

Cal Newport 51:24 Ooh. And the call, it looks like, is gonna be our Slow Productivity Corner question of the day.

Speaker 51:29 Yep.

Cal Newport 51:30 Our Slow Productivity Corner, if you don't know, is we try to have at least one question per day that, uh, per episode that relates to my new book, Slow Productivity, which I highly recommend. If you like the show, you need to read this book because it's sort of the source guide to everything we say about digital knowledge work. Um, but so, so our Slow Productivity Corner's question's a call. Let's get some theme music. [gentle music] All right.

Speaker 52:03 Hi, Cal. My name is David. I work in marketing, and I'm calling from Perth,

Speaker 52:08 Australia. I'm li- listening to your book, Slow Productivity, and I was struck by how some of the examples you give, like Robert Macfie and Anthony Zeika, and also the slow food movement, uh, reminded me of some interviews I read recently, uh, with a Korean-born philosopher, Byung-Chul Han. Now, Han came to prominence with a 2015 book, The Burnout Society, and it's, it's really struck me that you and he are kind of describing similar things about the present moment. I'm new to your podcast and your work, and I wondered if you'd covered anything about Han. The connection just, it seemed to me to be obvious and kind of important. So yeah, [laughs] just a small niggling question. Cheers.

Cal Newport 53:01 All right. Well, thanks for the question, Mark. Um, no, I did not know about Byung-Chul Han until recently. Uh, a couple people actually, after Slow Productivity came out, sent me a pointer to his book, The Burnout Society, which I haven't read yet, but I want to. Uh, I've loaded it here. So I loaded it up here on the, the screen. I looked it up after your call. So, so here's the book, and let's read a little bit more about it 'cause this, this is interesting to me. Um, it's called The Burnout Society. Here's the... Let's read about the author first, Byung-Chul Han. Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chan, uh, Chul-Han teaches philosophy and cultural studies at Berlin's University of the Arts. In the past few years, his provocative essays have been translated into numerous languages, and he has become one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe and beyond. His work is presented here in English for the first time. So, uh, this book is categorized... Stanford University Press published this book. So it's a, it's a academic press book, not a pure trade book. Um, its categorization is philosophy, social theory philosophy, post-structuralism and phenomenology, sociology, and culture. So this is more of a sort of academic book. So it sounds like what's going on here is Byung-Chul Han is, has a really big following, especially in Europe, and it's a little bit more recently that he's coming in translation over to the sort of the English-speaking market. So he probably, his ideas have probably, I'm gonna guess, are big in certain parts of the world and are just probably expanding their footprint here in the US, which might be why I hadn't heard about him before. Um, let's read a little bit about the book itself. This is from the description on the publisher's website. It... I'm gonna read just a few quotes here. "Our competitive service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, user-friendly technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline Personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Uh, he looks... And now I'm gonna paraphrase a few things. He looks at stress and exhaustion as not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomenon. He denounces a world in which against the grain response can lead to disempowerment. He draws on literature, philosophy, and the social natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection. All right, so it sounds like there's sort of a lot going on in this book. So there's an economic argument lurking in here that a consumer economy that's based on low friction and availability of information and goods and services, um, changes our engagement with difficulty and hardship. And so, you know, hey, I c- I'm just used to everything being easy, so when things are hard, I have a hard time actually dealing with that. So I think that's an interesting point. Uh, there also seems to be something in here about lack of intellectual reflection, so what he calls intermittent intellectual reflection, lack of time for that, uh, and instead having constant neural connection through technology is also having some sort of negative impact. Um, so these are obviously, like, ideas, uh, that are congruent with the things I talk about, uh, especially that last one, intermittent intellectual reflection. This, like, this comes back to, I think, digital minimalism, where I talk about solitude deprivation. Like, you need time alone with your own thoughts or there's negative consequences, and technology makes it possible to avoid time alone with your thoughts, so I think that's there. Uh, taking an economic lens, I think, to trying to understand some of our psychological or philosophical ennui, I mean, that's something I do as well, though I think we focus on different ideas. So for example, it sounds like he's focusing here on, uh, easy availability of goods and information as making us ill-suited for hardship. In Slow Productivity, by contrast, I talk about pseudo productivity as leading to a, a real problem. So this idea of redefining productive labor as visible activity is causing a lot of problems, both economically and personally and psychologically when it comes to the knowledge work. So it's a similar lens, but it's looking at different aspects of it. Uh, multitasking, and we both dislike that. Anyway, so it sounds like, yes, uh, Byung-Chul Han, like a lot of authors right now, are tackling these problems we have in our sort of technological world. There's a lot of these w- we are not as happy as we used to be, and there's problems, and it sounds like he has some interesting angles, some interesting things I agree with, some interesting things that are different than what I talk about. I talk about some things that are different. There's a bunch of other books like this, but this one looks cool, and I like that it's a little bit more academic. So I will check it out, and then I will report back, uh, about what I learned. All right. So there we have our Slow Productivity Corner question of the day. [Instrumental music] I also wanna do a case study. This is where I read an account sent in from one of our listeners

Cal Newport 58:24 about how they put the ideas we talk about on this show into practice in their actual life. Today's case study comes from Ashley. Ashley says, "I was listening to your episode on the Deep Life Stack 2.0, and you mentioned putting your phone on the charger right when you get home from work. This is something I have been wanting to do for a long time, but for a lot of dumb reasons have never actually committed to it. I finally committed and put my phone in our council table drawer so it will be out of sight when I am home with my kids. Yesterday was my first day doing that, and I was doing well until I put my baby down for her nap. My four-year-old is still awake at this time, so usually I will put a show on for him, but I am too tired to do anything productive because the baby still isn't sleeping through the night. So I will watch YouTube videos or listen to a podcast and generally just waste this time. I was debating getting my phone out or maybe watching a movie with my son but didn't wanna go against the spirit of the role, the rule around putting my phone away. As I am deliberating this choice, my son comes up to me and tells me something that has been going on at school. Normal kid drama, but something that has been really bothering him and that he has been struggling with. I am convinced he wouldn't have told me this had I put on a show for him. It was only because he had the space to sit and think, and I was available and distraction-free, that he thought to talk to me about it, and it was a really important conversation for us to have. I am grateful for the reminder to focus on my relationships and to remove the distractions that are getting in the way of me connecting with my kids. I still wasn't productive during that time, but I had probably the most important conversation I have ever had with my son up until this point, so thank you." All right, I think that's a great case study. Uh, so she's talking about the... Ashley's talking about the phone foyer method, where when you're at home, you don't keep your phone as a constant companion, but instead something you can go to look stuff up or use if you need it for a very specific purpose. Like, I could, I could put on a podcast to listen to or, or take a phone call, et cetera, but not something you pull out at the slightest hint of boredom. Ashley is emphasizing one of the advantages of this method when you have kids, is that the device really can be a boundary that goes up between you and your kids. Mom, Dad, they're looking at their phone. They're not engaged with me or my world. I guess I'll go do my own thing. It's a boundary that does sit between us and our kids. It's a boundary that does, uh, eliminate those sort of boring stretches where sometimes something really interesting comes out of it, where the kid just wants to start... My sons will do this all the time, just start downloading something they're thinking about, and this leads to something else, and then you... And, and, and soon you're, like, learning something important, or you go, and we're gonna play a game. We're gonna go throw the ball around, and interesting stuff comes out of it. A lot of good comes out of just sort of informal structuring of time with people in your family, and then the phone can sort of get in the way of that, especially if the kids themselves have phones too, and now you've, you've essentially dissolved Any of these sort of strong in-the-house type of social connections, there, there really is a cost to that. So I do, I do appreciate that. Um, and one thing I wanna clarify, actually, Sue... Well, two things. One, as you know, 'cause you have other kids, I have full empathy about the kid not sleeping through the night phase. Um, and just a reminder, that goes away, 'cause that's a terrible phase. I mean, it's a good phase because it's a phase where, like, your baby's really young, but man, that's also a hard phase. So [laughs] that does, that does get better. I always, I always say that when a parent writes in, that the sleep does get better. Um, but two, you said, "I still wasn't productive during that time." Well, there's no reason to be productive during that time, right? So it's, it's, it's not so much about productivity. When we say I, I, I don't wanna always be distracted about my phone at home, it's not because if I'm distracted by my phone I can't be producing more widgets, I can't be producing something useful. No, the, the, the issue with the phone distracting you is that it keeps you away from things that are even more meaningful. It's not a lack of productivity we're fighting here, it's a reduction of meaning. It's a reduction of more intentional activities. There's nothing productive about, uh, using, like, the... We have this little loom that, like, my five-year-old likes to kinda make, you kinda knit things on it. Nothing productive about that, but it's, like, a meaningful or intentional activity that the phone could get in the way of. So yeah, we definitely don't wanna think about our at-home behaviors through the perspective of productive or non-productive, but meaningful and intentional versus, uh, arbitrary or out of our control. So anyways, that's a great case study of the phone foyer method in action, and thank you for sending that in. All right, so we have a cool final segment coming up where I have some entertaining news about slowness from around the world, but first, let's hear from another sponsor. [whooshing sound] So I wanna talk about Mint Mobile. Uh, you know, it's spring cleaning season right now, and, uh, one of the f- takeaways we often have after we do a spring cleaning is we wonder how we ever lived, like, the cluttered life we were living before we did the cleaning once we see what it could be like when it's clean. Well, it's kinda like when you find out that you've been paying a fortune for wireless when Mint Mobile has phone plans for $15 a month when you purchase a three-month plan. So it makes you say when you discover that, "How was I paying so much money for phone service before?" Just like when you clean your house. "How was I living in such a dirty house before?" That's how it feels when you find these affordable Mint Mobile plans. It's time to switch to Mint Mobile and get unlimited talk, text, and data for just $15 a month. We're actually just setting up a new Mint Mobile plan now because we want... You know, we, we have this flip phone I've showed you. We're setting up a plan for that flip phone. It used to be in the studio, but we brought it home so that when my, uh, my 11-year-old is home, uh, by himself, that he has a way, or he gets home from school, like, on his own before we get there, he has a way he can call or text us without having access to the internet. So like, yeah, it's only 15 bucks a month. We can put, like, a really nice plan on this simple phone. So I love Mint Mobile. It's just a way to get premium wireless plans without having to pay the big bucks. Uh, they all come with high-speed data. They all come with unlimited talk and text. It's all delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You'll have connectivity wherever. So you can ditch overpriced wireless with Mint Mobile's limited time deal and get three months of premium wireless service for just 15 bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three-month unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, you have to go to mintmobile.com/deep. That's Mint Mobile, M-I-N-T, mintmobile.com/deep. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com/deep. $45 upfront payment required, which is equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Speeds slower once you get above 40 gigabytes on the unlimited plan. All right, I also wanna talk about our friends at Maui Nui Venison, a mission-based company bringing the healthiest red meat on the planet directly to your door. I love the story about Maui Nui. Here's what's going on. On the island of Maui, there is an invasive deer species, the axis deer, that's eating all the vegetation and it's causing all these ecological problems. So they have to cull the axis deer herd to, to, to sort of, uh, prevent these ecological problems. At Maui Nui, what they figured out was, wait a second, the meat in these deer is incredibly nutritious because they're eating a, a Hawaiian salad bar all day. So instead of just destroying these deer to bring the populations in check, why don't we, uh, harvest this meat to produce very healthy, very healthy red meat? And that's what Maui Venison does. It's a delicious and tender protein. The, the, uh, the sticks, the beef jerkies, the venison jerky sticks, whatever you call those, are fantastic. High protein, very low fat. Um, we've grilled up the steaks. The venison steaks are fantastic. It's... My kids love them even. Um, so you're getting this, uh, really high quality, highly nutritious meat that's very sustainably harvested. Th- this is, "We have to cull these herds anyways. Why not not waste this meat?" So I highly recommend trying their venison jerky sticks or their steaks. They have bone broth. The fresh cuts are fantastic as well. Uh, I love Maui Nui, um, venison products in general. Uh, you can get 20% off your first order if you go to mauinuivenison.com/deepquestions, one word. So that's Maui, M-A-U-I, Nui, N-U-I, venison.com, mauinuivenison.com/deepquestions to get 20% off your first order. All right. Jessie, let's go on to our final segment. [whooshing sound] Now, I'm calling this final segment Slow News. Uh, three

Cal Newport 1:07:22 different things from around the world that involve the notion of slow in an interesting way. So this is sort of a tribute to my book, Slow Productivity, which again, if you like the show, you need the book. Because it's sort of the source code to my thoughts about how to manage digital era knowledge work. So you can find out about the book at calnewport.com/slow. All right, so I have three things I wanna show you. The first thing comes from Switzerland. I have it on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening. This is the Slow Watch that moves at half the speed of a normal watch. So let me show you a picture of these watches. So as you can see, Jesse, what's missing on these watches, and I'll zoom in, what's missing on these watches is a minutes hand or a second hand.

Speaker 1:08:10 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:08:11 It has 24 hours and one hand that just moves slowly through all the hours of the day. So that is the Slow Watch. These are 300 bucks if you're wondering. Um, let's read about it here. They have some, some text about this. So what's the idea? So slow they can't even get their website to work. [laughs] Ah, here we go. It is ironic the website was slow [laughs] when I was working with it earlier. All right, so here's their explanation of this concept. All right. "A 24-hour one-hand watch allows you to see the entire day in one view and experience time in natural way. This fundamentally changes the way you look at your watch, and it will give you a much better consciousness about the progression of your day. This way of showing the time is inspired by the original clocks that were based on the sun clock. Those early clocks indeed had only one hand that displayed all 24 hours. You can still see them on some old church towers. Only when people's lives became busier and busier did they feel the need to create this unnatural split of the day into two 12-hour halves and break each hour down into 60 minutes. That's when we started to chase the minutes and get stressed by time. So let's turn back time and be slow again." Uh, time and timekeeping as a technology and how it impacts our understanding of the world is a well-worn topic in technology criticism. If you go back to, like, Lewis Mumford's book Technics and Civilization, he sort of opens that book talking about the monastic orders inventing sort of usable clocks so that they could time their prayers, and talks about how this changed our conception of, of the world, that, that, that time was broken into discrete, evenly spaced units. And so just inventing this technology changed our understanding of the world. My understanding about minutes and seconds was the railroads made this useful. So, like, for large scale internat- national railroad networks to make sense, we needed some way of, uh, we needed time at just finer granularities, right? Because we actually had to know when a train arrived so that you could get from that train to another train, and that completely changed the way we understood time as well. There's a lot of cool, uh, discussions. Uh, Oliver Burkeman has a good discussion about this in Four Thousand Weeks. Um, anyways, it comes up a lot. It's a cool topic. All right. Next example from Slow news. I'm gonna read something here. Looks like the Slow Watch is still on the screen, Jesse. I don't know if that's... Oh, there we go. All right. Let me, uh, read this letter from a listener. "I really love Slow Productivity. It's a fun read. So much of it really resonated for me as an author who has embraced the slowness of a creative life, especially one away from social media. I know that I write better books when I take my time with the stories. My next book is perhaps an interesting Slow Productivity case study. I wrote the first draft in 2012, and it got a book deal in 2014. Then because of getting pushed by other books I had coming out first and then my editor moving to a different publishing house, the book sat for years. In the meantime, I kept writing other things and would occasionally take another stab at editing the book. I wasn't happy with the ending. About eight years after I wrote the initial draft, I realized I had the skills to completely rewrite the book and make it better. Almost a year after that, the ending finally worked itself out. This is a picture book. It's not very long, and yet it still took over 10 years to get right." All right, and it turns out this picture book, which I'll load up on the screen here, Help Wanted: One Rooster, there's the picture here, uh, comes out in June. So 10 years later, this book is coming out. I thought that was a cool case study, this idea of spending 10 years to get a book right. Not a long book, right? But just let me come back to it. It's not quite right. This really resonates with the third principle of Slow Productivity, obsess over craft. It's, you know, the, you want something to be good. You wanna get better at what you do. Completely changes your relationship to work. And something like this, like spending a decade working in the background on a book, makes a lot of sense in the Slow Productivity mindset in a way that it might not otherwise in a pseudo-productivity mindset, which is focused instead just on activity. So Julie, thanks for sending in that entertaining example and informative example of slowness in action. All right, so my final, uh, thing is it's actually a, from England, and this is gonna be something about me. [laughs] So a couple people sent this to me. I guess there's a, a satiric literary magazine in, uh, England called something, Private Eye, I believe. Um, and they have a literary review section. Anyways, they, they had a comic I put here on the screen. This is a, from a literary magazine, and it's a satirical comic called First Drafts. All right, so here's the... I'll explain this cartoon. I appreciate this cartoon. For those who are listening at home, uh, it's a three-panel comic. In the first panel, there's someone staring at a blank screen on the computer. In the next panel, they press one button, and the letter C goes up on the screen. And in the third panel, they're leaning back satisfied drinking a cup of coffee. The caption for this comic is Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. So there we go. I think it's a sat- satire of Slow Productivity. You write one letter after great contemplation and consider you've done your work. Um, I'm mainly just happy, Jesse, that whoever drew this comic thought that me and that book is well enough known that people would understand the comic.

Speaker 1:13:43 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:13:43 That's the good news, I think, that, you know, there's a [laughs] assumption that enough people, uh, in the UK have seen this that they'll actually understand the comic.

Speaker 1:13:51 Well, you had that big profile in the Financial Times like last year.

Cal Newport 1:13:54 That's right, yeah. And I was on the bestseller list over there, so, you know-

Speaker 1:13:57 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 1:13:57 ... it's, it's me. And I'm going over there. Uh, f- I'm g- mid-May, I am going to London and doing a few days of publicity activities over there. Actually, I wish I had a... This would be nice. We should get a copy of this comic. Would be nice to frame for the HQ.

Speaker 1:14:12 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:14:13 Private Eye. All right. [upbeat music] Maybe I'll have to grab a copy of that when I'm over there. I don't know how often it comes out, but maybe I'll try to find a copy of that to bring back from England. That'd be funny. It's the first time I've been featured/satirized in a cartoon.

Speaker 1:14:25 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:14:26 So good, I suppose. All right, well, anyways, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with a, uh, another episode of the show. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you liked today's discussion of intentional information, I think you'll also like episode 287, where I discussed how to take notes on the information you choose to take into your life. I think you'll like it. Check it out. The system I use for keeping notes on information for all parts of my work and life.