Master Your Email Overload - Cal Newport | Modern Wisdom Podcast 317

1. 0:00 – 0:22

   Intro

   1. CNCal Newport0:00

      If you wanted to design what are the, the worst possible things you could expose yourself to when trying to get in flow or do something meaningful and deep, probably email and social media would be what you would come up with. Like, if you were a mad scientist, and, like, my, my goal is not to take over the world but to reduce productivity as much as possible, those would be what you would design.

   2. CWChris Williamson0:19

      Do you purposefully go out of your way

2. 0:22 – 0:55

   Writing for the sake of writing

   1. CWChris Williamson0:22

      to write the most shocking and triggering books in the world?

   2. CNCal Newport0:26

      You know, otherwise I get bored. So, (laughs) if you're, if you're gonna spend a couple of years working on a book and getting it out there, my philosophy is you might as well take a big swing. 'Cause I don't know, I couldn't imagine anything more tedious than just... I call it writing for the sake of writing. But just coming up with an idea that, well, this qualifies as a reasonable thing to write a book about, and crafting the book and putting it out there and no one cares. I like to take big swings. So I either want to hit the ball out of the park or twist around and fall down after I miss. But that's more interesting, I think, than, uh,

3. 0:55 – 3:09

   Deep work and digital minimalism

   1. CNCal Newport0:55

      playing it safe.

   2. CWChris Williamson0:56

      (laughs) Yeah, I totally agree. It seems to me, looking at kind of the, uh, Cal Newport-averse at the moment, that the deep work philosophy is kind of the central thrust, and then currently you're creating different delivery mechanisms and doing objection handling for what's getting in the way of achieving it. Do you reckon that's a, a fair assessment?

   3. CNCal Newport1:18

      I think that that explains Deep Work in a World Without Email. If we wanna increase the umbrella big enough to also capture digital minimalism, the, the term that was born basically of the pandemic, so over the last year, uh, the, the term I coined was the deep life. And I, and I see if the, the deep life is sort of the umbrella concept that most of this work goes under. So it includes work and it includes the world outside of work. So in the world of, of work, the, the deep life pushes towards deep work. So the book Deep Work is about that. The book A World Without Email is about the, the structural and organizational obstacles to having this more fulfilling work. And then probably Digital Minimalism, which is more about your phone and social media and your personal life, that's more about making your life deeper outside of work. So I'm, I'm trying to unify everything I talk about with this, with this word "deep."

   4. CWChris Williamson2:08

      Yeah. And what's the end goal of that?

   5. CNCal Newport2:11

      Uh, I want a deeper life. It's what... (laughs) I just think it's important. I mean, look, I'm, I'm interested in my life being as deep as possible, and, and I have to write about what I care about. Uh, there's also just a huge hunger for it, and I didn't really articulate this is what I was doing until I began podcasting during the pandemic and having a much tighter feedback loop with my audience and realizing that there's this real hunger out there. I think there's a lot of people, uh, in the US for sure, but in a lot of other countries as well, young people, newly-emerging middle-aged people, like in my cohort, that are relatively, I would say, adrift. And what I mean by adrift is that they're not actually rooted to resilient philosophies or foundational systems, right? So they're sort of just going through career-ism and life and something comes and knocks you off your path (laughs) and you don't know what to do, or nothing knocks you off your path but work just seems, "What am I doing here? I'm just on email all day." There's a hunger for this, and we see that hunger out there, and that's a, it's a hunger I feel and I'm trying to

4. 3:09 – 5:25

   The ecological impact of technology

   1. CNCal Newport3:09

      feed.

   2. CWChris Williamson3:10

      All of the previous wisdom that our parents' generation and even the stuff that I did at a business bachelor's and then a marketing master's 13 years ago, or 12 years ago, most of that feels irrelevant now. This is how quick the world is moving. There was no social media marketing when I did it. It was just after you needed to have a university email address to get on Facebook. Twitter wasn't there. Instagram wasn't there. There was no such thing as influencer marketing. There was no talk about productivity systems on how to get past the digital minions and the, the pitfalls that you can tumble down. So, it doesn't surprise me that this is an emerging field, right? The technology is always going to move quicker than the cultural artifacts that teach us how to keep up with it, and even quicker than the legislation which might actually be needed to help control people's use.

   3. CNCal Newport4:04

      Yeah, I, I... Everything moves quickly and everything has impacts. Uh, when it comes to technology, I think the more, one of the more interesting, actually, analyses comes from Neil Postman, who talks about the ecological impact of tech, for example, which is we're often incorrect when we think about tech as being additive. We're way too, I would say, uh, self-important (laughs) when we feel like, oh, tools come along, and we just use them strategically for, uh, extra power they give us. Actually, new tools, new technology, innovations tend to be ecological. The new technology comes in, and the whole way the world works changes. And so what you're talking about is a great example of that. We've been getting a lot of these ecological changes driven by new technology in the last, let's say, 25 years, if we want to go back to the beginning of email, but certainly with smartphones and social media. And that's a big thread I talk about, too, because part of this dislocation, this lack of depth, this shallowness has been a consequence of new technology coming in, in an emergent fashion changing the ecology. So it's not like people were really planning to do it this way. We weren't ready for it, and suddenly we, we, the, extend this metaphor, we've lost our old ecological niche and feel adrift, and our work is all... We're, we're on email all day in work. At, at home, we're just scrolling phones all day. We're anxious. We don't feel rooted to anything. Tech played a big role in that. So it's time to actually stand back, like naturalists, (laughs) and study this ecologies here and be like, "Okay, the world has changed. We need to rebuild our

5. 5:25 – 7:26

   The primary issue with email

   1. CNCal Newport5:25

      lives."

   2. CWChris Williamson5:26

      What's the primary issue with email, then? Is there something wrong with the technology itself?

   3. CNCal Newport5:31

      The primary issue is actually neurological. It's the cost of network switching. So human beings, their brains in particular, our attention systems are very sequential, right? What we're wired to do is to pay attention to one thing, and then when we're done, switch our attention to another thing. That switch can take some time and it takes some energy. It could take five, 10, 15 minutes to really change your cognitive context from this over to that. Now, if you're doing one thing after another, the way that humans operated for most of our existence, that switching cost...... it gets lost in the noise. It's not a big deal, you know? I'm, I'm working on this for two hours, and then I switch over to go fix the wagon for the next hour. The fact that there was 10 minutes up front before I really got locked in on my wagon fixing, who cares, right? Email, and here's the issue, is the checking of these inboxes, or the checking of Slack, or the checking of Teams, triggers a network switch. Your mind has seen a completely different context that's very salient because it involves communication from other people, and it involves urgency. So our mind immediately begins to trigger a network switch when we see an inbox, but then we wrench our attention back to what we're doing before that network switch can complete. We don't sit there for 10 minutes. What we're really doing is just seeing, oh, did, did my boss write back about what time the meeting is? So we initiate network switches, turn our attention back to the main thing, try to abort that network so watch it go back to the previous cognitive context, and before we can get back there, we go back and look at the inbox again. It is these repeated partial network switches from a neurological standpoint that is a disaster. It reduces our ability to think clearly, it causes cognitive exhaustion. This is why by two o'clock in the afternoon most office workers kind of give up on doing anything hard, and it makes us anxious. So as a tool, fine. SMTP is a great protocol. POP3 is a great protocol. Uh, if I want to send you a file or broadcast out a memo, I'd rather use those protocols than a fax machine or memos. The thing that's killing us is this style of work that email enabled that requires us to keep checking,

6. 7:26 – 9:05

   The problem with email

   1. CNCal Newport7:27

      and that has been a disaster.

   2. CWChris Williamson7:29

      So the primary issue is that it forces you to switch attention from doing work to talking about doing your work and then back again?

   3. CNCal Newport7:38

      Yeah. And even if, even if what you're doing in your inbox is, is very critical and it's part of your work, the, it's the network switching, having to network switch that mu- much means you can't do anything that well. Now, the key distinction is that is not a necessary side effect of the tool of email. In fact, email spread in the early 1990s had nothing to do with that. Email spread in the early 1990s to replace the fax machine and to replace voicemail, which it did really well. It makes complete sense why it spread. It was a productivity silver bullet for those purposes. Once it was in the offices, we adopted this way of working that I call the hyperactive hive mind, where we said, "Well, now that we can do very low friction, fast digital communication, why don't we just work everything out on the fly with back and forth messaging?" That's what causes all the context shifts. Because if I'm working everything out with back and forth messaging, I have to keep tending these conversations. If I don't check my inbox, I'm grinding to a halt a lot of these asynchronous back and forth conversations and stuff doesn't get done. So it was really the adoption of this hyperactive hive mind workflow that followed the spread of email that began to cause all the problems. So if you get rid of the hyperactive hive mind workflow, and it's great that we have email, because again, I don't want to have to fax you a contract, I want to send it to you, I don't want to send you the new menu in a memo folder for the office cafeteria, I want to CC it to you. Email is not the problem. The hyperactive hive mind workflow that email makes possible, that's really the culprit, and that, I think that is the thing that has been causing a lot of trouble in modern work right

7. 9:05 – 11:05

   Why is context switching so suboptimal

   1. CNCal Newport9:05

      now.

   2. CWChris Williamson9:06

      Why is context switching so suboptimal and yet so tempting? Is it hacking into something somewhere in the neurology or the psychology of how we work?

   3. CNCal Newport9:18

      Well, I, so it, it, it's an important question, right? Because when we think about distraction writ large, let's say digital distraction writ large, there is often an aspect to this conversation which is the addictive impulse to check. But what I want to do here is actually separate out two classes of distractions that seem similar but there's different underlying mechanisms going on. I want to separate the professional distraction of I need to go back and check my inbox, I need to go back and check Slack. And I want to separate that, let's say, from I want to check my phone, I want to look at what's going on Twitter, I want to look on what's going on, uh, on social media, I want to see what's on YouTube, right? Let's separate those two. When it comes to the, the stuff that's happening on your phone, this is what my book Digital Minimalism is about, there is what's called a moderate behavioral addiction usually at play here. These tools have often been designed to actually induce this behavior of constant checking. There's a lot of aspects that go into that. Uh, so I think it is, it is proper to use even the framework of, of behavioral addiction when thinking about why we look at our phones so much. Email and Slack seem similar because we look at it so much, but the underlying dynamic is different. It's less because there is an addictive impulse but more because if the hyperactive hive mind is how your organization largely collaborates, you have to check it. Because if you don't check it, you're falling behind on back and forth conversations and it, it, it's gonna slow things down, it's gonna upset other people. And that's why I've been pushing back on using the perspective of, of addiction for thinking about email. It's not an issue about irrational or suboptimal behavior of the user. In fact, checking your inbox all the time is basically your only option if this is the way your work actually functions. What we have to do here is change the way that you, the underlying way that you actually collaborate, that we, we don't fix the email problem with individuals tweaking their hacks, we fix it by having the whole team change the rules by which they collaborate.

8. 11:05 – 12:47

   The hyperactive hive mind

   1. CNCal Newport11:05

   2. CWChris Williamson11:06

      Otherwise, it would just be get some Tiago Forte course or learn to batch process or do a David Allen and, and that would fix it. But-

   3. CNCal Newport11:17

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson11:17

      ... there's a lot of people listening, and myself, who have gone knee-deep in that world and yet there's still this hyperactive hive mind, this relationship, this expectation from other people which pulls you through. It's almost like, it's almost like if social media didn't have the compulsive, uh, the variable schedule reward, but did have people waiting on the app to see if you were going to clear your notifications all the time. That's kind of what it's like.

   5. CNCal Newport11:49

      And, and, uh, there would be professional ramifications if you didn't. (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson11:52

      (laughs)

   7. CNCal Newport11:52

      You know what I mean? Like... That, that is what's kind of... And, and I think the, uh, a very useful analogy here is like if you're in a boat and you're out on a lake and it's filling with water...... the, the equivalent in this metaphor of better productivity tools and taking (laughs) online courses about productivity and buying these tools, it's like, "Okay, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna, I'm gonna buy better buckets to bail this with. I'm gonna take a, an, an online course about how-"

   8. CWChris Williamson12:14

      Subscribe to Superhuman. What-

   9. CNCal Newport12:16

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson12:16

       Get on the waiting list for Superhuman. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   11. CNCal Newport12:18

       Zettelkasten bucket, my bucket technique is gonna get better, right? Like, I'm gonna have, you know-

   12. CWChris Williamson12:22

       (laughs)

   13. CNCal Newport12:22

       ... more efficient bucket techniques.

   14. CWChris Williamson12:24

       Big bucket. (laughs)

   15. CNCal Newport12:24

       What, what you need to do is, uh, plug the bottom of the boat, right? That's what the issue is. This is what's happening with our inboxes. Uh, we need to stop trying to bail the messages out of there quicker. We have to change the underlying processes that are putting those messages into the inbox in the first place. If you do that right, you don't really need much (laughs) productivity tools or hacks or thinking to handle your inbox well, because it'll be relatively trivial to do.

9. 12:47 – 14:29

   Digital minimalism

   1. CNCal Newport12:47

   2. CWChris Williamson12:47

      Well, I mean, as a perfect example, your approach to digital minimalism, you have a limited slippery slope of how much social media can impact you if you don't have social media.

   3. CNCal Newport13:01

      Yeah. I mean, so-

   4. CWChris Williamson13:01

      If you get at the root cause.

   5. CNCal Newport13:04

      Yeah, if you know, like, so I don't use any social media, so I don't have to worry about it. Uh, the people I know who are digital minimalist and use social media, so they're deploying it in a minimalist fashion, they also are much better off, because if you're deploying social media in a minimalist fashion, that means you're deploying it for particular uses. And that changes the whole equation, 'cause if you know, "Oh, I'm using this tool for this," then it's much, much easier to put guardrails around everything else, right? So if you say, "Well, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm using..." uh, it's a real example from, from someone I know, he's a Instagram fitness influencer. So, uh, Instagram is very important to his business, right? I mean, uh, posting, he's a very muscular, (laughs) very muscular guy, and he needs to post photos of him doing athletic thing or videos or however, however Instagram works, right? But when he knows, "Okay, here's why I use Instagram, because if we put these photos on this schedule, it, this is, it helps this business, it's important to me, here's why I'm using it." Once he knows exactly why he's using it, then he can optimize how he uses it. And his big hack was, "I'm not gonna use the phone on the camera. We're actually gonna..." They use better GoPros. "We're gonna use better cameras, and my team then takes the photos and on a desktop, posts them to Instagram on a regular schedule. Not having Instagram on my phone means..." And I'm speaking in the, from the perspective of the influencer now. "It means that I'm not going to be distracted all the time by this, like, going through, seeing what everyone's up to, and yet I'm still getting all the power out of it, because once I know why I'm using it, I can figure out how best

10. 14:29 – 15:45

    How much are people checking email

    1. CNCal Newport14:29

       to use it."

    2. CWChris Williamson14:31

       How much are people checking email?

    3. CNCal Newport14:34

       So the one study I cite says once every six minutes. Another study I cite says about 126 messages sent and received a day, which works out to something actually quite similar. I just summarize that all as basically constantly.

    4. CWChris Williamson14:47

       (laughs) And that was sort of average knowledge workers. That was using RescueTime, right?

    5. CNCal Newport14:54

       Yeah, so RescueTime is a great dataset because they have these tens of thousands of users. And I, I talked to their CEO when I was working on this book. They realized at some point they had great data, so they hired a, a real professional data scientist and let her just get her hands (laughs) into that data, and they produced all these great reports. Um, but it's backed up. I talk about there's observational workplace ethnographies where they actually go into workplaces and look over people's shoulders. There's other studies where they go into workplaces and temporarily put monitoring software on computers, and all these numbers work out to be about the same. There's certain points in the day where you can't check email, like you're literally in the middle of something where you're away from your computer. Outside of those moments, people rarely go more than a handful of minutes without at least doing a quick check. But the quick checks are just as damaging as spending 20 minutes, because it initiates the network switch, and it's the initiation that kills you, not how long you spend afterwards. The initiation kills

11. 15:45 – 19:20

    What knocks people out of flow

    1. CNCal Newport15:45

       you.

    2. CWChris Williamson15:46

       I had Steven Kotler on the show a little while ago. Do you know who that is?

    3. CNCal Newport15:51

       Yes, I know his name. What-

    4. CWChris Williamson15:51

       Flow Research Collective guy.

    5. CNCal Newport15:54

       Okay.

    6. CWChris Williamson15:54

       Big into flow, um, and he was talk-

    7. CNCal Newport15:57

       He has a new book out, right?

    8. CWChris Williamson15:58

       The Art of Impossible. Dude, you would-

    9. CNCal Newport16:00

       Yep.

    10. CWChris Williamson16:01

        ... you would love it. I highly-

    11. CNCal Newport16:02

        I want to hear it.

    12. CWChris Williamson16:02

        ... highly recommend. You should really consider getting him on the show. I don't know whether you do, how often you do guests, but man, he, he blew me away. Fantastic dude. And, um, he was talking about, 'cause he understands the biology, right? He's not bothered with psychology. He just wants to get straight into how the body works, and, um, he was talking about the most common thing that knocks people out of flow is an emotion. So if you sense any emotion, whether that be a, an impulsive happiness or sadness or anger or discomfort or whatever it might be, that will just knock you out of flow. And if you think it takes a while to, you've got to get the brainwaves at the, the, it's the balance between delta and theta or something is the correct brainwave state that biologists have found that's where the neuroscience of flow and so on and so forth. You gotta do all this work to get yourself into this optimal state. And just a little bit of an emotion not only gives you all of the pain of the context switching and then takes time for you to get back into, uh, rhythmically kind of how it feels, but flow, this peak performance state that we're all desperately trying to chase where you get your 110% output done, it's, it's writing words that you can only write when you're in that position, and you've just lost it because the compulsion to check email or you've left notifications on or whatever it might be.

    13. CNCal Newport17:24

        Yeah, I mean, the, if you wanted to design what are the, the worst possible things you could expose yourself to when trying to get in flow or do something meaningful and deep, probably email and social media would be what you would come up with. Like, if you were a mad scientist saying like, "My, my goal is not to take over the world but to reduce productivity as much as possible," those would be what you would design, because what do you get with email? It's, it's communication from other people that is often urgent and introduces, uh, unsatisfiable in-the-moment demands. You're exposing yourself to things that people you know need that you can't get to them right now, and then you try to turn your attention back. Good luck. Social media is all built around right now, most of the platforms, this type of emotional valency, right? Trying to trigger various emotions, right? So again, that is also designed like a mad scientist would do, so let's expose you to, like, some, some outrage or funny, whatever it is, right, really quickly, really distilled, just like Kotler talks about, right? So those two things are like the, if you work backwards from his book.... and said, "How can I minimize your output?" I would say, "Okay, here's what I want you to do. Every five minutes or so, look at one of these two things." And yet, this is how most people (laughs) in the knowledge economy work, and it is 50% of the US economy. We're like, "We're fine with this. Let's just, let's just work with our brains, create value with our brains, but set up an environment that is the worst possible way to do it." It would be like if in the 1920s, we were running auto factories with the lights off, right, and people were putting steering wheels where the, the tires should go-

    14. CWChris Williamson18:54

        (laughs)

    15. CNCal Newport18:54

        ... and they, we forgot to put the roofs on, and we say, "Yeah, but you know, we're saving on the electric bill," (laughs) or something, right? It's like, it's crazy. People are like, "This is insane," but we have this blind spot because we don't really understand knowledge work that well yet, and it's hard to see inside a brain. Where you can see physical stuff, you can see that I'm missing the tire-

    16. CWChris Williamson19:10

        Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    17. CNCal Newport19:11

        ... but it's hard to see what's going on in the brain. We're working in the worst possible way, and we seem to just shrug our shoulders, and be like, "I guess this is just what work is." And there's an absurdity

12. 19:20 – 21:25

    Industry and revolution of industry

    1. CNCal Newport19:20

       to it.

    2. CWChris Williamson19:21

       You talk about the similarities between the industry and the revolution of industry about 100 years ago and sort of where we're at with the knowledge economy now. Can you talk about that relationship and similarities?

    3. CNCal Newport19:35

       Well, there's often a lot of work that's required when you have a technological revolution that intersects with commerce. It's not night and day, right? It's not, here is the electric dynamo, next week, we've completely rebuilt how factories work. It's not, okay, here's the first car factory, uh, next week, we have the assembly line. It takes a long time for us often to figure out what's the best way to actually integrate new technology into commerce. And I talk about it in the book, in particular car manufacturing, it took about 25 years to figure out how to do this right. And to get from building cars using the convenient and simple craft method to the inconvenient, real pain, tons of overhead, annoying assembly line method that was also 10X faster, that took time and a lot of experimentation. I think something similar needs to happen in knowledge work. So right now, we're working in the- the simplest, easiest, most flexible possible way, the first thing we came up with, which is the hyperactive hive mind. Well, let's just, everyone can be connected, let's make communication as fast and low-friction as possible, and we'll just work things out on the fly. That's fine. It was a good first step, but inevitably, we're going to evolve, we're gonna evolve to better ways to actually work. We're gonna turn the lights back on (laughs) inside the- the metaphorical auto factory. But the main thing to remember about this evolution in the industrial sector is that it took time and it was a pain. The best way to build cars was harder than the easiest way. The best way to build cars had a lot of false starts, a lot of experimentation. It was a huge pain for the employees. It was a... They had to hire more managers. It was very difficult to figure out how to make this thing work, but it was worth it because it took the man hours required to produce a Model T from 12.5 down to 93 minutes. And so that's the main thing I want people to take away from that metaphor is that, yes, knowledge work is gonna get more sophisticated. We're gonna get more out of our minds. It's gonna be less frustrating, but the ways we work is probably gonna have more rules and guides and systems and hard edges, and it's not gonna be easy to get right at first. And that's just what the evolution of business looks

13. 21:25 – 22:41

    Henry Ford

    1. CNCal Newport21:25

       like.

    2. CWChris Williamson21:26

       Wasn't it a statistic that Henry Ford became the richest man in America five years after he perfected the production line process?

    3. CNCal Newport21:36

       Yeah. And the company became the biggest in the world. Yeah. But it was a pain. I mean, just imagine if you were in the Ford factory and you were, you were working in the Ford factory before this experimentation began. The way they were building cars would've made complete sense. They would put a chassis up on two sawhorses. You would be part of a team that would sit on that chassis and build a car. It made complete sense. And to have a factory, you would just have lots of chassis and lots of teams. You know? And you're like, "Yeah, how else would you build a car?" This is very convenient. It's very flexible. I understand it. Now imagine the assembly line comes along. Now we're gonna have these chains moving with gearing systems. We have to build custom tools that can come in and bore 12 holes at a time into the engine block so that we can move it from here to here faster, and it keeps breaking. And this part's going faster than this part, and the whole thing stops, and you had to hire all these managers and engineers just to get it working. He must have been like, "This is the most annoying thing. This is not at all convenient. This makes no sense. Can't we just sit here and build cars?" And then it became the biggest company in the world and he became the richest man in the world because the right... the best way to do things is not, not often the same as what's the easiest, what's

14. 22:41 – 26:15

    Rory Sutherland

    1. CNCal Newport22:41

       the most convenient.

    2. CWChris Williamson22:42

       Are you familiar with Rory Sutherland, the vice chairman of Ogilvy? Big, gruff British man, and he talks like this and everything's a bit fucking shit, isn't it? Uh, he's one of the smartest behavioral economists on the planet. He's a wonderful guy. He's been on the- the show twice, and he's always said for years and years, email would be far better if it cost five pence every time that you had to send one to just add that little bit of friction. And I think you talk about this as well. People use email for all manner of malign intents because the cost to do it is so low. You get an email... I do this all the time. I find it... If- if I can't be bothered to answer the central question of the email, sometimes I'll ask a much more superficial question to just be like, no, bang, back over to you. It's your side-

    3. CNCal Newport23:28

       Yep.

    4. CWChris Williamson23:28

       ... of the net until I can then be bothered to deal with it, or the inevitable unnecessary confirmation that goes around when there's 10 people CC'd in, in a big group thread, and you're like, "Uh, what all this is doing is just throwing this thread back to the top of..." So yeah, I think, um, because it is so frictionless, which is what makes it a great communication tool, it also creates this slippery slope. You- you talk about, um, is it... We don't understand what happens to a technology when the cost goes down to zero or when the friction goes down to zero, it causes some strange externalities.

    5. CNCal Newport24:07

       Yeah. You gotta be careful about very low friction, and I- I think that's absolutely is what happened with email, and we- we can document this, right? I mean, I... One of the stories I got from a researcher, a behavioral organizational, behavioral psychologist I talk about in the book was this story about where they came into this office and ran an experiment where they took-... 12 people off email for a week, with no prep, just, like, "You're off email for a week. Let's see what happen." And she told me, like, one of the interesting stories here is there was this one guy, one of the 12, and he had been really complaining because his boss would bother him so much with these, quote unquote, urgent emails, right? Like, "What about this? Can you do this? What's happening here?" And this guy's job required him to set up a lab, because this was a research, a research company, and it would take hours, but it would take more than it needed to because his boss would bother, bother, bother him with all these urgent emails. So now the guy setting up the lab is one of the 12 who's gonna take one week away from email because he's participating in this experiment, and the boss stopped bothering him during that week. And what made it interesting is that the boss's office was three doors down. So the friction t- for asking this guy to do something went from this and hitting send to let me just open a door, walk ten feet, open a door, and be like, "Hey, Bob, can you do whatever?" That friction was enough to basically drastically reduce the amount of stuff that this boss was bothering him with. Because zero friction is a really weird state. I think this is what's happening with Zoom meeting overload during the pandemic. If you're in an office and you want to set up a meeting, there's a little bit of friction. A, there's a little bit of friction if I have to go and reserve the room, and that takes a little bit of time. But there's also more of a heightened social capital friction, because I gotta see those people come into the room for the meeting I set up, and they had to go get their coffee, and then they, they're (laughs) not that happy, necessarily, they have to be there, and they're looking at you like, "Okay, like, you made me come all the way over here. What's going on?" There's a little bit of friction. In a world of remote work and Zoom, it all goes away. Like, I, it's, I just add your email addresses and hit invite, boom, and then you'll just show up at this thing. What happened? Zoom took over people's entire day. Right? (laughs) And, and y- you now have people during the pandemic that were basically doing Zoom from nine to five. People have complained to me that, like, they don't have time to go to the bathroom

15. 26:15 – 28:30

    How does email make us miserable

    1. CNCal Newport26:15

       during the day. That's a problem, because there's not any breaks in between Zoom, and then they have to do their real work elsewhere. So when you get rid of friction, very weird things happen.

    2. CWChris Williamson26:23

       How does email make us miserable?

    3. CNCal Newport26:26

       Well, for one thing, the idea of communication from people we know piling up and we're not responding to them does not play well with our Paleolithic social circuits. Like, we treat, we've evolved to treat one-on-one relationships very carefully, and for good reason, because if we don't, you know, we're gonna starve next time we go through a famine and the tribe's not gonna share food with us 'cause they don't like us. We take relationships very seriously. That type of circuit is not well-suited for an inbox that's filling. Now, you can rationally tell yourself, "Uh, don't worry about it. This is not tribe members, and it's not urgent. And look, we, we, we have response time norms in our company that says don't expect a response within 12 hours, so it's all fine." Your rational brain can say this. But your deeper brain doesn't care. It says, "People need us. We're ignoring them." Just like you can't convince yourself not to be hungry, even if you explain very carefully that you have dinner reservations in two hours and you're not gonna starve, so I don't need this warning about being hungry, you're gonna stay hungry 'til you eat that food. The deep social circuits are gonna remain anxious about you ignoring people until you answer them, no matter what your frontal cortex tells your mind about response time norms. So it makes us anxious because that makes us unhappy. The constant context shifting makes us physiologically unhappy, right? I mean, it, it's a draining feeling that exhausts us. It can create anxiety. Like, we physiologically feel bad if we're doing this unnatural, rapid context shifting. You do this over a long period of time, it's just straight-up exhausting. Our brains aren't meant, uh, aren't meant to do this. And then three, it's incredibly frustrating because linguistic communication, purely written communication is incredibly impoverished. We're really not good at communicating just with written words. We're much better at having voice and tonation and body language, and then we get a lot of information. We... Communication is much more accurate. So we are constantly being misunderstood and constantly misunderstanding other people, which again, as social creatures, is in itself very fraught and very frustrating. So you put all those things together, it's not surprising that when they do surveys on people's wellbeing, you see very strong correlations between increased use with these information and communication technologies and increased unhappiness.

16. 28:30 – 31:15

    The NHS example

    1. CNCal Newport28:31

    2. CWChris Williamson28:31

       It's so interesting when you try and take a first principles approach to something that's so ubiquitous. Like, the vast majority of people that are listening, they have to use email, whatever it is. The, the nurses... So the NHS is a re- (laughs) a really good example of this. God, you'd have a field day. Um, one of my buddies is a recently, uh, qualified medical doctor, just gone through his F1 and his F2 as a student, and now he's fully fledged. And, um, some of the processes that they need to go through to send an email downstairs, they can't take something downstairs, they have to wait for it to come back up. So they're physically... And, you know, there's people on beds waiting for them. So w- I think when you can see these individuals moving, you know, they've got to locomote around places, and they're, they're tethered, they're genuinely tethered, as opposed to this, which is more, uh, psychologically tethered, I suppose. The impacts are crazy.

    3. CNCal Newport29:27

       It, it, it really is. I mean, it w- it's... We're a little bit used to it in some sense that all of this constant ongoing, uh, communication, this is just what work is. It's kind of unavoidable.

    4. CWChris Williamson29:39

       That's the way it's been. That's the way it'll always be.

    5. CNCal Newport29:41

       And I think the biggest problem is until we identify that the hyperactive hivemind is the issue, people's thought process is, "Okay, I feel really overwhelmed with all this communication, but if I just stopped using email, it would be terrible." And they're right. Like, if the hyperactive hivemind's how you organize, then you can't just not use email. And the prob- that's when people give up though. (laughs) They're like, "Well, if I just stopped using email, I wouldn't be able to talk... Nothing would get done, and I'd get fired." And they're right about that. But they're, what they're wrong to do is just to give up there. You gotta ask the next question, "Okay, why is it that the way we work requires me to use so much email?" And that's where you start to get somewhere interesting. So to me, like, the first principle that unlocks everything is stop talking about individuals' habits. Let's go underneath the covers and say, "What are the different processes that make up what we do in my freelance business, in my team, in my company, whatever I do? What are the different processes I come back to again and again? These are the things that make up my working life. Great."... how do we actually implement these processes? How do we move the information around? How do we communicate and collaborate? How do we reach decisions? What is our actual explicit set of rules, or guides, or system for this one, and for this one, and for this one, and for this one? And until you actually do that, the default will just be the hyperactive hive mind. We'll get overloaded with context switches, we'll all be miserable. But once you realize, oh, if I change the underlying process, how we implement it, that's generating all these unscheduled messages in the first place, I can actually fix the problem. And that's the way to fix the problem. The underlying structure about how we work needs to move away from unscheduled messaging towards other things, that might be more of a pain, the assembly line was a pain, but is absolutely worth it if it gets rid of these unscheduled messages as the primary mean

17. 31:15 – 34:39

    The process principle

    1. CNCal Newport31:15

       with, by which we collaborate.

    2. CWChris Williamson31:17

       That's great from a god's eye view, with all of the perspective of not having to be in the trenches. But if you're just some gnat desperately trying to be a digital minimalist, and a deep worker, and a world without email, uh, deep lifer, uh, it's a little bit more difficult. Like where w- where are people supposed to start? Where should they highlight, or what are the places that someone could start to begin looking at the process principle?

    3. CNCal Newport31:46

       Yeah. So if- if you're- if you have no say, right, like over other people, you're- you're part of a team in a big company, you can still do this process just with what you can control, right? So you- you literally start by saying, "What are the different processes that make up what I do in my job?" And if you're not sure what those are, use your inbox to help you, right? E- take one day, and every time you get an email message, ask the question, "What is the repeated process this email is involved with, that it's connected to? What's the thing that I'm- I do regularly that this email is helping me make progress on?" And you can use your inbox to help figure out and literally write down, "I'm involved in scheduling client meetings on a regular basis, producing white paper reports on new products. I'm involved in..." Thing after thing after thing. Now you have this list of the different processes you're involved with. Ask the question for each, and not all at once. L- we'll start with the low-hanging fruit, and once that goes well, we'll move on to new ones. But take some of these processes and ask the question, "Given just what I can control, how do I want to implement my involvement with this process in such a way that it minimizes the number of unscheduled messages required to actually get this thing done?" And looking at just what you can control, you can drastically reduce those unscheduled messages. And sometimes it's very simple, right? Sometimes it's just there's a tool you can slot in there, right? It's, "Okay, I have to set up a lot of meetings with people. Um, that generates a lot of unscheduled messages 'cause we go back and forth, so I'm going to use scheduling software." One quick solution, boom, that saved you a lot of unscheduled messages. Sometimes you have a process, you- you figure out some implementation that y- you're not going to advertise as some new sort of system. You kind of stealthily recruit people into it, right? So you email someone, "Okay, um, we got to get this report out. Uh, here's what I suggest. I'll work on a draft on Monday, and by close of business Monday, I'll put my draft into this shared folder, then it's all yours. If you have any questions, I have office hours Tuesday at noon, so you can just stop by the office, or also I'm in the Slack channel just for office hours, and well, we can hash it out then. Uh, and then just get whatever you're doing, get it into the Dropbox by close of business on three. I'll then take a final look. Hey, designer, who I've CC'd on this, whatever you see in that folder at the end of day Tuesday, you can take it, format it, put it live," right? It feels like you're just sort of laying out a plan. And it- you know, you'll send the email, people are like, "Yeah, sure. What? I'm glad there's a plan, whatever. So I need to do this tomorrow. Great. I don't want to think about it anymore." You've just co-opted all those people into an implementation of this process that's going to get that report created with zero unscheduled messages. So there's a lot you can do without having to, uh, make believers of everyone, without having to give everyone a copy of my book and convince them to read it. There's a lot you can do just from the perspective of an individual once you know what it is you're trying to do, and once you know that the objective is look at your processes, adjust your implementation to reduce unscheduled messages. The more you can do that, the better your life is going to get, even if no one else around you knows that you're doing that, and even if no one else around you is even on board

18. 34:39 – 38:29

    Automating workflow

    1. CNCal Newport34:39

       with that plan.

    2. CWChris Williamson34:40

       The vast majority of the work that you do after you've been in a job for, what, probably six months to a year, is just repetition. "Done this before. I know this before." And you realize this, because when you first step into a job, you're constantly asking people for advice. "Where does the- where do I get the media pack from, and how do I send a file to accounts? And what do we do when we need to schedule a meeting in," and all this sort of stuff. Then after a while, you're like- you just know it. So one of the principles here, I think, that we can try and take away is, okay, how can I automate as much of the workflow of the things that I need to do as possible? How can I make it go seamless? And yeah, I think using your email inbox over an extended period of time as an identify, "Okay, so what's coming up consistently?" It's scheduling, it's accounts, it's asking for the Dropbox link, or whatever else it might be. And focusing on the attention capital, that should hopefully free us up, because we're not doing this...

    3. CNCal Newport35:38

       Yeah.

    4. CWChris Williamson35:38

       ...constant context switching. It allows us to get more work done that actually matters.

    5. CNCal Newport35:42

       Yeah. Uh, so that- that's absolutely right. I mean, the- the way I think about it is there's- there's two rough classes, um, maybe three, depending on how we want to talk about it. But there's- there's- let's say there's a small number of rough classes of what these optimized process implementations look like. One big class in there is automation, right? This is something where it's the same steps every time, like you're talking about. So if there's something you do in your work where it's the same steps every time, like this gets written, it gets reviewed, it gets signed off on, it gets formatted, it gets posted, right? It's the same steps every time. You can automate that, which means you find a workflow that allows you to go through those steps without ever requiring someone to have to wait for a message unscheduled and then respond to it, right? Another class of things you might need to optimize are one-off, like, oh, we have a new project we have to work on. So there's not some steps that we- it's always the same every time. But there, what you want to focus on is, uh, how can we structure where the information goes and how we communicate and collaborate about that information, right?... so there, it's probably going to be on Trello, or Asana, or Flow, or Basecamp. Like, let's, let's get a place for the information to live. Let's have these highly structured meetings in which we can check in and look at the information and decide who's working on what. You want to structure when you talk about it, where the information lives. The third class, roughly speaking, of the book I talk about are protocols, where, where it's literally, like, a, a, a type of back and forth communication that happens on a frequent basis, and how you can put in place protocols there that actually makes that require much fewer unscheduled messages. So instead of clients just calling, sending you emails whenever they have an issue, you maybe have, we've set up, "No, no, we have this weekly check-in call, and we immediately post a written summary of everything we committed to do during that call, but you have to wait till the next call if you have a question," right? So, these are kind of the three classes of what these all look like, but the key thing is, what you're trying to get away from is the context switch, that's the productivity poison. The best proxy for context switching is unscheduled messages. So unscheduled messages is what generates all those context switches, because you have to keep checking while you're waiting for that message to come. Be willing to do more work, more work, and spend more time if the trade-off is less unscheduled messages. That's how painful it is. So I would rather, I would rather spend 10 minutes to try to list out in an email, "Okay, here is all the times I'm available for the next three weeks," because, uh, I don't want to go back and forth to set up a meeting with, because that's going to generate five unscheduled messages. I'd rather spend 5 to 10 minutes now and give you 20 options than send you a 30-second message right now that's like, "Yeah, when are you free?" but know there's going to be five more interruptions over the next couple of days to set it up. The context switching are sort of so much more dramatically costly than actually just spending more time in the moment that I really like to emphasize that. You're not trying to optimize time, you're not trying to optimize convenience. Be willing to work harder and have more complexity and spend more time if it saves you from the need to have to do unscheduled

19. 38:29 – 40:19

    Power law effect

    1. CNCal Newport38:29

       messaging.

    2. CWChris Williamson38:30

       And this is because there is a, there's a power law effect going on with the context switching, right? It's not just the time that, because if we were going for pure time, if context switching didn't have this disproportionate impact on our ability to focus, I imagine that most of these arguments, or some of these arguments at least, would have a lot less veracity. Be like, "Well, hmm, we could go about this thing, but actually, considering I can just send off an email in 30 seconds, I need to get 20 emails worth of time saving because of that," but it's not just the 30 seconds of the email, it's the subsequent time that goes over the top. I think that little story is a good microcosm for kind of the, uh, the entire world of email use, right? That everybody, every organization, and then inter-between organizations as well, everybody has had the opportunity to step back from the urgent and look at process, protocol, and whatever the third one was, I've forgotten, uh, to look at those things and think, "Right, how can I, how can I change these? What can I do now? Let's just take, let's just take a month off, let's take a month off from clients. Let's, let's not have any business coming in, but know that for the next five years, we are going to have every workflow under the sun done, and we're going to be working at 2X capacity."

    3. CNCal Newport39:47

       Yeah. Yeah, and hey-

    4. CWChris Williamson39:48

       But this-

    5. CNCal Newport39:48

       ... if we have to, and if we have to change it every month, we have to change it every month, right?

    6. CWChris Williamson39:52

       Yeah.

    7. CNCal Newport39:52

       Still worth it, right? I- i- if we have to evolve, we miss things, new things come up, great. Spend the time to do it. Spend a half day a week. You're still (laughs) gonna end up better off. Like, oh, we're gonna spend three hours a week doing nothing but meeting and talking about our workflows and trying to make them better and reduce the context switching, you would still be better off. You could spend a day a week and probably still end up better off. Like, we're going to a four-day week because all we do on Friday is figure out how to reduce messages, you would still end up better off. That's how, that's how, uh, disproportionate

20. 40:19 – 42:09

    Inherent laziness

    1. CNCal Newport40:19

       the cost is.

    2. CWChris Williamson40:20

       There's an inherent laziness, isn't there, that you talk about to do with using email. Because it's so frictionless and it doesn't actually require you to do much in the way of abstract thinking. There's no metacognizance required, it's just brain, fingers, send, brain, fingers, send, over and over and over again.

    3. CNCal Newport40:39

       Yeah, and we play, we play responsibility hot potato with email, which, which you, you mentioned earlier, which is where basically I feel a little bit of stress or anxiety that this thing is my responsibility and on my brain. If I shoot you an email that says, like, "Hey, what about this?" Or "Thoughts?" question mark, it relieves that temporarily. It is now on your plate, right? Because I've, that, the email (laughs) is in your inbox and I, I freed up that space and I feel a little bit better. You get the "Thoughts?" question mark email and you're like, "Ah, crap, the hot potato's on my plate now," right? You're like, "Okay, so, um, uh, remind me again what this was about?" Send. Boom, off your plate. You've thrown the hot potato onto my plate now, and now I have this thing in my head. I'm like, "Uh, let's chat about it. When are you free?" Boom, now it's off my plate, right? And we do this with everything, um, because we don't like the discomfort of having things on our plate. This is what happens when we try to keep up with an inbox that's overflowing, it's like, just getting it off my plate. I don't care if I know it's coming back, I j- I just want that relief in the moment. But

    4. NANarrator41:32

       Yeah.

    5. CNCal Newport41:32

       ... again, the response to all this is basically, "Too bad," right? I, work, by definition, is the application of force against something that is otherwise on rest. It is, by definition (laughs) , something that requires effort. It's what work actually is. So, trying to minimize effort is not a very good metric (laughs) when you're trying to say, "What's going to make me more effective at work? What's going to make my company more successful? What's going to make my, what's going to make my company grow?" We have to figure out what's the right way to do this, and then we have to do it because we want to be successful in what we're doing. And work is effort. It's actually synonymous.

21. 42:09 – 44:26

    Best practices

    1. CNCal Newport42:10

    2. CWChris Williamson42:10

       What are some of the best practices for people who have to send emails? What are some of the ways that they can create and send emails that can't be automated?

    3. CNCal Newport42:19

       Well, so, uh, if you're, if you're thinking about unscheduled messaging as the poison, then it really changes the way you think about your communication. So now when you're communicating with people, you're seeing the bigger picture here. "Oh, there's some objective we are trying to get to. It's going to require some collaboration, coordination. How can we do this with a minimum of messages?" And once you have that mindset, it really drastically changes...... what you send and what you suggest, you know? And so you have to know what it is you're trying to optimize. So, so one thing you get is more of these process-oriented emails, like the example I gave about producing the document, where it's not just thoughts, question mark. You're laying out, okay, here's the plan to get us from here to us being done. And I'm laying out a plan here that's sensible and, uh, doing a little bit of work upfront, but I'm going to reduce unnecessary messages along the way. You do more of that. You also start to do more fallback-type things. I'm a big believer, for example, in office hours. Set times on set days where you're always available for anyone to stop by, uh, in person or virtually, depending on what the circumstance is, and you can move more and more coor- quick coordination questions or discussion to those. "Great. Grab me at my next office hours. We'll get into it." Boom. You start sending that message a lot more. Each one of those messages where you say, "Just grab me at my next office hours," you may have just saved a 10-message back and forth conversation. Maybe that doesn't sound so bad, but that's five messages in there that you have to wait, wait for and respond to pretty quickly, right? Because if you wait a day to respond, this conversation will take two weeks. Well, that means you might do 10 inbox checks for each of those five messages because you're, you're checking, checking, checking, waiting for it. So you may have saved 50 inbox checks in one day just by saying, "This is great. Grab me at my next office hours." Right? Like, the, it, the, the savings are really big. So process-oriented emails, defaulting to things like office hours or status meetings, uh, these are the types of best practices you see once you realize the whole goal here is not about clearing out your inbox quicker, not about expectations. It's about unscheduling messages, like, that I... Messages that are gonna come in at some unspecified time that I'm gonna need to respond to relatively quickly, that is what I am trying to get away from. It completely changes the type of things

22. 44:26 – 45:44

    Zoom rooms

    1. CNCal Newport44:26

       you do.

    2. CWChris Williamson44:27

       You use... Do you sit in a Zoom room? I know that's one of the potential solutions, that you could just have a Cal's Zoom room, and there's the link, and anybody can just drop in and drop out as they need during this window on this day.

    3. CNCal Newport44:41

       Yeah. So, so there's, there's three things I've seen. There's, uh, because academics, we do, where office hours come from our world, right? So, uh, virtually speaking, Zoom rooms is a big one. You actually set up a waiting room, and then, uh, you bring people in one on one. So if someone shows up while you're talking to someone else, they don't show up in the middle of your conversation. They're in the waiting room, and then you can, you can bring them in. Slack channels, I've also seen, right? It's like an office hour Slack channel, uh, if people wanna type instead of talking to you. "I will be in this channel during these hours, so jump over there. We can go, and there'll be a transcript and searchable." So that's nice too. And then, uh, door open cl- door open, you know, in-person office hours are fantastic, professors. I, I rely on this incredibly heavily in my life as a college professor, like a lot of professors do. We- we've kind of perfected this idea, especially if we're working with students, is like, "Sounds great, sounds interesting. Come to my office hours." Right? And, and the students like it because it's incredibly clear. Great, I know what I need to do. And we like it because if we had to keep up 35 different ongoing conversations with 35 different students, it would be untenable. So yeah, Zoom, Slack, and

23. 45:44 – 47:11

    Objections

    1. CNCal Newport45:44

       your door open.

    2. CWChris Williamson45:46

       What are the main objections that you've heard from people when you've suggested that they implement a reduction in email?

    3. CNCal Newport45:53

       So where you, where you really start to get the objections is before you're able to get into the details of what the real issue is. So if you just see, for example, the title of my book, people who live in the world of the hyperactive hive mind say, "Any reduction in email would make me worse at my job." And they're right. If the way you organize your work is with back and forth messaging, the more time you're away from messaging, the worse you do at your job. And so there's a lot of objections around that. Once you get past that, though, and say, "No, no, it's the hyperactive hive mind itself that's the problem. We need to find ways to collaborate that has much less unscheduled messaging," there's been almost no complaint. I- I've, I've actually been surprised. I thought there'd be more pushback from, from, uh, tech types or some pe- They're like, "Look, no, no, this is good. Like, this, this rapid back, back and forth is, uh, it's a advanced state of human existence as we really are able to make quicker decisions." There's just a universal detestation of this. And maybe it's because the pandemic made the hyperactive hive mind more hyperactive, but once I actually explain what I'm talking about here, people say, "Yeah, I hate that." (laughs) And that they... Great. Good. I'm glad. Let's, let's figure out a way to get rid... And people know it's hard. People are, are quick to say, "It's not gonna be obvious how to change this." Like, that I all get. But there is a lot less protestation than I thought. I- I think we're at a point now where we- we no longer think this is high-tech. We just are frustrated

24. 47:11 – 50:56

    Incognito

    1. CNCal Newport47:11

       with it.

    2. CWChris Williamson47:12

       You touched on something earlier on about, uh, the trying to be incognito when you're suggesting these small changes and kind of bringing people in surreptitiously. I think that's quite important because one of the things I imagine that some people might have as an objection is, "I don't want to be the black sheep that's coming in here, like, with my blue-blocking glasses on, and my special gel wrist pad for my keyboard so I can type at 0.5% faster." You just don't wanna be that guy. And I- I've heard you talk previously about how, um, blanket email responses saying, "I'm not available," or, "I'm busy," or, "I only check email at these times," that that's a bad idea, and also steaming in and saying, "Right, guys, I'm not gonna be dealing with email, and I'm not gonna be doing this," 'cause it- it kind of just waves a flag above your head. And socially, we have to remember that we are dealing with non-rational other beings, and if you steam in, they go, "Oh, bloody hell, Cal's brought his light-up keyboard in again with him, and he's not replying to emails until 4:00 PM every day." But you can... I- I suppose that the social element of this needs to be more, uh, subtle.

    3. CNCal Newport48:23

       Yeah, it's really important. Uh, the- the key psychological element that's relevant to these type of changes is buy-in, right? If people are involved in a decision being made that affects them, then they're much more likely, of course, to buy into that decision, i- as opposed to being felt like that change is imposed on them. So if you have a team, and I... Ultimately, in a perfect world, this is the right scale at which to make these changes, is at the team level.... not the individual and not the organization, but at the team level. If you have a team making changes, let's, here's how we're gonna work on clients, here's how we're gonna work on reports, and we're gonna try to minimize the hyperactive hive mind. If everyone on the team is working together and everyone has a say, then yeah, you wanna be super clear about it and write it down, and we're gonna check in on it every two weeks because everyone has buy-in, right? We all have buy-in 'cause we're all involved. What happens is when an individual makes changes, that is gonna affect your life, right? Because I now, you know, I don't use email and you're gonna have to go into my Trello board and whatever. You're affecting my life, but I had no say in that. Like, this was just your decision. That is, from a psychological perspective, very fraught, and you're almost certainly gonna get pushback. So, that's why, yeah, I suggest in the book that you should make changes on your own, you should see your own processes and try to reduce back and forth messages, but don't advertise. 'Cause when you advertise changes that you unilaterally made, even though they are better, the people around you say, "Here are something that impacts me that I had no say in." And the human instinct there, no matter how good it is, no matter how much it's probably (laughs) gonna make even their life better, their instinct is, "I don't know about this. I don't like this." And so I always say, don't advertise, you know? Don't put out an autoresponder explaining when you're not gonna be checking emails. Just check emails when you need to check emails. If someone complains, then you can explain it to them. But don't give people a reason to be upset that they didn't realize they needed to be upset. Wait till they're actually upset (laughs) and then try to assuage them, because you'll figure out most people don't care. A reader sent me the other day an autoresponder. He's like, okay, this is the hive mind gone to a new extreme. Someone had... It was, like, a temporary power outage or something. But basically, the autoresponder was like, um, the, the power had to get turned off temporarily by the, the repair crew, so I'm not gonna be on email for the next hour. (laughs) He's like, okay, this is the hyperactive hive mind pushed to the extreme where you feel like even if you're just gonna be away for an hour, you need to explain to people, uh, it's a sign that we're in trouble. So yeah, I'm a big believer, if people didn't have a say in the change, don't advertise it. So, if you're doing it as a team, everyone should be on the same page, that's great. If you're doing it as an individual, just do it. And, you know, if someone complains, you can f- finesse that

25. 50:56 – 52:30

    First steps

    1. CNCal Newport50:56

       later.

    2. CWChris Williamson50:57

       What are the smallest first steps that people can take to implement this into their lives? What can they go away and do this evening or tomorrow?

    3. CNCal Newport51:04

       Well, so you have to start by listing out all the processes. And the, and the list can grow, but, like, here's all the things I do regularly. And then look for the lowest hanging fruit. Like, what is the thing on here that would be easiest for me to overhaul and reduce unscheduled messages? For most people in most office jobs, it's gonna be meeting scheduling, right? I am going to use a, a scheduling tool, or if it's socially unacceptable to use a scheduling tool, I'm literally gonna have, like, a text file with available times on it that I just paste into emails. And then, you know, once someone takes one, I just take it off the text file, right? Uh, however you need to do that. That's usually the lowest hanging fruit, and it has a disproportionate, a disproportionate advantage, 'cause again, the example I gave before, each meeting you try to set up over email might be 10 messages, five of which you have to wait for, each of which requires 10 email inbox checks. So each, each time you send out a scheduling link, instead of saying, "When do you wanna meet?" you might save 50 email, uh, inbox checks in a short period of time. So, people are often surprised. It seems minor, and yet they feel much, (laughs) much more relieved. All right, so that's low hanging fruit. Office hours, I think, is another low hanging fruit process, because there's a lot of different processes out there that you can vastly improve simply by pushing people towards office hours. And so I think that's a, that, that, those are becoming more acceptable. I think that's another, uh, that's another easy thing to set up. So, list all the processes, look for some low hanging fruit to get the taste in your mouth. Those are two things that'll probably show up once you're looking for what are the easiest changes I can make.

26. 52:30 – 53:38

    Scheduling software

    1. CNCal Newport52:30

    2. CWChris Williamson52:31

       I like the text file or the spreadsheet that you copy across and delete out of. I have to say, I would be a prime candidate for using Calendly or some other sort of scheduling software, doing, what, 150 podcast episodes a year. So, three a week, plus guesting on other people's shows. Calendly should be my solution. But I know when I ask someone when they're available and I get a reply with a Calendly link, there is something in me that feels a little bit... I, I just don't like the process of doing it. And I think you touched on it, it there. But you basically get the beauty of a Calendly link with a little bit of a copy and paste, and you could keep it on a note. You could even make it as an autofill in Alfred or something else like that. Um, yeah, that's a, that's a really, a really nice solution. Can you talk me-

    3. CNCal Newport53:22

       And I just wanna say real quick, remember the cost, the proper cost balance. Oh, it's gonna take me a minute instead of 10 seconds to, to keep this list and send it out, but you're saving potentially 50 inbox checks, each of which has a 10 to 15-minute impact on your concentration. So, when you know the cost, you're willing to do a lot more

27. 53:38 – 54:40

    Cals example

    1. CNCal Newport53:38

       on the front end.

    2. CWChris Williamson53:39

       So, if Lillian from Penguin Random House is listening, she'll know that the reason that she's getting big fat lists of dates off me for all of the upcoming authors is gonna be because Cal told me to do it. Can you talk me... (laughs)

    3. CNCal Newport53:51

       Well, but, but by the way, like, Lily and I have a good system. I, because, you know-

    4. CWChris Williamson53:54

       I know. You've got your spreadsheet, right? And she goes and puts things in.

    5. CNCal Newport53:56

       Because we're promoting this book, she had to, she had to approve, because... (laughs)

    6. CWChris Williamson53:59

       (laughs)

    7. CNCal Newport54:00

       But we have th- we have this thing, and she puts it in the shared doc. And, and, uh, you know, and I check it twice a week. And, uh, yeah, anyways, once you know what you're optimizing... And I didn't do it for my UK publisher because I don't usually do a ton of publicity in the UK. So like, I, it's, I won't bother. But then the book was popular in the UK, so we, we were booking a lot of, a lot more UK, uh, publicity with my UK publisher, and we didn't have this system in place. Night and day, right? Um, it's, it's like, well, what about this time, what about that, back and forth. And so it's this great A-B test, (laughs) you know. We're doing the exact same thing, two different teams in two different ways. I'm like, oh man, uh, that was... The Lillian method is so much better.

    8. CWChris Williamson54:38

       You should have called it that. She'd love that.

28. 54:40 – 57:55

    Cals email setup

    1. CNCal Newport54:40

       She would.

    2. CWChris Williamson54:41

       What's your personal email handling setup? I've heard you say that you've got six different email addresses and a number of other processes. Can you just give us, like, a, a high-level view of how Cal Newport sets his emails up?

    3. CNCal Newport54:54

       ... yeah, I have, uh, multiple addresses. So, uh, in my role as a professor, I have a, sort of a general university address. This is where university business comes through, right? This is the announcements and stuff like this. And, uh, and then I have a separate university address I use for my collaborators, right? So people I'm actually working on research. So I separate that. And then in the writing world, um, I have the, I have an address called interesting for my readers to send me tips and links and books that I, that I might find interesting. Uh, and then I have, um, a couple secret addresses I use once I'm doing back and forth for someone, but I don't, I don't want it to be public-facing. And so I have a, I have a relatively, and I have a personal address that I use with my friends and family. A lot of different addresses all have their own inboxes, and it allows me to customize how and when I use them. So some of these addresses, I have what I call sender filters on them. So if you're going to send a message to interesting, you're gonna see there's a description of what to expect, which is like, I love to see links and books and articles. I do read all these messages. I, I basically never respond. Like, so I can set expectations for something-

    4. CWChris Williamson55:57

       Oh, is that-

    5. CNCal Newport55:57

       ... like this.

    6. CWChris Williamson55:57

       ... is that an autoresponder?

    7. CNCal Newport55:59

       No, it's, so it's actually, uh, on my contact page. So for me-

    8. CWChris Williamson56:02

       Yeah. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

    9. CNCal Newport56:02

       ... sender filters, it's like, okay, here's the address, and I describe, I, I describe it right there. Uh, and if you go to my contact page, for example, I, it's channels, right? There's no general purpose address on my website, right? There's, okay, you want to send me links, go here. You want to, it's like a publicity interview type thing, go here. Which, which will go to, like, a publicity team. You want to talk, a talk, you want to book me for a talk? Well, go here, right? So you see, you can slot yourself into the proper channel and you know what to expect. Some things that people want my attention for, there's no channel for them, but they're not mad at me. I'm not ignoring them. They're not sending it to a general purpose address that I'm then ignoring them at. There's just no outlet for them, uh, to send it. And so psychologically, I think that's, it's much, much better. And then when and how I check these inboxes, um, to me that's less interesting because what I'm constantly trying to do is figure out what are the underlying processes that are putting messages into these inboxes in the first place? How can I improve them to have less unscheduled messages? So it's, for me, it's not a game of how often or when I check it. It's making sure that I don't have too much pressure in any of them. You know, if there's a ton of, ton of emails coming into my, one of my personal writer addresses because Lillian and I are trying to schedule a lot of interviews, the question is not how often do I check this inbox? It's, oh, we need a better system so I don't have so many of these back and forth unscheduled messages, right? If there's a bunch of student emails coming in because a lot of students have questions about their grades coming up because of the midterm, I say, okay, what matters here is not how often I check this inbox. It's I need to talk to my TAs and set up a system where they have access to the grade spreadsheet and they can send a message to the TA and get this information. Let's figure out a way to do this without just a lot of unscheduled messages. So that's always my mindset with my various inboxes is, is not when and how I check it. I mean, when I do my time block planning, I, uh, I put email time in there. Some days I don't check at all. Some days I'm trying to catch up on things. It's the process-oriented thinking that matters for me. Are there too many messages in here when I check it? How do I make sure that's not the case next time I check it? That's the way I'm thinking.

29. 57:55 – 1:08:35

    Multiple email addresses

    1. CNCal Newport57:55

    2. CWChris Williamson57:56

       It's so counterintuitive to have multiple email addresses, and yet I think of all of the things that we've gone through today, everything we've said, what is a high upfront cost that you can pay to make the downstream contact switching cost reduced? Just making an email address for online purchases. Like, just that, just for when you buy some new clothes or DIY equipment or your Rightmove alerts or whatever the hell it is that you've got going on. It seems (laughs) honestly, I've, I've heard you talk about this before during my research for this talk, and I thought, I'm such an... I, I considered myself a sophisticated digital individual, and I realized just how idiotic it is that I use a main email for friends, for business, for podcast scheduling, for all manner of different things. Like, that's, that should be something that everybody can go away and do today. You could make the same email address that you have and just add a number one, two, or three on the end of it-

    3. CNCal Newport58:56

       Yep.

    4. CWChris Williamson58:56

       ... and there you go. There's your three inboxes. And what's it take? How long does it take on Gmail to do that? Five minutes, maybe less?

    5. CNCal Newport59:03

       You don't even have to do that. You know, you can, for some things you can just do, uh, any term and a plus sign and then your normal Gmail address, and, and it'll send it to your normal Gmail address and you can filter it. So you can do signup... I think this still works. Signup plus and then your normal Gmail address, and just use that every time you, you do any online shopping or have to give your, register for anything-

    6. CWChris Williamson59:21

       Oh, and would you set up auto rules-

    7. CNCal Newport59:24

       ... and then set up a filter.

    8. CWChris Williamson59:24

       ... in, in Gmail?

    9. CNCal Newport59:24

       Yeah. And then you set up a filter in Gmail that takes that and, uh, tags it. And so this is what I do. So I have some of these addresses all come into Gmail, but-

    10. CWChris Williamson59:33

        I was gonna say, how do you, how do you then... What's the infrastructure on the, on the internal end?

    11. CNCal Newport59:38

        Yeah. So I have, I have filter rules that auto-label them, right? And, and then auto, auto-archive. There's a couple things I do. One thing I do, which is, uh, which is considered eccentric, but I've been doing this for years and years, is everything that comes in my inbox is marked as read. I do not like this idea of, like, unread and read messages, and, uh, you can let these things pile up. So I make everything just look the same. It's all on read. So it's like this is not a storage facility. You know, handle things and get it out of here. Um, you can't... You don't have the advantage of new things are going to be black. And, and so-

    12. CWChris Williamson1:00:09

        Are you archiving quite aggressively then?

    13. CNCal Newport1:00:12

        Yeah, and then I archive quite aggressively. So, so things get... a filter rule will apply a label and then, uh, archives. And then, uh, I go to the different labels to see... So actually I put most things through a Gmail account, but everything's auto-archived and auto-labeled. And then you see the list of labels on the side. They're kind of... These are my inboxes, right? So if I click on-

    14. CWChris Williamson1:00:31

        Yes.

    15. CNCal Newport1:00:31

        ... the label for, you know, Georgetown collaborators, it'll then show me everything tagged with the Georgetown collaborator. So it's, it's my inbox for, uh, that particular address. But this means I can filter things even beyond, uh, just addresses too. Like, well, I know anything that comes from this person. So, like, I have an administrative inbox, which is all the signup stuff and newsletters, and it, it...... I, I barely glance at this thing, and it's the bulk of my emails goes into that inbox. What really happens is they're labeled with that in archive, and if I click on that label, I can see them all. Um, but yeah, so that, that's the way, that's the way I handle it. But there's a lot of different ways you can do it. Honestly, I think having completely separate accounts is probably a little better. Like, uh, because you want the real context switch protection of, "Okay, I, I need to go see if this Amazon order shipped." I'm, I'm logged into an account that's just-

    16. CWChris Williamson1:01:20

        Ah, yes.

    17. CNCal Newport1:01:20

        ... like this type of job. Yeah.

    18. CWChris Williamson1:01:21

        So you want to silo yourself into-

    19. CNCal Newport1:01:24

        Yeah.

    20. CWChris Williamson1:01:24

        ... different operating modes.

    21. CNCal Newport1:01:27

        Yes.

    22. CWChris Williamson1:01:27

        And the more-

    23. CNCal Newport1:01:28

        And here's my friends.

    24. CWChris Williamson1:01:28

        ... that you can do that ... Yes. Yes, yes.

    25. CNCal Newport1:01:29

        Here's my friends. Let me log into this account. Here's my business account. Let me log into this account. Uh, here's my internal business account. Like, in your situation, you might be like, "Oh, and here's my external-facing business account where I'm, I'm interacting with guests, uh, that we're trying to book," or this or that. And so when I'm there and I log into that account, that's all I'm, I'm just in that world. I'm not seeing something from my friend, and I'm not seeing something from Amazon, I'm not seeing something my mom sent. Like, oh, I'm just in the world right now of dealing with guests. It really makes a difference because of the context switching cost.

    26. CWChris Williamson1:01:58

        Dude, there are people listening to this that are rubbing their hands with glee and waiting to get home to their laptop tonight to set these up. I'm gonna, I'm going to 100% take that on. I, I appreciate the principles. I think the principles and everything else is a, a fantastic thin end of the wedge to get the buy-in and to understand the context of why context switching is bad. But I think that on the backend is, is like a really, a really cool solution for a lot of this. I hope that it's gonna help a, uh, a lot of people. And the last question actually about, um, uh, is actually moving back to digital minimalism, and this is something more behaviorally that you may have stumbled on. I wanted to know how people can start a, a sort of a deeper, more digitally minimal journey if they've got hard embedded habits around how they use their devices. That there's no unlinking those synapses, that myelin is down hard. How do they get past those existing routines? And this could work for email as well.

    27. CNCal Newport1:02:51

        Mm-hmm. Well, I mean, in digital minimalism, I, I suggest 30 days and see, okay, you gotta commit to 30 days away from all these optional personal technologies, right? So that's your commitment, 30 days where I'm not on social media, I'm not on YouTube, I'm not on online news, um, you know, 30 days. Okay. Then during those 30 days, some of this is unwiring the synapses. Some of this is this sort of detoxing effect. But the thing that makes those 30 days successful is if you aggressively reflect and experiment to figure out, what do I really wanna do with my time in my life? Right? The aggressive experimentation reflection is what allows you to finish those 30 days and say, "Here's what I really wanna spend my time doing, and now I can rebuild from scratch. Here's the tools I'm going to use, and I'm going to use them to service these things I care about. And everything else, everything that was not an answer to this question of what's the best way to use technology to service these things I care about, I'm not gonna use anymore." That is much more sustainable, right? Because then what happens as you're going forward is that you're committed to a positive vision of what you want your life to look like. That is something that is very sustainable. What doesn't work is if you try to just minimize negative. You say, "I spend too much time on Instagram, I'm just gonna try to use Instagram less." Or, "I'm gonna take 30 days off from Instagram to, to somehow feel better, and then I'm gonna resolve to use Instagram less." Trying to reduce a negative is often not that effective. Committing to supporting a positive is. So if you come out of the other side of these 30 days with this new vision of here's how I spend my time, I do this, this, and this, and here's how I use tools to help this, uh, then it's much easier to ignore the tool that doesn't fit into that picture. The, maybe you used to use TikTok a lot, but now you're like, "You know, I have this vision I love and it makes me feel good about how I'm living, and TikTok didn't have any role in this vision, so why would I go do that? I'm much more interested in continuing the, the, the, live this deep structured life to get after it, to do the things I really figured out I want to do." So that's what I recommend, 30 days. It's not a detox. It's a time for actually reimagining what you want your life to be like.

    28. CWChris Williamson1:04:45

        Have you considered that longer term, probably in 40 or 50 years' time, we're going to see I used my phone too much or I spent too much time on email or on social media as one of the top deathbed regrets? Have you thought about that?

    29. CNCal Newport1:05:01

        Um, it, yeah, it's, it's an interesting question because I don't, I don't know if it's gonna last 50 years, this, this type of behavior. I, I think we're ... When you look at techno cycles, there's this initial roughly 10-year period where we have exuberance and experimentation, right? So if something really interesting, new technology comes along, it opens up a lot of new opportunities that didn't exist before, the first period is typically one of experimentation and exuberance, right? This is where you tend to see a lot of extreme behaviors. What happens next in the, the tech adoption cycle is that we get past that and begin to settle in and make decisions about, "All right, all right, we're used to this now. How do we actually want to integrate it into our lives long term?" And the hope is when you get to that phase, things become more reasonable. I think that's the transition we're making now with smartphone use. We created this large attention economy. We have these very, uh, appealing apps. We were using them in an experimental exuberant mindset. Those two things came together and suddenly we're looking at these things all the time, especially if we're very young because they, the, the, let's say, like, the adolescent brain has a very hard time trying to deal with socially engineered (laughs) distraction, right? These are unformed brains that, that hyperfocus on sociality, so it's really, really, uh, really, really appealing to them. And so we're using these things all the time. My observation working on digital minimalism is that as of about 2017, most people realized, "Uh, this is not great." Okay. Uh, let's r- r- we're gonna need to bring this back in some as we move forward onto new technologies. And so I'm hoping, uh, that the role that, like, our phone and social media, et cetera, is gonna play in our lives is gonna, is gonna reign back in over the next 10 years or so. So hopefully 50 years from now, it'll be more like looking back at that period with a little bit of interest or maybe even tinged with a bit of embarrassment, "Man, (laughs) th- that 2010 to 2020 was a crazy time," right? It was like the roaring '20s, you know. We were all flapper dancing in speakeasies, um, but we moved on. And I think that's gonna be the case. I mean, I'm not even a big believer in the idea that these, having a small number of giant social media companies that basically dominates...... interaction expression on the internet, the idea that that's going to be long term, I don't even think that's the case. I think even that we're gonna look back at and be like, "That was this weird period where there was four or five companies that just dominated people's interaction expression on the internet." I don't think that's going to be a long term thing either. I think that's also going to be of the moment... And once you no longer have these giant companies with their own private versions of the internet that are trying to monetize attention, a lot of the, uh, the excessive use is gonna go down. And so I'm, I'm much more of an optimist about where we're gonna get.

    30. CWChris Williamson1:07:32

        That's an oddly positive outlook. I thought that you would have had something far more apocalyptic to have been Cassandra about for the future. What is next? What can, what can you talk about or what you're working on next or what we can expect from you over the next couple of years?

Episode duration: 1:09:27