How to Use Notebooks in 2026 (The Best System)

Cal Newport 0:00 Do you like the idea of an old-fashioned paper notebook? I mean, a lot of people do. There's something aesthetically pleasing about a well-made notebook. There's also the excitement of anticipating the original thoughts or insights that this tool is gonna help you usher into the world. But then, if you're like most people, you buy that fancy new notebook, and it ends up sitting idle, and then eventually you forget about it. So here's the problem. It's not enough to simply own a nice notebook. You need a specific use for it that takes specific advantage of its analog format. When it comes to paper, in other words, it's how you use it that matters just as much as what you own. This, of course, inspires a natural question. What are the most effective ways to make use of a notebook? Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this podcast, which is the perfect opportunity to go looking for some answers. All right, so here's my plan. I'm gonna use myself as an example. Um, I actually use four different types of notebooks on a regular basis. I have them here. Um, and I'm gonna go through them. I'm gonna go through each of the four different types of notebooks that I use. Um, I'm gonna explain how I use each notebook. I even have, uh, close-up shots of interior pages of each so you can see that use in action. So if you've ever felt an urge to integrate more pen and paper into your daily life but you weren't sure how to make that habit worthwhile, then this episode is for you. All right, as always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. [upbeat music] All right, so as mentioned, here's my approach today. I have four notebooks, the, of a s- four notebook types that I actually use. I brought four of my own notebooks here today, and for each I'm gonna go through and tell you three things: what activity I use that notebook for, why that activity is well suited for analog on paper instead of doing something digital, and then why the specific type of notebook I use for that activity, why is that specific type of notebook the right one, at least for me. All right, so we're gonna start with the, uh, first type of notebook I use on a regular basis, which is a planner. In particular, I use, uh, my own product, the Time Block Planner. What do I do with this particular type of notebook? I plan my days. So if you haven't heard me talk about time blocking before, it's an idea that I first introduced in my 2016 book, Deep Work, where I say the, the best way to make the most out of your mind during a workday is to actually block out the time of that day, to give every minute of your workday a job, to make a plan for your cognition as opposed to just reacting to what's happening, what's incoming, and what you feel like doing next. It can be an exhausting way to work, but it, it, I usually argue, gets about, on average, two X more results per time. It makes it much easier to control distraction. It makes it much easier to arrive, um, in states of depth. I'll pull up on the, the screen here. Here's a sample time block plan page from inside that notebook. You see it's pretty simple, right? We have, uh, on the left side of the page, the hours of the day, and then I'm just blocking off the hours of the day and saying what I'm gonna do during them. So from nine to nine thirty, I'm reading. From nine thirty to eleven, I'm finishing the podcast prep. From eleven to twelve, maybe I'm recording a podcast. So I'm giving a plan for every minute of my day. Uh, Jess, you might notice my formatting here. I al- I, I just evolve over time my own formats for time blocks. But you'll notice dark lines, like around read, is how I indicate deep work. Double lines, like under finish podcast prep, is how I indicate administrative work or work that doesn't require deep work. And then triple lines, I don't know where this came from, but triple lines on the right is an appointment, so something where it's actually also on a calendar. Uh, other time blocking tricks, I put a number in this admin block down here, and then up in the upper right I can have a more detailed list of tasks that are supposed to fit in that block that I can't actually fit them all in there. All right? So that's a, that's a key part of my day, a key notebook use of mine is to use a time block planner. All right, question two, why paper for this usage? We have all sorts of digital planning tools. Well, there's a few reasons why I like planning my day on paper. One, I think your day feels more intentional when you've actually sketched it out with that tactile feel of a pen on page. A little insider knowledge about the Time Block Planner, uh, because I actually sell this myself, is the paper is carefully selected to feel optimal with the type of pen I most often use, which is a Uni-Ball Micro zero point five millimeter ballpoint. Look, we got... Jesse has one for me here. Da-da-da. We have these all over the office. I have so many of these at home, Jesse, it's crazy. So the paper in the Time Block Planner is actually optimized for it. It's a little bit rough. It's not, no gloss, and it kind of pulls the ink off there, but without being so grainy that it blots. So I love the tactile feel of drawing out my day. Makes it seem intentional, much more so than if I'm just moving things around on a digital screen. I also wanna separate my daily plan from my computer because not all of my work is at the computer, and sometimes I wanna check what's coming next without having to go into the digital rabbit hole of this fully connected, multitasking digital distraction machine. So I like having my plan as something I can bring with me that's not just on my computer. Um, I also crucially have it in my room at night, so if I remember something, I can just go over to my time block plan, and I'll write it on the page for the next day so that when I make my time block plan for the next day I'll see it. So that's a way to try to get things out of my mind without, again, having to interact with the whole digital ecosystem every time I have any idea or reminder that I wanna keep. All right, so why this particular notebook types? Like, what's specifically good about this type of notebook, uh, for this particular use case of daily planning? Well, there's two things that were key to me when I designed the Time Block Planner. Um, one was I wanted it to be lie-flat. So we got good, sturdy, double spiral bound, um, bindings that allows this thing to, to lie flat so I can work on it and plan it and have it on my desk. And two, I wanted full or near full-sized pages because you need a lot of room for planning. You don't have to have my particular notebook to do time block planning, but you wanna look for those two features. A good, sturdy, probably double spiral bound, easy lie-flat binding, and near full-sized pages. Before I created this planner, I used to use the black and red double spiral bound notebooks, which, you know, served a similar purpose for me. All right? So that is notebook number one. All right, notebook number two. This is gonna be controversial, Jesse. And we know, uh, already notebooks is a touchy subject. Well, this is gonna be controversial because my second type of notebook, uh, is digital, and that is my reMarkable Paper Pro, which the good folks at reMarkable sent me at some point. And I really actually, I really like, I really like this digital notebook. Um, what do I use it for? I'll start there, and then I can get into the details, uh, about why the reMarkable. Okay, so what I often use this for, um, is for longer term plans, strategic plans, or vision. So if I have some important bigger thing, a sort of professional, big professional project I'm working on, or even more important, a Halloween display, that is gonna take a lot of my, my focus or energy, I'm gonna build out and update a plan that I'm gonna use and reference to help guide my actions over many months. I will often use my reMarkable Paper Pro to keep that plan. So I'll load one up here on the screen. Um, this is a screenshot. I kind of mocked this up a little bit, but this is a screenshot from the reMarkable Paper Pro itself. You can see, you can draw. That's what I love about this thing. Even though it's E Ink, I'll get into that in a second, you can have different width pens, you can have colors, you can have highlighting. So here we have, like, a sample controller layout for a, uh, Halloween decoration plan. You can see here we have our, our Falcon controller on a Raspberry Pi that's going through an Ethernet hub over to a pixel controller that then has strands and digital change spots on them with the powered speakers coming out directly from the Raspberry Pi. So I can draw these things, I can make this plan, I can build a list of, okay, so what are the steps to... Where am I in this project? So it's good. I use this for bigger strategic plans. All right, so why do I wanna use paper for this purpose? Well, first we have to answer the question, is it paper if you're on a reMarkable as opposed to a paper notebook? And I would say it's very close. And here's the key thing I want to say technologically about a reMarkable versus, like, an iPad. It's not a, a lit screen. It is not an, an LED or LCD screen like you would have on an iPad or a smartphone where you have pixels that glow with different colors and then that gives you, uh, a screen, right? It's not that. So it's not like a TV, it's not like your phone, it's not like an iPad. These actually use E Ink technology, the same things you would see in a Kindle. Underneath it all, you have physical disks that turn with electric... You put a little electric current, they turn, so you're actually sort of physically, you are k- physically creating. You're creating a physical mark. It's the pen is causing physical disk, the, the, the switch. So it's flat, it's not lit. I mean, it has lighting on it, but it's like you're lighting a page. It's not the page itself is actually lit. Uh, it has a great paper-like, uh, feeling. There's a drag to it that the pencil goes across. You can feel friction. Um, it, it can respond to friction. So it, it, it's very close to the feel of paper, the way it looks, the way you actually write on it. Um, but it has the other nice thing of you can have thousands of pages in here, and they automatically back up to the cloud, so you can just grab a page from it and print it if you wanna carry it with you portably. All right, so, uh, why I like to use paper or simulated paper for this type of strategic planning is that I don't just type. I like to draw shapes. I like to draw diagrams. You saw that in my example. I wanna use color. I wanna use highlighting. When I'm planning, I use all of those features. Um, and so if I was just typing something, it's harder. You can't have a diagram. You can't have easily different colors. You can't highlight differently. That's one of the reasons why I use the reMarkable instead of an analog notebook, is that I don't want to carry a bunch of colored pencils and highlighters with me, but all of that is built into the reMarkable. Also, it's expensive, so I take it seriously, and that somehow makes me take the plans more seriously. If I put a plan in there, I'm not gonna lose it in the way that... You know, I have a lot of notebooks, and if I just write it in some notebook somewhere, who knows where that notebooks, notebook's gonna go. It's gonna disappear in a backpack that I stop using. But this thing I'm not gonna lose, and so I u- I like to put my more serious, uh, planning into it. All right? So that's both why paper and I guess, uh, why I'm using this, uh, particular notebook for those particular types of plans. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible. 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All right, so the next type of notebook I use on a regular basis are these. This is a Field Notes notebook. So if you're listening instead of watching, they're small. It's like soft, um, staple binding, and the cover is just like a slightly thicker page. So it's very flexible pocket size, uh, notebook. I've used all different types, but I like the blank page variety I find to be the best. All right, what do I do with my Field Note notebooks? Um, I use this for single purpose brainstorming. So if I have a particular issue that I'm trying to make progress on, it could be, um, working out a book idea. It could be trying to f-improve something professionally like, "Okay, how do we push this podcast to the next level?" It could be figuring out a personal improvement, like you have a vision for a new health milestone you want to get to, and you're trying to figure out like, "How do I do that? Why am I having trouble with this?" You have a, a n-a knotty issue, K-N-O-T-T-Y, that you're trying to make progress on, and you're not quite sure how. Single purpose planning says you have a dedicated notebook to that issue that you take notes in as you have insights, as you have ideas, you double back, you return to things. You're-- it's a sort of an extended dialogue captured in paper of you trying to solve a particular problem. I'll bring up a page here on the screen that I mocked up. This is sort of the type of things it looks like in my single, uh, purpose planning pages. Like, so here it shows me trying to like understand maybe this is, uh, YouTube and the role of YouTube in this podcast and, and I have this sort of list here of on one side, do you want to just try to maximize views? And there's some pluses and minuses, or you try to maximize quality, but there's some minuses and pluses, and I have some notes on it. That's the type of thing that shows up in my, uh, single purpose notebooks. So like, so you could imagine, you know, if this notebook was dedicated to figuring out, uh, how to get more... You know, what to do with YouTube and this podcast. There'd be a lot of pages like that as I try to figure things out. All right? Um, in general, I like single purpose planning like this because complicated problems take thought. Like, we're not used to giving things extended thought anymore because we're so distracted and we're afraid of our own cognition. But hard things require hard thought. This is what I was taught as a theoretician at MIT. You want to solve a problem, you're gonna come back to it again and again and again, and your mind gets better at it. You find different angles, and eventually, hopefully, you make progress. So a single purpose notebook helps you do that. You don't forget the things you've written down. You accumulate knowledge. You can double back. It's a great way to make progress on difficult projects. So why paper for this usage? Well, for me, portability is the key thing. I want to be able to have the single purpose notebook with me so that I am ready when insight strikes. I don't just sit down... With these type of problems, it's hard just to sit down and force it. "All right, I g- I have an hour, and I'm gonna sit down and solve this problem." You might, or you might get stuck. What you really want is the ability that, you know, you're on a trip, and you're reading something, and suddenly you have an insight about this problem, and you want to be able to pull this out of either your pocket or, uh, whatever, it'll fit in whatever bag you have. Pull it out and jot down some notes. You-- It's the portability is what matters. It's like, "I'm working on this problem. I'm bringing this with me." I, I like to do problems on trips. You know, something I often do is like if I'm heading off on a trip, like a business trip, a book tour or something, I'll, I'll have a single purpose notebook. Like, my goal for this trip is to make progress on this problem, and I'll bring it with me at all times. It'll be in my pocket, um, it'll be in my bag, it'll be in my backpack, and I'm just sort of working on making progress. So why this particular notebook? Well, if you want portability, Field Notes is really a great way to go. They're small, they're flexible, they're light. They can fit in a pocket. They can fit in the front pocket of your backpack. They can fit in a purse. They can fit inside a jacket, inside the inside pocket. Um, they're more portable than Moleskines, which I used to use for this purpose. Those are a nicer notebook, in my opinion. They're thicker with a hard binding, and you can't fit them in a jeans pocket very easily. They're not gonna fit in a lot of inner pockets of jackets, so there's like an extra level of portability. Also, you can buy these things in bulk. Moleskines are kind of expensive. I buy these like 20 at a time in just big packages, so you're not, it's, you're not being precious. Like, I'm just grabbing thoughts, and maybe half the stuff I write in there doesn't matter. I don't care because it's, you know, I got a, I got a ton of these. It's not, it's not a real expensive thing. Um, I think that helps as well. So that's why I use this particular notebook for that particular purpose All right, so we've made our way to the fourth type of notebooks that I use on a regular basis. Um, so here's my fourth type of notebook that I use for extending my working memory. All right, so let me be a little bit more clear about this. When I'm working, and I, I need to separate this from single purpose notebook usage. When I'm working on a hard problem, this was particularly true, I'll say, when I was doing applied mathematics as a theoretical computer scientist, but I think it also expands to other types of technical problems, be them professional or in their personal life. When I'm in the middle of trying to solve something with deep work and concentration, you can become much smarter if you're able to extend your working memory beyond what your brain can handle. And the classic way you extend your working memory in the moment beyond what your brain can easily store is with paper. And so I like to use, uh, grid line composition notebooks, usually cheap ones like you would get for school. I, I classically use these when I'm trying to solve a problem, uh, to take notes in the moment. Draw diagrams, put down the mathematical equations, see if they actually work. I'll load a page up here. Uh, this is actually from working on, um, this is from the notebook I brought. This is from working on a particular problem a few, I don't know when this was, maybe like five, six years ago. And it's just extending my memory. I'm drawing a bipartite graph. Uh, and I have some questions about it, then I thought some more. Um, and then I'm, I'm sort of, I was trying out a proof strategy here based on these different size bands. You can see I'm working out on the side here some, some simple math just to see how things simplify. Uh, okay, this is from July 2018, Jesse, so this is-

Speaker 20:10 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 20:10 ... seven years old. So yeah, I'm working out the math here a little bit just to make sure what I had in my head actually makes sense. This is just, look, if you look at this as a whole, doesn't really make sense. It's not like a well-thought-through argument. It's me just extending my memory. I'm, I'm having these thoughts in my mind. I'm writing them down, so I don't have to hold it just in my head. Um, and then I can check it, go back, think some more. Wait, is that math right? Let me write it. So I use grid line notebooks as a way of extending my working memory when working on particular hard problems. Why is this different than the single use notebook? Because, you know, I, this is in the moment. The single use notebook, I might over a few weeks be working on one problem and building up more and more thoughts. This is, I am right now trying to make progress on a theorem, and I'm using one page from this notebook to, to write down and extend my working memory in the moment. Um, I don't, I don't need to go back to it. If I make progress on a proof or a technical problem, then I'll transfer that over to like, uh, you know, LaTeX or wherever I'm writing up the formal paper. I'll send the notes via email to my collaborators. It's, it's not archival. It's just in the moment trying to extend your memory. So if I go through this particular notebook from five, six years ago, every page is completely different. You'll have a couple pages from one time I used it, a couple pages from another, so it's just about extending your working memory in the moment, but that does make you much smarter. Um, this was actually my primary method really for working on mathematics, uh, when I was doing theoretical computer science research, is I would go for a walk, and I would try to make progress, and I would stop and pull out a composition notebook from my bag and, uh, take notes and see if it made sense, and then keep going and pull, write some more in the notebook. Those composition notebooks and me on foot is how I did, I would say, like half of my mathematical insight, and then the other half was working on shared whiteboards with collaborators. Put those two things together and you got, you know, that's most of the mathematics that I've, I've published. So that is a fantastic use for a notebook. But why paper? Well, because look, what I'm doing, I'm doing a lot of math symbols. I'm doing a lot of diagrams. A lot of my work is sort of graph theory based, um, a, a mix of probabilistic, uh, randomized analysis and graph theory, so you're gonna draw a lot of graphs, and you're gonna do a lot of, uh, algebra. That's, you know, pen and paper's the best for that. You could just, you could write all these different symbols and equations and simplify and cut them. You know, it's just the best for that. You can draw the picture, so it's by far the best technology for doing that. And the portability was important because, again, I would bring these things on walks all over the DC area to work on thoughts and take notes in my notebook. Um, and I would, I would s- I would use school ones. Like this is a cheap one. I, I had some for a while, uh, the marble composition classic notebooks from the '80s and '90s. I used a bunch of those. I didn't overthink it because, again, it's just in the moment making my brain smarter. It's not that it itself is archival, right? So why the particular, like what did I care about? Like why this particular notebook? Uh, grid lining was the key to me, right? Because if I'm gonna be doing mathematical equations and drawing graphs and drawing diagrams and writing text, grids are, uh, what's gonna be useful for me because it allows you to line up things. You can put different vertices in different boxes. You can line up your mathematical... You know, mathematical equations will have different levels, big sigmas plus small subscripts, and so it makes it easy to write and line up all your different symbols. Also, when you're doing, uh, you know, like I was doing, again, I mentioned I end up doing a lot of probabilistic analysis, which means anyone who's done like concentration bounds, you're gonna get these like giant fractions, and the numerator itself is gonna have fractions. The denominator is gonna have its own fractions, and those are gonna be raised to exponents. You just need to be able to sort of expand and contract, um, as needed on the page. The key thing for grid notebooks that I've learned in my life is it's really hard to find the right level of brightness for your grid. If the grid is too defined, it is gonna clutter your writing, and it's gonna be hard to differentiate. You'll see the grid lines will be interpreted in your mind similar to your marks on the page, and it's going to, uh, clutter the writing. I bought a 12-pack of grid notebooks recently, legal style, from Amazon because I, again, I use this all the time to expand my working memory, and it's worthless to me because the grids are too strong. And it clutters it. But like this notebook here, uh, this level, this is pretty good. So it's, it's, the grids are noticeable, but you want them kind of in the background so that this is blue and light, so when I'm writing with my black Uni-Ball Micro on it, um, it clearly differentiates them. So like that was a, a big part of the trick, why this notebook is it's grid pages, but the right grid, blue and light. Uh, and that can be sometimes hard to get right. All right, so there we go. Let's just review these real quick because those are the, the four specific uses I use in my life for notebooks. In fact, let me grab them all here. All right, just to review, I use a notebook for daily planning, needs to be double spiral bound, lay flat, good paper. I use a notebook for longer term or strategic planning. I use a reMarkable Paper Plus because I can do all sorts of colors, I can do, uh, highlights, I can do diagrams, and I take stuff in here seriously, so it makes me take those plans seriously. I do single purpose planning in highly portable, pocket size, almost disposable notebooks like Field Notes. That's how I make progress on big, complicated projects. And I use cheap grid lined composition notebooks for doing ig- uh, working memory extension. It's all about just being smarter in the moment. It's not archival. You don't want to be too precious about what you write in there. There's other uses for notebooks as well, of course. There's many other systems that are out there. But I wanted to give a sense of what I do, right? Paper is important. Paper plays a big part in my life. But you have to know why you're using the paper. If you just buy a notebook from a museum gift shop because it looks nice, nothing's gonna happen with it. You have to buy a notebook for a reason, and a reason that needs paper and needs the particular format of that particular notebook you bought. That's how you get the most use out of the analog. Uh, so think in terms of specificity, and you will get more utility out of your analog tools. So there we go, Jesse.

Speaker 26:32 I have a couple questions.

Cal Newport 26:34 Yeah.

Speaker 26:35 So with the reading block, is that the books that you review on the show, or is that-

Cal Newport 26:41 Oh, that's... Yeah, so in the sample time block plan, which here I'll, I'll load it, I'll load it up here, I had a reading block in the morning-

Speaker 26:50 That's considered deep work

Cal Newport 26:51 ... Uh, considered deep work, yeah. So the reason why I have it on there is, um, I'm trying something new right now the last couple of weeks, which is because I'm, I'm... I need to cover a lot of reading for the new book I wanna write about thinking.

Speaker 27:05 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 27:05 And my goal this summer is to read a lot of books about related topics, about thinking and the mind, the evolution of human thought or whatever, so that I really kinda know what I'm talking about and I can think through this book more, more, uh, carefully. To get through all those books, because they're kinda beast, um, I have a rule where I want to do either 30 or 60 minutes of reading a day just of those books.

Speaker 27:24 Okay. So that-

Cal Newport 27:24 And then beyond that-

Speaker 27:25 Is that a 30-minute block?

Cal Newport 27:26 Yeah, I put a 30-minute block down. Um, I'm at 45 minutes today, but I, I, I wanna get to an hour, uh, because that's the only way to get through. And then I do other reading. Any, all the other stuff I read, I just read after that.

Speaker 27:36 Yeah, okay.

Cal Newport 27:36 And that, that's, that I'm not scheduling on my, my workday plan necessarily. So yeah, I'm, I'm trying to see... I've discovered I, I... It depends on the book, but on the book I'm reading now, I'm averaging about a page a minute. So if I do 60 minutes, I'm getting about like 70 pages done, and this is like a 450-page book. So like if I'm not putting aside an hour a day, I'm not gonna get through it.

Speaker 27:58 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 27:58 It's gonna take too long. So that's why that's on there. That's something I've been trying. Uh, so to me, that, that's professional reading. That's like part of the effort I... That's part of my key deep work right now this summer. I'm done with one book. I'm in the early stages of thinking about another, and the way you do that is you read a lot.

Speaker 28:15 Yeah.

Cal Newport 28:15 I just wanna make sure I get it done.

Speaker 28:18 And then do you still do a lot of math?

Cal Newport 28:20 Not right now. Uh-

Speaker 28:22 Do you miss it at all?

Cal Newport 28:23 I do a little bit, yeah, yeah. Because like the summer, you know, the summer is when all those conferences were and I've been hearing about them and I've, you know, it's, it's, it's on my mind right now. But yeah, for people who don't know, I, I mean, I kind of have an interesting professional trajectory, but my, my academic training was in computer science and in particular, uh, distributed algorithm theory, right? So that's what I did. I trained under Nancy Lynch at MIT. Um, that's my main work, is doing algorithms and lower bounds for distributed, distributed systems. And that's, that's m- you know, that's what I did. Uh, that was my academic work, and then I was always writing books and articles at the same time. Those sort of merged together at some point around the pandemic as Georgetown got very serious about digital ethics as an emerging field that they wanted to play a major role in, and they wanted me to play a role in them playing a role in it. Um, so that happened, and also I ran out of promotions, right? So I'm a full professor. There's no more promotions to get. So it's not like I have to be super careful about keeping publication, uh, counts up to a particular level to make sure that I get the right letters to get promoted. Those two things came together, and in recent years, I've been much more aggressively focused on the question of the type of technology I did the math for, how it affects us, and what we should do about it. So I haven't been doing, um, almost any of the old mathematics. Uh, but I think my... I'm staying sharp because I'm reading a lot of hard things and I'm writing a lot. I don't know. I guess the like work-

Speaker 29:46 Is it kinda like golf? If you don't do the hard math, you get a little-

Cal Newport 29:50 Yeah, I think you get rusty.

Speaker 29:51 Yeah.

Cal Newport 29:51 Yeah. And I'll be honest, I was never great at math. I mean, I'm good at math compared to the average person, right? Because I'm a, you know, professor who does applied mathematics research. But compared to other theoretical computer scientists, it was always like one of my weaker... It was, it was always one of my weaker, uh, skills-

Speaker 30:07 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 30:07 ... was some of the details, the algebra, like it's all

Cal Newport 30:11 experience. I'm, I'm fine at it, but I, I probably would've been... wasn't the best at it. Um, but I do kinda miss it. It's fun. I miss the puzzles, but it's not like I'm not staying sharp because I, you know, hey, working on like a hard New Yorker piece or something like this can [laughs] ...

Speaker 30:26 No, yeah, yeah.

Cal Newport 30:27 That pushes you as well to, in somewhat different ways. It's, it's why, by the way, people detect, if they really think about it, a certain type of- ... rigor or, like, logic or puzzle pieces fitting together behind my writing and thinking is because I spent all my life doing mathematics. So it, it definitely affects the way I write. It's why you get that sort of feeling when you read my writing of like, "Oh, this all just kind of makes sense." It's because I'm making sure all the pieces click together like in a proof, and your mind recognizes that subliminally, and it's like, "Oh, this makes more sense," right? So I, I kind of structure my writing and thinking like a mathematician. All right. Do you use notebooks, Jesse? I've gotta get you some notebooks.

Speaker 31:03 Yes. I use two, two to three.

Cal Newport 31:09 Two or three different types, or two to three at the same time?

Speaker 31:10 Two to three different types. I have a field notes that I carry around.

Cal Newport 31:13 For what use?

Speaker 31:14 Um, general thoughts.

Cal Newport 31:16 General thoughts, right.

Speaker 31:17 Sometimes I try, like, the solving a problem, and that would be a separate one. I have a time block planner that's... I make my own just 'cause it's a little bit smaller.

Cal Newport 31:24 Yeah.

Speaker 31:25 I like it a little bit smaller 'cause it fits in my bag.

Cal Newport 31:26 Can I just say something? [laughs]

Speaker 31:28 Traitor.

Cal Newport 31:28 [laughs] I know.

Speaker 31:30 One word: traitor.

Cal Newport 31:32 And then I have a notebook for my Spanish classes. So the field notes is because you want portability.

Speaker 31:38 Yeah.

Cal Newport 31:38 Yeah

Speaker 31:38 That I can take everywhere.

Cal Newport 31:39 Yeah.

Speaker 31:39 I have, like, a nice little case to, like, write random stuff down that I don't forget, and I do revisit it. Like, I just, like...

Cal Newport 31:46 They're good for that, too. Like, I usually have my time block planner for capturing things, but field notes can be good for that, too, like capturing thoughts. Or, like, if you're on a trip, you can just bring one to capture stuff.

Speaker 31:57 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 31:57 Like to-dos that come up. "Oh, I gotta remember to do this." Like, so you can get things out of your mind, and then when you unpack from the trip, you just go through it.

Speaker 32:03 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 32:03 Like, yeah, it's another good use for it.

Speaker 32:04 And it's the same case that it fits in a nice little case, and then I have, like, another piece of paper that I can, like, write my workouts on, and then I can also, like, if I'm golfing, I can put my scorecard in there and put it in my back pocket.

Cal Newport 32:17 You- but you write your workouts in the field notes, or you have a separate piece of-

Speaker 32:19 No, I have a separate piece of paper that goes behind it.

Cal Newport 32:21 I see. And then what do you do with that later?

Speaker 32:23 Uh, if it fills up, I just get a new piece of paper.

Cal Newport 32:25 And that's re-

Speaker 32:26 I, I fold it up so, like, every time I go to, like, a, a gym I just, like, know what I'm doing.

Cal Newport 32:30 Oh, so it has your workout on it.

Speaker 32:32 Yeah, I write it out-

Cal Newport 32:33 Yeah

Speaker 32:33 ... before I go.

Cal Newport 32:34 Yeah.

Speaker 32:34 And I put- but I put it in the same, like-

Cal Newport 32:35 So you don't have to be looking at your phone.

Speaker 32:37 No, not on my phone.

Cal Newport 32:38 Yeah. I like that. Let's take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible. Now, some of my proudest moments from earlier in my life are hitting key financial milestones. I still remember the day I finally paid off the last of my student loans from college. Now, you know what I wish I had had back then? Monarch. Monarch is the personal finance app that goes beyond just telling you what you've spent, but to also help 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

Cal Newport 33:18 if there have been major changes or other spikes in your habits that are causing problems. Do you have a question that might help you make, uh, financial decisions? Like, maybe you wanna know, "How much did I spend on travel last 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 would've hit many more of those meaningful key financial milestones probably much earlier. So I want you to 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. Now I just wanna talk about our friends at My Body Tutor. Do you wanna get in better shape but struggle to follow through? Here's the solution: My Body Tutor, T-U-T-O-R, an online coaching program that actually delivers results. Now, how does it do this? Well, when you sign up, you're assigned a coach. They help you devise a nutrition and exercise plan custom fit to your specific goals and circumstances. And then, and this is the key part, you quickly check in each day on the My Body Tutor app to let your coach know how things went. It's this accountability that really helps you follow through. It also puts an advocate in your corner who can help you adjust your plan to whatever life throws your way or notice where you might be struggling and offer help. So if you wanna get healthier, go to My Body Tutor today. And if you do, mention that I sent you, and they will give you $50 off your first month. That's mybodytutor, T-U-T-O-R, .com. All right, let's get back to the show. All right. So there you go. Uh, that's enough about my thoughts. Uh, we wanna hear what you have to say as well. Like we like to do on Mondays, we open up our inbox to see what you want to tell us about. If you have a question or an observation or wanna send us something you think might be interesting, you can send it to podcast@calnewport.com. All right, Jesse, let's open up this mailbox. Who do we have first?

Speaker 35:24 Our first message from Joe and Marcy, who shared a perhaps controversial article.

Cal Newport 35:29 Well, controversial articles are my favorite type of articles. Let's pull this up on the screen and see what Joe and Marcy had to send. All right. The headline here: "A neurologist claims Gen Z has a lower IQ than millennials." Jesse, I believe that for sure, 'cause I'm a millennial. Um, let me just read a quote from this, see what's going on here. "For the first time since cognitive development data began to be collected in the late 19th century, an entire generation is showing lower intellectual results than its parents. That is the assessment made by Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and former teacher before a United States Senate committee. According to him, Gen- Generation Z, born between 1997 and the early 2010s, shows a measurable decline in attention, memory, reading, mathematics, problem-solving, and overall IQ." If I read further, you know what he's gonna blame that on. Uh, it has to do with technology. All right. That is controversial, right? It's controversial because every generation... There's a cliché that every generation thinks the generation that follows has all of these issues or flaws, but this is an interesting one. This is sometimes known as the reverse Flynn effect, this idea that the global increase in IQ- Began to stop around the time that, uh, smartphones became ubiquitous. Horvath is pointing towards data that shows that this-- if you break it out by demographic cohorts, Gen Z is actually seeing a sharper, um, decline or in, in the IQs as compared to the millennials or people who are only, um, a little bit older. And so I don't know, I guess you would point towards the mechanism Horvath would say is the use of technology during critical learning years. Horvath is, uh, very much against the use of technology in the classroom and ed tech, so I think he connects it probably to that as well. These are all complicated issues, but, uh, you know, I think it's an important one to think about is I talk about cognitive fitness. I wrote that big New York Times op-ed earlier this winter about cognitive fitness as the new revolution we need to care about. This is the type of data that should be capturing our attention. When you see a generation following on a, a, an IQ measure, when you see all generations starting to reverse IQ gains around the time certain technologies spread, it has to be the same as saying, "Hey, once we started using trans fats, we saw jumps in heart attacks, and so maybe that's a problem." I think we need to see this type of data, uh, through that lens. I'll tell you my other observation, if you bring this back up here again, Jesse. This is on MSNBC. My God, they got a lot of ads.

Speaker 38:02 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 38:02 It's everywhere. Look at this. There's that, and then over on the right, and then there's another ad here, and this is surrounding and other articles. Like, it's almost... Man, it's un-

Speaker 38:11 It's unbearable

Cal Newport 38:12 ... maybe that's why our IQs are getting lower. So we can't get

Cal Newport 38:15 to the text because there's so many ads. MSN talk- talk about millennial references.

Speaker 38:21 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 38:21 Remember MSN? That was, like, the big deal. Microsoft was like, "The internet is important." You got MSNBC and msn.com. All right, what else do we have, Jesse?

Speaker 38:32 Our next message is from Jenny, who shares a surprising statistic from a recent report on how parents feel about smart prin- smartphone bans in schools.

Cal Newport 38:41 All right, so I'll just read the part of Jenny's letter where she gives this statistic from a recent report. Jenny says, "This short report is about parents' thoughts and expectations around the ban of smartphones in schools. Interestingly, 39% of parents think that less screen time at school will mean more pressure for screen time at home, and 46% say that screen time is already one of the biggest causes of conflict at home. I think this highlights a need for support for parents in how to manage screen time at home in as conflict-free a way as possible." All right, so that report, for those who are interested, is f- uh, conducted by uSwitch, the letter U Switch, and the report was called Cracked It, so if you wanna look up more details there. Um, I do think we need to think more about how parents deal with screen time. I'll tell you what a lot of parents are doing that's leading to the type of issues you see cited in this study, is that they are being, um, ambiguous and arbitrary. Uh, it's you talking to their kids. "Well, you have a phone, and it's kind of yours, and you have a right to use it, but I'm gonna be kind of upset that you're using it, and then I'm gonna s- uh, but it's yours, but I'm gonna kind of guilt you a little bit. Like, 'Are you on your phone again?'" And then occasionally just arbitrarily be like, "Put that phone away. You've been on it too long." Which creates a situation in which it's entirely and always a negotiation. Like, "Okay, my parent is upset that I'm on the phone. Do I have to put away the phone now? Probably not if I argue it enough. Let me..." And it's... So you're just constantly going back and forth. Lack of clarity, lack of definitiveness. So what is the better way for parents to deal with phones? Well, first of all, wait till an appropriate age to actually give a kid a phone, which I think is restricted phone in high school, unrestricted phones after the age of 16 at the earliest. Your kid will be upset. Your kid also, you know, wants to drink beers at lunch and watch TV all day instead of going to school. Just because they want to do something doesn't mean that it's necessarily critical for them. Um, number two, when you do give your kid a phone, it's yours. It's not the kid's. The kid doesn't have a plan with AT&T or Verizon. They didn't sign a contract. They're not old enough to do it. They're not paying

Cal Newport 40:57 for it. It's your phone that you are letting them use for particular purposes. You make that clear right up front. This is not your phone. There is no portion of the Declaration of Independence that says, "Thou are, uh," you know, "have the right to pursue, to own your own phone. It's your property that can't be taken from you." No. Parent's phone. They're letting you lease it on their terms. Three, I think those terms have to be, let's keep it simple, landlining. When you are in the house, all smartphones are plugged in in the kitchen. That's just how it works. Now, here's the thing. You as the parent have to do it too. But it'll be good for you, trust me. The phones are in the kitchen. If you need to look something up, you go into the kitchen and look something up. If you're expecting a call from a friend, you put it on the ringer, you go into the kitchen when it rings. If you have text conversations you need to keep up with, you need to go stand there in the kitchen hunched over the toaster oven doing those text conversations, which is gonna make you after a while be like, "I don't wanna just do this all night." And it means when you're not in the kitchen, when you're at dinner, when you're watching a movie, when you're reading a book, you're not looking at your phone. It's not there as a second screen. It's not there as the second source of distraction. I think that is the best way-- I mean, because again, parents are like, "Here's why I have to give a phone to my kid," is there's some complicated scenario in which they're going here at this time, and they, they might miss a bus, and, and they're, and they need to coordinate with their friend for the ride, which I get. Like, this is why our family has, like, three or four dumb phones that we kind of give out to our kids as needed for various logistical things. I get it. But if that's why your... the kid needs the phone, then this is a fantastic way to introduce that into their lives without having it colonize their brain like the chestburster al- you know, aliens from the Ridley Scott movie. You have it, but you don't h- it's, it, it's not with you all the time, and at home it's n- it's not up in your room. It's not with you everywhere you go. We're not fighting about it. It's my phone. You can use it. Here's the terms. Plugged in when you're at home. That's it. That's just it And if you've already given your kid a phone and you're in these type of debates, it's an easy switch to make. You say, "New household rule. Here's what I wanna do with my phone as the parent that I'm paying for. It's under my name. It's my contract. They're gonna live in the kitchen while we're at home." And that's just it. It's a binary rule. Boom, boom, boom. That's it. You want a phone, we do the rule. That's it. No more daily negotiations, no more arguments, no more, uh, vague shaming. Like, well, if I just act upset enough, maybe they'll voluntarily use the phone less. They will thank you. Their brain will thank you. Your cognitive fitness will thank you. Their mental health will thank you. So I, I- To me, I think that is the way to deal with teenagers and phones in your own home. Don't argue with terrorists. All right, what else we got, Jesse?

Speaker 43:28 Our next message is from Jackson, who has a practical question about remote working.

Cal Newport 43:34 Oh man, remote working. Remember how much we used to talk about that?

Speaker 43:37 Yeah.

Cal Newport 43:37 When we were doing the pandem- in the pandemic, like it was a big... I wrote a lot of New Yorker stuff about that. All right, this is blast from the past here. Jackson says, "I work remotely and my wife works out of the house. This means I'm home by myself most of the day. I have noticed I really struggle during downtime between meetings or deep work sessions with being unable to resist listening to a podcast or checking my phone. How would you suggest combating this urge?" All right, so Jackson, I would say two things are gonna come together here. One, you need the time block plan, right? So by time block planning, you're not asking yourself the question, what's next? If you're asking yourself all day the question of what's next, then you're constantly gonna have to answer why what's next should not be checking your phone or listening to a podcast. "Hey, I'm feeling a little bit of exhausted. I'm not really inspired. Let me go do that instead." Make the plan in advance. This is what I'm following. But you gotta couple this with part two. The plan needs to be very reasonable and sustainable. So if you're working from home, this is the key, don't think about this as I'm in the office for eight hours that I have to fill. It's no, I'm making a reasonable time block plan for the day that's gonna get a lot of good work done, but some days I'm gonna finish that work at 3:00, then I'm gonna have two hours before my wife gets home and I'm gonna be done with my work and go do something else with that time that I feel is like very productive. I'm training, I'm running, I'm woodworking, I'm, you know, building complicated Halloween decorations or something like this, right? Or, uh, you know, a couple days a week, I'm gonna start my day late and I'm gonna go, my first block of the day I'm gonna go to the coffee shop, I'm gonna read, I'm gonna go for a long walk or I'm gonna have, um, a long midday section some days as well and some days are just gonna be packed and I have so much to do and I have a lot of meetings the whole day's gonna be full. So you use time blocking to get intentionality about your time so you don't have to question what should I do next all day long and then you couple that with, again, I call it, you know, variability and sustainability. So you have different schedules, different days, some days end earlier than others. You have breaks in there and so you, you don't push yourself to exhaustion but you also don't leave it up to yourself in the moment about to decide whether you're exhausted or not and so that's, that's what I recommend to remote workers especially in summer. Put some variety in there. You know? Just don't schedule meetings after 3:00 on Thursday and just be like, "I'm gonna leave at 3:00 and I'm gonna go, uh, watch a movie." Like that's how you get the value out of remote work. So time block plan but be more variable and sustainable with your schedules. All right what

Cal Newport 46:08 we got next?

Speaker 46:09 Our next message is from Ulysses and it's about focus in the World Cup.

Cal Newport 46:14 Ah, last night. You watched last night, Jesse? We're, we're-

Speaker 46:16 Yeah.

Cal Newport 46:17 Yeah. The US didn't play a great game.

Speaker 46:18 I mean they got crushed.

Cal Newport 46:20 Got crushed. I watched the... [laughs] You know it wasn't going well when you watch the goalie run up to kick a ball and just kick the ground instead and then someone else just scores on him.

Speaker 46:28 [laughs] I know.

Cal Newport 46:31 I feel like that would be every play if I was the goalie in a World Cup game. Like to me it is stressful. I don't know soccer very well but it's stressful to me the fact that like the goalie has to come way out of the goal all the time.

Speaker 46:44 And he can't use his hands.

Cal Newport 46:45 Yeah and they're constantly kicking it back to him and like you're constantly kicking the ball back towards your goal because it's like the right thing to do. Yeah. Meanwhile in better news the Nationals game last night.

Speaker 46:57 Oh what happened?

Cal Newport 46:58 Crazy. It was, um, when I turned it on it was Astros were up 6-1 in like the third inning or whatever. Then the, then the Nationals turn around and come back and push it. Next time I started watching it now, uh, checked back in it was 12-6 Nationals.

Speaker 47:15 Get out.

Cal Newport 47:16 12-6 Nationals including a James Hoyt grand slam including a, a CJ Abrams three run home run including a, a Curtis Mead home run. All right come back again it's 12-11 Nationals. By the time we get to the eighth inning two outs the lead's only one. Uh, they bring in Beeder and they hold on and win the game by one run.

Speaker 47:39 Wow.

Cal Newport 47:39 23 collective points. [laughs] Yeah it was a crazy game. Lot of home runs. The Astros are a home run hitting team as well so, um, does that answer your question?

Speaker 47:47 [laughs]

Cal Newport 47:50 Who's our, who are we talking to?

Speaker 47:51 Ulysses.

Cal Newport 47:52 Ulysses. Does that answer your question Ulysses? I hope it did. All right wait he had something about the World Cup right? All right so he sent us a tweet. This is the coach from Uruguay so let me, I'll read, uh, this tweet here. Bisla who I think is the coach from the Uruguay World Cup soccer team explained that the

Cal Newport 48:12 Uruguayan players asked him to shorten his 10-minute team talks. "I understand that today's youth struggle with attention but is it right that professional players who earn millions can't concentrate for 10 minutes? Should coaches adapt? I don't know." All right that's interesting so the supposedly allegedly the players from Uruguay told their coach we can't listen to you for 10 minutes. Here's why I'm a little suspect about that Jesse is isn't a soccer match is like in a phenomenal feat of concentration right?

Speaker 48:42 Yeah.

Cal Newport 48:43 Like you're on that field for like a lot of the game and as we learned you can't have like a moment If you have, like, a moment of lost concentration, you kick the ground and they score on you easily, right? Like, you constantly have to be thinking where everyone is, what's the right play, what's happening over here. And so I have a hard time believing they can't concentrate.

Speaker 49:02 They probably have film sessions, too.

Cal Newport 49:04 Right? Yeah, you have to study the other team and your offense and your defense. And also, these are-- Of all the young people in the world, the young people who probably spend the longest stretches of time without phones or distractions has to be these, like, perf- soccer athletes who have to train for hours a day.

Speaker 49:20 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 49:20 Where it's like them and baseball players. These are long games without breaks, you know. Um, so they're, they're very used to not having that type of distraction. Maybe they just think his speeches are boring.

Speaker 49:31 Yeah.

Cal Newport 49:31 Or, so here's my other theory, though, is attention contexts are unique. So that's the other thing that's possibly going on here, which is a, maybe a general point worth us all thinking about. Being able to concentrate in a particular context, it doesn't necessarily translate over to other contexts, right? So, you know, if you're in the context of playing a soccer game, your brain, there's nothing else that's voting for your brain's attention during that time because it's put a lot of value on making the right plays and a lot of negative value on making the wrong plays. And so staying focused on the game clearly wins the sort of your brain voting for what we should do next. There's also no other real option. There's no phones out there. Like, what else are you gonna do? But there's a completely separate attention context, which is I am, you know, inside the locker room, and this is a place where I look at phones, and there isn't this drive of if I don't focus, I'm gonna make a mistake. And in that attention context, I don't want to sit and listen to a speech. I, I mean, I think that is probably common. It, it, and it, it gets to a bigger point of, like, don't put too much, uh, stock in the transference of skills, right? So I mean, I've talked about this a lot. Um, if you play chess, there's a lot of advantages you might get by playing chess. That's hard to do. You'll get very good at playing chess, and it requires a lot of focus. It doesn't necessarily make you better at ignoring your phone when you're watching TV because it's a completely separate context. So if you want to practice concentrating in a particular context, you actually have to practice concentrating that context, which means you have to remove the very desirable stimuli, take them off the table, and rewire your brain so it gets used to actually getting value out of what's happening there. And so we have to be a little bit careful about if I do this one thing really well with focus, it's gonna make me better at other things. There's tons of meditators who you can't get off their phone when they're at dinner because it's a different, it's a different, uh, cognitive context. So that might also be rearing its head. All right, uh, as our final segment on Mondays, we like to do an update about what I have been up to. Uh, I'm back from travel. We managed to get enough of the Monday episodes in the can that you guys didn't miss anything. Uh, but I was out in Colorado. Um, Jesse, we went to Crested Butte, and then we went to Rocky Mountain National Park. I decided that Crested Butte would be a really good location for summer book writing. Like, if I was finishing a book. Uh, it's a... The town is literally at... Have you been there?

Speaker 51:52 No.

Cal Newport 51:52 It's at the end of the road. Like, literally the road ends, you know, goes to the Gunnison Valley and ends at Crested Butte. There's, like, a, a dirt road you can take over the mountain to the Rocky Mountain Research Station. But, like, it's the end of the road. It's eight thousand feet. It's really high. But it's, like, a cool town, kind of like a hippie ski dirt bag town with a Western vibe and surrounded by beautiful mountains. You could rent, like, a house on the edge of town, I thought about it, and you could, like, get up, you could go for a hike or mountain bike the Lower Loop Trail, ride all day, then go do, like, some athletic thing in the afternoon. Uh, it gets cold every night no matter when it is 'cause it's so high. So I like Crested Butte. Uh, the Rocky Mountains were beautiful as well. Did a lot of, um, hiking out there. The whole state's on fire, which is not optimal.

Speaker 52:33 Mm.

Cal Newport 52:34 But, but otherwise, uh, that was a pretty good trip. I didn't bring work on the trip. It's really been a while since I've had a trip like this. I wasn't writing in the morning. I was just on the trip. I wasn't even doing a lot of, like, brainstorming or planning because I was hiking with my, um, my eight-year-old because remember the two kids are at camp. And when you hike with it- my eight-year-old, he has a sort of Dada-esque nonsense dialogue that he just goes mile after mile. Where, like, you can't-- It's not an interaction. He's just sort of, like, saying things and just unloading things from his mind. It's very Zen. So, like... But if you're not talk- if you don't listen, he's not gonna wanna do the hike. So it's like meditative hiking. You just had to sort of just let, you know, those details about Minecraft that don't quite make sense wash over you mile after mile. So it was actually a, it was interesting sort of cognitive cleansing trip for me, though I am kind of g- glad to be back to writing. Um, what am I reading? Two books I've finished since the last episode that we talked about it. Uh, I finally read Walter Ong's book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Everyone always cites Walter Ong, right? So this-- He's a mid-century to late mid-century, twentieth-century scholar, and he wrote this book, Orality and Literacy, about how writing changed the way the human mind works. Everyone cites it, but I never got around to reading it, and now I'm thinking a lot of these people who cite it, I'm like, "I don't know if they actually read it," because they're often just citing the, the big picture thesis. But the book is fa- the details are fascinating, like really getting into just... And you can see it, you know, the, just the way we're able to think and how words as a technology changed the way the mind actually operated, uh, and perceived the world. It, it's academic, but it's, I found it to be very readable. Um, couple interesting things in there. One is he talks about the Phaedrus dialogue from Plato, right? So this comes up. There's a time in the 2010s where every technology book brought up this, this dialogue. It's a Plato dialogue from, uh, uh, the Phaedrus, where the character of Socrates has a conversation with Phaedrus, this young Athenian, and basically he sh- he expresses skepticism about the written word. Like, "Here's why I'm worried about writing. We're gonna forget things. You're not gonna be able to really understand something if you can't debate it. Our memories are gonna become bad." Like, he's basically... It, it, and it's often brought up as, like, a famous example of techno-skepticism. Ed Long maintained like, I think that's overblown. I think it's overreading what's really being said here, that Socrates, uh, the character of Socrates is really talking specifically about philosophy. We do still actually privilege the Socratic method, back and forth dialogue. Like it's, it's a pretty reasonable point. But actually Ong is on board with like no, no, Plato was really suspicious about writing. But then Ong points out, which I've never heard before, the irony of it is that Plato didn't realize the way he was thinking about writing, the way he was thinking about philosophy, everything in the way that he thought was only possible because of writing. He has a post-literate mind, so the rise of Greek rationality required writing. Without writing, you're back to more like the Homeric epics where you, you're, everything is memorized and you, you're sp- it's a completely different, you read Havelock, it's a completely different type of way of thinking and transmitting information. So Plato didn't realize that the very grounds on which he was criticizing writing were formed by writing. And that's why, like in The Republic, he's like, "We need philosophers, not poets." That's basically saying we need literate people instead of, uh, illiterate, right? In other words, writing made philosophy possible. Before that, you just had epic poets, and he's like, "The, the philosophers with their systematic thinking, that's what we need in the ideal society." And then yet in his other book, he was saying, "Oh, writing is bad." But writing made all of everything he did possible. He just didn't realize it yet, right? He didn't realize writing is what had changed, because you don't notice when ways of thinking change. So I thought that was interesting. Anyways, it's a really good book. Don't be afraid of its academic-ness. Uh, I really enjoyed it. I also read the book Lost by Rachel Hardigan, who's a Takoma Park writer. She used to work for National Geographic, which is downtown. Uh, it's about Amelia Earhart. The interesting thing about it is it's a dual narrative structure. You have the story of Amelia Earhart intertwined with the story of lots of people who, after her death, were trying to like find a plane or had different theories about what really happened with her. Um, the whole book came out of Rachel doing a few excursions for National Geographic on some of these trips that were going out to try to, um, either find Earhart's plane at the bottom of the ocean near Howland Island or to survey these i- there's these theories about, um, she actually landed and she died on this island or that, and there was these surveys to go try to find her bones and stuff like this. So she went on some of these expeditions of people who were convinced they could, um, they had the real story of Amelia Earhart. So it intertwines those with the story of Amelia Earhart and, uh, I found it interesting. And then I was at a air and s- museum in Chicago, the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum. We stopped on the way to the airport. They had an exhibit of a Amelia Rose Earhart, who's actually not related, but in like the 2000s or '90s or something like this, recreated her flight. So interesting. Amelia Earhart's a fascinating character.

Speaker 58:00 Hmm.

Cal Newport 58:01 Um-

Speaker 58:02 Can you imagine trying to find her plane at the bottom of the ocean?

Cal Newport 58:05 Mm-hmm. Bob Ballard tried.

Speaker 58:08 Oh, because he found the Titanic, right?

Cal Newport 58:09 Yeah. And they did, uh, a really comprehensive survey with all the latest technology of a particular area and did not find it. Um, I mean, the, the problem is, yeah, I mean, it's not like that we don't know where in the ocean. She was trying to, she was with, um, uh, Fred Noonan, her navigator. They were trying to land on a particular island, Howland Island. They got close because they were, there was radio communication with a Navy ship that was out there-

Speaker 58:37 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 58:37 ... to try to help guide them in. But there was just a, a, a, like always with aviation disasters, a confluence of different mistakes. The radio wasn't being used properly. They didn't know Morse code. They had different, they, some miscommunications about things. The, the, the antenna for the directional finder, they had taken it off the plane. There was winds that were strong enough to push you off course, but not strong enough that you would like see obvious signs of the winds on the whitecaps. And like, so it just seems like all these things added up and they just, they, you know, you're 60 miles off where you need to be, and then you're in the Pacific.

Speaker 59:12 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 59:12 And so, so the plane's probably out there somewhere. But, um, but actually it would mainly be dis- disintegrated by now anyway, so. You know, it's interesting. Um, Jesse's put up well with my cables, if, with my ethernet cables. The, there's a lot of electronics in the, in the HQ right now because I'm, I'm honing in on some projects.

Speaker 59:34 I do have one question for you. Did you listen to the Walt Disney episode on Acquired?

Cal Newport 59:40 I did indeed. Yeah, somewhat, so look, the, to me this is significant. I don't quite, quite know what this means, but I'm listening to, uh, Audible, a book on tape about Disney. I, I mean, I'm like an expert on the Walt Disney Company and Disney.

Speaker 59:53 No, I know. That's why-

Cal Newport 59:54 I'm really an expert on it

Speaker 59:55 ... I was listening to it and I was like-

Cal Newport 59:55 So I, I found another book about, uh, Disneyland, like the machinations behind making that project work. And I was listening to that and, and I stopped to go listen to the whole Acquired episode and then came back to it. And then I was like, "Wait, man, this is interesting." They're, these are very similar things. Like long form audio, they're within a couple hours of each other.

Speaker 1:00:19 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 1:00:19 One they, you know, spent a couple months working on. The other is like probably two years, three years of effort or whatever. Um, they'll probably make more money on advertisements on that ep- I'm sure they will actually, on that episode, than the author would make for the book that I read. And so I, it felt significant to me to be doing both of those at the same time. Is this like the future of audiobooks, this, like what they're doing? Which is it's somewhere in between the effort required to research and write a whole book, but it's, you know, more detailed and comprehensive than just like a blog post or a Substack essay or something like that.

Speaker 1:00:54 Mm-hmm. I didn't realize how many cigarettes he smoked.

Cal Newport 1:00:57 Yeah, I mean, constantly.

Speaker 1:00:59 Like three packs a day.

Cal Newport 1:01:00 Yeah, that's why he died at 65.

Speaker 1:01:02 65, yeah.

Cal Newport 1:01:04 He was kind of lucky to make it that far. I'm fascinated by him. I'm fascinated by the-

Speaker 1:01:07 And then how about the city you wanted to build in what?

Cal Newport 1:01:10 Epcot. Experimental city of tomorrow.

Speaker 1:01:13 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:01:15 I might, I might end up... I got a, a s-

Speaker 1:01:17 Building a city? [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:01:19 I'm gonna build a city.

Speaker 1:01:20 With Halloween lights.

Cal Newport 1:01:21 It's all Halloween.

Speaker 1:01:22 365 days.

Cal Newport 1:01:23 365 days a year of Halloween. That's... Anyway, so that's what all these wires are for. Um, I'm working on my, um, um, uh, I mentioned I'm building a much more complicated Halloween controller for this year. So I, I'm actually using open source software, but like real controller software as opposed to just custom building, and I'm buying custom circuit boards instead of building my own. Um, and it's all networked, so like more professional or prosumer displays are ethernet networked. So your, your, all the different circuit controllers you're using can speak over ethernet to a common controller. But my hub is in the lab, and I need to hardwire that to the internet, so I have a 100-foot wire to... That's what that wire is here. Because our router is here in the studio, and I need to, for now I'm hardwiring the, the hub and the other... So I'm, I'm making progress. I've been working on the light controller. I programmed my own light controller last year, so it's really nice to have a off-the-shelf light controller. It's a little more complicated. Um, and that's what, that's what I'm working on now. Um, so progress.

Speaker 1:02:24 Just like Walt Disney and his trains.

Cal Newport 1:02:27 I thought about that. So, uh, like Walt Disney and his... I, I write about it in my new book, by the way, The Deep Life, coming out next year. I write about Walt Disney and his trains, and I actually argue about that as a general strategy, um, seeking, I, I had a term for it, but like seeking these sort of remarkable projects that are completely nonsensical. It's just like interesting and completely non-instrumental, um, as a way of getting out of sort of the doldrums and sort of finding new inspiration, whatever. And I give a lot of examples of different people doing that. So yeah, I go, I go deep on Disney and his trains. I know too much about Disney.

Speaker 1:03:00 Actually, when they were talking about the trains and the acquired, I was, just thought of your newsletter and the picture you had, so I could easily know what it looked like.

Cal Newport 1:03:07 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, because I wrote about it.

Speaker 1:03:08 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:03:09 Yeah. Yeah, I wrote about it last summer.

Speaker 1:03:10 Oh, yeah, that picture.

Cal Newport 1:03:11 Yeah, of him on the trains. Yeah. Uh, fascinating stuff. All right. That's, uh, that's all the time we have for today. Um, back next Monday with another advice episode. The Thursday AI Reality Check episodes are a little bit off and on in the summer just because of my travel. Um, so there may or may not be one this week. But we're keeping the Monday ones going, so you'll always have your dose of Monday advice. So until next time, 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, calnewport.com/ideas. [outro music]