How Your Phone Is Changing You - What Happens When You Mindlessly Scroll | Cal Newport

1. 0:00 – 26:48

   How Your Phone Is Changing You [1:43]

   1. CNCal Newport0:00

      So as most of you probably know, I am not a heavy phone user. I do own a smartphone, but I don't use any social media, so my phone just isn't that interesting to me. Um, when I work, I time block my day, so the idea of just casually looking at my phone for distraction is also something that I'm just not that used to. That was until last week. A couple things happened at the same time. First, I got sick. So I was home sick for about a week. You might still hear it in my voice today. Um, so I found myself without much to do. I was often bored, and my phone was there, and suddenly I was looking at that thing much more than I normally would. Then, piling on, we had Hurricane Helene here in the States, uh, which caused the disastrous flooding in Asheville. Well, I have a good friend in Asheville, and so I was really plugged in, following the news, trying to piece together from various online sources minute by minute what was going on up there, and that also got me looking at my phone even more. So there was this period, it was less than a week, but it was a period in which I was constantly using my phone. It punctuated everything that was going on in my life, and I'll tell you, here's my review of that period. It was terrible. But the scary thing is, I think this is how a lot of people live basically all the time, with that phone just sort of always there, never that far away from their life. Uh, this concerns me based on my experience. So what I wanna talk about today is what happens. Let's define and explore what happens when your phone plays a constant presence in your life, and then let's get to some solutions, what you could do if you wanna get away from that. All right. So let's start with trying to explain what it is that happens when you use their phone that much. A, a statistic here I think is helpful. How often do we check our phones? Uh, according to one survey I found from reviews.org, which is roughly in line with other data I've seen, Americans now check their phone an average of one hundred and forty-four times a day. Uh, we're also spending an average of four hours and twenty-five minutes total each day on our phone. That latter statistic is up thirty percent from last year. If you do the math on a hundred forty-four minutes of, uh, checks, rather, of your phone per day and assume roughly a sixteen-hour waking day, that's checking your phone roughly every six point seven minutes is what that averages out to. This means the average American has the networked digital world essentially never far from their attention. It is a constant cognitive presence. I'm gonna give a name to this state for the sake of our discussion today. Let's call it continuous partial participation in the networked digital. Most people, or at least a lot of people right now, exist in a state of this continuous partial participation in the networked digital. That's what I experienced last week. That's what I felt was terrible. Let's try to understand what goes wrong in this particular state. The first problem has to do with brain fog, right? So I noticed this in my own experiments with contis- continuous partial par- uh, participation, is that it was as if I was experiencing the actual world around me through a fog. I mean, I could see what was going on. I was having conversations with people. I, I knew where I was, but it was like you turned down the resolution on the video camera. The colors weren't so bright. The details of what was going on was not so bright. You were there, but only sort of kind of there, like you were remembering being there, not actually being in the physical situation that surrounded you. Now, this makes sense if we think about that statistic we looked at. When you're in this state of continuous partial participation in the networked digital, you are never far from being exposed to this networked online world. There's a lot of information you've encountered, information that requires processing, especially since it's often highly salient information. So your brain is dedicating resources to processing and making sense of what you last saw when you looked at your phone, right? When you put your phone away, your brain doesn't just snap and focus on the new thing you're doing. It's still trying to make sense of what it just encountered. So you don't have one hundred percent of the normal cognitive resources that would be dedicated to the world around you right now at your disposal. A non-trivial portion is still trying to process the digital world. Now, this is fine if you transition from the digital world somewhat permanently to the real world. Okay, I'm done watching this movie, and maybe for ten minutes I'm not, like, completely present because my mind's making sense of the ending, but after about ten or fifteen minutes, now you're present. When you're checking your phone every once every six point seven minutes, you never actually get that freedom. So you see the world as if through a fog when your mind is never that far from encountering the networked digital. The second problem has to do with your perception of the world itself, the way you understand the world and what's going on. I wanna read a quote here. It's a little lengthy, but I think it's a good one. It's a, it's a quote from an important book that came out in two thousand and nine. This book was written by the science writer Winifred Gallagher, and it was called Rapt, R-A-P-T, with the subtitle Attention and the Focused Life. I talk about it. If this sounds familiar, it's because it was influential to me, and I quote it somewhat extensively in my two thousand sixteen book, uh, Deep Work. All right. So let me quote Winifred Gallagher here. "That your experience largely depends on the material objects and mental subjects that you choose to pay attention to or ignore is not an imaginative notion but a physiological fact. When you focus on a stop sign or a sonnet, a waft of perfume or a stock market tip, your brain registers that target, which enables it to affect your behavior. In contrast to things that you don't attend to, in a sense, don't exist, at least for you. All day long, you are selectively paying attention to something, and much more often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this process to good effect. Indeed, your ability to focus on this and suppress that is the key to controlling your experience and ultimately your well-being. So what Gallagher is saying here, and she summarizes it this way elsewhere in the book, your world is what you pay attention to. We, we, we tell ourselves this myth that there's just, like, an objective world around us that we see through our senses. It's not really what we are experiencing. We are experiencing a mental construction of the world inside our brains, and some of it is visual, and some of it is auditory, and some of it has to do with what you smell, but some of it has to do with how you feel, and some of it has to do with, like, what it is particularly that you're focusing on. So your world, your perception of the world, is shaped by what you pay attention to. So what happens when we have this continuous partial participation in the online? Well, we are spending a non-trivial amount of our attention targeting at things that are highly emotionally salient. They're pushing buttons that makes it something we wanna look at on our phone, and that could be fear, that could be outrage, that could be an emotional charge. It could be a sort of constant exposure to epic-ness, right? It's the, the surfer on the biggest wave. It's, like, the, the violent crime that is super violent, right? Things are, uh, exaggerated past scale online. Uh, it's also a world of deep cynicism, a world in which people are cutting each other and trying to take each other down and carefully looking for, uh, taboo violations or trying to police their own. This is a world that's not so pleasant. It is a world that is a mix of sort of Red Bull, MTV, and Orwell. And if you're looking at this network digital once every 6.7 minutes, the construction of the world that exists in your mind is going to overlap heavily with this amalgam of MTV, Red Bull, and Orwell. And your perception of yourself and the life, uh, that you lead and the world that is surrounding you is going to be dark, it's gonna be exhausted, it's gonna be strained out, it's gonna be upset, it's gonna be in a defensive crouch. It literally makes your world worse. What you pay attention to constructs your world, and we're paying attention to things that construct worlds that we don't actually like spending time in. I had a memory, a really strong sense memory, when I was thinking about this portion of this deep dive discussion. I don't know why I remember this, but it was a, a random day from my 20s, right? This would have been the 2000s. It was a random day as a, when I was a doctoral student at MIT, because I remember being in the office, so this would have been, like, 2006 or 2007. And for whatever reason, I got this, like, really clear memory of that day. And what I remembered was, this was pre-smartphones. I mean, I don't use social media, but even if I wanted to back then, they didn't exist. I mean, Facebook was around, but I didn't have a phone, and I didn't use anything. I have this, like, these, this memory of what, like, a day was like back then. I remember on my way to the status center at MIT where my office was, stopping at the Au Bon Pain on, I think it was Main Street as you went from the Kendall subway station on your way to Vassar Street and ultimately to the status center, and getting an egg sandwich and just being like, "This is great. I like the egg sandwich here. Isn't it great just to, like, eat a egg sandwich?" I remember being in my office, and I was probably working on a paper, um, giving that attention, and then working on, uh, a blog post. I was, back in the day, I was blogging three days a week. So I probably wrote a blog post. And what I remember about that day, it was sunny, it was April. I know this 'cause it was marathon day. And I was like, "It's great it's sunny in Boston, and the, the spring is coming." And I left early, and I went down, uh, to watch the marathon, and I had the Red Sox game, which they play early on the day of the marathon. I had it on. I had one of these little radios you could plug in. I was listening to the Red Sox game, and it was sunny, and I was enjoying the sun, and I remember being like, "This is nice, and it's just nice that it's sunny, and spring is great. Isn't it great? It's gonna be warmer more, and baseball season has started. I'm excited about that." And I was probably looking forward to, like, hey, we got this Netflix DVD in the mail I'm excited to watch, and, like, um, maybe, like, my wife and I were gonna go to the farmer's market to get something for dinner, and it was just pleasant, right? It was just paying attention to, like, what you were doing, appreciating what was nice about the day, looking forward to some things that were coming up. The world my mind created that day was a, was a really nice world to be in. And it would have been very different if I had a phone, and I was on social media, and I was just constantly checking in on things and, because I, I would have had one foot in this digital world that wasn't nearly as pleasant as just wandering over. Uh, I went to the, the Federal Plaza, I remember, and there was a, a food truck. My doctoral advisor's son had a food truck, and I got, like, a, some food from the food truck and was walking over to watch the marathon. It was all great. Just paying attention to the moment. It would have been so different if I had been in a state of continuous partial participation to network digital. This is what Winifred Gallagher gets into in that book, Rap. The motivation for that book about attention is a cancer diagnosis. And she learns that by paying attention to things that matter to her and to the positive, she was able to construct a world that was pretty sunny, even as she was going through, objectively speaking, some darker things. So it matters what world you're exposed to. Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos. You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're gonna like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. All right. The third problem is lack of quiet, right? It is in the, the long pauses in life when nothing much is happening that your mind slows down and quiets and real insight can be had. The Catholics have a good term for this process. They call it discernment, right? So they discuss this in terms of turning your intention interior to try to understand the, the sort of will of God. But, uh, it's a concept that secularizes nicely. That it's, it's when you are quiet and turned inward, it's you alone with your thoughts and looking at the world around you, that some of your most profound insights come, when some of the, the sharpest clarity is identified, where you, you realize, "Here's where I am. Here's what matters to me. Here's what doesn't. Here's the path I wanna be on. Here's how I have left that path, but how I might actually get back. Hey, this really maybe difficult thing has happened to me." This is where I process that. I, I make sense of that, and I get resilient growth out of it. That quiet, cognitive quiet, is so critical to, uh, a life that's not just rich and fulfilling, but a, a life that you can continually aim back towards meaning and depth. Obviously, if you exist in a state of partial, a continuous partial participation in the network digital, you don't get that quiet. Because why do you tolerate that quiet when there is the perfectly distracting TikTok video just a second away? Pull that out, hit that button, uh, and, and you'll be sort of taken away. And I gotta say, my, my experience of living this way last week was it's not like these distractions are fantastic, right? The, the allure to your str- to your screen, that drive to go back to your screen, is stronger than the reward you actually get. I actually found the actual looking at the phone and the scrolling to be numbing in a sort of weird kind of unsettling way. You felt just sort of vaguely uneasy and like your, the edges had been rounded off of your emotions, positive and negative. So it's, it's, it's not like you're getting something wonderful. You're numbing yourself with it. That was my experience of it. So the quiet is actually where so much of life is actually figured out. All right, so if we don't want to exist in this state, what can we do? Again, I'm gonna give six ideas. You've heard some of these before, but let's just put 'em one after another. How do you escape a state of continuous partial participation in the network digital? One, make your phone less interesting. Take the social media apps off your phone. Stop using the social media if it's not vital to you. If it is vital to you, use it, uh, on your computer. Don't have it on your phone. Don't put games on your phone. Don't put the YouTube app on your phone. Make your phone less interesting. Your phone should now be dedicated towards phone calls, text messages, information like maps, and audio content. Remember, the original vision of the iPhone that Steve Jobs laid out when he first introduced it in 2007 is that we made a really useful phone, and we combined it with your iPod so you don't have to carry two. That's a great vision. I can scroll through my voicemail instead of having to, to dial into a voicemail system. I can listen to, like, podcast and music really well, and if I need to look up something, there's a map. Three, treat your workspace like it's a phone-free school. There's this big push going on right now, we should talk about this in another episode, but a big push that I'm a, a, a fan of towards phone-free schools. And not don't have your phone out in the classroom, but have it out in the hallway or at lunch, but the model of your phone goes away when you walk in the door, and you don't get it again till you walk back out. We just have too much research in the context of phones that this is so much better when the mind of the kids can focus completely on, uh, what's happening in school and the people around them and not being distracted by the phone and, and knowing that they're gonna see that phone soon, and they wanna see what's going on. We know it's a much better experience. Well, this holds for adults as well. Kids might be a little bit more susceptible to the distractions or the impact of these distractions, but it holds for adults as well. So treat your workplace like you're working in a phone s- free, uh, school, and the way you do that is you put on a custom do not disturb mode on your phone that blocks everything but phone calls. You tell the people who are important to you in your life, "If there's an emergency, call me." And they will, uh, if there is an emergency, which won't really happen, so they'll rarely call. But you don't have to worry that if your kid's sick at school or something, that you're not gonna find out about it 'cause the, the call's come through. Put your ringer on, and put that phone in your bag. I just, I don't use my phone while I'm working. Again, if there's a call, I'll hear it, but I don't, I, I don't use text messaging. I don't go on social media. Uh, it's a phone-free school simulated in my workplace. Now, if there's, like, messages you wanna check in on, maybe you're trying to organize something, great. You can schedule time for that. Over my lunch break, I'm gonna take out my phone, catch up with people on text, and what am I gonna say at the end of those conversations? "All right, I'm about to put my phone away for the rest of the day, but this is where we're leaving this, and, uh, we can check back in after." In fact, this would be a good time to say, "I'll be leaving around 5:00. It's a half-hour commute, so, like, you know, feel free to call me then too if we really wanna work it out." So just let's set expectations. I'm putting my phone back away. People will learn in about a week or so that you're not on text continuously during the day, that you'll check it midday, and you're accessible after the workday. They adjust to it. All right. Four, treat online content browsing like you would watching television shows. Right? Remember how it was in 2009? It was, "I am excited to watch a, this episode of this show tonight, and I'm gonna go watch that." Uh, "'The Office' is on right before 'Parks and Recreation' on NBC on Thursday. It'll be great. We're gonna get dinner ready, and we're gonna watch those shows." That's very different than I'm gonna watch clips of this episode spontaneously and randomly all throughout my day no matter what else is going on, right? It's different. You should make your online entertainment more like TV shows in 2009. I'm gonna put aside a half hour, an hour, I'm gonna load up my laptop, and there's, like, a lot of sites I wanna check. You know, I wanna get all of, like, the online chatter about the baseball team I'm following. I wanna... I, I follow these Instagram influencers that are fun or aspirational. I wanna check in on all of them and see what's going on, like what videos they've posted. I'm gonna go down some rabbit holes of links, and I'm gonna have some fun, and I'm gonna do it from 7:00 to 8:00. You c- you can consolidate the experience of entertainment online and not make it something that you just have in the background as, like, a, a, a constant thing you turn to throughout the day. All right, now here's some... The last two ideas are a little more non-digital. Um, five, actively practice presence and gratitude. So, like, create an experience that you're gonna enjoy. Look forward to the experience. When you're in it, force yourself to actually sit there and think and say, "This is great. I'm really liking this." And when you're done, be like, "That was great." You know, like, I am going to go for a walk in the woods, uh, after I do a shutdown, and I'm gonna, like, bring my favorite tea with me and, and I'm gonna go and journal on this rock, and I'm gonna look forward to the walk. I'm gonna enjoy it while I'm doing it. I'm gonna have some moments, like, "Isn't this great?" It's just retraining your brain to pay attention to the moment and enjoy what's happening in the moment. I was much better at this back in the, those grad school days I was talking about, and it made a big difference. And finally, go analog in your activities. Journaling helps. It could be the structured journaling we talked about in an early episode. It could be you working through, like, a particular issue. It's analog and it's interior, and there's no digital distraction. Read real books. Reading is great. It slows everything down, because after 5 or 10 minutes, your brain is fully committed to constructing the world on your page, and it gets you out of that sort of brain fog, partial attention type existence. Read more. And spend more time outside. Go for walks. Go for long walks. Go for runs. Go for rows, whatever it is. Analog experience. Heightened notable analog experiences where you get used to yourself, your interior, and paying attention to the world around you. All right, so there we go. I did not enjoy being in the continuous partial attention, uh, giving continuous partial attention towards the networked digital. I don't think you should be in that state either. You don't have to be in that state. It's not worth it unless you have a lot of stock in Meta or, uh, ByteDance, some sort of stake in ByteDance. That's who makes TikTok. Uh, if you don't, you don't need this in your life. That's what I'm saying. Uh, reduce the footprint of your phone. Give yourself full attention to what you're doing, either all digital or you're all in the real world. Hopefully, those ideas will happen. Yeah, Jesse, it was not... I was not a happy man. I was, like, depressed.

   2. SPSpeaker21:20

      What were you scrolling?

   3. CNCal Newport21:22

      Um, so for the Asheville news, it was... I was finding a lot of stuff on Twitter.

   4. SPSpeaker21:29

      Oh, so you have Twitter on your phone?

   5. CNCal Newport21:31

      Uh, browser. I don't have an app.

   6. SPSpeaker21:33

      Oh, okay.

   7. CNCal Newport21:33

      Is there an app?

   8. SPSpeaker21:35

      For Twitter?

   9. CNCal Newport21:36

      Yeah.

   10. SPSpeaker21:36

       Yeah, there is. I don't know.

   11. CNCal Newport21:36

       Is that a dumb question? Okay.

   12. SPSpeaker21:38

       [laughs] Yeah.

   13. CNCal Newport21:39

       Yeah. No, Twitter... So for most of the accounts, the, the issue is I have these burner accounts for doing journalism.

   14. SPSpeaker21:46

       Mm.

   15. CNCal Newport21:46

       Right? Because, like, you can't look at them without... So, uh, there... I have this long-standing, uh, burner account on Twitter that allows you... So you can go and look at... But it's, for me, it's like going to individual people's things in the browser and then looking at their feed. So I don't have, 'cause I don't use Twitter, I don't have a thing where... I don't have, like, a feed. I don't have a timeline.

   16. SPSpeaker22:08

       Got it.

   17. CNCal Newport22:09

       Is that the word, right? Like, where it, like, puts things into it from people you follow and stuff. I don't follow people. I don't have a timeline. But I go to individuals, right? So what, what I was doing was I would find, okay, here's someone who's on the ground there who has, like, some cellular access, and then let me see what they're saying. Um, also a lot of stuff, news and web. Like, okay, there's an update on the city of Asheville, um, local news. So, like, local news would post, like, clips and updates, like what they were seeing, what was going on.

   18. SPSpeaker22:34

       Mm-hmm.

   19. CNCal Newport22:34

       So it was, like, a lot of, uh, consolidating news. Um, it actually served a purpose. Like, I eventually found, um... So my friend got out of there, uh, but it's not easy to get out of there. All, almost all the roads were destroyed, right? Asheville's up in the mountains.

   20. SPSpeaker22:50

       Yeah.

   21. CNCal Newport22:50

       Right? Um, everything was flooded. But so, like, how do you get out of there? I found on Reddit, someone on Reddit had posted, I was Google searching, someone on Reddit had posted, "Okay, we made it out. Uh, I-26 is open south of Asheville, the only interstate open in all the four cardinal directions. But to get there, you have to detour, uh, it's closed in Asheville. So here is this, like, very specific detour on back roads that will eventually get you to I-26 far enough south that you're, you're below the flooding, and then you can get from there to 74 to 80, whatever, and get to Charlotte." So, like, actually all that searching got an escape plan.

   22. SPSpeaker23:30

       For your friend?

   23. CNCal Newport23:30

       Yeah.

   24. SPSpeaker23:31

       So you provided it to him?

   25. CNCal Newport23:33

       Yeah, he got out.

   26. SPSpeaker23:33

       He, by the map?

   27. CNCal Newport23:35

       Yeah, it worked.

   28. SPSpeaker23:35

       Oh, you saved him.

   29. CNCal Newport23:36

       It's still the only way out of Asheville right now. It's a bad situation. Um, but man, it's stressful. I mean, there's so many stressful things going on in the world that, uh, you could constantly be in that state.

   30. SPSpeaker23:48

       Mm-hmm.
2. 26:48 – 35:03

   How do I teach my bosses to be deeper?

   1. CNCal Newport26:48

      book that visit. Plus, Zocdoc appointments happen fast, typically within 24 to 72 hours of booking. You can even often score same-day appointments. So stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to zocdoc.com/deep to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C .com/deep. Zocdoc.com/deep. All right, and with that, let's move on to some questions. Who do we got first, Jesse?

   2. SPSpeaker27:22

      First question is from Trevor. "I run a small business and have two managers that are disorganized. They always prioritize the urgent over the important. They love to talk about stress and overwork. What can we do to better evangelize the deep life?"

   3. CNCal Newport27:37

      Well, I'm trying to decide if this is the right terminology to use here or not, right? So when we talk about the deep life, we're talking about the intentional construction of a life that focuses on the things that matter to you and minimizes the things that don't. So a, a bad job can get in the way of realizing a deep life, but what you're evangelizing to your bosses is not the deep life, but just having a sane way of actually working. They don't need to know about the deep life, but they do need to know about administrative overhead and, uh, the context switching, that when you have too many things on your plate, more and more of your time is dedicated to the servicing of those obligations as opposed to actually finishing things themselves, so the rate at which you actually complete useful work goes down. It is not a linear function that the more stuff I push on my employees, the more stuff that will get done. That's not actually the way it works. And they need to know about the cost of having to jump back and forth your attention between different targets, like happens when you have bosses that demand instant responsiveness. Always emails, always calls. You always have to jump back and forth. It makes you dumber. You've invested in these brains and your knowledge work organization, and now you are reducing their ability to actually produce value. So in a perfect world, you make this case, and what would be the books? The books that I wrote that would be relevant would be Deep Work, A World Without Email, and Slow Productivity. You make this case, you give them those books. They say, "I like the sound of this Cal guy. These ideas make sense," and then they're, they're not bad bosses. Um, probably won't work. It's worth trying, but it probably won't work. So what do you need to do then? Well, you need to cash in your career capital to make your situation better. That could be, uh, either changing your setup at your employer, changing your setup so that you are willing to trade accountability for autonomy. Uh, usually that means I'm gonna focus on just this thing, which is much more self-driven, autonomously executed, um, as opposed to, like, juggling a lot of easy things, being a general vessel for, like, the to-dos your boss might have. You say, "No, no, I handle this type of thing. Uh, so I'm not super accessible and I'm pretty autonomous, but in exchange, you can hold me very accountable, and if I'm not delivering, like, objectively, the numbers are here, this thing is selling, the client dollars are coming through the door," however you measure yourself. "If they're not... If I'm not objectively producing value, then you can get rid of me or move me back to what I was doing before." That type of trade works well here, right? Because, you know, often- The thing these types of bosses fear is they're being taken advantage of, or like, "You're not working hard. You wanna get out," or, "Why do you wanna work from home? Why don't, why do you wanna be less accessible? I'm worried that you're taking advantage of me." When you're able to have accountability, "No, no, you're gonna look at this number. It's objectified. I'm creating this much value," it gets rid of that fear, and it allows them to be like, "Okay, you're doing that. Great, and I'll go bother these other people with my email." Uh, the other thing you might do is just find better bosses. Like, what, what should you be looking for? When you're looking for a job, what should you be working for when it comes to these type of issues? I always say the main thing you should be looking for is not a particular idea that they subscribe to about management or work or time management. What you should be looking for is an interest and opus- openness to systems. Bosses that say, "Okay, uh, you have a way you wanna organize your work. You have a reason you wanna do it that way. Great. I love that initiative. Try it. Let's see how it goes." You wanna have bosses that if you ask them, like, "What's your time management philosophy?" That they're gonna go roll a whiteboard into the room and be like, "Sit down. It's gonna take a while." Like bosses who think a lot about the actual structure and organizational work because they are gonna be more open and adaptable to you actually trying systems of work that's gonna be less frenetic, less hyperactive hive mind, less overload, less context switching. I think anti-system bosses, like the, the types of bosses you have, are a real problem, and we don't qualify or quantify the impact of that problem enough. I think bosses that demand responsiveness, have no interest in systems, have no interest in good or bad ways to work, but just sort of see it more as like, "Do you respond to me? And I wanna make sure no one's pulling a fast one on me," like that's as bad as having like a verbally abusive boss. That's as bad as having an incompetent boss. That's as bad as having a boss whose behavior directly conflicts with your ethical values, and we should treat it as such. Like, I really care about is this a workplace that respects the way the human brain functions and is open to people being, uh, critical and systematic about how they approach their day and their time and their work. And if it's not, I mean, I think you need warning sirens going, and we should be more willing to see that as being a major problem. If more people push back about that, if more people chose employers based on that, if more people left employers based on that, I think employers would get better. So I think anti-system bosses, we should treat that as the problem that it is.

   4. SPSpeaker32:57

      So I emailed with Trevor a little bit. He's the overall boss, and these are two managers below him, but I think the same advice probably holds true in terms of-

   5. CNCal Newport33:05

      Oh, that's, that changes... Yeah, that's interesting.

   6. SPSpeaker33:08

      Yeah.

   7. CNCal Newport33:09

      Oh. Oh, then you have some leverage there, Trevor. Give him the three books. Like-

   8. SPSpeaker33:14

      And if they don't do it, he can get rid of them.

   9. CNCal Newport33:16

      Yeah. A- and, and have systems. Like read the books, work with them. Say, "How do you wanna structure your workloads? How do you wanna structure your communication? Like what's going on?" Uh, put the ideas from the books in place. Have them read the book so they understand the underlying ideas. I think they'll come around because it's like a much better way to work. The people who have trouble with the more systematic way of working are the people who are leveraging the smokescreen of artificial busyness to get away with not actually doing work. Those are the people who have trouble. The people who say, "Wait a second, if I actually have to go and execute hard things on a schedule, it's gonna require a lot of focus and organization. It's not gonna be easy, and it might not go well unless I give it my full attention." Some people look at that and say, "I can't do that," or, "I have no interest in doing that. Can't I just like jump back and forth on a bunch of emails and calls and be busy and be in the mix of things and kinda just give the pseudo-productive sense that like I'm around?" Right? Those people sometimes struggle when you try to get more systematic, but that's great 'cause you don't want those people, at least not in that type of position. I- if it's in a cognitive production-oriented po- position, you need people who can actually do the hard cognitive work of producing value. Yeah. All right, so Trevor, you're in a better situation than I thought, but that other advice holds for anyone whose bosses above them are, uh, really being a problem. All right, what do we got next, Jesse?

   10. SPSpeaker34:34

       Next question is from Blake. "I'm a physician, and as I understand it, my interactions with patients is considered deep work. The problem is that I have to context switch all day between different patients. Physicians are evaluated by volume. Quality doesn't matter. To my managers, I just need to avoid a lawsuit. How do I navigate this situation in a deep manner?"

   11. CNCal Newport34:55

       Well, there's two related issues here. There, there's the specific issue of modern medical practice and the volume of patients. That's a big problem,

3. 35:03 – 37:45

   How can I focus as a doctor when I have to keep switching from one patient to the next?”

   1. CNCal Newport35:04

      not a problem I'm gonna be able to solve. That's a problem with medical care and reimbursement in this country. But your first issue is important because it gets to a general point that I think applies to a lot of people, which is what is the scale at which you're measuring deep work? Right? So you're saying you're thinking about each patient engagement as a standalone deep work session, and it is deep work. Like you're, you're dealing with a patient, what, what's happening? You're bringing in a lot of information. You're putting the context. You're trying to figure out what's going on. You're looking for subtle patterns and realizing like, "I think it's this, but this, this symptom over here maybe isn't really fitting with that type of diagnosis and maybe something more complicated is going on." Um, it is, it requires concentration and the application of a hard-won skill. But where I think you could change your view is you then see moving to the next patient as an unrelated deep work session. I'm gonna say instead, why don't we expand the timescale of this deep work and say a morning spent dealing nonstop with patients is one long deep work session? And what happens in this deep work session is like I get different types of problems come at me, and I have to kinda keep my focus, uh, steady and not get too distracted and be able to pivot from this to that and back to this, and it's all medical, and it's all diagnoses, and I'm in that context. See that as your deep work session. Increasing the scale is often helpful in this way because, uh, what happens otherwise, if you think, "Okay, this patient's one session That patient is another session. You're gonna release your focus in the two minutes in between. All right, I'm gonna, like, look at my phone. What's going on with sports? What's going... And you're gonna introduce this, uh, concentration-sapping distraction into your kinda cognitive context, whereas instead you just like, "Okay, here's my three-hour deep work session. I'm gonna get through 15 patients. Let's keep our focus, see if we can do this." It's gonna be much more sustained. Uh, I think the scale idea makes more sense when you look at other types of examples. It's more obvious. So if you're a math student, you have a problem set, right? 10 problems. You wouldn't say, "Well, my problem is, uh, I keep having to switch my context because first I'm working on this problem, and then I have to work on this problem, which is a different problem, and then I'm working on this third problem and it, it, it, it's dealing with something different, and, and my, um, my context switch." You're like no, working on the problem set is one context. You're in the world of doing math problems. It's like a, a radio host, like what I'm doing now. I see answering these five questions I'm answering as a deep work session, not five deep work sessions that are kinda unrelated. So in general, think about this. If you, if you worry that your deep work is too fragmented,

4. 37:45 – 39:08

   How do I overcome notebook overwhelm?

   1. CNCal Newport37:45

      but what, what's happening is you have one deep work requiring thing after another, start treating that whole thing as one big session. It changes your mindset. You pace yourself. You maintain better concentration, and, and it, I think it just works out better. All right. Who do we got next?

   2. SPSpeaker38:01

      Next up is Laura. "I have a Remarkable 2 tablet, and while I love it, I'm still drawn to using other planners and single purpose notebooks. How do I merge these tools? I'm feeling a bit of notebook overwhelm."

   3. CNCal Newport38:14

      I think of my Remarkable 2 as like a stack of a bunch of notebooks put into one. So however many notebooks you have in your Remarkable 2, you're saving yourself having to carry or keep track of that many notebooks. Uh, I also don't have everything in my Remarkable 2. Uh, mainly I do single purpose l- single purpose notebooks. I still do those. Almost everything else, I guess I do have in my Remarkable 2. Um, I've got my planner, obviously, Time Block Planner's paper. I don't do that in my Remarkable. I have single purpose notebooks. I don't have any going right now, but when I'm working on a new big project I'll, I'll pull that out to really, uh, get into it. Small field note notebook just for working on a single project. And most everything else I keep in my Remarkable. Um, so I, I think it's okay if you have some other notebooks. If you have other sort of physical notebooks that aren't single purpose, you just sort of are using

5. 39:08 – 43:15

   Can “creativity” be added to the deep life buckets?

   1. CNCal Newport39:08

      pages of some normal notebook or legal pad to work on something, you might wanna bring that back to your Remarkable 2. I kinda like the discipline of like this is just, like, w- my general purpose notebook for working out anything that needs to be worked out, because now you have a nice copy of everything and you only have to bring one thing with you. But I think a planner plus Remarkable plus single purpose notebooks, that's a completely fine combination. To me, that makes a lot of sense. My Remarkable. All right, who do we got?

   2. SPSpeaker39:35

      Next up is Natasha. "Have you considered adding the category creativity to the deep life buckets of craft, contemplation, community, and celebration? I guess this could fit into craft category, but I think it goes deeper than that."

   3. CNCal Newport39:49

      Well, when it comes to deep life buckets, the key is having buckets. The particular collection of buckets you have is somewhat arbitrary, right? So, like, the whole idea here is just to make sure that when you are reflecting on what matters to your life, that you're not getting myopic, that you're not having all of your attention snap into just one aspect of your life, such as your career. And so having the different areas broken out allows you to look at each of those areas separately and have a, a part of your vision for the life well lived that touches on each of those areas, right? So when you're creating that master narrative, your ideal lifestyle, these buckets are gonna help you be sufficiently broad in that thinking. When you're trying to take action to get closer towards your ideal lifestyle, these buckets will help you divide those actions among different areas that are important, right? So having buckets is critical. The specific cr- buckets you use, eh, it doesn't really matter. You'll probably change them. So for example, I've been experimenting recently with a different set of bucket definitions that are based off of a body metaphor. So I'll, I'll run this by you quickly. I should do a whole episode on this, but just to give you a sense, like something I've been messing around with, 'cause it, it actually works kinda well. It's not alliterative, but it's based on body, uh, the body. So think about this. You have, uh, when thinking about your ideal life, the head, so y- this is where you're thinking about your mental life, your intellectual life. It's, it's things like ideas and reading and what quiet and what role your phone plays in your life, and like the type of stuff we were planning in the deep dive. That's covered in your head in this metaphor. You have the heart. That covers relationships, connection to community, to family, to other people, right? So that's where you deal with, like, the role of other people in your, in your life. Hands. This is sort of corresponds to craft. Your work, like what it is that you're actually creating, but also, like, skilled pursuits that may be non-professional, like hobby type pursuits, but it's craft in general. We think about, like, what you're, you're building things with your hands, so it's, it's like producing new things of value in the world and enjoying the process of doing it yourself. This is kinda stretching the body a little bit, but we could say the soul, the deal with philosophical, theological type of issues that are critical to your conception of your life well lived, and then here's a new one I added. So Jesse, this didn't fall under the, the alliterative buckets that had the C's in it. Uh, feet, and I don't know if you can guess, but what I'm thinking about for feet is the places you live and exist. So that's thinking about on the big scale, like where I live. You know? Uh, what- ... city do I live in? What type of house do I... In that city, where do I live? Like, it could be those type of decisions, but it could also be the spaces in the place you already live. So, like the, the renovation I'm doing on the maker lab of the HQ, that would also be something that would fall under the feet, uh, the feet component of this type of deep life decomposition. It's like, where you s- the places you stand.

   4. SPSpeaker42:57

      Mm-hmm.

   5. CNCal Newport42:58

      That's one, it's coming up when I'm working on my Deep Life book. It's coming up that, uh, we didn't deal enough with that probably in the show, but, like, the places in which you exist play a big role in, like, your perception of a life. Like, where you live, what type of place you live, and what

6. 43:15 – 47:50

   How do I overcome the guilt of no longer being pseudo-productive?

   1. CNCal Newport43:15

      your spaces are like. So, like, I'm messing around with that. It's a body metaphor, you know? I don't know. Maybe something else works as well. I, what I'm trying to emphasize there is you do need categories for understanding the parts of your life that are important to you, but my categories might be different than yours, and your categories might change over time. Just like now I've moved on from the alliterative Cs to trying out, uh, body metaphors. All right. Ooh, are we up to the slow... Looks like the Slow Productivity Corner?

   2. SPSpeaker43:43

      We are.

   3. CNCal Newport43:44

      All right. So, uh, let's hear that theme music. [slow music] For those who are new, the Slow Productivity Corner is where we take a question that is relevant to my most recent book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. If you have not yet read that book, you should. Get it wherever books are sold. A large fraction of what we talk about on this show is based, at least in some part, on what we talk about in that book, so it's sort of like the user guide to Deep Questions. All right, Jesse, what's our Slow Productivity Corner question of the week?

   4. SPSpeaker44:22

      It's from Susan. "Moving away from pseudo-work makes me feel very vulnerable. I went from being able to tell my bosses about 15 teeny incremental updates to only being able to talk about one or two projects at a time. Nobody has jumped down my throat about this, but I'm feeling guilty. My friends are also judging me because I'm not putting in a solid eight hours at the desk. They believe in sit still and look busy. I'll do things like take a nap, hopefully to think better, wander around outside, or sit in a comfy chair and journal about a work project to help me come up with solutions."

   5. CNCal Newport44:55

      Well, Susan, I like the direction you're going. I'm gonna give you some reassurance here. Uh, first of all, your friends aren't judging you. They don't care. They don't really care about your work habits. Uh, maybe someone made a comment once. I wouldn't worry too much about it. Two, I wouldn't advertise too much. This is like the hidden secret of people who follow the slow productivity philosophy. You know, you can construct these very sustainable, energizing, productive professional lives. You're doing stuff that matters, but your life is very sustainable and interesting. We don't advertise it much because, again, you're right, a lot of people don't get it. They are caught up in the cult of pseudo-work, which, as I explain in the book, is where you believe that visible activity is the best proxy for useful effort. And to that mindset, anything that reduces work in the moment is dangerous. So just don't advertise. Take your naps, sit in your comfy chair, but maybe just don't tell people that's what you're doing. They're probably not gonna reassure you because they don't understand, and also they probably don't care that much. Third, uh, you need to focus on part three of the slow productivity framework. So you're doing the first two parts, doing fewer things, working at a natural pace. Excellent. To make that work in a way that is sustainable, that doesn't make you feel guilty or similarly build up, like, a resentment towards work in general, is quality. You need to become obsessed with the quality of what you produce now that you're doing fewer things at a natural pace. You need to get obsessed about the quality of what you produced in a way that you didn't have to bother when you're doing 15 things. It was impossible to do anything that well anyway if you're doing 15 things. You were getting credit for being busy. Now you're gonna get credit for doing things well. And as you start delivering things that catch people's attention as being unusually good, the scrutiny on you will go down, and your self-scrutiny on your behavior is gonna reduce as well. You're gonna feel more confident in this new approach to work. So be careful about your time. Time block plan. Make sure that you're giving, uh, large blocks of focused work on the things that matter. Adopt a deliberate practice mindset where you're trying to deliberately get better at the skills that you're applying in your work. You're like an athlete training to get a better free throw percentage or to cut some time off of your mile run times. You wanna be practicing systematically to get better. Get obsessed with quality, and then you'll feel much better about the other parts about your life that are now getting more sustainable. That's the whole mix that makes this whole thing work. You're not doing too much. Your pace is varied, but the stuff you're doing is very good. You have to have all three. And I think as you obsess over quality and as you see the tangible results of that obsession, you're gonna feel much better. So you're on the right track. Slow productivity is such a better way to approach the working world. So keep it up, but get the quality

7. 47:50 – 52:40

   The Pomodoro Technique and overcoming distraction

   1. CNCal Newport47:50

      in your, your, uh, crosshairs as well because that's gonna make this whole thing work. All right, let's hear that music one more time. [slow music] All right. Usually around this time in the show, we like to take a call from a reader or listener, I suppose. It's hard, Jesse. I have so many different ways that people encounter me. They watch me, they listen to me, and they read me, so I have to kind of get that straight. Uh, we'll say listeners. All right, so do we have a call from a listener this week?

   2. SPSpeaker48:22

      We do.

   3. CNCal Newport48:23

      All right.

   4. SPSpeaker48:26

      Hi, Cal and Jesse. My name is Nancy, and I live in, uh, Brussels, Belgium, in Europe. I have a question about episode 319. You tell us that when you do deep work and you've been disturbed, it takes about 20 minutes to refocus to do deep work again. But what about the Pomodoro Technique? Because then you work for 25 minutes, and you take a five-minute break, and then you work again for 25 minutes. How does it match with the 20 minutes it takes to regain focus? Thank you. Bye.

   5. CNCal Newport49:04

      Uh, that's a very good question. Actually, interestingly, you know, the, the 20 minute, that specific quantity, I was having a hard time remembering exactly where that particular number came from. Now, the fact that it takes a long time on the scale of many minutes to return your focus after a distraction, that is well known in multiple different studies. You can look, for example, at Sophie Leroy's work on attention residue, among others that have quantified this. But if you go back and read Sophie's papers, for example, she doesn't quantify exactly how long it takes. But I had this 20 minutes. I've always used this 20 minutes, and I couldn't remember where it came from until I was researching for the deep dive at the beginning of the episode. I was, uh, going back to Winifred Gallagher's book, Rapt, and I discovered, oh, that's where it's from. She talks to a cognitive scientist in that book who's talking about the distraction and bringing your attention back, and he gives that exact number. Takes about 20 minutes to get your attention back after you're distracted. So it's like I rediscovered where that specific value came from. Um, clearly it's not so precise. It could be seven minutes. It could be 27 minutes. It kind of depends, but it's many minutes. Okay, so back to the Pomodoro Technique. For that to work, so you're talking about 25 minutes on, five minutes off. For that to work, you can't initiate a significant context switch in the five minutes off. Uh, back in the old days of my newsletter and blog, I had a term for this. I called it deep breaks. What you're doing, if you want the Pomodoro Technique to succeed, what you're doing during that time off is you're giving your brain a breather, but you're not distracting your brain. So it's like, okay, I bring the intensity down, but then I, I walk to get coffee and come back. I, I go down the hallway and back. I stretch out and then do my next Pomodoro. What you can't do is expose your brain during that short break to highly salient distractions that are unrelated to the task at hand. So if you look at your email, if you look at social media, right? Or start a conversation with a colleague about an unrelated project during that break, your next Pomodoro is gonna be much worse. You, you probably won't, as you said in the call, you probably won't get your full concentration back towards the end of that, that, that Pomodoro. A couple other things I would say, though, uh, in addition to deep breaks, is if you're gonna do a Pomodoro-type technique, I call it interval training, concentration interval training, I would probably start, I guess 25 minutes is a good place to start, but you wanna increase that duration as you get comfortable, right? Um, once you can hit those 25 minutes without it being too much of a cognitive strain, make it 35. Once you can do 35 minutes without it being too much of a cognitive strain, make it 45. So maybe you wanna do a week or two at each duration. You want that duration of comfortable focus to get pretty close to about 90 minutes, then you're set. If you can, if you can keep focus on something for 90 minutes, it's not easy, but without it being a, like a real impossibility, where, like, your attention just wanders off and you run out of steam and your mind can't tolerate it. If you can, like, consistently do 90-minute blocks, think about that as like you have trained the fitness of your brain to a level that, like, you can do some damage now with deep work. All right? So the first part of my advice is, if you're taking short breaks in between sprints, you can't expose yourself to highly salient distractions. I mean, if you really need to look at something, make it non, uh,

8. 52:40 – 1:01:05

   A 39-year old changes careers

   1. CNCal Newport52:40

      non-super engaging and super unrelated to your work. Like, you could look at baseball trade rumors on a break from, like, academic work, because it's, you know, it's just, like, kind of interesting, but it's not something that's going to capture your attention or create a lingering sense of distraction. All right? So that's my advice. Take deep breaks. Expand those Pomodoro sessions over time until they're much longer than 25 minutes. All right, I think now we have a case study. This is where you, my listeners, send in your own accounts of putting the type of things we talk about on this show into practice in your own life. Today's case study comes from Yael. Yael says, "I've been a longtime reader and listener, and your advice has guided me well. I wanted to share some recent developments in my life as a case study. I'm a 39-year-old social psychologist, and as my children grew older, I felt the need for a career change. This led me to enroll in a master's program in counseling psychology at a prestigious university in New York. Your voice kept echoing in my mind, encouraging me to build on the skills and abilities I've developed over the years, which influenced my decision. During the first semester of the program, I used a time blocking method. I even bought your journal, though I never wrote in it. I still plan my days on a simple notepad with your journal as inspiration. My grades were all A's. I submitted every assignment ahead of time and received excellent feedback, but that's not all. During this first semester, I conducted meaningful research, built connections with a well-known professor, and presented our preliminary findings at a major conference in New York City. I also used to run a large Facebook group where I shared my thoughts and interesting discoveries from my reading and research. I loved how quickly I could jot down ideas and receive immediate reactions. However, it eventually became too time-consuming without much tangible benefit. I've often heard you explain how we like to believe things will work a certain way, like gaining popularity through social media and being discovered, but that's not how things usually unfold in the real world." Instead, I've shifted my focus to writing my thoughts more coherently, and I've started publishing them in a widely read newspaper. All right, Yael, I like this case study for a couple, couple reasons. Uh, one, there's a, a good reminder here for students, which is that being systematic about the job of being a student will make you a very good student. Most students are terrible at being a student. They don't manage their time. They don't have a realistic plan for how they're gonna get their things done. They give no foresight to how they're gonna approach their assignments, what techniques work, what don't. They don't adjust their approaches based on what they learn in practice. And because of that, uh, if you are focused and systematic, it's a major advantage. And I hear from especially, uh, students coming back later in life, because students who come back later in life are much more likely to treat it like a job. I hear from these type of students again and again, "I'm crushing it," right? "Because I'm treating this like a job. I'm an adult." So all students out there, take this lesson to heart. If you apply the type of advice we talk about here to student life, you are going to seem like a superstar. I also, also like the point here about the Facebook group. It's easy to write stories about something and what it's gonna do and why it's good, but the story isn't necessarily true, and you have to be willing to act on what you discover. So like, yeah, it, it ... You're like, "I'm on this Facebook group, and I'm publishing stuff, and I get feedback, and I have a story that this is important for my ideation because it's kind of fun. And I have a deeper story that maybe I'm gonna be discovered and go viral, and it's gonna, you know, lead to all these great things." But you r- r- the reality you discover is like it's, it's distracting me. It takes a lot of time. Maybe it strokes my ego, but it's not helping me get better at what I do. And so Yael said, "No, enough of that. I'll do something harder and more traditional like trying to publish in a newspaper, push myself to get better." As she points out, we often tell this story to ourselves about social media. We often tell ourselves a story about how, uh, what we're doing professionally on social media is critical to our success. We have this big audience, and we would disappear without it, and the reality is often that's not true. The sense that you have an audience that cares is something that is carefully constructed by these platforms to keep you using it. But for 99.9% of people and jobs and companies, uh, it's not at the core of doing what you do better. So Yael, I appreciate that case study. All right, what we got for our final segment, we'll be talking about the books I read last month. But first, hear from another sponsor. [swoosh] We actually have a new sponsor today. It is a game-changing product that you can use before a night out that will include drinks. The product is called PreAlcohol. Uh, let's be honest. People like Jesse and I, we're older than we used to be. Uh, the, the, uh, 20-year-old Dartmouth student in my path probably had an easier time having a few drinks with friends than the, uh, 42-year-old version of me, where now you get two beers in and, you know, uh, the next day you're on a stretcher or, or not as ... Can't party as hard as we used to there, Jesse. But sometimes it's nice to go out and celebrate, uh, a, an event or to go, like, catch up with a good friend, and that's where the, uh, idea of PreAlcohol comes in. In particular, the product I wanna talk about here is ZBiotics PreAlcohol pre- probiotic drink. It's the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. So here's how this works: when you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It is this byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for your rough next day. PreAlcohol produces an enzyme to break that product down. So what you do is you, uh, drink the pro- the PreAlcohol before you start, before you have your drinks. So you remember to make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, then you drink responsibly, uh, and feel your best the next day. So hey, I think this is something that's invented, uh, is a godsend for, for those of us who no longer rage like we once were able to and now can actually again have that night out catching up with a friend or a birthday party, throw down some ZBiotics first and lessen the impact of, uh, having that fun night out, right? So I kept hearing about PreAlcohol and wondered what it was actually like. I've tried this out. I get what people are talking about. It's a good idea. Um, and with their GMO technology, ZBiotics is continuing to invent probiotics that will help with everyday challenges of modern living. So go to zbiotics.com/cal to learn more and get 15% off your first order when you use Cal at checkout. ZBiotics is, uh, backed with 100% money back guarantee, so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to zbiotics.com/cal and use that code Cal at checkout to get 15% off. I also wanna talk about our longtime friends at Shopify. When you think about businesses where sales are rocketing, right, like Feastables by MrBeast or Thrive Causemetics or Silicon Valley's new mandatory weekend uniform supplier Cotopaxi, you might think about their innovative projects, sure, like their progressive band or their button-down marketing, but an overlooked secret to their success is the businesses behind the business of making selling simple, and for millions of, uh, businesses, that business is Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. They're the home of the number one checkout on the planet, and the not-so-secret secret that Shopify boosts conversions up to 50%. That means there's way less of your shopping carts are gonna be abandoned, and you're gonna get way more sales. So if you're growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell whatever, wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between. Shopify helps you at every one of these places. When we open up our long... I was gonna say, like, long anticipated, but probably, Jesse, the right phrase is, like, our long feared online Deep Questions store, of course Shopify is what we're gonna

9. 1:01:05 – 1:13:24

   The 5 Books Cal Read in September, 2024

   1. CNCal Newport1:01:05

      use. It's easy. It's a great experience. Conversions are gonna go up. You should consider it, too. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that you see at Thrive, or Feastables, or our long feared Deep Questions store that will be here soon. Uh, get the same checkout they all use. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/deep, but type that in all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com/deep. [bell dings] All right, Jesse, let's get to our final segment. [swoosh] All right, it's the first episode in a new month. I want to review the five books I read in the month before. So we'll be talking now about the books I read in September 2024. Uh, the first book I read was The Devil's Teeth by Susan Casey. I am a big Susan Casey fan. I'm actually trying to find a way to interview her because I want to interview her for my new book, maybe even get her on this podcast. So if you know Susan, let me know. Um, but I'm going back and rereading some of the Susan Casey catalog. The Devil's Teeth, I think, was her... I think it was her first book. It takes place... So the, The Devil's Teeth is referring to the Farallon, Farallones or Farallones, I don't know how to pronounce it, Islands off the coast of California, right beyond San Francisco. It happens to be the place that has one of the most consistent, largest populations of large great white sharks. And it's a typical Susan Casey book, so it is adventure/science. So she goes out there, and she spends time on the island and on a boat off the island, and the boat almost sinks, and, um, but you learn about the people on the island and the, the, the sharks and what they're learning about the sharks. And, uh, Casey does... She's a great writer. It makes sense. I mean, she was the editor at Outside during the Jon Krakauer era, so she really understands how to do adventure writing. Um, I'm actually rereading The Wave right now, so I'm kind of in a, a Susan Casey trip. Her most recent book, which was about deep ocean. Oh, what's it called? The Underworld. Also fantastic. I recommend it. All right. And then I read The Outrun by Amy Liptrot. This is a memoir. So A- Amy Liptrot, she grew up on one of these Scottish, small Scottish islands, sort of like beyond the Shetland Islands. I don't know the UK geography well, but I think this is, you go north from Scotland, and they have these islands, uh, that people live on. Grew up on a small island, escaped to London, kind of loved the city life, but became a really serious alcoholic. Returns, uh, to this island where she grew up. This is a memoir. Returns to this island as part of her process of getting sober, and so it's kind of a memoir of that return to the island, and rediscovering herself, and, and finding sobriety. She's a very good writer. Uh, I think I was attracted to it because I was attracted to these islands, and it was cool to hear about what life is like on these, these small, windswept North Atlantic Scottish islands. All right. Um, then I read The Amateurs by David Halberstam. This is about rowers, scullers preparing for, uh, uh, '84 Olympics, I think. I don't know. Which ones did we boycott, Jesse? Was that 1980?

   2. SPSpeaker1:04:27

      I can look it up. [coughs]

   3. CNCal Newport1:04:30

      Well, anyways, uh, it follows a group of scullers who are preparing to compete for the spots on the Olympic team for one of the Olympics in the '80s. It's called The Amateurs because the, the point was sculling was, like, kind of one of the last truly amateur sports, uh, at the Olympics in that there, there is no, like, professional career in it. These are people doing it in their own time. And, uh, Halberstam follows four or five of these characters. They're all Ivy League ro- ex-Ivy League rowers who are basically sculling full time and trying to compete for these spots. And, um, it's good. I mean, clearly he's, he's, he was influenced by John McPhee. There's definitely a levels of the game, uh, sense of the game type vibe to this book. Maybe more detail than you really want to hear. If I, guess if I'm gonna critique, it's a famous book. These people aren't that interesting. The story is kind of the same. Uh, they went to Yale. They wanted their dad's approval because they weren't playing football like their dad, and their grandfather, and their great-grandfather did. They get into rowing. They have freak bodies for rowing. They get really good at rowing. All they do is row. Rowing really hurts. They want to win the Olympics. And you kind of hear this story again and again. Uh, the, the main variation is, I think, um, one of them went to Harvard.

   4. SPSpeaker1:05:51

      [chuckles]

   5. CNCal Newport1:05:52

      But that's, that's the thing. He really gets into the pain of competitive sculling though, too. Ooh. Like, it's just, part of it is just pain tolerance-

   6. SPSpeaker1:06:01

      Yeah

   7. CNCal Newport1:06:01

      ... for the last, uh, the last 500 meters when it's all lactic acid. Um, but it's a classic book, and it really gives you a sense of rowing. It actually got me... I'm back on a rowing program, so it had that effect. I'm getting back in rowing shape because I have this dream of when I take my next sabbatical, getting back on the river.

   8. SPSpeaker1:06:21

      Oh.

   9. CNCal Newport1:06:22

      Yeah. There's a couple boathouses around. Do you know there's, like, a real serious boathouse in DC?

   10. SPSpeaker1:06:27

       Yes, I do 'cause-

   11. CNCal Newport1:06:28

       The Potomac

   12. SPSpeaker1:06:29

       ... my buddy's rowing in college, and y- I think he was-

   13. CNCal Newport1:06:33

       Yeah, I think it's the Potomac Boat Club has some Olympians that train there.

   14. SPSpeaker1:06:36

       Oh, okay.

   15. CNCal Newport1:06:37

       Yeah, it's interesting. All right, uh, then I read, and this has turned out to be timely, but I didn't know it at the time, The Machine By Joe Posnanski, the baseball columnist. The Machine is about that famous 1970s era Reds team with Pete Rose and Johnny Bench, um, that went on to win the World Series.

   16. SPSpeaker1:06:58

       Mm-hmm.

   17. CNCal Newport1:06:58

       And it, it's a baseball book. It follows that season. Uh, it's, and it's, it's good. I mean, it's a well-covered season. He had a lot of... Posnanski had a lot of sources to pull from. He's a classic baseball columnist, so you're gonna get that kind of classic baseball column style, which is, like, a very s- if you haven't read these type of classic baseball books, uh, you know, be prepared. It's a very specific way of writing that's, like, it's high energy. It's sort of in the room. Um, it's, uh, it's kind of like psychologically like you're inside the minds of the players, uh, like, how they're feeling about things, and it, like, moves around. Um, but it also has a sort of old-timey feel. It's a real stylized thing, but a well-written book. Uh, but anyways, Pete Rose just died-

   18. SPSpeaker1:07:39

       Mm

   19. CNCal Newport1:07:39

       ... a couple days ago after, before recording this, so it's kind of sad. Uh, but it's a, a good look at that, good look at that team. The one flaw from a baseball perspective is, I mean, they... Look, this team, it was called the Big Red Machine, they used to call it. It had a fantastic offense. But doesn't matter how good your offense is. You win the World Series, you have to have your pitching just working, right? And in this book, eh, the, the pitching doesn't come up that much.

   20. SPSpeaker1:08:06

       [laughs]

   21. CNCal Newport1:08:06

       It's like, "Oh, we're pitching. It's fine." But it's like Pete Rose and how he was hitting or this or that. Um, the other thing that seemed to caught my attention is the way Posnanski talks about hitting. It seems to be just a, uh, force of will. Like, Rose was mad and wanted some hits and tried really hard and got a lot of hits, as opposed, like, the reality of hitting, which is, like, a, a game of timing and adjustments and, and, and trying to figure out what's going on with my swing and, like, what, what do I need to adjust it? What are the pitchers trying to do with me? Modern hitting is a cat and mouse game where you are studying that pitcher in the dugout loo- and trying to understand, okay, here's what they're gonna come at me with, and here's my strategy to go after it. Um, it's not just I got mad and I'm gonna have a big game, and then you hit it. You can't, you can't force yourself to hit. All right, the last book I read, this is kind of crazy. Um, I count books in the month I finish them. I've been, like, kind of slowly reading this book in the background for a long time. It's not really a book you're supposed to read through, but I did anyways. It's called You Shall Be Holy by Joseph Telushkin. This is a book on ethics, and it's, like, a reference book. I mean, it's, it's 600 pages. It's a doorstop. Uh, and it's, like, topic by topic, and then with each topic, it's broken down into numbered subtopics. And it's, uh, here's the ethical th- here, here, here's what, citation for this, citation for that. And it's kind of like a manual. But, you know, look, I'm a, a member of the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown. Um, I'm the director of the Computer Science, Ethics, and Society academic program at Georgetown. I'm, I'm more involved in my academic life at the intersection of ethics and technology, and I was thinking, "I need to know more ethics." Now, there's the sort of formal study of ethics, like, coming out of philosophy, and you can, you can study Kant and all this sort of normative thinking, but I was like, "I just need to, like, brush up on, like, what do our ancient sources tell us about what's good and what's bad in certain situations?" So I figure, okay, how... If you want to keep going back, you're eventually gonna end up at Jewish sources. Uh, so much of the ideas of modern Western ethics originate in ideas that go all the way back to the, the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible, which then influenced Christianity, influenced Islam, and then influenced, uh, Enlightenment human right-based thinking. All of that goes back to, like, ideas that were being worked out in the second millennium BC. So I said, "Great, I'm gonna read a book, uh, this is Jewish ethics." So it goes through just super systematically. Like, well, here's what we know about this from Torah or what Talmud says here or what a medieval commentary says here. It's just systematic. And I, at some point, I was like, "I'm just gonna read this whole thing. I'm just gonna, like, load into my head a whole bunch of, like, like, pre-classical, sort of like ancient ethical thinking, the kind of foundations that developed into the ways we think about these things today." So I read the whole thing.

   22. SPSpeaker1:11:08

       Did it give scenarios?

   23. CNCal Newport1:11:10

       Yeah. No, and it, it's, it's, like, super, um, it gets super precise. Like, okay, we're... Gossip, right? You know, we're talking about gossip. It's gonna really break down into subcategories. Like, okay, but what happens if, what about the situation in which you're gossiping about another person but that gossip could prevent the person you're gossiping to from being defrauded? Like which, so it's like the prohibition of gossip or the need to help, uh, your friend from being de- like, what takes, you know, precedence?

   24. SPSpeaker1:11:44

       Mm-hmm.

   25. CNCal Newport1:11:44

       Like, well, in that case, you should help your friend from being defrauded, but minimize the information you give so that it's sufficient to avoid that, but no more than that, because then you're, you're reveling in the gossip. Or it's always like, you know what I'm saying? It's like-

   26. SPSpeaker1:11:59

       Mm-hmm

   27. CNCal Newport1:11:59

       ... category, subcategory, subcategory. And I, it's meant as a reference book. Oh, I wanna know about what does Jewish ethics say about this issue? I'll go to the chapter and then go to the subchapter, and you, like, look it up. But I just read the whole thing through. Um, and I just did it at night. I just read, like, 20 pages.

   28. SPSpeaker1:12:16

       Mm-hmm.

   29. CNCal Newport1:12:16

       And then it was, it became, like, a nice, like, meditative background. I don't even know when I started that, but I finished it last month, so I count it. Uh, here's the, the bad part though. It's volume one. [laughs]

   30. SPSpeaker1:12:30

       How many volumes?

Episode duration: 1:13:24