How to Kick Your Scrolling Habit (Practical Advice)

Cal Newport 0:00 My philosophy of digital minimalism, my approach for dealing with these issues, argues that these tools push out other things in your life and therefore then fill a void that those things used to fill. When you just do white-knuckle abstention, you are faced with the yawning, uh, void of boredom and your own thoughts and anxiety. It's very uncomfortable. You just sit there like, "What am I supposed to do?" You need something to have that smoothing distraction. So the first step is not to abstain from your phone. The first step is forget your phone. Do what you want do on your phone. Watch your dino mountain gravy videos. But start adding at the same time really quality alternatives. Start adding into your life things that can eventually take the place of just looking at your phone, that can eat away at that sensation of boredom and anxiety of being alone with your own thoughts that drives us back to the succor of low-quality distractions. So what would these things look like? I'm gonna give you six different things. We'll call this our high quality leisure toolkit. Six different things that you should probably engage with, all of them to some degree in your life in preparation to changing your relationship with your phone. One is gonna be reading. You should read a lot more. This could be a mix of things that are just really fun, magazine articles or books that are really fun to read, as well as things that are smarter. A recent episode of this show, uh, Jesse, I don't know if that was 286 maybe, I got into how to engage with this higher quality leisure, um, how to learn to engage with harder books, uh, so you might wanna check out that episode. All right. Second, higher quality video media, prestige TV, movies, documentaries. This is another piece of this toolkit. Uh, this is content which I'm gonna go out on a limb here, um, and guess that slightly more money and time was invested than in the video of gravy being poured down the mashed potato dinosaur mountain, so stuff in which real creative energy and focused effort was placed. Number three, skill-based hobby. Something you're into that requires a skill you can get better at. Your results get better as that skill improves. This creates a feedback loop that our mind really likes, that can be more compelling to our mind than low quality distraction. "Hey, I'm working on this new project that is more advanced than I've done before. I think I might pull it off." This is compelling to me, compelling enough that these other lower quality distractions aren't so strong in their appeal. Four, have some sort of exercise-based hobby, some sort of physical fitness where you're trying to build a streak, finish a... hit some marks in terms of where you wanna get in your health. Some sort of serious engagement with the physical. Among other things, this frees up, uh, it frees up your body. It releases these chemicals into your mind that makes you less, uh, gets you out of this torporific state of, "I'm low energy. I wanna minimize energy. What's the lowest energy thing I can do to engage?" It puts you more into a state of we're active, our muscles are growing, our lungs are being used. It changes your look, outlook at the world. Number five, get involved with communities that meet regularly, even if this is just friends that you have a standing, "We go and see a movie every other week. We go to dinner once a month," or a bigger, uh, more organized activity, a, a league or a group that you go to. Have something that meets regularly that involves other people. And six, seek, seek out adventures. "I wanna go travel to see this sports team play at the away stadium. Uh, I want to go to this museum. There's a special exhibit that's coming, and I wanna go read by a waterfall that I heard about that takes a two-mile hike to get to." Things that are above and beyond what's easy and are really cool or could create a really interesting experience. If you have these six things in your life, reading, high quality TV and movies, skill-based hobby, exercise-based hobby, regular meeting communities, and adventures, take some time to add all these into your life. Now you're gonna be in a position where the monopoly that your phone has on your time and attention has dissipated. It is now competing against higher quality versions of things that can satisfy the same needs that were driving you to your phone. Those needs are gonna drive you one way or the other, but the phone gives you a low fidelity solution to what you crave. These high quality leisure activities give you a higher fidelity s- uh, solution, and therefore they're gonna more, uh, be more easily victorious. All right, so that's step one. You put alternatives to your phone in your life before you even worry about your phone habits. Step two, we declutter. Now, this is the core idea from my book Digital Minimalism. Uh, I don't believe in detoxing in the sense of take a break and then go back to what you were doing before. I believe in decluttering. So you step away, you take a break as step one of making permanent change. So the way this works is that you take 30 days where you are now ready to stop using these optional digital technologies in your life, the TikTok, the Instagram, the Twitter, uh, you s- the video games, YouTube. You step away from these optional technologies, but now you're prepared to do so because you have these six areas of high quality leisure already in your life already rock and rolling. Just lean heavily into those. You're not staring into the void. You're not sitting there, uh, like a detoxing drug addict shaking, like, "What am I gonna do next?" You're doing other things. So you're getting a taste of life without these tools. In doing so, you can see what you miss. You can also figure out what you really care about. At the end of the 30 days, then you can decide what, if anything, you wanna add back into your digital life. To add back a tool, it must be really valuable. Like, hey, this actually satisfies something that's important to me. And two, when you add it back, you should have clear rules for how and when you're gonna use it. So maybe Twitter comes back into your life because you realized you really do need to keep up with baseball trade rumors that are going on. This is really important to you that during the hot stove season, you, you do really like baseball, and it helps you engage to, to hear the baseball reporters sharing rumors on, uh, player trades. Let's say this is the situation. Well, now that you know this is why you're bringing Twitter back into your life, you could have clear rules on it. All right, I check in on these, these rumors on, uh, during lunch break. It takes about 20 minutes. I don't follow anyone on Twitter. I've just bookmarked the four baseball reporters who I follow, two from my team and, you know, maybe, like, Ken Rosenthal and, and Jay Papasan, or national reporters that have good sources, and I look at it on my desktop computer when I'm at work. So now I get that value. Every day I go on and see what's going on, but I also don't have Twitter with me on my phone, and these are part of a much larger timeline that I can check at any time. It has endless information. I've put this tool back into my life for a specific reason with specific rules. This is how you reconfigure a digital life that operates on your terms, supports what you value, and yet minimizes the, uh, unnecessary negative side effects. So none of this is about this technology is good or that technology is bad. None of this is about, uh, you need to live exactly this way versus that way. It's about intention, but you can't have intention about your digital life until you build a life that's better than what we just saw when we took this quick tour through the state of social media in 2024. Again, what we just encountered here is fine but also sort of weird and eccentric and idiosyncratic. To look at that now and again, who cares? It's like reading the tabloid in the supermarket checkout line. But if I found you reading the National Enquirer three to four hours a day, seven days a week, I would say, "Okay, buddy, I think we need a better hobby." And that is implicitly what we've all ended up doing. So to fix this relationship with social media and our phones more generally, put in place the alternatives that are much better. Get yourself to the place where your mind is increasingly embarrassed by choosing TikTok over all of these other much richer options, and then do your organized declutter. If you want to find out more about this, my book, Digital Minimalism, of course dives into all these details, but hopefully I've given you enough there to get you started. Did you see, Jesse, in the Super Bowl, there was an ad for Snapchat?

Speaker 8:53 I did.

Cal Newport 8:54 It was, uh... It seemed to me like Snapchat was trying to argue, uh, we're better. We, we don't have some of the same problems as other social media platforms, even though Snapchat, as any social media research will tell you, has been at the core, for example, of the teenage mental health crisis and its intersection with social media. It's very big among teenagers, and Snapchat conversations, it leads to all sorts of issues. Uh, I was joking with the person I was with when we were watching the Super Bowl. I was like, "This is sort of like having a, an anti-fentanyl ad sponsored by crack."

Speaker 9:26 [laughs]

Cal Newport 9:27 Remember crack? The... This was better in some sense than it was now with fentanyl. That was sort of the sense I got with that ad. You know, like, it was hard to get crack, so, like, you know, you, you wouldn't do as much of it. Fentanyl is, uh, it's a interesting argument. Hey, we're better than the other stuff that's causing damage. Oh, well. All right. Well, there we go. So I'm not joining social media yet, Jesse, but, uh, it was good to see you.

Speaker 9:51 Yep.

Cal Newport 9:52 Um, by the way, I was proud that Instagram was not signed in on your, your iPad. That means you must not be a heavy Instagram user.

Speaker 9:58 I tried to open it on the app on my iPad, and then it was asking for my password, and I haven't used it in a while. And then I tried to find my password and I entered it, but then it wouldn't get, let you reset it, so.

Cal Newport 10:09 No, I like that though. That means you haven't, you haven't used it in a while, and you've been okay.

Speaker 10:13 I've been okay. Think about all those beach vacations though you could've been learning about.

Cal Newport 10:16 Yep.

Speaker 10:17 Yeah.

Cal Newport 10:17 Every once in a while, like, a coach, like my golf coach or someone will send me a video, so then I go in and check that out, and then-

Speaker 10:22 Yeah. Uh, people have done that too, and you can... They'll let you see, like, one thing, and then they'll say you have to log in.

Cal Newport 10:28 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 10:29 Yeah. Um, so there you go.

Cal Newport 10:32 I want to take a quick break to talk about some of the sponsors that make this show possible. I'm actually recording this ad right before my family leaves for a beach vacation down in Delaware, and let me tell you one thing we're packing for sure: Cozy Earth beach towels. Longtime listeners know how obsessed I am with Cozy Earth's bed sheets. Well, now with their beach towels, I can experience that same luxurious sense of premium quality while by the water. These towels are ultra soft. They soak up the water, and they're big enough to provide a comfortable resting place on the sand. Now, if you're not a beach person, you can enjoy the same quality in Cozy Earth's bath towels, which will make your own bathroom feel like a spa. And of course, there's no risk as Cozy Earth stands behind everything they make with a 10-year warranty. Cozy Earth towels are oversized, ultra plush, and completely built for your best summer day. So head to cozyearth.com and use my code DEEP for an exclusive 20% off. That's code DEEP for an exclusive 20% off, and if you see a post-purchase survey, mention that you heard about Cozy Earth right here. Now let me tell you something else. I probably should have started this podcast earlier. I knew it was a good idea, but I was paralyzed by some of the technical complexities in getting a show like this up and running. I don't want you to fall into that same trap if you're thinking about starting your own business but are worried about the complexities of selling things. Here's the secret to eliminate these fears. Use Shopify. It gives you everything you need to start selling on day one, so you can focus on what really matters: growth. Now here's one feature in particular I think is critical. All Shopify storefronts are integrated with checkout for no extra charge. So among other benefits, this offers your customers one-click checkout, which can significantly improve conversion. Look, you don't wanna be wasting, you know, time, uh, fixing issues in your business or trying to get technical platforms up and running. Let Shopify handle these details so that you can grow your business on your own terms. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business, so go make your idea real. If you're ready to stop putting off your business and start hearing [cash register dings] then you're ready for Shopify. Start your free trial at shopify.com/deep today. You heard that right. Start your free trial at shopify.com/deep. That's shopify.com/deep. All right, let's get back to the episode.

Cal Newport 13:06 Who do we got first?

Speaker 13:07 First question's from Henry: "What do you think of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death? I feel like that book fits well as a root for your digital minimalist philosophy. Do you think that the medium of screens fundamentally opposes the deep life?"

Cal Newport 13:22 That's a good book, Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman. The late Neil Postman is often cited by people who do techno-criticism. So Henry, I'm gonna point you towards a recent article I wrote for The New Yorker. This would've come out in December. I don't remember the exact title of the article, but I can tell you it is about Neil Postman, not Amusing Ourselves To Death, but instead his subsequent book Technopoly. So I argue in this article that Technopoly is probably the best full summary of Neil Postman's philosophy regarding technology, and in that article, I get into the impact of Postman's technopoly theory on my own thinking about techno- technology and techno-criticism, and it did have a big impact. So you're correct to note that Postman is related to my work. Um, I draw probably more heavily from Technopoly than Amusing Ourselves To Death, so check out that New Yorker piece to, uh, get a better sense of that. Um, I like Amusing Ourselves To Death. It definitely is a standalone book worth reading. What people often get wrong about it is they think it's just a book about TV being bad, and yes, that's the, the main theme. It was written in the 1980s, the Amusing Ourselves To Death. It's talking about doing so with TV and the way that TV has evolved, but there is a deeper techno-critical argument that's proven very influential in that book. What Postman argues is technologies in general, and media technologies more specifically, can affect the way cultures actually think. TV was just the latest example of this. So he talks in the book famously about how during the time of Abraham Lincoln, the media culture was built on newspapers, and newspapers would have really long articles in them, right? You'd have thousands of words, articles, and speech transcriptions. Uh, the, uh, American, America at that time was actually highly literate. You didn't have a lot of other diversions, so you're plenty happy to spend lots of time reading all these details in the, in the newspaper. He called it a lexicographic media culture. He said in a lexicographic media culture, we were very comfortable with, uh, consuming information in sort of long discursive discussions. He's like, "This is why, for example, when Abraham Lincoln was debating Stephen Douglas in the fame- uh, Lincoln-Douglas debates, these were huge spectacles that would have huge crowds. They would each talk for three hours at a time. Lincoln would talk for three hours, and then they would all get lunch or dinner, and then Stephen Douglas would talk for another three hours, and then Lincoln would have a one-hour rebuttal." And Postman said, uh, "We were completely comfortable with that in the mid-19th century because this was the media culture, was one of long discursive." And so he argues in our, the culture of the '80s, which was based on soundbite television, the way that we process information and think about things is much different. The media affects how we think. The bigger example, I mean, he goes into how Gutenberg and the printing press, that gave us a, a way of thinking and introduced a way of thinking that was more precise and structured. And he said that the printing press changed the way we thought in such a way that the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution became possible. And until the printing press, the media changed and changed the way our minds worked, we weren't actually, uh, capable of having the scientific res- revolution. Books came before it. Books changed how we thought, how we changed how we thought. We could do things like invent science. Newspapers changed how we thought, so we were comfortable with very long discursive discussions, and so on. So of course, the, the interesting question is how did social media and phones change the way we thought? How does it change the way we engage with the world? That's a question a lot of people post Postman have been tackling more recently, uh, and it's a smart one to think about. If the media itself, the form of the media changes how we just cogitate, what does that mean about how our brains operate in a world of social media? That is something worth thinking about because I think those impacts have been profound. So check out that book. It's a cool one. Check out my New Yorker piece about, uh, Technopoly as well, because that's also a very deep book. All right, who do we got

Cal Newport 17:45 next?

Speaker 17:46 Next question's from Roshan: "I was wondering if you could square the theoretical four-hour daily limit on deep work mentioned in Deep Work and the pursuit of high quality leisure mentioned in Digital Minimalism. Is it possible or p- to pursue a high quality leisure activity on a day you completed deep work professionally?"

Cal Newport 18:04 Yeah, it, for the most part, it's not a problem. That four-hour daily limit, what that comes out of actually is people who are in states of more intense deliberate practice. So that number was first identified in a study of professional violin players. Four hours broken into two two-hour chunks was about, on average, the maximum a professional player could practice, because when professional players practice, it's incredibly intense. They don't just play stuff they know how to play. They're instead systematically and deliberately trying to push their skills to the next level. Pros can do that for four hours, um, but not much longer. We see that in other places as well. There's a type of software development called extreme programming in which you, you sit two people at the same monitor. It is very intense programming where the one person's looking over your shoulder and you're, you're, you're trying to build the best code with someone watching you do it. This is very intense because you have to have like a violin player practicing complete unbroken concentration. I write about this a little bit in my book, A World Without Email. So what they found with extreme programming is that it's super productive. You would think, "Hey, we're doing two people per screen. We're gonna get half as much done." But the code is so good and you get quality code so fast, it's incredibly productive. But they also learned it's, uh, you can only do it for a certain number of hours a day. People completely burn out. You know, you get like 4:00 in the afternoon, it's like everyone has to go home and take a nap. There is no notion of working late in an extreme programming environment because it's too exhausting. Um, high quality leisure typically doesn't trigger this unless you, your high quality leisure is intensely practicing your instrument. Uh, high quality leisure is not going to exhaust you in the same way as, uh, fully focused deep work, so you should be okay. If you feel like what you're doing is pretty exhausting, like maybe you're working on a novel on the side as a leisure project, and that really can, like extreme programming, like practicing an instrument, that really can actually de- make a lot of demands. Um, you know, do less of it and balance it out with other leisure activities that pull from different parts of your brain or are less exhausting. There's a cool book on this from the early 20th century, Arnold Bennett's How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day, and one of his arguments is even if you're exhausted from your work, if you switch over to unrelated high quality leisure, your energy raise is not false. Right? So he's arguing our brain, yes, our brain needs rest, but it gets that rest in sleep. So yes, we do have to sleep every day. But when our brain is active, like we are awake, it does not actually demand in the way that we imagine complete downtime, where it just needs to sit there and do nothing or consume very low quality, uh, uh, media. In the world of Arnold Bennett, sort of snobby, uh, striving middle class that's, uh, middle class England in the early 20th century, he described as sort of low quality media that you're drinking and like playing cards and sort of just sitting around and listening to popular music. And he says, "You don't need that. This idea that you need that's not true. Uh, ponder poetry," or whatever his definition of high quality leisure is. He says, "It'll re-energize you." Our brain wants to do interesting stuff. So yeah, you might have to adjust a little bit, but you should be able to find on almost any day, unless you're actually sick, a groove of high quality leisure that is gonna feel better and be more energizing than just falling back to, "Let me do nothing hard at all." I actually have a listener sent me a first edition of How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day. I have it displayed in my library.

Speaker 21:50 Yeah, I think you've mentioned that before.

Cal Newport 21:51 Yeah. It's, it's really cool. I'm, uh, I'm really happy to have that. All right, who do we got next?

Speaker 21:56 Next question's from Sam. "Hi, Cal. I'm working on digital minimalism, and one of the high value activities I want to include in my life is watching sports on TV, but there are so many commercials throughout sports that I feel like I could use the commercial time better. Do you have any ideas on how to deal with activities that have inherent frequent breaks such as sports?"

Cal Newport 22:15 What do you do, Jesse, when you're watching TV sports?

Speaker 22:22 I... That's a good question. Yeah, I just... Like for instance, during the Super Bowl, I had it on and-

Cal Newport 22:29 Yeah

Speaker 22:29 ... it was just-

Cal Newport 22:30 It's just on.

Speaker 22:31 But a lot of the times during NFL games, like on Sundays, I'll be at work, so the TV's not on anyway.

Cal Newport 22:37 Yeah. So you're sort of-

Speaker 22:38 So I'm kind of-

Cal Newport 22:38 You're kind of just checking in.

Speaker 22:40 But then on like a Saturday or, sorry, like a Monday night game, I will, yeah, just have it on.

Cal Newport 22:47 One of the things I used to like, well, I still do, I wrote about this in my newsletter, is, uh, reading a book while listening to baseball on the radio. That's a favorite of mine. Maybe even outside on a summer day. You read a book, and then you sort of put the game on when the, when it comes back. And with baseball, you can kind of tune in and out a little bit, right? So you're like, "Okay, if something interesting's happening, I'll really listen, but now it's going to commercial break. I'll go back to my book." Uh, if they're in a pennant race, I could get more reading done because as we got towards later innings, I would, uh, turn the radio down when we were pitching because it was too much stress.

Speaker 23:20 [laughs]

Cal Newport 23:21 So I, I... Then you could get a whole half inning of reading, 'cause when it's your team up to bat, it's all possibility. You're like, "Hey, anything good could happen here. Nothing that terrible could happen other than we just get outs." Um, so I don't know. If you're watching sports on TV, I would say it's fine to have some sort of leisure activity that you're going back and forth through. I would not make it work-related, because if you context shift, like into your email and then back to the football game, your mind is now stuck between these two worlds and you're not gonna get the sense of relief of doing something un-work-related. So don't make it work-related. Also, don't make it engineered to be addictive. So you mentioned in the longer version of your question that you're watching YouTube videos. I don't like that, necessarily that tension between, "Hey, uh, look at me, look at me," like addictive if the content has these recommendations that are grabbing your attention, and now you're competing that against the, the high quality activity. I would rather your, your secondary leisure activity be a little more boring. Be on like that same level of slowness as the, the game on TV itself. So I think a book is a good example. Some other sort of analog thing that you're working on, something that you're trying to fix. You're, you're, you're cleaning something while the game is on, and you kinda clean during the commercials. Maybe have a, a secondary activity that is on a equal level of slowness. It's not competing for your attention 'cause then you, you really get the experience then of your brain downshifting to this medium, which itself I think is just clearing and useful. So I think it's okay to have something to do during the commercials. Just, uh, don't make it work-related. Don't make it too addictive.

Cal Newport 25:04 All right. What do we got next?

Speaker 25:06 Next question's from Chris: How do you envision digital minimalists interacting with augmented reality once the technology has advanced sufficiently to replace all the screens in our lives as you have predicted?

Cal Newport 25:18 Well, first of all, I still think my prediction is not, not being, uh, discovered enough, not necessarily from me, but, uh, I don't see en- enough other people talking about that prediction, in particular in their coverage of the new Apple Vision Pro. I don't know that everyone yet is still on the same page that I'm on, which says the whole reason why Apple is investing in the Apple Vision Pro, the whole reason why they're doing this is because you don't need to-- Once this technology is sufficiently advanced, you don't need to own separate screens. Once you can fit an Apple Vision Pro into a pair of Ray-Ban glasses, I don't need a phone and an iPad and a laptop and a TV and an office computer. I just need these glasses, which can put similar-sized screens wherever I happen to be. Uh, so why buy all those things? That's a huge industry. The consumer electronics industry is huge. Apple's profit comes almost entirely from building physical screens in nice brushed metal boxes. If those all go away, Apple's in trouble, so they wanna own the virtual screen future, and I'm still convinced that's where we're gonna end up. If I want to make a phone call, I put a screen in front of me projected by my glasses. If I wanna watch TV, there's a screen put on the wall projected by my glasses. If I wanna write, a screen comes in front of me at the coffee shop projected by my glasses. I don't need to own other bits of electronic. I just need whatever drives those glasses. So when people do hear about this future, their concern is, like Chris's concern is here in this question, are we gonna be super distracted in a way that we don't even know now because there is no hard line between reality and the digital? Could our whole world be full of these distractions? Here's my current guess. No. I think even in a world of virtual engagement, so augmented reality engagement, we are still gonna prefer the screen metaphor as our, uh, the mediation with the digital. So even when these screens are not physical, they're being projected in the space by a pair of Apple glasses, we still are gonna want our digital to be within some sort of screen, a clear demarcation between the digital and the real. It would be possible, of course, for the digital world to be fully integrated in a more obfuscated way with what's going on around us. I don't think we're gonna want that. I don't think that's what the market's gonna demand. I think the market's gonna be very happy with, "I don't have to buy screens anymore. My TV is awesome because I can just make a giant screen without having to buy one. I don't need a separate laptop and iPad or what have you because I can just have four monitors whenever I need it. This is great. I don't need keyboards and mice. It just is gonna look at my hands." I think that is gonna be a compelling pitch to the market, but the screen metaphor will persist. I mean, think about this. This has been the dominant metaphor of media consumption for over 500 years. B- basically, when we switched from the scroll to the Codex, the bound Codex, as our way of conveying written technology, the idea of a constrained rectangle containing information has been what we've done. Movie screens, constrained rectangles. Televisions, constrained rectangles. Computer screens, constrained rectangles. Phones, iPads, video games, constrained rectangles in which information is found. So I think that, that metaphor is gonna continue, not because it's necessarily the best way. I mean, maybe it's, you know, it is better to have the things we're interacting with just sort of be in the world, and we can't tell the difference between them and other things. Maybe it is better, but psychologically and philo- philosophically, I think we prefer to have a clear demarcation between real and fake. So yes, I think it's gonna c- AR is going to completely upend the consumer electronics industry. Most of us will be engaging with a world augmented with digital elements just all day long. But it might not look, as paradoxical as this might seem, that different than our current world today. We might not be able to reach out and grab the screen we're looking at, but I think it's still gonna be a screen. There might be some exceptions, some games, et cetera, but, um, some pop-out stuff, so... But I don't, you know, I don't even think so. Like, so Jesse, I see, like, a lot of these demos of checking email in AR.

Speaker 29:47 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 29:48 The demo videos, they like to have it sort of your, uh, like your messages fly out, or, like, they're kinda in space, and you're scrolling in space and, and then over here you're writing. And, you know, maybe, but I also think people will be happy with, "No, I can just have a giant screen in front of me," so it's, you know, I can see my-- I have two messages side by side. I don't need the messages to float in, like, little envelopes.

Speaker 30:12 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 30:13 I'm fine with what Gmail looks like. I just wanna be able to access Gmail wherever I am and have, like, a really big screen where I can look at two messages side by side and drag things back and forth. So I think something like the screen metaphor, that's my new prediction, um, is going to dominate. Also, it's just technically easier. That's gonna be the-- That's gonna be easier than trying to more complexly integrate digital elements to the real world. The easiest thing to do with AR is just try to anchor a screen in space as you move around. So we'll see.

Speaker 30:41 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 30:42 But that's my current, that's my current guess. I still haven't found a excuse to get an Apple Vision Pro. I'm trying to find like an article idea that's gonna re- that would require me to get one of those to mess around with.

Speaker 30:53 How much are they?

Cal Newport 30:55 Three thousand bills.

Speaker 30:56 Oh, really?

Cal Newport 30:56 Yeah. I think they're expensive. Jaron Lanier just wrote a good New Yorker piece on, on this, so.

Speaker 31:01 I'll have to check it out.

Cal Newport 31:02 That might have burned the, my opportunity to convince The New Yorker that I really need an Apple Vision Pro [chuckles] .

Speaker 31:07 Or you could just borrow his.

Cal Newport 31:08 Yeah. Uh, be- well, yeah, maybe I can. Jaron, come on. You know, he helped invent, uh, virtual reality, so I think he was well-suited to write about this.

Speaker 31:16 He probably has two.

Cal Newport 31:18 I... Yeah, I should. He probably does.

Speaker 31:19 [laughs] He probably does. All right. What we got next? All right, Laura,

Speaker 31:26 next question. "How can I have a digital minimalist life when I have a online business based on social media? I'm a full time YouTuber who struggles with keeping up with my subscribers' interactions. I have a channel with thirty thousand subscribers that keeps growing at a very good pace. I've been trying to reply to all the comments on my channel, but lately it's been getting harder."

Cal Newport 31:46 Well, Laura, I think it's a good question because it emphasizes a common confusion about digital minimalism. You don't have a digital minimalism problem, you have an entrepreneur workflow problem, and I wanna distinguish between these two because I think it's important. When people hear digital minimalism, and they know that it has to do with having a more healthy relationship with your tools, they often change the second word in their head and say, "Yes, what we're talking about here is digital minimization. The goal of this philosophy is to use as little technology as possible, uh, to, to remove technology from your life. More removal is better than less." And from the perspective of digital minimization, you say, "Ah, I'm spending all this time on YouTube, uh, that goes against minimization because I'm spending time on YouTube, and so maybe this philosophy doesn't hold." Minimalism, though, is different. Minimalism says you figure out what's important to you in your life, you figure out what tools, if anything, support these things that are important because you know why you're using the tools. You can put rules around their use that dictates how and when you use them. So in this case, you run a... You're a YouTuber. Your, your business is based on YouTube. Clearly, when you go through this exercise, you would say, "Yes, engaging with YouTube does support things I value, such as making money and keeping my job. My job requires me to use YouTube." There's no problem there. Digital minimalism say there's a reason why you're using YouTube. Um, it would also say, of course, have rules about how and when you use it to make sure that you do the stuff that's important, but not paying unnecessary side effects, and this is where I think this becomes a business workflow problem. Your issue is your channel has grown, and it takes a lot of time to interact with subscribers. Like, that's your problem. That's a business problem, that your, your, your rules for engaging with YouTube as your channel grew was, "I'm gonna try to answer, uh, user comments because that leads to more engagement and will help the rate at which my channel grows." I, I guess this is, like, a common YouTube strategy idea. Now your channel is up to a given size that these interactions become more difficult because of scale. So what do you have to do as a business workflow problem? All right? Either I have to put aside more time for doing this or move on to the next stage of my channel growth where I no longer try to interact directly with subscribers. I mean, all YouTube channels will eventually go through that stage. Once you get to a certain size, you're not interacting with your commenters. I mean, we just had Ali Abdaal on the show. He's not sitting there. He has five million subscribers. He's not sitting there trying to answer every comment. So there's some point where that no longer makes sense, and maybe you're at that point [clears throat] which would mean you stop doing that, and if you're not at that point, my suggestion would be to lean into the how and when attributes that digital minimalism says you should place around any technology in your life and be much more structured about it. I have one hour here and a half hour here every other day where I go through and reply very quickly to comments. I don't look at them otherwise. So I've put fences around it. That's where you are. You either need better fences, wider pastures fenced in for this behavior, or you need to move on from this behavior. But this is a business workflow problem more than it is a minimalism problem. Minimalism is not about stop using technology. If you have to use technology, give up on it. It's about being intentional. So just be very careful about your intentionality here with YouTubers and comments and say, "Is this necessary? Is there another way I could do this? Let's rethink how I wanna engage with these tools." But that's a business work- workflow issue. I mean, I remember going through this with my newsletter and blog, very similar, Laura, to what you're talking about here. Early on, we're talking two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight when I started this, I answered every email that people sent me, and I was, I was talking mainly to students back then, and so I would get these emails from students with specific problems, and I really liked trying to give them advice. A, it felt useful, and B, it help- helped me better keep up with what are the specific issues that students right now are facing. As I talk about often on the show, however, there was this point where I had to stop doing that. There was just too many readers, therefore too many emails. It was taking up too much of my life. It was stressful. I couldn't keep up. I was spending hours working on it, and eventually I had to evolve to the next stage of my media career and say, "Okay, I no longer have a sort of open email address where I just answer questions. Um, it's just not sustainable." And it was weird, and then I got over it. So, you know, maybe you're there. But I like this question because if you use... Your, your business is based on social media, you could still be a digital minimalist. Just have to be intentional. If you're having trouble with your work, it might not be a technology problem, but just a workflow problem. We don't talk to our subscribers on YouTube.

Speaker 36:37 Yeah.

Cal Newport 36:37 Is that something people do, Jesse? Like, does that help your channel grow or something?

Speaker 36:42 I think it might, but it seemed like it would be pretty-

Cal Newport 36:45 I don't think I n- would know how to do that. Like, what... I don't know how comments work on YouTube.

Speaker 36:51 You just go to the s-

Cal Newport 36:52 I, I would have to-

Speaker 36:52 ... YouTube Studio and then you-

Cal Newport 36:53 You do it in, like the back end.

Speaker 36:55 Yeah.

Cal Newport 36:55 And then it would show up as coming from, like, the channel itself.

Speaker 36:57 Uh-huh.

Cal Newport 36:58 Um, audience, I'm unlikely to do that. So if you're, if you're watching this on YouTube, I am unlikely to go in and start, uh, responding to the comments, but there you go. YouTube is a weird beast. I wanna take another quick break to hear from a sponsor that helped make this show possible. Look, some of my proudest moments from earlier in my life are hitting key financial milestones. I still remember the day I finally paid off all of my student loans from college. You know what I wish I had back then? Monarch, the personal finance app that goes beyond just telling you what you've spent, but also helps you set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. For example, Monarch can send you a weekly AI recap of your spending, which makes it easy to discover if there's been some major changes or other spikes in your habit that are causing problems. Do you have a question that might help you make a financial decision, such as how much did I spend on travel this summer? Well, you can use Monarch's AI assistant, and it will get you the information you need. It's like having a financial advisor in your pocket. If I had had access to this app back when I was first starting out, I know I would've hit more of my key financial milestones much quicker. Uh, so write your own money story with Monarch. Use code DEEP at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code DEEP. All right, let's get back to it. All right, do we have a call this week?

Speaker 38:30 Yes, we do.

Cal Newport 38:31 All right, let's do that.

Speaker 38:32 All right, here we go.

Speaker 38:33 G'day, it's

Speaker 38:34 Logan here. I'm a Kiwi currently living in the US working as a financial consultant. I have a question around decentralized social media. I've spent the last five years developing my artistic drawing skills to a proficient level and feel that I could now generate some real revenue. I'm not about to quit my day job. My question is more about how do I share my content with an audience? How do I monetize it? How do I do this and still maintain control over what I create while not handing over the reins of these things and my audience to a large social media company? Ideally, I would only use social media as a tool to funnel viewership into some other thing. I would love to hear your thoughts. I've heard you talk theoretically about this idea, but don't really know how you imagine it to work in practice. Cheers for all the hard work. Al.

Cal Newport 39:22 Well, I got two ideas here. Um, one, let's just talk fundamentals. You want to sell something online. You're monetizing a rare and valuable skill you have online. There's a fundamental principle here which says you need a home where the... like a home base for this im- uh, this material, this content, the drawings, music, artwork, whatever it is. You need a home base that you can control or allows you to control what you're selling. You also wanna have, uh, control over how it's sold. So never let your home base for what you're trying to monetize online be something owned by someone else, right? So this is what would happen, for example, if, uh, your main place where you, you hold your content's on a social media platform. That's their content. You're working for that platform to help them harness eyeballs. They decide how they show it to people. They decide how the selling works. They can do what they want with that material. This is very different than having your own website, for example. Uh, it's very different than selling things using the Shopify store. Um, it's your stuff. Shopify is just helping you sell it. It's very different, let's say, you know, a podcast. Yeah, you'll have a hosting service somewhere, but this is just a server that hosts your MP3 files, which are your MP3 files. And all these other players, like Spotify or Apple iTunes players, are just getting copies from the server. You own it. It's yours. So you want to own, have a home base for whatever, whatever you're trying to monetize online. The more you can have your own home base that you can control and that you own, the better. You can then use, as you mentioned, various platforms du jour to try to draw attention to this home base. So for writers, for example, their home base might be an email subscription newsletter, and they use other social media tools to try to pull people towards it, but what matters is their list. Artists might show some of their artwork on Instagram, but they have a website where their art lives and where you can actually order limited edition prints through their own Shopify store. They can control it. Podcasters like me, we put video versions of these podcasts on YouTube. There's a whole new audience there, a younger audience that can learn and find these on YouTube, and some people just like to watch it. But the show itself lives, we own it, it lives on our own, uh, you know, third-party podcast server. Like, that's what matters to us is the show itself is something we own. You could shut down YouTube tomorrow, and it doesn't matter because we have this show with an audience we've built and, and we owned and so on. So I think that's a good principle. Two, go into this idea of using existing algorithmically recommendation-driven platforms like social media to promote your work. Go into that with your eyes open and care. What I often tell people who are wondering, "Okay, I have this old-fashioned skill. How do I promote it in the new media world?" I say, "Start by seeing what you would have done 12 years ago." 2012, we think of that, roughly speaking, as the point where social media, uh, tipped into becoming something that was generally assumed to be used. That's when it really grew to cultural ubiquity. All right, so what would you have done in 2011? How did people who drew get attention to their work and sell their work? How did people who wrote books used to get attention to their work? How did artists get attention for their work? How did musicians find and grow in audiences in 2011? Ask yourself that question and start there. 'Cause what often turns out is those are still the main ways you should do it. That social media, sure, you can go on there, maybe there'll be some break, but more likely it'll just be you are dedicating your time to help generate attention for this company so they can monetize it more. I think the reason why we get so, uh, it's so appealing to think, "I wanna promote this work on, on social media," is because there's this lottery ticket feel to it. "Hey, you never know. These TikToks might go viral, and I'll be the next Justin Bieber." That could happen, but it probably won't. Now, the, the platform will string you along, give you a little burst of views every once in a while, so you think that you're just around the corner. But for 99.9% of the people, that's not how it worked. The old-fashioned way is what's really matters. I, I'm a musician. I get better at playing. I start performing. I build up my own audience and mailing list. Uh, my skills get to a place where this begins to attract the attention of A&R executives who are desperate to find actually really good musicians. Now that I'm connected with A&R representatives, I go on tour. I'm opening for bigger bands they've set me up to do. That puts me in front of a bigger audience. This gets me ready. It probably takes about 10 years, but now we're ready to actually have an awesome album. We have the whole mechanisms of this record label behind the album. That's complicated and boring. What's better is I'm on YouTube, and next week Kim Kardashian or MrBeast is gonna mention one of my songs, then 10 million people are gonna view it, and then I'm just gonna have a lot of money. So there's a lottery ticket feel that I think new media, social media gives to us. There's also a scariness with the existing traditional methods of getting an audience in many creative fields. There's a scariness because it is rife with rejection. Well, an agent might say, "I don't want your book." The... You perform, and they don't call you back because your music's not that good. You try to move your gal- your, your drawings in a gallery or sell prints at the, at the f- market, and people don't like them. Social media kinda hides you from that type of rejection. It's like, "No, like it's, it's out there," and it, it, uh, it engineers like a, a background hum of attention. So if you're, if you're on social media, it'll make sure that, like, you're gonna get some people are gonna see you. You'll have some followers, so it gives you that, that simulacrum of people care, and then you have this lottery ticket mentality in the background, "Hey, this could take off any time." It's just psychologically easier. So I think we get seduced by these new channels because it gets around everything that made succeeding as a creative hard just, uh, 12 years ago. We get seduced by these new channels. That being said, you might find when you do this exercise that no, no, no, there is a, a particular now market for this stuff that didn't exist before, and there's a way to get there through a particular social media channel. So sure, go in with your eyes open, execute that plan carefully. But be careful about just this general seduction that somehow everything that has always been hard about trying to make a living in a sort of interesting, creative, autonomous field, that you can bypass all that through social media. The person who's winning in that equation is Mark Zuckerberg, right? The person winning that equation are the people that can monetize all that time you spend doing this, uh, this sort of like easy, low return activities online, monetizing your attention. Be very careful about how you use that world and why you're using that world.

Cal Newport 46:28 All right, so I wanna do a case study before we get to our final segment. We found a case study that has to do with digital minimalism. I don't think I got a name on this one, actually, so we'll just call this person Anonymous. Uh, all right, here's what he wrote: "In May of 2022, I read a post on lesswrong.com called Do a Cost-benefit analysis of your technology usage. I immediately read Digital Minimalism, completing it in June of 2022, and beginning my digital declutter, then gradually removing more and more apps from my phone. I also eventually picked up Deep Work and spent time on improving my time blocking and multi-scale planning game. It's been 1.5 years since I read Digital Minimalism and started applying its lessons. Since then, I have, one, drastically increased how much I read; two, drastically increased how much I exercise; three, incrementally increased how much I sleep; and four, significantly increased the amount of movies and video games I have actively and consciously consumed, in contrast to passive or regretful consumption. After one and a half years of saying to my wife, 'Let me tell you what Cal Newport says you should be doing,' she has gone from rolling her eyes and making fun of my hints and razor to forcing me to listen to her read out loud passages from So Good They Can't Ignore You." Well, uh, there's a good and a bad in there. The, the negative lesson there is don't bother your wife about Cal Newport stuff. Trust me, there's thousands of wives and girlfriends around the world who are tired of hearing about Cal Newport. My empathy goes out to your wife. But the good in here is that digital declutters and digital minimalism works, right? He got intentional about his technology usage. He added things into his life that was more meaningful to him. And look at these changes. He's reading. He's exercising. He's sleeping more. He's much more conscious about how he engages with media. This is someone who I can tell you is probably a lot less anxious, a lot more engaged than he was before, probably a lot more productive in work as well. It's like the heavy drinker doesn't realize the impact this is having on their lives, the hangovers, the lack of energy, the lack of other pursuits until they move on, and then they realize, "Oh my God, life is in Technicolor before it was in a sort of a fuzzy black and white." So I love hearing those case studies. You can completely change your relationship with your phone. It's not as hard as you think, and the results when people do can be pretty cool. All right,

Cal Newport 49:09 so now we've made our way to our, uh, final segment where I react to something I've seen in the news. Interestingly, we are combining this final segment with, uh, another segment, which is our weekly Slow Productivity Corner. [gentle music] So Slow Productivity Corner is where we do answer a question or tackle a segment each week that's related to my upcoming book, Slow Productivity, which you can pre-order now. Go to calnewport.com/slow to read an excerpt and find out more. I usually use a question, but I had this final segment which put me in a slow productivity mood because it featured someone who is featured in the book. So the, uh, the person I wanna talk about today is JRR Tolkien, author of other things, among other things, of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Uh, in particular, there's a quote that was sent to me by a curator of medieval manuscripts at one of the libraries at Oxford. So I thought that was just so cool that I was like, "I'm gonna take seriously whatever, whatever you send me." You know when you're getting a message from a curator of medieval manuscripts at Oxford, they're probably not writing you about kettlebells or bow hunting.

Speaker 50:33 Or TikTok videos.

Cal Newport 50:35 They're probably not, "Hey, did you see this fire TikTok video? At first I thought this guy was sus, but now I know they're Audi 9000."

Speaker 50:45 [laughs]

Cal Newport 50:46 See, I'm mixing late 90s lingo with, with modern lingo. No, it's, it's very dignified. Um, so he sent me this, uh, this quote from Tolkien. I'm actually gonna bring up an article on the screen for those who are watching that also includes this quote. Here's an article here from the New Criterion called "The Constellations of Fantasy" that is talking about this really cool Tolkien exhibit that was put on by the Morgan Library & Museum a couple years ago. What I like about some of this artwork, so you can see for those who are watching on the screen, um, an illustration that Tolkien did himself of, uh, for The Hobbit, and you sort of see this fantastical English landscape. I assume this might be the Shire done in pastel colors. Here he is working, picture of him working. All right, here's other illustrations he did. This is from a series of stories he did for his children about Father Christmas. It's a fantastical picture he did about, uh, it says, "Father Christmas going to his snow palace." Here's a collection of graph paper from the exhibit that had been, uh, pasted together, and on here, Tolkien has drawn out a map of Middle-earth. This was his first map of Middle-earth. This caught my attention because, you know, I know a lot about Tolkien. I read the Raymond James academic biography a couple years ago. He's living his life at Oxford, where he's being overwhelmed to some extent by the administrative, by the details of being a lecturer at Oxford in the early 20th century, the stresses of being in a field, philology, that was transforming into modern linguistics, and he was on the old-fashioned side of that. He was grading a lot. He was preparing a lot of courses. You know, he was really busy and feeling overwhelmed. He also worried about money. Meanwhile, look what he's doing. He's drawing these, these almost childlike fantastical images. His imagination was soaring. When Lord of the Rings began to do well, he finally saw that he had a chance to spend less time with all of these grinding activities that he just sort of felt were put upon him, and more time in these fantastical worlds that are revealed through his artwork. And this brings us to the quote that was sent to me by this curator of medieval manuscripts from Oxford. It's a quote in a letter sent from Tolkien to, uh, Stanley Unwin. So here's the quote. "Writing stories in prose or verse has been stolen, often guiltily, from time already mortgaged, and has been broken and ineffective. I may perhaps now do what I much desire to do and not fail of financial duty." So what he's pointing out there is that he had, he had been stealing time from these other professional grinding activities to which it had already been mortgaged to work on these fantastical images that really spoke to him. And once his books started doing a little bit better, he finally had time to actually, without guilt, focus on this thing that's really important to him. There's a slow productivity lesson in there. Tolkien, as an exemplar of fast productivity, "I have all these things I'm doing and juggling as a professor and doing all these things," wasn't that happy. Where did he find real peace? Being able to return to these fantastical worlds that he was creating, working on fewer things, slowing down on the work, obsessing over the quality of the few number of things he did. This is hard to get to. Not all of us are gonna get there completely. Not all of us are gonna write Lord of the Rings. I give a lot of advice in my book about how to move towards this world, but I just thought it was a great example of the joys of slowness. This is what Tolkien wanted to do, was engage in this slower, more engaging world to get away from the fast productivity of his time. So the issues we face today in our world of Slack and email were issues that Tolkien faced in the, the early 20th century in his age of academic responsibilities, and so I just thought it was cool to see that quote and to see these examples of the fantastical worlds that really drew his attention. Here's another one here. Here's an ink drawing he did called eeriness. I mean, he had, like, this childlike imagination, but it was sophisticated. That's what he wanted to do, and eventually he was slowed down enough to be able to do it, and there he found this real contentment. So perfect example of the promise of slow productivity and a great excuse, Jesse, to hear once again our slow productivity theme song. [gentle music] All right, so that's all the time we have for today. We'll be back next week with a new episode, and until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you made it this far, you must be ready to join my fight for depth in a distracted world. Now, the best way to do this is to join over 125,000 people who receive my email newsletter each Monday. You can sign up at calnewport.com/ideas, and when you do, I will send you a free guide to my seven best ideas about cultivating a deep life. Sign up today at calnewport.com/ideas. [outro music]