EVERY SPOKEN WORD
125 min read · 24,869 words- 0:00 – 1:19
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- TFTim Ferriss
[upbeat music] Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is a very well-caffeinated Tim Ferriss. Welcome once again to The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Cal Newport. Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, who previously earned his PhD from MIT. His scholarship focuses on the theory of distributed systems, while his general audience writing explores intersections of culture and technology. Newport is the author of seven books, that's a lot of books, man, including most recently, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and A World Without Email. I think some of those allude to how he's able to get so much done. He's also a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast. You can find him online at calnewport.com. And there are a number of things conspicuously absent from this bio, and thank you so much, Cal, for sending me an elegant, streamlined bio. I sometimes get five or six pages that need to get cut down [laughs] dramatically. So welcome to the show. Nice to see you, Cal.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah. Well, thanks for having me.
- 1:19 – 4:38
A lesson from Steve Martin
- TFTim Ferriss
I thought we would start where so many good things start, and that is with Steve Martin. You have written about Steve Martin before on your blog. You are prolific, uh, on your blog, which I very much appreciate, since that's where I started as well, in the blogosphere. What are some of your favorite lessons or any lessons that come to mind for you from Steve Martin? And he's fresh on my mind because I had COVID recently, and while I was recovering, I was watching Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and one of my favorite episodes was with Steve Martin. So let's start there. I'll pass the mic over.
- CNCal Newport
Well, Martin was a big influence on me early on in my career because of that book he wrote, because he wrote his memoir, Born Standing Up, which was a professional memoir. It, it... The whole point of the book, the way he explained it in interviews, was, "I wanted to actually capture how I got from nothing to being a very well-known and influential comedian. I didn't wanna skip the steps." He complained a lot of celebrity biographies would sort of skip the interesting part, that one day they would just be playing at the Copa [laughs] and you'd say, "How did they get there?" Uh, so he wrote this professional biography. It came up, might have been 2007, 2008, somewhere in there. I was a young grad student then. I had started grad school around 2004, 2005. So I was at MIT, I was blogging, I was writing books, I was doing research. And that book was very influential to me, in part, and maybe mainly due to something he never actually said in the book, but he said in a Charlie Rose interview about the book, where Charlie was asking him, like, "Well, what's your-- Let's boil it down. What's your advice? What's your advice for aspiring entertainers?" And Martin said, "I always tell them the same thing, and it's never what they wanna hear. They always wanna hear, 'Here's my tips for finding an agent. Here's my way f- tips for doing an in run around the typical pipeline.'" He says, "My advice instead is always be so good they can't ignore you. If you do that, lots of other good things will come." That, that was his advice. That hit me like a lightning bolt. I mean, I remember at this time as a young scholar, second, third-year PhD student, I published some books, I was thinking up all sorts of schemes. Well, how do I market my work? How do I have a new angle on research that people haven't seen? How do I, maybe if I write, you know, at an, in a cross-discipline way no one else is doing? And that hit me like a lightning bolt. It was basically saying, actually wait. First, just do really good work, and that's hard, and you're probably not that good yet, and you need to practice and get a lot better. That became the foundation for almost everything else that happened in my professional life and so much of what I wrote about. So I, I owe him, I owe him quite a bit for that inspiration.
- TFTim Ferriss
So let's use that as a segue into focusing not just on what you do, but also perhaps beginning to touch on what you don't do. Because just as with Steve Martin, a lot of what I find fascinating, or some of what I find fascinating about you, is what is absent, right? It's kind of [laughs] sort of like the, the, the case of the dog that didn't bark in Sherlock Holmes, right? And really paying attention to absence sometimes. And for those people who have heard a lot of bios on this podcast, social media handles are not prevalent in your bio [laughs] among other things. We don't have to focus directly on that, but
- 4:38 – 7:13
On living “the deep life”
- TFTim Ferriss
let's perhaps start with your definition of the deep life, this phrase, this term. Could you just unpack that for us and, and tell us what that means to you and what the constituent parts are?
- CNCal Newport
The term the deep life is something that emerged in the early pandemic, though the ideas and sentiment had been a long, around for a long time in my writing. The pandemic hits, and I make a lot of changes. Suddenly I'm not seeing my readers, I'm not seeing my students, much more isolated, and I began a podcast so I could connect to people, and I went on a heroic one-month period where I wrote a, an essay every day. And the whole direction of what I was writing about shifted pretty dramatically. I mean, I was in the, the-- At that point, I was finishing up a, a business book, a book about communication in the business world, and I'd been writing much more about the impact of tech on business at that time. I was sort of on a roll with that. And suddenly I found myself in my writing and in major segments [laughs] of the podcast, like, talking about life and building a life of resilience and meaning and depth, and that is where this term, the deep life, came up. My, my audience just really was interested in this, and we in a symbiotic fashion really began to work out what we meant by it. But at a, at a high level, the deep life is a term for one of these things we all know it when we see it, we just haven't really been approaching it systematically. It's when you see someone living a life in such a way that- Uh, it resonates. It feels authentic and interesting and resilient, that they're not the type of person who's gonna look back at the end of their life and say, "What did I do?" We as humans have a deep craving for that, but we often suppress that craving 'cause it's complicated and we don't know what to do about it, and we don't have a lot of cultural support for this idea of crafting a deeper life right now. That's not where the cultural pressures are, so we kind of avoid it and look for the short-term burst of good chemicals, the short-term burst of, "I feel good about this. I got a like on this. This beer makes me feel good," or whatever it is, and we put it aside. And so I tried to excavate it. I think the disruption of the pandemic cleared aside a lot of the noise, and I've been working on that as one of the things I've been talking about quite a bit, is systematically speaking, let's put a, a, like a Cal Newport overly systematic nerd computer science brain to this, can we break down what the deep life is, how you get there, what you need to do, what you don't need to do? And it's really emerged as something I've, I've, I've thought a lot about.
- TFTim Ferriss
All right. We may, we may take a bit of a boomerang path to come back to that, but I think a lot of these
- 7:13 – 20:10
Study Hacks and book deals
- TFTim Ferriss
topics will intersect. So I want to go back in time a bit. So we were just talking about pandemic. Let's go much further back, and part of the reason I want to do that is these days, say, if, if someone comes up to me on the street, it's nine times out of 10 about the podcast. And let's call it in 2010, 2012, if someone emailed me, it would've been about tech investing and startups. But my career, at least in any credible sense, [laughs] didn't start with that, and really, it was The 4-Hour Workweek that put me on any map to speak of. One of my employees knows you and got to know you through Study Hacks, and he moved from overseas to Canada to a university. He went from skating through high school because there really wasn't much required to getting his first Fs, and was panic-stricken because he needed to correct course, ended up finding Study Hacks, your work, and transformed himself into an A student. Is that where you first found your groove, would you say, in terms of public audience and feeling some momentum in your career, or was it before or after that?
- CNCal Newport
You're right. It's a good history to get into, that my, my initial books, the first three books I wrote, were aimed at students. They, they were, they were books roughly speaking of student advice, though the third one I'll touch on in a second began to veer away from that. And actually, that third book intersected with, with you in a, in a way that you may not remember, but I, I think I wrote an essay for your blog back then about one of the ideas. Uh, but I started with student books, and my blog in the early days was called Study Hacks because it was advice for students. And the, the backstory on that is as a high school student during the late '90s, I had started a dot-com company. Uh, this was the first dot-com boom. No one really understood this technology, so there was this brief period where we thought that, uh, if you're young, that must mean that you really know about tech in a way older people didn't.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
So [laughs] it was like a brief moment of insanity where they would give 17-year-olds tens of thousands of dollars to do things we didn't know how to do. But as an effect of that, I was a 17-year-old who knew the business and productivity section of Barnes & Noble very well. So I was reading business books and productivity books because I was trying to figure out what the hell I was doing. Then I went to college and I'm, you know, I'm taking on student loans. I, I wanna do well. I'm, I'm trying to take my, my college career seriously, and I said, "Great. Let me go to Barnes & Noble and get the books about here's how the top students study so I can figure this out," just the way I bought, you know, a David Allen book or a Stephen Covey book to figure out how to do business stuff. And those books weren't really there back then. There was a, a sense in the publishing industry back in the '90s that you had to be, quote-unquote, cool or students would reject the book, and, uh, in that effort, they accomplished the opposite. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
So it was all these books with, like, kooky people on the covers, and it's all about, you know, your crazy roommate and how to deal with the dorm food and, and I just had this idea. I was like, "Look, what we need to do is write a book for college students who wanna know how to do well exactly like a business book. This, this doesn't exist. Don't try to talk about naked roommates and dorm food. Just be like, 'Here's how the top students study.' Like, let's just do this."
- TFTim Ferriss
Don't talk about the naked roommates. That's more of a show, don't tell kind of situation. [laughs] Continue.
- CNCal Newport
I would say so, yeah. You only need to see that once.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. [laughs]
- CNCal Newport
And, and so that's what got me started. So I had this idea, and I was a writer in college. I was doing computer science and I was also writing, and, you know, I was the editor of the humor magazine. I was a columnist for the newspaper. I was really into actually humor writing. But I could write, you know? I'd, I'd trained myself to write in college. And I was, uh, in New York and hanging out with an entrepreneur friend of mine, and he's like, "Well, stop talking about it. Just write the damn book." So I was like, "Okay. [laughs] We'll figure that out." And then I figured out how to... You know, it's not that hard to figure out. I, I, I, in a, sort of a, a Tim Ferriss-ian style, I, I, uh, I found an agent and said, "Look, I, I don't want you to be my agent. I want you to just teach me how this whole industry works. I want you to teach me how can a 20-year-old get a book deal." And there's a very narrow path you would have to navigate as a 20-year-old to get a book deal, and she laid it out for me, "And it has to be a book about students, and you have to know how to write." And we figured it all out, and I literally took this-
- TFTim Ferriss
Let me pause you for one second.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Did she end up becoming your official agent or not?
- CNCal Newport
No, I was true to my word. No, she was a fiction agent.
- TFTim Ferriss
Okay. Got it.
- CNCal Newport
Right? Now, my memory was this was actually... Whose agent was it? Uh, she was a, she was an agent who represented I think maybe Ann Patchett, so like a very well-respected-
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm
- CNCal Newport
... I might have that wrong, but that was my, my memory, was like Bel Canto had come out around this time.
- TFTim Ferriss
So I want you to, don't lose track of this timeline, but how did you get her ... attention? Why would she take this time to sit with you?
- CNCal Newport
So this was a family connection. My memory was my uncle's a journalist, and I said, "Would you be willing to connect me for a..." And, again, this was very Tim Ferriss style the way I went around this. This is why I think we're simpatico. [laughs] Your book hadn't come out yet, but it was very Tim Ferriss style. I said, "Look, uh, one hour. I just wanna talk to them on the phone. I do not want them to be my agent. I'm not gonna try to sell myself to them. I just feel that I need to understand the landscape. I'm not gonna be able to navigate this 'cause it's too atypical, I'm too young. I mean, uh, I'm gonna be ignored." I, I knew there'd be a narrow path. And so I was true to my word. And, and so she was a fiction agent, so she wouldn't have represented me anyways.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- CNCal Newport
That was my memory. So I was very clear. And you know what? She gave me the roadmap. She, she told me, like, "Here is exactly what, what you would have to do." Like am- among other things, she said, "You have to go do commissioned writing." Uh, so I went out and started selling articles to these middling college-focused websites and magazines so I could, I could have commissions. The second thing I did-
- TFTim Ferriss
Now, is that important just to show that you're credible or that there is a market for your writing?
- CNCal Newport
Yes.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- CNCal Newport
They're gonna want writing samples, and they wanted-- they were gonna want writing samples on the type of writing I was gonna do. And if I was gonna be writing a student advice book, I needed advice articles. So I did that. The second thing she said any agent would be worried about when I actually went to find an agent was, you know, is the content gonna be good? And, and so what I did there is I sold a commission for no money, $200 or something, for a, a nothing online college magazine. I don't even remember what it was. I used that commission to do all of my research for my first book. [laughs] So I mean, I, I talked to... Because the first book, I talked to a bunch of Rhodes scholars and Marshall scholar. Like, the premise was I'm gonna talk to the best of the best and extract advice from them. And this article required me probably to talk to two people, and I talked to 20. You know, [laughs] I just, person after person, "Oh, it's for an article. I'm writing this article. Can I get an interview, interview for this article?" And I had to figure out how to find them. But it turns out it's not hard. You look up press releases from colleges to, to learn who had just been awarded a Rhodes scholarship or a Marshall scholarship or a Truman scholarship, and then you could... Often at this point, email directories were private, but all you had to do was find the email address of any student on that campus, and then you said, "Ah, there's the naming convention."
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- CNCal Newport
You know, at Harvard, it's like firstname.lastname@fas.harvard.edu. So then you could figure out how to get to them. And so I did all of the interviews for the first book, and then wrote out the whole annotated table of contents, so I could come, when I started to talk to agents to actually be my agent, I could say, "I can write. Look, I'm an editor of a magazine at college. I write in the paper. Here's articles I've written for student advice. I have a good idea. Here is the whole thing laid out." And then the third thing I did is I, I made the format of my first book as easy as possible. It was 50 short rules, each with a contrarian title, each two to three pages long. So I made the task as tractable as possible. I was not gonna try to do some sort of sophisticated take. And, and so all of those pieces came together. And then the final piece was, how do you find the right agent? And what I did there is I f- I used the acknowledgement sections of target books to see when the author thanked their agent, so I could see what agent was working on what book. And I took the business book whose format I was completely copying for my student book, found the agent of that book, wrote that agent and said, "I wanna do this book, but with student advice instead. Here's all the stuff." And she signed me right before my 21st birthday, and I've been with her for 20 years now, actually. So [laughs] that's how that all started.
- TFTim Ferriss
Wow. That's amazing. So let's see. What year roughly would that have been when you signed to that agent?
- CNCal Newport
So this was 2003. So in the spring of 2003, if, if my memory serves. Uh, I was 20. I turned 21 that June. I was a junior in college. Uh, I signed a contract, a book. I had pitched it as Conquer College, and the head of the agency said, "You can't have the hard K's right after each other." So [laughs] we, we changed it to How to Win at College. And I wrote it the fall of my senior year of college. I would just wake up early and write for 60 to 90 minutes every morning. I just would wake up and write for 60 to 90 minutes. The format of the book was perfect for it, because you could do a draft of one chapter in 60 to 90 minutes, and that was that. And that book, I finished that book while still at college, and it, it came out right after I graduated. I sold another book while still in college. So while that was still in production, I upgraded. I was like, "Okay, I'm now gonna do a book with normal chapters," and this was How to Become a Straight A Student. This, this ended up becoming probably the, the biggest of my student books. You know, I had no idea how much it'd been selling in the background, because it was never, you know, a big bestseller. But it, I checked last week, and that little book has sold like 300,000 copies.
- 20:10 – 23:01
What was Cal’s focus in high school and college?
- TFTim Ferriss
this leads me to ask, and we're gonna bounce all over the place 'cause that is how my brain functions or malfunctions, you graduate from college, what does your first six to 12 months look like out of college?
- CNCal Newport
I mean, the two things I did in college is I wrote and I did computer science, right? So I was a com- real computer guy. I think we actually overlap- When I was in high school, I went to high school in a small town near Princeton.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- CNCal Newport
And so I think this may be even overlapped when you were there as an undergrad. I ran out of computer science to take, and so I was taking computer science at Princeton in the university classes when I was still in high school. So I went to Dartmouth College and was really just doing very well into computer science. So I was really, uh, like a locked in sort of computer science student and so I rolled right out of Dartmouth into MIT. And so I was on a-
- TFTim Ferriss
Got it. You went directly. What type of focus did you have within computer science? What were you most interested in and focused on?
- CNCal Newport
As an undergrad, it's just you're learning everything. The research I was doing as an undergrad was more network systemsy, and I made a big leap when I went to MIT. I was mainly being interv- You know, you, you interview, the way it works is, uh, potential PhD advisors. You go and you meet with them and, and then they, they essentially make you offers. Like, "Okay, come ... I'm gonna make you an offer to come join my group" And so you go and meet with them and, and it was mainly the systems, the systems-oriented professors who were meeting with me. But I had been a real big fan, you know, I wrote, uh, of a Richard Feynman. I'd read like the James Gleick biography, Genius. I was a fan of John von Neumann, of Einstein. I had, I had in my mind just this, this image of mathematical research, of standing at a whiteboard and proving a proof. It just was incredibly romantic for me, even though math wasn't really considered my strong suit. And so there was one theory professor who said, "I need a systems person to come to my group to help build wireless network systems" And I'd done wireless network research. So I, I went to her group and then just pulled a fast one, and just immediately started trying to write theory papers and became a theoretician. And so, you know-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
... I haven't programmed a computer since I arrived, [laughs] since 2004 when I left school and went to MIT. I joined a theory group at MIT and am, uh, have been a theoretician ever since. So I, I, I haven't touched a computer since really.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] All right, so if we, if we look at programming though and we look at writing prose, if we look at poetry, there are some similarities, right? And depe- depends on who you talk to of course, but I, I think of, for instance, an artist named Dmitri Cherniak who works in, in generative art predominantly at the moment. And he put up a post recently on Twitter where he showed a screenshot of his code and he said, "This is my art."
- 23:01 – 30:32
Developing a writing style
- TFTim Ferriss
So it occurs to me that you can strive for and find elegance and beauty in all of those different domains. So there's perhaps more overlap than one might expect, at least from a first principles perspective. You mentioned in passing that, "I trained myself to write in college." I wanna hear more about that [laughs] because I would imagine it wasn't this sloppy, ad hoc approach, just g- given what I think I know of you. How did you train yourself to write?
- CNCal Newport
One of the things I always tell people, because it was my experience, is that in order to get the deliberate practice aspect of skill acquisition applied to writing, like if you wanna get better at writing fast, you have to be writing for editing and you have to be writing in the context of acceptance and rejections. Because writing is one of these things where everyone can do it well enough that if you're mainly just writing on your own, so I'm writing in a journal, I'm writing a blog, I'm doing National Novel Writing Month, it's just me, you know, working on my novel, you don't necessarily get that stretch that's going to improve your skills. And so the thing that mattered for me is that I was writing for editing and for acceptance and rejection. So-
- TFTim Ferriss
For editing meaning writing for an editor. You have a, you have a reader.
- CNCal Newport
An editor who's gonna edit it and also will reject it if it's not good. And so this is actually why writing for the, the humor publication was a big deal. I mean, you probably remember from your time in, in Ivy League schools in particular, there's a real culture around humor writing because it used to be, you know, back in the days where everything was the, the, the sort of old, old boys network, the vast majority of, of comedy writers for shows like SNL or, or The Tonight Show, they were a lot, they were coming out of these Ivy League humor societies.
- TFTim Ferriss
What is the name of the humor magazine at Dartmouth?
- CNCal Newport
At Dartmouth, it's The Jack-O-Lantern.
- TFTim Ferriss
The Jack-O-Lantern. And people may have heard the term Lampoon. The Lampoon is, is out of Harvard, and then you have-
- CNCal Newport
Yep
- TFTim Ferriss
... a number of different magazines at Princeton, and so on.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah, exactly. And then they all have these huge old histories, you know. So, like, Dr. Seuss did cartoons for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern in the 1920s and, you know, anyways. So that's a very competitive world. You would pitch pieces, and if they were funny, they would go. So they, back then it would be, you know, print magazines. You would pitch pieces, and if they were funny enough, they would get in. And if they weren't, they wouldn't. It was th- it was just starkly competitive. And then I wrote a humor column for the paper, but it was the same thing. To become a columnist, they would say, "No, no, no. Yeah, we'll do that one. No. Yeah, we'll do that one." And if you got five in the paper, you had the, the possibility of doing the columns. So I think that really stretched my skill, and that helped. That helped. And, and, you know, I'll say the two things that helped my writing the most, to your original point here, is, A, humor writing turns out to be incredibly useful for any type of writing because humor writing is all about the, the timing, the pacing, and the music of the words. You, you have to replicate the timing of a stand-up comedian using grammar and word choice and having to get the right rhythm to set up the punchline, wait a beat, and nail it. You have to do that all with words. That gives you an incredible facility with sentence crafting. And so, I mean, I'll tell you, like, today as a writer for The New Yorker where... Which is very craft-focused, you know, they really care. Writing craft is a really big deal over at The New Yorker. The training I did as a humor writer is incredibly applicable because you, you hear, you hear the words as music and the pausing and the rhythm. It's, you, you have to actually, the performance of the reading, you think a lot about it, and that actually really helps over there. And then mathematics, just like programming, that has been the other key to my success [laughs] because if you do proofs, for example, it's, you develop this sense where, ugh, it's not right. This doesn't work. The pieces don't fit. And then when the pieces fit, it's the, the chorus of angels, right? Like, your mind is like-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
... I don't like when things don't quite fit. And when they do, it's dopamine coming out of your ears. It led to my style of writing, which is, my advice writing's very intricate, you know. It's lay out the generative theory that lays out these pieces, and these pieces all fit together. And you might not notice it consciously when you read it, but part of the experience of my writing is that all of the pieces I'm laying out there all click together into a whole where everything fits nicely, and this is symmetric with this, and this makes sense here, and nothing is hanging out. And it, it reduces this cognitive drag that happens sometimes when writing's a little bit less, the ideas are a little bit less formed, and it makes it harder to write. But I think that's been a, a bit of a secret sauce in my work, is that it's, it's cognitively pleasing because your brain appreciates the fact that sort of nerdishly and obsessively all the pieces actually fit together.
- TFTim Ferriss
So a few things. Number one, I think we might have to call this podcast Cal Newport: A Chorus of Angels. [laughs] That's, that may be where we go with this, just to get people in the door. And the second is what you're talking about in terms of symmetry and structure. If anybody listening is interesting ex- in exploring that further, there's a book called Draft Number Four by John McPhee, who's a staff writer at The New Yorker and just a behemoth of a craftsman, and, uh, really, really thinks about structure a lot and lays out structure of pieces graphically. So Draft Number Four makes for a really fun read if you are willing to go into the weeds and be as, as a super nerd when it comes to that type of topic. I want to ask you about humor writing. So I was the graphics editor, so an illustrator and graphics editor at The Princeton Tiger, which is-
- CNCal Newport
Mm-hmm
- TFTim Ferriss
... kind of the equivalent of The Jack-O-Lantern. And just a piece of trivia for people, uh, for, for whom this will make any sense. I took that job, or I, I applied to that job more accurately, because, uh, Jim Lee had previously held that post when he was a student, and Jim Lee at the time was one of my favorite comic book pencillers, or just beforehand had been one of my favorite comic book pencillers, has, had rebooted the X-Men. I think he's now at DC. Still need to get him on the podcast. And I would sit at this desk, and at Princeton there's this street called Nassau Street with all these gigantic mansions called eating clubs of different names, and they all have their particular personalities. And, you know, F. Scott Fitzgerald was at Ivy over here, and JFK was also at Ivy, and then this person was at such and such. It, uh, so it has this storied and bizarre history. But when, when he would go out, I, [laughs] I don't think this is speaking out of school. It's pretty funny. People go out, I, I wanna say it was Thursdays and Saturdays, and just get hammered. And I didn't get hammered too much, but I opened up the drawer at one point of this desk, and I found drawings [laughs] that Jim Lee had done clearly when he had come back from being completely hammered. [laughs] At least that was my impression, and I was like, "Oh my God, these are treasures." And I don't know if I ever told anyone about them, because I didn't want them to disappear. They were like my little secret in this desk. But the reason, these, the reason I brought this up is that the, the head editor of the magazine at the time ended up shortly thereafter going and becoming the editor-in-chief of Maxim magazine, which at the time was a very, very big deal. So it just kinda goes to show you how quickly you can jump.
- 30:32 – 36:08
On writing humor
- CNCal Newport
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
My question for you is How one can practice humor writing or cultivate an awareness of that timing and so on that you're talking about if they don't, and most people won't, have access to working at such a magazine? Do you have any thoughts?
- CNCal Newport
Yeah. I mean, uh, again, it has to be for editing, right? So you have to find a place to submit with humor writing.
- TFTim Ferriss
You need someone who can reject you and help you improve.
- CNCal Newport
You need someone who can reject you, yeah. And, and because it's like the little things matter. I w- I would... So one of the things that The Jack-O-Lantern did is we would also do sort of Onion style once or twice a year fake newspaper. So there was a daily newspaper at, at Dartmouth called The Dartmouth, and we would print the paper that was exactly the same format, and we would just change like the U to a V or something, and we would put it in the machines where, uh, [laughs] the regular newspaper was.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
But it was all Onion style. And I was good at Onion style stuff 'cause there's a certain like dryness that has to work. And for whatever reason, I have this memory. I, I did a piece for it once, and so timing matters. So I don't, I don't remember exactly the title, but it was something like, "Team from Amish University Places Last at Robotics Competition."
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
Which you gotta just, there's a straight laceness of it. And I, and I remember I wrote this thing, I wrote it as a, maybe a sophomore or something like this, and it was just, it had to be the exact rightness of dry. And I remember the editor came in and added some extra things to it, like some quotes like, "Oh, and then Jebediah said..." Like I had, I had made it really dry, where I was trying to do it very reportorial style and it, like at some point you f- you figure out they put like tinfoil on a cat or something. Like it was something, but it was just, it would be revealed very dryly. And I just remember he added a few like qu- quotes from some of the people, and I felt like the whole thing fell apart, you know?
- TFTim Ferriss
Huh.
- CNCal Newport
I was like, "That's out of the character. You're breaking the dryne- like, there's a whole whatever." But the only way you're gonna get that type of fine-tuning is submit things, have it be rejected, have things be accepted, and then try to understand why the thing they added is ripping up your [laughs] like, this is just I, this is making me, it's just not right. I think that really matters. And then the other thing for comedy writing is you have to consume a lot of stand-up comedy, I think. You gotta see the timing. The timing of the top stand-up comedians is th- actually the foundation on which m- all humor writing comes out of. Like, at the time when I was doing my column for the paper, my column, I tried to ape Dave Barry's style.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- CNCal Newport
So I don't know if you remember Dave Barry. I mean, he-
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, I was just thinking of Dave Barry. Yeah.
- CNCal Newport
He won a Pulitzer for his c- his comedy column, which is crazy.
- TFTim Ferriss
That's incredible. Yeah.
- CNCal Newport
Incredible, yeah. But he was a timing guy.
- TFTim Ferriss
Dave Barry's great. Do you have any favorite books? Or if people wanted to start with something, do you have any suggestions?
- CNCal Newport
Just read his collections. He has, uh, his collections are fantastic. His whole thing was the setup, and then he would come in with the absurd punch to the gut. So he would, he would set you up and it'd be kind of dry, the timing would be just right, beat, and then something completely absurd, and then he would just keep-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- CNCal Newport
... rolling. So he'd, he'd be writing about, it would be mundane, like people bring too much stuff on the plane to put into the overhead compartment. But I still remember-
- TFTim Ferriss
Right
- CNCal Newport
... and, and at some point in his piece, there's people with, you know, full grand pianos and a, a, you know, such and such brand John Deere yard tractor that they're trying to get up there. It's like the precision and the absurdity that he just, boom, comes out of nowhere and hits you with it that, that has a good... Simon Rich is really good at that style.
- TFTim Ferriss
I don't know Simon Rich.
- CNCal Newport
He's a younger guy. He was, he was at SNL, I believe. Uh, he, I think he's a Lampoon. So he came out of the Lampoon, he's at SNL, and he does some Shouts and Murmurs for The New Yorker that's hilarious. He, he's sort of the, I think he's the modern, you know, young version of Dave Barry. It's a little edgier than Dave Barry is.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- CNCal Newport
But he, he, the absurdity... And, and what he does really well, not to geek out too much on, on comedy writing, but he does the-
- TFTim Ferriss
Nope, let's do it. Don't hold back. [laughs]
- CNCal Newport
The amplification of absurdity. So he'll set up an absurd situation, he'll take it very seriously, and he'll be very dry about it, and it just, the absurdity of what's going on increases. And like the Simon Rich, uh, his, what he's really known for is, uh, you end up in just, like, the most absurd places, but without ever losing the dryness. So he had this great piece during COVID about, like, what should you do if you're... Like an advice column. Like, what should I do if my kid's afraid of, you know, monsters in the closet? And like, at first it starts off with kind of reasonable advice, and then it becomes pretty clear that this, this column e- exists in a world in which there has been a portal that has opened up and, like, savage monsters are actually out there in the world and are coming in and taking and devouring children. And like by the end of the article, it's all about, like, you know, uh, uh, y- you're, you're, have your shotgun and you're explaining to your kid that you're gonna die for the cause as you leave, you know, to go fight the monsters that have been whatever. But he keeps the dry, all of that builds up within the idiom of a Q&A advice column. And, and it's great. I love it. And, and in the end, the great thing about Simon, unlike Barry, is like it's actually a whole metaphor for, like, the stress and anxiety parents were feeling about COVID and how, like, we're trying to, you know, use the idioms of normal news while everyone's terrified. And so there was, there was a, there was a heart to it that was really sophisticated. But yeah, that's the dream. Uh, maybe I should have done that. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, I'd say, you know, never say never. I am gonna throw one more hat in the ring, and that is Bill Bryson. And for people who want a place to start, A Walk in the Woods, which is Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. It's just an outstanding, outstanding book. Also very, very good with timing.
- 36:08 – 43:01
Fresh thoughts on slow productivity
- TFTim Ferriss
And I, I want to perhaps just return to, and I think these are related on, on some level, a term that, that I have in front of me. I suppose I'm coming back to it visually. I haven't mentioned it yet. But could you speak to slow productivity? And, uh, you know, perhaps you could, could speak to, uh, John Gribbin's book, The Scientists. You mentioned a bunch of scientists earlier in this conversation. Because you, you strike me also as kind of a proof case or a test case Of slow productivity in a world where it is thought by and large to not be possible or to just be outdated. So could you just expand on that in any way that makes sense to you?
- CNCal Newport
Well, I mean, I'll tell you, and this is literally true, what I was doing in the moments before we logged on to do this discussion right now, I was, I was in the other room in my office this year with a notebook working on slow productivity, notes on slow productivity, because I'm thinking about maybe writing a book on it, but I'm still in the, the earlier stages. And, and I had gone for a walk earlier and had been developing some new thoughts, and I wanted to get them down. So I was actually pretty frantically taking notes in my notebook, uh, as I was w- like looking at the clock like I got to get in to, [chuckles] to talk to Tim. So when I say it's fresh on my mind, I mean, it's literally fresh on my mind. And, and so that's a big caveat. That means this is not a fully baked idea. It, when it's, it's-
- TFTim Ferriss
I love half-baked ideas.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah. So the ingredients are swirling. So here I'll pitch you what I wrote down an hour ago. [laughs] So, so as of an hour ago, this is the way... Because I, what I do when I'm thinking about ideas is I, I try to basically re- repitch them out from scratch, and I do that again and again, and, and each time I do it, there's overlap with the previous times, but also new pieces. And, and that's how it polishes. It's why it takes me six months to a year to get, for example, a book idea ready to even propose. Like it's just, this is the, like we talked about the math mind, like I, I need the pieces to make sense. So my, my, my current take on slow productivity is the problem itself. So here's the problem we're facing. The human brain is wired to-- It's, it's good at making a plan for executing something that you think is important, and it makes you feel good when you complete that plan. Uh, this is critical to humans, why we're different than a lot of animals. We can, we can actually come up with a plan to do something and feel motivation to do it and feel good when we actually... You know, we need to fix the fence, we fix the fence, the cattle can't get out, we feel really good. The issue is if you don't do anything, let's say I'm, I'm not making any plans, I don't want to do anything, we know that makes you feel terrible. So you take away people's autonomy, their, their sense of efficacy, and they're miserable. We know that. But if you put too much on people's plates so that now you have more on your plate, more obligations to which you have some sort of ascent to complete than you can easily conceive actually all getting done, you short-circuit that drive. Just like your drive for hunger is really important, but if you eat like a huge amount of junk food, it, it short-circuits the drive, and you end up unhealthy. So when we have way too much on our plate, more than we can easily imagine how it's going to get done, it makes us really unhappy because we're short-circuiting a cognitive drive here, and we get sort of anxious and overwhelmed, and it doesn't feel good. And, and so we can't treat humans like we would a, a computer processor. We want a computer processor, you want to pipeline as many instructions as possible that are sitting there so that not a single cycle is wasted because you just want to make sure that you always have something to do. But for the human brain, that huge pipeline of things that are waiting to be done actually makes the brain unhappy, right? And so our solution to this type of overload, we have too much on our plate in work and in our life admin as well, our solution has been to, to, uh, use fast productivity. So fast productivity are, are like tactics and systems for increasing the amount of things you finish on the scale of days and weeks. So how do I get more stuff? This is what all productivity software is about. Lower friction, easier access to information, take out seven steps in the process of getting this meeting scheduled. We want to maximize the number of things we can execute on the scales of days and weeks. My emerging concept of slow productivity says shift that scale up to years, months and years. I want to maximize the amount of meaningful stuff I get done in the next five years. It completely changes the game in a way that becomes very compatible with the human brain. Because now suddenly, while I'm going to try to do a lot less, the stuff I'm doing, I'm doing it on a, a larger timescale, so maybe I'm working a lot on it this week, and then I go a month without doing it at all, and I have a hard day today and an off day tomorrow. You have the seasonality up and down rhythms, which is a better fit for the human brain. You get rid of the sense of overload because if you want to produce, you know, a good book in the next two years, that's a very different set of initiatives than I want to do as many writerly related promotional things as possible this week. Like that latter could be a real source of stress and overload. The former can be a real source of fulfillment, and you, you tend to produce things of higher value because when you're just focusing on maximizing what you can do in the scale of days or weeks, it diverts the sustained application of energy and attention needed to actually do the things that move the needle or that you're proud of. And so I think it's a real issue. I think in the workplace, we have to completely rethink work allocation. Our current mode of doing this is completely incompatible with slow productivity. We basically just throw an unlimited amount of work at individuals and say, "It's up to you to self-regulate." It's an impossible task to ask. And so, you know, I had this New Yorker piece recently called Why Do We Work Too Much? And I sort of make this argument in there that if we have to self-regulate, we're just going to end up with 20% too much on our plate. We're going to let stress be the feedback function that slows us down. And in our personal lives, we probably need to be doing significantly less, but the stuff we're doing, do it better and over longer time periods. So I, so [sighs] there's just this fundamental mismatch with our brain that's happening right now, that this, this epidemic of busyness, I think is causing issues because of its mismatch with our brain, and maybe something like slow productivity is the way out of it.
- TFTim Ferriss
So let's, let's look at some, some beacons of hope perhaps, but we're gonna, we're gonna look at the ghosts of Christmas past first. [laughs] So very briefly, in The Scientists by John Gribbin, you wrote on your blog, this was 2021, I think it was, uh, towards the end of July, that you're, that you're reading his magisterial tome, I'm not quoting, uh, verbatim, The Scientists, and you're up to page 190, which is you're only up to Isaac Newton. And I'm just gon- Now I am gonna read. Verbatim, "Even early on, I'd become intrigued by a repeated observation. Though the scientists profiled in Gribbin's book are highly productive," in quotation marks, "by any intuitive definition of this term, the daily pace of their work was incredibly slow by any modern standards of professional effectiveness." And this comes then to, I'm skipping ahead, what you just said, "When
- 43:01 – 50:41
Contemporaries who have mastered slow productivity
- TFTim Ferriss
viewed at the fast scale of days and weeks, the famed scientists in Gribbin's book seem spectacularly unproductive. Years would pass during which little progress was made on epic theories. Even during periods of active work, it might take months for important letters to induce a reply or for news of experiments to make it across a fractured Europe." Now I'm gonna ask you a follow-up question on that piece. I'm only gonna read a little bit more. "When we shift, however, to the slow scale of years, these same scientists suddenly become immensely productive." And last line I'll read, "No one remembers Newton's lazy lockdowns, but his Principia achieved immortality." And I'll ask a few questions, and then feel free to tackle them or answer a different question however you like. So the first is, I would imagine some people hear this say, "That's great, but we just live in different times. Like th- we are contending with different problems and a volume of stimulation that these people could not even conceive of. And had there been TikTok and Twitter and so on, perhaps Newton never would've achieved anything [laughs] you know, which is [laughs] maybe, maybe not. And that's why I wanted to just note that I wanted to ask about important letters taking months to induce a reply and so on. They had some, some inbuilt friction in the system that has been removed in certain ways, and you could perhaps reintroduce it. But the question this leads me to, which is really the real question, is are there any people who come to mind for you who are more contemporary, they could be dead, uh, but let's just say within the last 20 years, who stick out as being particularly good at slow productivity? Could be a category of person, but do we have a, do we have any contemporary examples?
- CNCal Newport
There's a couple places where we, we still see a lot of slow productivity. So one is fiction writers and in particular literary fiction writers, but also some genre fiction writers. This is one of the few places where you're allowed to basically say, "Leave me alone. I'll come back when I have a book." And so if we look, for example, at Dave Eggers, the novelist Dave Eggers, he works in a, he works in a house on a laptop that doesn't have internet connectivity, so there's no Wi-Fi. And he just basically works 9:00 to 5:00. He's pretty hard to reach. Uh, he talks to a couple times a week, from what I understand. He does have like assistants to deal with some of the logistical stuff. But he just, you can't really-- He doesn't do much but work on, on his books. Another example is, you know, Neal Stephenson. I-- he wrote that great essay, you know, years ago, Why I'm a Bad Correspondent.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, it's so good. So good.
- CNCal Newport
It's so good. I- I mean, it, it, it's inspiring, but basically his point was... He's mellowed out some, by the way. I remember going to see him do a book publicity tour, uh, back in Cambridge and, and back then, that was the only time he would leave was to do publicity tours, and he seemed so upset that he had to be there [laughs] because he just wanted to be writing. And he really didn't want nerd-- He hated nerd questions about like the canon of his books. But anyways, but the bad correspondent was like, "If I answer all your messages and go to all your conferences and answer all your emails, what will I have in the end? I'll have like a couple thousand messages I sent to individuals. If I instead don't do that and write a book that I'm really proud of, then maybe, you know, a million people are gonna read that book. And so my impact will be bigger if I ignore your message so that I can be basically writing something for a lot of people." John Grisham is another example. I went down this rabbit hole recently. He, not long ago, his longtime assistant retired, and he didn't hire anyone else because he didn't need one. He has created this life, from what I understand, he has created this life where basically his editor knows how to get in touch with him. Outside of his two weeks of book publicity, you can't reach him. He doesn't do things. I mean, I, I know he does do some things. He does do some political fundraising stuff. But basically, he says, "I write my books once a year." A- and he, he said, "I didn't need to rehire my assistant because not enough people knew my phone number for it to make any sense." And, you know, so basically, he just set that up, and, and he put his energy other places. He, uh, he built a bunch of baseball fields and became the commissioner of the Little League in the, one of the, the town he lived. So he, he put a lot of time into that. He's really into coaching. So that was inspiring. And then if you look at mathematicians and scientists, like, that are really at the cutting edge, they're just getting after it, you know. They're not on, they're not on Twitter tweeting all day long for the most part. Uh, putting aside, let's say, like public health stuff during COVID, but for the most part, the top mathematicians, the top theoretical computer scientists I know, the really leading edge lab scientists, they're doing their thing, you know. They're, they're going for their Nobel. They're trying to get their fields. They're trying to, they're trying to do the work. And so th- that's another category I think that you see where this is not for me. So I, I, I take great inspiration from your novelist that really can just disappear. I collect stories, by the way, of dual home professional writers who live-- It's always just they live in a city in the winter, and then they have like a farm they go to in the summer. It's just my dream, you know, one day. So yeah, there's people out there doing it, and there are people like, and like me. Like you, you hinted at it before. It's like the weirdest thing about me as far as anyone is concerned is that I've never had a social media account. And it turns out it's allowed... Like today everyone understands it, but until like a minute ago, people thought I was literally insane. And it's fine. I had friends. I knew what was going on in the world and sold a couple books. So [laughs] you know, it's like I, I think we tell ourselves that like we're stuck in this way of existence. We're not really stuck. We have a lot of options.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] Let me just add a few footnotes. Thank you for that. So Neal Stephenson, for people who don't know, uh, first of all, N-E-A-L Stephenson, S-T-E-P-H, and He'll pop up as soon as you type in N-E-A-L. But if you've heard the term metaverse, probably came from his novel Snow Crash. He's written many. Seveneves. My favorite is probably Cryptonomicon, which I think is a rare choice as a favorite, but personally I think-
- CNCal Newport
Well, not in my world. Computer scientists love Cryptonomicon.
- TFTim Ferriss
Ah. It's so prescient in so many ways. I mean, if you look at, you know, cryptographic, sort of cr- cryptography leading into decentralized currencies and so on, like he is, he has spotted so many things around corners 10, 15, 20 years in advance. It is, it is really quite mind-boggling. Uh, so [laughs] Neil Stephenson's piece Why I Am A Bad Correspondent, I'll put it in the show notes as well. I was going to include Why I'm A Bad Correspondent in this book that I was working on a few summers ago that I ended up canceling [laughs] which was The No Book. The, the placeholder title was The No Book, and I kept writing and writing and writing this book on how to say no and coming up with compelling reasons for why I should not write the book [laughs] myself. So it was kind of this recursive situation where I ended up saying no to The No Book. But the Why, Why I'm A Bad Correspondent is outstanding, so we'll put that in the show notes. You mentioned writers, you mentioned scientists, and, uh, then one of the things that is perhaps weird or that people consider weird about you and that, and that is that you don't have social media accounts. So I'm going to ask you just to let this bake for a minute what other things people would consider unusual or strange, right? Um, and, and you can take that in any direction you want, but about you, your workflow, how you work, how you live, anything.
- 50:41 – 55:14
Resisting Facebook and social media
- TFTim Ferriss
But before we get to that, the no social media. So found a GQ piece on you and digital minimalism, and, uh, you mentioned that you had a tech company during the dot-com bubble. And you've joked that you originally didn't sign up for Facebook because maybe there was... I'll just read the quote. "There was probably a little bit of petty jealousy," Newport says, "like, 'Oh, why is his company so popular? I'm not gonna give him the satisfaction of using his product.'" So did you commit... Is that just purely in jest or did you early on commit to that and then it just worked for you so you continued? In o- in other words, was it like a first principles decision or did it start off in a different way?
- CNCal Newport
Through the sands of time, I'm trying to remember, 'cause I had to go back and do some research and I, I did confirm that Facebook arrived at my college in 2004, and I, I confirmed that was true, and that was the first major... There's things before that. There was Friendster, et cetera, but those were more niche. Like, there wasn't a real pressure to sign up for those.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- CNCal Newport
My memory, and again, this is through the sands of time, is that there was two factors why I didn't sign up for Facebook. One was just what you were talking about. So, so Mark Zuckerberg was a contemporary of mine. He was a computer science student at Harvard at the time that I was a computer science student at Dartmouth. We had both started companies around the same time. His has been a little bit more successful, so [laughs] I think, you know, like Facebook ended up a little bit more successful than Princeton Web Solutions, uh, which is what [laughs] which is what I had been running. I mean, you know, comparable if you just add seven zeros. Uh, [laughs] so there was some of that because, like especially I remember like all the women I knew and they were, they were like, "Oh, this is so fun. I wanna be on there." I'm like, "Why are they interested in this guy's service?" There was some of that. The other thing, and I think this is true 'cause I have a really strong memory of this, I have a weird, it's not a phobia, but, um, an inability to do rank list, right? So if you ask me, "Hey, what's your favorite book?" Uh, which I get asked a lot on podcast, I don't know how to answer it. If you say, "What's your f-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
... two favorite movies," I can't... It's, uh, there's, there's probably a name for it.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, our rapid fire questions are gonna be great towards the end of this. Continue.
- CNCal Newport
Oh, I free- you'll see.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
You'll see. I'll free- I freeze on these all the time. Or if I know they're coming, like I, I've done Ezra Klein's show a few times. I learn like these are-
- TFTim Ferriss
You're like, "Sorry. Sorry, you're cutting out. I'm sorry. What was that?"
- CNCal Newport
Yeah. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
"Yeah, your, your connection's really bad." [laughs]
- CNCal Newport
They're all great. It's like enumeration innumeracy, if I'm gonna invent the word, and that was what early Facebook was, was you would... Your profile was a favorite quote, favorite movies, favorite books. It was a lot of Erving Goffman Presentation of Self type sociology. You had to decide, like what am I gonna say my favorite movie is, my favorite quote to try to create a presentation of self that was... And I c- I can't do that. I c- I can't. So I really remember it was the combination of those two things. I was like, "No, this isn't for me." And I gotta tell you, all it took was a few years of separation that suddenly I felt like Margaret Mead among the Polynesian islands because-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
... I was the only person not using this, and it was so interesting. Like the, from a remove it was like really interesting and I was like, "Okay, I think I'm just gonna run with this for a while." And I gotta tell you, from the outside it seemed more and more absurd. Not that the services seemed absurd in isolation. The thing that seemed absurd, my memory, was this presumption of universality.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- CNCal Newport
That these are technologies that everyone has to use and it's weird if you don't. I thought they seemed kinda niche. Like they're kinda cool and if you're into technology or Web 2.0, maybe it's interesting. I had nothing against them, but I was really wary about this rising presumption that everyone has to use it. And I, you know, I'm an internet nerd from the early days and I'm like, "I don't know that we should consolidate the internet into two or three companies where they built their own private shadow version of the internet that they control." We already have the internet. Do we have to use these private walled garden versions of the internet? And, and this idea that it was weird not to use it, that's really the thing that got to me after... Th- that was the thing that really probably made me an advocate in the skeptical column among social media. It was not that I thought what was happening on Twitter was bad. Um, it was why is it such a big deal that I don't use it? So that's, that's really what, what pushed me into a place of, you know, something weird's going on in our culture.
- TFTim Ferriss
Thank God your personal Everest is putting together lists of favorite books and movies. [laughs]
- CNCal Newport
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
If, if you hadn't had that problem, who knows where you'd be? God, you'd be-- you could be just another troll on Reddit or something. So that's a good thing that you had that friction.
- 55:14 – 1:02:50
Crafting the lives we desire
- TFTim Ferriss
Let's shift gears a little bit 'cause I wanna continue to focus on the unusual, and unusual not in any sense of impracticality, but uncommon, uncommon things that you do or don't do. What is your roles and values document? Do you still have a roles and values document?
- CNCal Newport
I do, yeah, yeah. It's, it's, it's part of what I pitch. I, I pitch this multi-scale approach to planning things out. And when I say pitch, I mean, you know, like on my podcast or my articles. Roles and values are at the top, and this comes right out of Stephen Covey, Sharpening the Saw, Seven Habits. Here are the different roles of my life, and here are the values that define how I wanna execute each of these roles. There's professor, you know, family, parent, right? You know, whatever the-- writer, whatever the role, community member, and here are my values. And, and there they are, and I look at 'em and I refine 'em, and you have to think about 'em. And then, and then in my scheme, y- y- you look at those when you then create your plan for the, the current quarter 'cause you wanna be in a line with your, your values when you make that plan. And then you look at your quarterly plan when you create your plan for the week 'cause you want your week, what you do this week, to be in line with what your bigger vision is for the quarter. And then when you build your plan for each day, figuring out what to do with your time, that's influenced by your weekly plan, and there you have a thread that connects everything you're doing indirectly, but without any breaks in the links all the way back up to your values. So w- what I'm doing right now is a multi-link connection all the way back up to here's the things I care about.
- TFTim Ferriss
All right, let's get into some specifics, more specifics here. You've written, uh, very well on, and I'm, I'm go- I'm going to get the phrasing imperfect, but you've written very well on how many meetings are created or scheduled because people otherwise don't have good systems for keeping track of things. In other words, they're afraid of forgetting to do something, and therefore, they just drop a meeting in the calendar with no clear agenda because at least it functions to prevent the sand from slipping through the fingers. You have this document, the roles and values document. If I were to create a role-- roles and values document, say, in Google Drive, I would be super excited. I would focus on it. I might look at it the next day, but if I did not have some system for forcing me to look at it, evaluate it, revise it, it would, it would become lost very, very quickly. I would forget I ever put it together. So could you just walk us through how you ensure that doesn't happen for you personally with the roles and values documents and then furthermore with the quarterly plan and so on? What does your workflow or your flow look like for those things?
- CNCal Newport
Well, I'm a big believer in, in what I call rooted productivity, right? So there has to be somewhere, I call it the root document, that says, "These are the, the, the core big picture systems that I execute in my life," and therefore, the only commitment I really have to make is that I will follow this root document, that this is the commitment. Either I'm someone who follows this root document or my life is chaos. And then that root document is what lays out what, what I'm talking about here. It lays out that multi-scale planning, that these are the types of planning I do. There's a few other things that lays out. It lays out that I do David Allen style full capture. I'm a big believer about not having open loops. A couple other things-
- TFTim Ferriss
Sorry to interrupt, but I will.
- CNCal Newport
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
Do you-- So do you read that every morning? Is this like your boot up sequence?
- CNCal Newport
It's internalized now.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- CNCal Newport
It's written down, and my listeners do the same thing. Like, we, we put it in a directory, call it root, you know, and, and you put all your planning documents in that directory. And you don't have to look at it every day once you-- You internalize it pretty quickly, but just knowing it's there, and you can assess yourself as am I following that or am I not? And it's a binary. And then everything else comes out of it. So we call it a root because then the tree of all these different systems and stuff grow out of it. And then you might be really nitpicking with all these other small little systems, but they all eventually connect back to the root. A- and to me, that's a really big deal, the, the, the biggest decision you make if you're gonna live a deep life, right? Because, like, productivity in isolation, I don't even know what that means. Who cares? But if you're gonna live a deep life, like, the ultimate original commitment is I'm going to commit to discipline in the sense of things I am going to do on a regular basis because they matter even if I don't feel like it. And, like, that is the biggest binary zero to one flip that happens in, in crafting a life. What you commit to, that evolves over time. You might find, like, this, this is a bad idea. I've been trying to, whatever, write down notes on a thing once a day, and that's not really working, and it all evolves over time. But the zero to one commitment is do I have some sort of structure I'm committing to with the goal of making my life deeper or am I winging it? That's the zero to one bit that I think matters more than any other.
- TFTim Ferriss
Are there any particular levers, actions, anything that have helped facilitate that for you personally, sort of disproportionately so, right? And, and I'll just-- I'll share a few things for myself, which are I, I think sometimes embarrassingly primitive for me to even talk about because I, I think I'll [laughs] some of my readers and listeners just imagine, like, I wake up every morning with this, like, mental karate chop and just, like, matrix my way through the day with all these sophisticated systems, and that is not really how it plays out. [laughs] And I will say, though, that there are a few things. Uh, one is looking at my Looking at my calendar on an annual basis and trying to block out extended periods of time for being offline. And by extended, that's one, two, or three weeks, and ensuring that I have hopefully something of at least a week once a quarter. So I'm actually leaving tomorrow for three weeks off the grid, and I will have no Wi-Fi and no phone for three weeks. And that's important to me on a multitude of levels. Number one, it allows me to check in and see how comfortable I am with myself when I am not over-busied. It provides me with time to reflect without the ability to indulge in the temptation to go on Twitter or check something. [laughs] So I don't, I don't need to rely on self-control, in other words. I'm sort of saved from myself. It allows my f- system, physiologically, time to kinda reboot and recover. And it also forces me to put in place or revisit systems that allow me to be gone for three weeks. So as an example, uh, figuring out right now th- and yesterday and today that my usual checks and balances with team members and assistants for wire approvals isn't going to work while I'm gone. So we need to upgrade those systems so that we don't have any issues, because my assistant, unless there is a, an emergency that necessitates a satellite phone, is not going to be able to reach me, right? And then those systems outlive the time off the grid. That's an example of one thing that I do that seems simple, it is simple, in theory at least, that has this huge spectrum of ripple effects. And there, there's some other things that
- 1:02:50 – 1:10:27
Integrating seasonality
- TFTim Ferriss
come to mind, but I'd, I'd love to know for you if y- if you're trying to focus on this deep life and rooted productivity, do any... Uh, which levers or actions have been particularly impactful for you that come to mind?
- CNCal Newport
I mean, I think periodic reflection plays a critical role for me, too. As a professor, there's a seasonality that's built into my work, which I wish could be widely replicated.
- TFTim Ferriss
So jealous. Yeah, I mean, I suppose I could do it, but man, it's such a great, such a wonderful thing.
- CNCal Newport
Everyone who runs their own business [laughs] who's entrepreneurial where you have some flexibility, I think you should integrate seasonality into what you do. I, I, I'm a big believer in seasonality in all scales, by the way. Busy and not busy parts of your day, busier and non-busier days of the week, busier and non-busier months in the season. I mean, I think at, at all scales we need it. Being pegged all the time, filling your time all the time is not, is not healthy for us. So for me, there's the December break and the summer break. And just like you, so for my December break, my last class is on December 6, that's the last time I'm on campus. And for all the time after that, between then and when the semester begins again, each week I've already blocked off one full day off from no meetings, no phone calls, no podcast recordings, no nothing, plus an additional half day off for what I call adventure work, where typically I'll go to trails outside, somewhere scenic. Sometimes I'll go to the museums in downtown DC to just think about one problem in a awe-inspiring or unusual location. I've already blocked those days off, 'cause I wanna get the most out of December. And then when I get to the summer, you know, it's, it's... With professors, it's a little bit weird. We're not really paid during the summer. What you do, a- at least at a research university, is you get summer salary from research grants, and that's how you cover the, the two months in the summer. And at some point, I, after tenure when I didn't have to worry about that so much, is I decided I'm not gonna take research grants for the summer. I'm just gonna take the summers off. I'll fill in the gaps in income, you know, with writing or what have you. And so I actually literally am not working for the university for two, two months out of the summer, and that's really critical for me. That type of seasonality is probably the, one of the biggest advertisements for, [laughs] for the professor life that I could give.
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm. What do you do on your days off?
- CNCal Newport
It's not clear, like, what on or off means for me. I, I mean, I, I read a lot, I think a lot, I take a lot of notes. Like, for me, a day off, what I care about is a day where I don't have to be interacting professionally with other people. [laughs] Like, to me, that's what off is. I, I don't have to go on Zoom, I don't have to go in for a meeting, I'm not in front of an audience. It's, I'm in full control of my time. I don't actually like not doing things when I have control of my time. I love to do things where I have complete autonomy over my time. I'm, I'm gonna go for a walk and think this through. I'm gonna go work on a book proposal. I'm gonna read this book. I'm gonna... You know, then when my kids get home from school, we're gonna go do something else. And so for me, a day off is a day where I have full autonomy over what I do. The blank calendar day, to me, is one of the more glorious sights. If you really wanna hear the chorus of angels, forget solving a math proof-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
... or getting a sentence to work right. Seeing a day on the calendar where there's nothing in Gmail, I think Gmail should have a feature where that just sort of, you know, pulsates an angelic glow. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
If you see, if you see an empty little, little feedback, right? The little feedback loop.
- TFTim Ferriss
I'm looking for some inspiration. So these half days of adventure work at inspiring or cool locations, I, I don't want you to dox yourself, but like [laughs] what, what are some locations you've used or types of locations, and why did you choose them, right? Because e- even if you say museum, if you're in a city, there are multiple museums you could choose, so how did you choose a particular place? And then when you are working on some larger problem or project, what does that actually look like? Is it just pen and paper? Is it laptop where you've knocked out the Wi-Fi? If you could give maybe one or two real-world examples, that would be super helpful.
- CNCal Newport
I think a lot about location. So if I'm down at the mall in DC, for example, there's a couple different Games I'll play. Uh, sometimes I'll go to the Botanical Gardens, which is, it's a, the National Botanical Gardens, it's a giant greenhouse. And, and so it's just, it resets your whole context because you're in a tropical climate with palm trees and, and there's these paths that go through it, and there's benches, and it's, you're gonna get really sweaty. It's very humid. But I'll go there. Sometimes I'll go to the National Gallery because there's a, there's a certain type of connection to history, classical antiquity mindset you get if you walk through and here's a Leonardo. You know? Like, you're looking at, uh ... I especially like the Italian Renaissance floor. And then there's a, an underground cafeteria at the National Gallery that connects the East and the West Wings in which there's essentially no cell phone reception. So then you go down there, and you get coffee from the coffee place, and there's this waterfall and, uh, that you can see through the glass. And then hiking, there's, uh, the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge. It's not far from me. It's, uh, you can go there and you can hike there. There's the Rachel Carson Greenway. That used to be closer to my old house and, um, I would hike the same thing every week, and so I got really good at the change of seasons. It was a real Thoreau move, like, noticing week by week how things were changing and what was happening with the leaves, and I had names for all the places, and I would do the same hike again and again. And this is all pen and paper. It's me, notebook, a Uni-Ball Micro, you know, 0.5 millimeter roller pen, and notes in a notebook.
- TFTim Ferriss
Ooh, a 0.5 guy. I like that.
- CNCal Newport
Fine point.
- TFTim Ferriss
I'm torn between the 0.7 and the 0.5.
- CNCal Newport
Well, uh, the bleeding, you know? I don't know.
- TFTim Ferriss
Deep inner conflict. [laughs]
- CNCal Newport
I don't know, man. I think if you're using a 0.7, you're gonna start to get some bleed.
- TFTim Ferriss
I think I'm a masochist.
- CNCal Newport
If I'm doing CS work, I'm doing math, and so there's a lot of little Greek... If you're drawing an epsilon or you're doing exponents or-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
You need a 0.5.
- TFTim Ferriss
My notepads are so full of exponents and epsilons, [laughs] I don't even know what to do with myself.
- CNCal Newport
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
So you have your 0.5 millimeter exponent-ready pen. You have your pad. You go to the Botanical Gardens. You're drinking coffee. You're sweating your face off. What type of work are you doing? Like, what is it, what does it look like for that half day? What, if we're looking over your shoulder, what is, what, what's happening there?
- CNCal Newport
So either I'm, I'm trying to solve a particular proof. So if I'm doing my, my, have my computer scientist hat on, I'm, I'm trying to solve a proof. I do a lot of kind of graph theoretical stuff, and y- you're drawing graphs, or you're just trying to make it work, or at least make aspects of it work, or figure out why it doesn't work. I'm drawing equations. I'm drawing graphs. Or if I have my writer hat on, I'm trying to crack structure. So for me, writing, of course, has to happen with a computer and, and it, that's just, it's a whole other thing, but I put a huge amount of time in figuring out the, the structure of the ideas that I wanna write. And especially if I'm working on something like a book proposal. I mentioned before, it takes me 6 to 12 months. Again and again, you're gonna find me somewhere with a notebook, just like I was doing this morning right before I got on the call with you here, just writing, trying to structure out, index, outline. Ah, it's not quite working. You know, how does this fit together? What about this format for the book? I'll sometimes buy a dedicated notebook for a book idea. It's a, it's a trick of mine.
- TFTim Ferriss
I do the same thing.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah. But that's what I'm writing. Yeah, so it'd be one of those two things.
- TFTim Ferriss
What do you use for writing
- 1:10:27 – 1:13:57
Fans of Scrivener
- TFTim Ferriss
books? What's, do you have a preferred software? As you're talking about indexing and playing with table of contents and structure, I have found Scrivener just to be a lifesaver in that-
- CNCal Newport
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... department. I'm sure there are a million other options, but I've used Scrivener for many, many years. What do you use for your book writing?
- CNCal Newport
When I switched to contributor status at The New Yorker is when I switched to Scrivener. I haven't tried it yet for a book, so we'll see about that, but I definitely, for all of my articles, all my New Yorker work, all that Scrivener. I love it.
- TFTim Ferriss
Why was that the catalyst to switch to Scrivener?
- CNCal Newport
So that type of writing, so, like, New Yorker writing's very dense. Uh, it, it's like dense in information. So you're citing a huge number of different, you know, you saw it in the article I w- I wrote about you. There's, like, a huge number of things you have to cite. And so the double pane feature of Scrivener is an absolute lifesaver. Like, okay, here is, I can just grab the article I'm citing and it's on the right pane, and then I can quote from it directly on the left pane, or I can take a different section of the article and put it on the right pane so that the left pane I can properly reference it. And then you just jump into composition mode when you're, so, you know, you're, you're pulling in information and kind of getting a draft of it, and then you shoot to composition mode full screen. Best composition mode of any tool out there, and then you're word polishing. And then you jump back. Ah, it's a, it's a great tool. I've loved it. I've been a fan for, ever since I started using it.
- TFTim Ferriss
I'll, uh, just for people who don't have context, add a little bit more. So Scrivener for me, the reason I, I began using it is that prior to that I'd used Word, and if you're using Word [laughs] and you have, let's just say, as in my books, which are both long and have many components, if you have 27 chapters and you have 15 open documents because you also have research documents and reference documents, your computer will cease to function, and your brain will cease to function. But with Scrivener, at least the way that I use it, you have these stripped down, format minimal documents that can all be looked at within a single application, and you can format it in, in different ways. A lot of screenwriters or playwrights use Scrivener. I think that's initially how it came onto my radar. I had not seen anyone use it for nonfiction at that point. But I cut, if you imagine your screen cut right down the middle, on the left-hand side you have this table of contents. It's the easiest way to think about it. And, and I will immediately break my book into three or four sections, even though I may not even have labels for the sections. And then I decide- Which documents will go into each of those sections. And you can just drag them around so you can play with the order. You can create another section as an example. And then you have research at the bottom of that left-hand pane. On the right side, if you split that in half horizontally, what I'm working on-- This is just how I do it. What I'm working on will be in the top right pane, and then below that, the bottom right pane, I will have whatever research doc I'm referring to, since my stuff is also very, very factually dense and requires citations and references and so on. And by doing that, you don't have to click back and forth between tabs or between programs, between documents. It's, it's a really, really elegant solution.
- 1:13:57 – 1:20:02
Trello for organizing tasks
- TFTim Ferriss
And, and I, and I hope you're not offended by me focusing on some of the tactical stuff, but I'm curious in the thought process behind some of your decision-making, right? That's much more interesting than just the output of the decision. It's like, okay, how did you arrive at this? So when I was reading about your quarterly plan, sample week plan, et cetera, in the end of this blog post, and that was from January of 2021, and, and I don't know if this is still the case, but I'll, I'll just read this last paragraph. "To be clear, most of my obligations on my plate exist as concrete items in my task lists, which, as my podcast listeners know, I maintain using Trello. But most of the projects that move the needle in my career, working on a research paper, writing a major article, never get discretized," I'm not even sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, "into bite-sized actions on a list. I instead treat them with the level of intention that their formidable difficulty deserves." So the Trello use-- I've used Trello. I like Trello. I tend to use-- I've used both Trello and Asana. I'm curious how you've ended up arriving at Trello.
- CNCal Newport
Trello has been my, my tool of choice recently for organizing tasks, and the, the way I actually use it is I do a different board for different professional roles. So I have a writer board, I have a, a board for CS research, so my role as a researcher, and then a board for the, the teaching and administrative pieces of being a professor. So they're, they're three separate roles. They have separate boards. Uh, the columns that I then divide those boards into represent different categories. You know, I have a column for, "I gotta process this." This is a David Allen idea where I need to put this down somewhere, this thing, but I don't really e-even know what this thing means I need to do. It's, you know, A, we need to recruit someone. [chuckles] Like, okay, I don't know what that means, but I don't wanna for- so let me just write that down under, you know, to process. Like, another hack I do is anyone I meet with on a regular basis, they'll have their own column on the p-particular board. So if anything comes up I need to ask them, I actually just put it on a card and put it under their meeting column, and then when I meet with them, I just go and boom, boom, boom, we go through it.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, that's clever.
- CNCal Newport
Then typically I'll have a column for like, okay, definitely this week this needs to happen. So I, I-- when I go through my weekly planning, I'll, I'll move things to that. And, and so I like that, that different roles, different columns, and I like that the virtual cards in all these tools can hold a lot of information. So I'm a big believer that all the relevant files, all the relevant notes, if someone emailed me something about this task that's relevant, you can just copy and paste this all onto the virtual back or attach it to the card. And so it's, it actually is also an information management system, not just a task management system. And so that's been what I've been using. And then typically I really go through those all at the beginning of the week. But when I build out my weekly plan, I'm often identifying off those boards, this is what I really wanna get done this week. And, and then I'm often executing largely off that weekly plan, though I should... Let me-- Actually, Tim, I'm gonna give a broader context here because I'm kind of a weird guy. I talk about a lot of things, so [chuckles] I'm gonna, I'm gonna attempt to try to, like, put all the weird things I do into some sort of context because we, we've covered a lot of territory.
- TFTim Ferriss
To un-weird the weird. [laughs]
- CNCal Newport
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Let's do it.
- CNCal Newport
Or just to, like, illustrate the weird. There's these two different main hats I wear. So there's, there's a hat where I'm a computer scientist and I, I publish papers on, on, uh, mainly, like, theory of distributed systems. Then there's a, a sort of journalistic public commentary critique type writing. This is, like, my articles for The New Yorker, my New York Times op-eds. My books mainly, and my books especially recently, have really been about tech and culture and their impact, though they have a, a real practical aspect too. But then I often also talk about productivity, largely 'cause it's just people are kind of interested in how I do these other things. So it's, like, become a-- It's not necessarily like a tier one topic that I write about, though I kind of do because Deep Work I think talks about this for sure. But then also we talk a lot on my blog and in my newsletter, on my podcast about, like, what we're talking about here because I don't think we talk enough about this, uh, in general. So people are out there, "Well, how do I organize my aspirations? How do I structure a life to be deeper and not get lost in the noise but not be overscheduled?" And so, uh, we geek out a lot on productivity as well. So just to give, I don't know if that's useful, but a landscape-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- CNCal Newport
... of, you know, I do these two big things, but then I have to care a lot about productivity to do these big two things. So then I talk about how do I do the productivity, [chuckles] you know, what do I do to make sure that I can still write an academic paper and a New Yorker piece and a book and a whatever, like how does that all fit into my life and... 'Cause I care a lot about it. So I don't know if that's useful, but that's my, uh, lay of the weird landscape for the various things I do.
- TFTim Ferriss
We are gonna talk about, say for instance, a, a 30-day digital minimalism experiment, so I do wanna dig into that. Before we get to it, though, we've got in 2019, the artist and writer Jenny Odell, is that right?
- CNCal Newport
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Helped kinda start the trend, which we're gonna talk about, when she published a book titled How to Do Nothing, subtitle Resisting the Attention Economy. So that becomes a New York Times bestseller. Barack Obama, one of his favorite books of 2019. Then it was followed, I guess a year later the following spring, by Celeste Headlee, I'm not sure if I'm saying that correctly, but Do Nothing, subtitle How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving. Then you have Anne Helen Petersen's Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Maybe a little less inspiring sounding [laughs] it doesn't... I'm always curious about titling decisions and the thought process behind it. Maybe I'm, you know, it could be a fantastic book, but I haven't read any of these. And then Devon Price's Laziness Does Not Exist. Now, these, these are, I wouldn't say entirely new in the sense that you can go back to Thoreau or Emerson, and certainly you can go thousands of years back [laughs] to, like, Hakuin, and you can find discussions of overwork, busyness, laziness versus contemplation.
- 1:20:02 – 1:25:33
Books in the “anti-productivity” category
- TFTim Ferriss
Are there any books, and I know I'm, I'm, I'm pushing on a, y- your weakness here in terms of listings, so I'm not asking you to list. But there, are there any books in the last five or 10 years from, broadly speaking, this kind of category that really stand out for you?
- CNCal Newport
It's an interesting category, first of all, and, uh, like I sometimes call it, like, the anti-productivity category, though that- that's not quite the accurate label, but it's a really interesting category. So, you know, m- my book came out the same month as How to Do Nothing, so we were... Me and Jenny were paired, and so many, so in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Ringer, there's all these articles that came out where it was, you know, always talking about us, uh, those two books together. So that was definitely had a close experience. Price's book is great. I blurbed that book. Celeste Headlee's book is great. I interviewed her for The New Yorker in, in a, in a piece I did. I would say that what I would add more recently, a book that's done really well, and I'll get into a reason why I think it did, was Oliver Burkeman's new book, which is, maybe it's called, uh, Four Thousand Hours. I might have the number wrong.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oliver Burkeman?
- CNCal Newport
Yeah, he's a British writer, and I blurbed that book because it's great. Anyways, it, and, and the subtitle's something like Time Management for Mortals or something like this.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
But it killed it. I, the book did great. It, it came out a few months ago or maybe over the summer. I have a bad sense of time. But the, the number of hours, and I'm getting the number wrong probably, is something with a four.
- TFTim Ferriss
Four Thousand Weeks-
- CNCal Newport
Weeks
- TFTim Ferriss
... Time Management for Mortals.
- CNCal Newport
There we go, weeks.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oliver Burkeman with an E. B-U-R-K-E-M-A-N. Yeah, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah, a- and he writes a column for The Guardian. So four thousand weeks is how many weeks you have to live. I think that really hit, and it really hit in particular because it was introducing a, like, a values driven productivity you could think about it. Like, it- it's about all that really matters when it comes to organizing your time or being organized is what you're trying to do is you only have so much time, and you wanna do things with it that's useful, meaningful, and effective. And to just, you know, be busy for the sake of being busy isn't good. I think all of those books make that argument. I think they're all pushing back on the, like, an empty, crushing busyness. I, all the stuff I'm doing is always frenetic, but I'm papering over the existential void I don't want to stare down by doing all of this, when what I probably need to do is, uh, stare into that void for a while, wait until the vertigo goes away, and then get up and actually start building something real. And I, I think they're all touching on that because it, there's this whole sort of fractured sense of overload that's happening right now. We have all these different things coming together. You have, like, the digital distraction piece, which obviously I'm, I'm sort of associated with, is really a symptom of the bigger problem. Uh, so yes, our phones can be a palliative to this existential despair, but the despair is there. And the despair is not gonna be fixed by just getting rid of the palliative and saying, like, you know, "Let's not use Instagram anymore." It's still gonna be there. We're using these things all the time because we, we just, it's more palatable to be active and busy all the time than sometimes to face what's hard about what's going on in our, in our lives or the world. And I think all of these books are picking up on that and, like, we need to slow the hell down, figure out what we really want to do, do these things at a reasonable pace, slow productivity, not fast, and face the hard stuff and, and, and make the good stuff better. All these books, I think, are getting at that main thing. They all just have different angles at this. So each of them have a, a different approach they take to this issue, and that's, like, its own interesting topic. I mean, everyone comes at this from different ways. Burkeman comes at it from, like, a humanist way. I kind of come at it from a humanist way too, in Digital Minimalism. It's about improving your life.
- TFTim Ferriss
What does that mean to, let's say in Oliver's case, to come at it from a humanist perspective? What does, what does that mean?
- CNCal Newport
Like, from a perspective of, of sort of trying to maximize or improve the flourishing of the, the sort of unique and cherished being that is the humans, right? Like, as a human, you are an important, unique entity to be cherished and should think about crafting a life in which you flourish, right? Like, that's the humanist. So it's, it's kind of in this, these lives of indiscriminate busyness where I'm just overwhelmed all the time and distracted every moment is you're diminishing your humanity, so that there's, like, a, the humanist approach where Anne Helen Peterson might come at this more with a sort of post-liberal, anti-capitalist type approach, that this is, like, productivity culture is really just part of the superstructure that supports the base of exploitative capital extraction, right? Like, we need to... It's an economic argument, you know?
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- CNCal Newport
So there's just, like, these different arguments. Uh, Celeste is more, comes at it from more of a cultural... O'Dell comes at it with a mix of humanist and economic and artistic, and that's, I think that's why that's a phenomenal book. I think it's very smart, very original. And so we all, there's just these different takes that are all coming at it, and all, all add something, but they're all getting at the same underlying issue of this sort of sense of crushing overwhelm and busyness.
- TFTim Ferriss
You know, I was thinking if this New Yorker gig, CS professorial life doesn't work out for you, you could actually work on some sobering children's books along the lines of Dr. Seuss, and the first one could be called The Despair Is There. [laughs]
- CNCal Newport
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Let's get these kids sobered up quick.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
Only gonna get worse, buddy. Get ready.
- 1:25:33 – 1:28:20
Who was John Newport?
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, yeah. So looking at that, uh, through, and this, this may not be the best segue way, but I'm gonna give it a shot anyway. We were talking about the deep life, and I'm gonna lead into this through that. And I'm looking at a post of yours from 2020, and it says, "I strive to divide my focused attention among four categories; community, family, friends, et cetera, craft, work and quality leisure," I love that term, quality leisure, "constitution, health," in parentheses, and last, "contemplation," and then in parentheses, "matters of the soul." So I'm gonna ask you, not the second, but I'm gonna ask you about that fourth one, contemplation, matters of the soul. And the way that we're going to move into that is through John Newport. So who was John Newport?
- CNCal Newport
My father's father, my grandfather, a Baptist theologian and scholar, and one of the only, of his era, Baptist apologist. Meaning, basically someone who... He was Southern Baptist, who was very interested in actually going out there and encountering other worldviews, understanding other approaches to things, and then trying to make a case. Let me make a case for the, the Baptist Christian worldview. Let me actually go out there and make my case. As opposed to saying the non-apologist approach of batten down the hatches, we have it right, I don't wanna hear about what else is going on there. My grandfather was someone who wo- he hung out with Carl Jung. He would walk with Heschel in Central Park when Heschel was still at the, the, the seminary there. He would study, or he was at Harvard for a year hanging out with Niebuhr, right? I mean, he was out there exposing himself to every interesting idea and worldview and approach that's out there. He would want to understand them deeply, and then try to understand why he, the advantages of his through comparison. And, and not to get too philosophical, but it was a sort of Socratic dialectical approach.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, this question is very much a philosophical question, so I-
- CNCal Newport
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... let's, let's not [laughs]
- CNCal Newport
So but he would find it, you, you would get more strength in what you, which is a big thing I took from him. You know, he was alive till I, right around, I mean, he, he died basically on his way to my high school graduation, so I knew him throughout my entire, up to the beginning of my adult life. The dialectical method of in encountering and fully understanding a different approach, your understanding of the world and your convictions will get stronger. That you don't want to try to avoid or sidestep or discredit before you have to see them. Go hang out with Heschel, go hang out with Niebuhr, go hang out with Tillich. He wrote a book on Paul Tillich. Go hang out, you know, w- with Jung, and really understand. And that, a- don't be afraid
- 1:28:20 – 1:30:38
Paul Tillich and being a concentration apologist
- CNCal Newport
of it.
- TFTim Ferriss
Who was Paul Tillich? Just so I know. I'll admit, I don't, I don't know that name.
- CNCal Newport
He was a Christian apologist, so he's like a Christian theologian, you know, sort of, of the same rough era as C.S. Lewis, but was a little more academic than Lewis. But so it's like v- very smart apologia, like really trying to unders- explain like the Christian worldview.
- TFTim Ferriss
Let me pause for a second. So apologist, I th- I would imagine for some people, has a sort of a negative connotation to it. But it doesn't seem like that's how you're using this word. Would you mind just e- explaining the use of, of that term?
- CNCal Newport
There's a technical definition that I'm using. So, so like the, the technical definition of, of an apologist is just that you're someone who is out there making a case for the thing that you believe in the effort of explaining it to other people. It doesn't have to be evangelical in the, in the general sense of that term, in terms of you're trying to convince people, but at least you're trying to encounter other people and explain why you're, what you, the thing that you're trying to explain is right. So I mean, a, a lot of like what writing you do or I do is technically would be apologia. Like if I write a book, you know, Deep Work is-
- TFTim Ferriss
I'm a productivity apologist. [laughs]
- CNCal Newport
Yeah. Like I'm a, I'm a concentration apologist.
- TFTim Ferriss
That's a confusing term.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Do you have any idea how that became, like the etymological reasons?
- CNCal Newport
I think it came out of theology.
- TFTim Ferriss
Came out of theology? That's super interesting.
- CNCal Newport
I think it might have. I, I don't want to talk out of school. I might be wrong about that. You're right, though. It's not in common parlance, so I, I should... Advocate, maybe.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- CNCal Newport
But the main point is, in the Southern Baptist Church at that time, you wouldn't see a lot of apologia because you didn't want to go out there and encounter other worldviews. Like that, like I would, I just don't even want to know about that.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- CNCal Newport
And I think we see a lot of that today, I mean, outside of the religious context. And, and so, you know, we talk about this a lot on my podcast, but don't be afraid of ideas or worldviews or approaches or philosophies that are, that seem different than what you believe in. You're not gonna get tricked into, out of your convictions or believing something that's false. You actually strengthen your understanding of the world, and therefore strengthen your own convictions by encountering other ideas that are well-formed. And, and that's, that's, it's at the core of the intellectual life for the last however many centuries you want to say it. That, that's sort of a core operation. And, and he personified that.
- 1:30:38 – 1:40:41
Matters of the soul
- TFTim Ferriss
So if we look at the, the contemplation bucket, and in parentheses, matters of the soul. So this is one of your four categories of focused attention. What does that mean to you? How do you focus on contemplation and matters of the soul?
- CNCal Newport
The way I would generically tackle that would be to say that humans have these intimations where this seems right or good or awe inspiring. This doesn't seem right. This doesn't seem good. Like certain behaviors you see, you know, in a movie, the villain, and it's just, it hits this thing inside. Like that's not, that's not right. You're watching Succession on HBO, and you're like, "All of my moral intuitions are telling me that these are bad people." [laughs] "Don't be like these people." Right? You know what I mean? Um, and we get on the other side, too. That you, you, you encounter the inspiring and, you know, the, the, the person who sacrifices or what have you. And it just- hit something inside and you feel it, right? And, and so you can call these in- intimations, like John Haught would call these moral intuitions. There's, there's different terminologies for it. Critical, I think, and this obviously by I, I mean like all of philosophy, but [laughs] you know, I- critically, I, I think is, and all of theology for that, that matter too, is figuring out how to actually structure a life around these intimations, a life that pushes you more towards the things that just instinctually hits you as this is, this is right and good and I just know it, and away from the things and the behaviors and the approaches to life that just hit you at a gut level as this is not right, this is not good. It, it, it hits me off. This is what philosophy does, this is what religion does. If we think about it from a big picture perspective, is ideas evolved over time through experience and argument that essentially help you align your life with the things that, the moral intuitions that are positive and away from the ones that are negative. It, it, it's why you shouldn't be quick, for example, to dismiss a field of philosophy or religion as like, "Oh, I can just figure this out from scratch," or it's talking about mythologies that I can't empirically validate in the world. What you really have there is a moral technology, something that's been evolved over time to align your life with these intuitions that you feel, and that's the contemplation bucket, is you better be doing something along those lines because just winging it is not gonna matter. And so, you know, I spend a lot of time trying to think about that bucket. Some details of how I tackle that may be as personal, some are not. I engage a lot in philosophy. There's religious engagements in my life. I'm not, I'm not formally practicing and associated with a particular religion, but that's also something that might not... I don't think that's necessarily a permanent state. I think there is a lot of intuition and brilliant human moral engineering, uh, in religions.
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, if you're open to it, I'd love to, to talk a bit more about this because I've, I've heard, for instance, conversations between Sam Harris, who's a friend, and Jordan Peterson. And I'm going to, I'm sure, misrepresent both sides, so sorry guys. [laughs] I'm just gon- kinda paraphrase. But i- you know, in general, Jordan refers to mythology and the Bible as sort of moral frameworks that have been time-tested, which is not to say, I don't think he would say, that we should base all of our lives on Cain and Abel or something like that. Uh, but the, the fact of the matter is that h- as humans, we've had a whole lot of trial and error over a very, very long period of time. Certain stories have s- have struck a chord and stuck, and maybe there's value in those stories. And then y- again, sorry Sam, I'm sure I'm misrepresenting, but if Sam is perhaps arguing that you should start from first principles, you do not need theology or religion, but can build a moral code and framework for yourself, I think Jordan's response to that would be, "You're expecting too much of people." Like, people are just gonna have too much trouble doing that. They want something out of the box that is good enough to be helpful. So what I'd love to ask you is, and I've spent a good amount of time thinking about these things for myself, just for myself, uh, not for anything else but my life. And I would love to know what this does for you. Maybe we could start there. Like, what, what is the, what is the need that it satisfies or the unease that it quells to have contemplation/matters of the soul as one of the four main categories? Maybe we could start there, and I'd just, uh, love to hear you ex- expand in, in any way you feel comfortable.
- CNCal Newport
In that particular division, my, my instinct is that Jordan is probably more on the right path. And, and I'll, I'll tell you a book that really was striking to me that I, that I think gets right at this. There's, there's this great book called All Things Shining, and it was written by a philosopher from Harvard and a philosopher from Berkeley, Dreyfus, and I forgot the other name. But they, they talk about this issue, right? So this was, this was the central issue that, that, this was what Nietzsche was worried about. Like, we're, we are now gonna have to create morality from scratch, and that's not gonna go well, right? And obviously, Jordan is very keyed into this because his early interest was in the rise of totalitarian regimes that occurred in the 20th century in that context, and spoiler alert, things did not go well.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
But there's this lament in that book about, it, it's looking at these prior periods in human history where they used the word the sacred, but they talked about life was just infused with the sacred. And the, in ancient Greece, the classical Greece, they really did feel like the gods, the Olympian gods would inhabit you. You know, like Aries would inhabit you, and that was to feel, like these feelings you would have was literally gods inhabiting you. And in the medieval Christians, everything had a, a place and a sacredness to it, even objects in the world. And then that all went away. And they opened the book with David Foster Wallace and basically use him as personifying, "I can just figure this all out from scratch from first principles." And, and they use him as a, it's a really poignant but tragic story because of course it's a story that ends up with Foster Wallace's suicide. And they, they use that to set up the, the difficulty of trying to build everything up from scratch and especially when, I guess that's what Jordan likes to, to, to point out, is we have these, these intuitions that are really deep and incredibly powerful. And, uh, you know, Jordan was very inspired by Jung, so he's really drawing from Carl Jung's, you know, J-U-N-G, his archetypes, his idea that there's these, the collective unconscious that has these archetypes that all humans have. They have a deep history pre-culture and that, that like our myths, the reason why certain myths resonate is they're pressing these buttons. And those, those buttons, what he would call archetypes, Jung I think of as intuitions, and that we have these technologies for sort of... And I'm using technology in not digital or electronic, but philosophical and theological technologies. Like it really, it aligns your life to these things. We're, we're meant to be aligned to them, just like our sense of thirst means we really need to drink water, you know? We, we shouldn't just ignore that and say, "Is there another way for me to achieve like the proper isotonic balance in my bloodstream?" Like actually the instinct just tells us to drink water. So, all of those things have been very effective to me. Uh, you know, with an A, effective in the sense of like affecting me. And so I think there's something to that, is that, I mean, a life that aligns with these intuitions can be very resilient and rich, and, and then we just have personal experience. And, and you know, some people get this through philosophy and some people get this through religion and, but they're drawing from the same internal hooks. And so I get very nervous when I think about the challenge, the, the Ni- Nietzschean [laughs] if that's a word, challenge of going back to first principle. I mean, we tried, I mean, this was all of philosophy tried to do this for a couple hundred years. Like what Kant was trying to do. I mean, it w- we, we all, we tried it. This is very difficult to just... And I know Sam disagrees, and he's smarter than me, so like, you know, let's listen to him maybe more [laughs] more than we listen to me. But, uh, you know, that's where I fall on that, if that makes sense.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. This is a topic of kind of infinite interest to me, and I'd, I'd love to keep batting things around for a little bit if you're open to it. So I, I actually have All Things Shining downstairs.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Uh, All Things Shining, subtitle Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly.
- CNCal Newport
Kelly.
- TFTim Ferriss
I was gifted this book, and you would think based on the title and how much of a stoicism and philosophy nerd I am, that I would have just taken to this like a fish to water. I found it very challenging to read. And I think perhaps it was just all of the references to Moby Dick e- and, and The Odyssey. It could have been that. I'm not sure, but I found it, I found it very, uh, dense in a way that made it hard for me to at least process at the time that I was, I was gifted it. And I'm just gonna mention a few things kind of in no, no particular order. And the fact of the matter is I don't know Jordan Peterson well. We've spoken before, and I've had him on the podcast, but I don't know him well. I would say I know Sam well and have spent a lot of time around Sam. I use his Waking Up app. I've read many of his books, and we've just spent a lot of time in person. Sam, by and large, is a ver- seems to me to be a very happy, at peace guy, right? So that's interesting that... Now, is
- 1:40:41 – 1:45:16
Finding the spiritual in craft and creation
- TFTim Ferriss
that Sam out of the box? How much of that is nature versus nurture and training versus default? I can't say. I have no idea. But, um, but he has managed, it seems, to thread the needle and sort of create meaning and frameworks for himself that really seem to work well. And certainly there are counter examples. And when I see a book like All Things Shining, do you know the backgrounds of the two co-authors? In other words, were they backing into the book from the perspective of people with religious upbringings, or do you not know the background?
- CNCal Newport
I know their background. I, I think Sean was, uh, Kelly was Dorrance's advisee or some such. But-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- CNCal Newport
... yeah, I, I don't know. I think they're, uh... Because they end up in a non-religious place, by the way, right? So if, if you get to the end of that book where they, they end up basically saying craftsmanship, craft is the, the solution to re-injecting sacredness in a secular world. So they do not end up with saying what we need is religion or, uh-
- TFTim Ferriss
Right
- CNCal Newport
... stoicism or a particular philosophy. They end up saying craft is partially our savior because when you're trying to build, do something at a high level, you have a rigid framework of value. That if you're a wheelwright, some wood is better than others, regardless of what other system you've created. It's just an external reality. This wood is better than that wood, and it's a way to actually get some firmament. So they end up saying you should focus on basically your work or [laughs] you know, craft and, and-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- CNCal Newport
... like taste and quality, which is actually maybe not that far from where Sam is. So I think it's a really interesting point.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, maybe they ended up converging. I mean, it's also very, not to paint with too broad a brush, but having lived in Japan and having gone to school there and speaking and reading and writing Japanese, I feel like I have some credibility to say that it's al- it's also a very Japanese, it's... or a very prevalent sort of Japanese sentiment and predisposition, is to focus on the sort of meticulous attention to detail within craft as a means of creating the sacred. Whether you look at the tea ceremony, you look at Kyudo, which is the Japanese archery. There are many, many different sort of instantiations, if that's the right word, of this throughout the culture, which is by and large, not always, but by and large can be experienced through a secular or religious lens in Japan.
- CNCal Newport
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
Uh, Japan's a fascinating example. I can't remember the exact expression. Uh, it's in Japanese, so I'm doing a terrible job of, of mangling a translation here. But it's something along the lines of, you know, we are Buddhists when we're born Christian when we get married and Shinto when we die. I might actually have it in the exact opposite, but, you know, Shinto when we're born, Christian when we're married, and, uh, Buddhist when we die. But what comes to mind for me when looking at all of these different approaches to trying to check the box of contemplation or matters of the soul is that, and I'd love to hear what you think of this because there's no right and wrong, how would I prove this, is that humans really do not like the discomfort of uncertainty and the paradox of choice presented by a life that is largely messy and outside of our control, and therefore we want frameworks and rules so that we kind of constrain the universe of things that we need to think about. Does that make sense?
- CNCal Newport
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
As such, something like the Ten Commandments, very helpful, [laughs] right? And having strict rules for what you can, say, eat or not eat are very helpful in some ways. It just removes certain territories of life that you need to think about, or at least you have some reassurance that you don't need to worry about. And at the same time, there's part of me that thinks, "Well, you know, religion is fantastic
- 1:45:16 – 1:52:57
Exploring spirituality
- TFTim Ferriss
for that," and I did not grow up religious. I've been exposed to a lot of religion, and honestly, very often I, uh, I have extreme envy of people with strong religious conviction for precisely that reason, right? 'Cause I, I just feel like I'm trying to David Foster Wallace my way through life, and it's really fucking hard and can be very, at least for me, destabilizing just to have this universe of infinite options and potential decision-making. At the same time, I think, well, if we are accepting religion because it is this pervasive, not to make it bad, but almost universal instinct of humankind, which it s- which it seems to be, like myth-making, I'm not saying that's what religion is, but meaning-making through stories and the, and religion in some fashion really seems to be an evolved instinct of some type. But we could also say without certain constraints, there are other impulses humans have, right, [laughs] that we constrain.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I know I'm, I'm going on and on a bit here, but it's, um, these are some of the questions that, you know, remain with me as I continue to explore. In my case, I think I've sort of passed the point of no return with respect to a specific denomination of religion. I just don't, I don't expect that I will be able to, for a million reasons, get there. So looking at the alternatives, these are some of the questions that I end up pondering. I mean, if you are talking to someone, let's say you're talking to students who are in a similar position. Maybe they had a really terrible experience being brought up in a religious household, or perhaps just for, for any number of reasons, they're just not going to end up at religion. Are there other ways you would suggest they explore? Because you said philosophy, but philosophy is so broad, right? I mean, you could just-
- CNCal Newport
Yeah [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
... go and walk into a philosophy department at any university and, man, you've got, you do have a paradox of choice situation on your hands. If you're, if you're an undergrad and going to like Epistemology 101 and kind of getting walked through it, that's fine. But if you're trying to use philosophy to help figure out your life and starting from scratch, do you have any secular recommendations for folks? Any other recommendations or thoughts?
- CNCal Newport
Yeah. Uh, I, it's a great question, and I, I just want to throw one, one idea into the mix. I mean, this is, it's, it's a common idea in some theological circles, but I think the author Karen Armstrong makes this argument very well in her book The, The Case for God. She is actually not religious affiliated. She used to be a nun and had a bad experience and left the, the Catholic Church. But she has this magisterial book called The Case for God, and long story short, uh, she said, "We don't understand religion today," and by today, she means after the Enlightenment, [laughs] because we think about it as the ascent to empirically validated truths. You know? Like I have to, to be religious means that I, here's this thing that y- this happened, this person did this, and I agree that this happened and this is true, right? And you're like, but I don't, quote-unquote, "believe that" or what have you. And her whole argument is like through all of the history of religion, it's actually a commitment to action, and it's after you do the action that the insight comes, that you start by doing the things and then later that gains you revelation. That's where you actually start to gain, y- you know, insight and understanding. You don't start with, "Okay, I think this is right," like some empirically validated thing, like, "I think gravity is right, and so now I, I can be all on board with it." Now, that was a really interesting take. I thought that was really interesting. We're not as used to it now because we're used to the world after Descartes, where it's all about we're in our head doing rationality. And so like, okay, religion like any, or a philosophy, we have to work our way up to it and believe it, and then we can go off and do it. And you know, some religions are better about that than others. I think like the Jewish tradition doesn't care so much about what's going on in your head. [laughs] Do these things, right? And then you'll have revelation, which is like through experience, acting as if. And, you know, don't overthink this. This God, Yahweh, and you gotta do this, and don't eat that, and do that, and you need to... You know, family's very important, blah, blah, blah. And you do this stuff and over time you deepen your understanding of the, what she calls the ineffable things you can't even put into words anyways. So in her mind, all of religion is trying to basically get intimations of the ineffable through action. And we think about it too much like, "Here's a alternative to my history book, and do I think this is right or not?" Which is interesting. I, and I think it's, like, a really... It's one of these mind-blow- I don't know what to do with it. I just think it's a really interesting point, and I've been just trying to get people to read her because I think that's a really cool book and is, is underappreciated. So philosophy can do... You're right. A lot of philosophy is complicated. I think this is why, you know, our mutual friend Ryan Holiday is really doing well right now, is because he's making stoicism accessible.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- CNCal Newport
And I know he's very influenced by you in, in that work, and you've done a lot to make stoicism a- accessible, and that has done a lot of good for people. I think also committing to communities of character seems to help people. So okay, like, when people are very committed to their role in the military, it's a, it's a community of character, a community in which there are certain characters underlined and emphasized, and there's sort of a structure there. People get this through other types of causes or volunteerism where you're, you're committed to a community that actually tries to live true to certain characteristics, elements of character they think are important. I think that can get you there, too. But I'm really taken by that Armstrong idea of act first, insight second.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- CNCal Newport
Get out there and start doing it.
- TFTim Ferriss
There's a quote, I don't have the attribution, but I think about it often, which is, "It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting." And what you say also brings up for me memories from several trips to the Middle East. I've, I've spent a decent amount of time in the Middle East, and what I've heard more than once from both Jews and Muslims is you would, you would hope for us to find more common ground because in our religions, and I say this as a non-Jew and a non-Muslim, so forgive me if, uh, anyone out there if I get this wrong. But we believe in action. Like, what you do matters. What you believe is really secondary. Like, what you do matters, and that's at least, you know, they would contrast that with some other religions where, like, what you believe matters first. Like, you can do all the worst things in the world [laughs] and believe certain things and then you are saved, and it's, those are fundamentally very, very different, right? And I don't, I don't have a, you know, particular perspective to add there, but it is a contrast, right? And these are things that I will obviously continue to, to think on because I find precisely for, uh, maybe some of the reasons that you already mentioned, the persistence of and the endurance and durability of religion to be fascinating. Even if I disagree with any of the tenets of, say, all religions, the fact that it is so persistent is very, very interesting, right? Like, are we evolutionarily programmed to create, have, adhere to religion in the same way that birds are programmed to build bird nests, right? I don't know. Maybe. It's, it seems entirely
- 1:52:57 – 2:01:57
Cal’s 30-day digital minimalism declutter
- TFTim Ferriss
possible. I'm gonna take a super hard left turn on topic shift if that's okay with you because I promised it. So segueing from, uh [laughs] religion and finding meaning and contemplation, let's talk about digital minimalism for a second. So I would love to hear you expand on your suggestion of people doing a 30-day digital minimalism experiment where one removes optional technologies.
- CNCal Newport
Yes. I appreciate the congruence we're making here between-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
... [laughs] the Islamic and Jewish understanding of the meaning of the world and life and also my 30-day declutter. These are all basically the same.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
We're all in kind of the same ontological category here.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, yeah. Tomato, tomato, you know?
- CNCal Newport
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
We're all going the same direction.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- CNCal Newport
Exactly. Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
But we got, you know, we have the, the prophets and also, you know, 30-day declutter. All just kind of the same. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Now, in fairness, if you have, let's just say stocks on your iPhone and Twitter push notifications and everything else just giving you a, a psycho-emotional death by a thousand paper cuts, how do you expect to find ultimate meaning in life? It's gonna be tough. It's gonna make it an uphill battle, [laughs] right? So that's my attempt at tying it together. All right. Let's talk about this, this suggestion, this experiment potential, and, uh, what that, what that might look like for people. And feel free to obviously add anything that you would like, but th- this is something that I think a lot of my listeners would be very, very interested in considering doing.
- CNCal Newport
The 30-day declutter is at the, the core of my philosophy of digital minimalism. So this was my take on what do we do about the fact that starting around 2016, people became very uneasy about their phones in a way that they weren't in 2014. There was this flip that switched where at some point we realized, "I'm looking at this thing too much." [laughs] Like, this is a problem. Like, we got, we got uneasy, and I could tell very precisely where that happened just based on reactions to my own work when it switched from, "You're crazy. You're crazy. You're crazy. You're crazy. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right." It happened in, like, a very quick period where my social media skepticism in particular really switched. And so my approach to it was you can't start with the habits and the tactics, right? You can't start with, like, let me get right to setting filters and turning off notifications and not having my phone in my bedroom and putting my s- my phone into grayscale and moving my icons onto the back screen of my iPhone. That doesn't work. You're gonna end up back where you were. And so digital minimalism by contrast was this humanist philosophy where it says, no, you gotta figure out what you're all about, like what you really care about and what you wanna do, and then work backwards and say what tech supports that. And that's how you choose- What tech you use in your personal life and what rules you put around it. You start with what's important to me, and then you put the tech to work. That's much more sustainable. But how do you figure out this question? Like, how do you get that insight into what do I really wanna do, what's important to me, when you already have all that distraction? That's where the declutter came in. And so I said, "Take 30 days where you don't use social media, you don't stream online videos. The only podcast you listen to is Tim and mine, and everyone else you stop listening to."
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
No video games, no online news that's very influenced by you and your low information diet, for example, and you experiment and you reflect, and you think about life and go for walks and join things and ride your bike and hang out with friends without, you know, sending them messages on a, a glowing bitmap screen, and you figure out what you're all about. And then at the end of the 30 days, you say, "What do I wanna do?" And so I had that idea. I mentioned it to my newsletter, because I was working on this book, but it was in the early days. And I said, "Does anyone wanna try this?" Uh, and my thought was, this is a big ask, so maybe seven people would say yes. And m- my plan was, that's great, I will follow these seven people and see how it goes, and write, like, pretty long profiles of them. It'll be good for the book. 1,600 people came back and said, "Yeah, I'm doing it."
- TFTim Ferriss
Wow.
- CNCal Newport
[laughs] So I, like, I threw that idea that I was gonna follow everyone. Uh, 1,600 people did it. One of the people who was doing it was the roommate of a New York Times reporter, so then The New York Times was covering the declutter. Like, it became a whole thing. And then they, I got hundreds and hundreds of reports back from people about their experience and what worked and what didn't. But the, the main takeaway was it is much more effective, if you wanna tame the technology in your personal life, if you wanna tame that, if you're working backwards from first principles of, "This is what I wanna do with my life, how can tech help?" it's incredibly sustainable. If you instead say, "I'm unhappy with all the tech I'm using now, so let me try to put in rules to use it less," that's incredibly non-sustainable. You're almost certainly gonna go back to where you were before.
- TFTim Ferriss
So if people want to give this a shot, what should they do?
- CNCal Newport
Well, I mean, beyond the obvious of buying the, the book I ended up writing-
- TFTim Ferriss
Obviously
- CNCal Newport
... or you should start, you know-
- TFTim Ferriss
Obviously
- CNCal Newport
Yeah. And, and a copy for each of your friends, because it's easier for them to read it than you to have to explain it.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
Once you've done that, [laughs] uh, it's actually straightforward.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
So literally what I say is just, I call them optional personal technologies. And then I wanna draw a really clear line here. This is really about your personal life. I've written other books about email and Slack and, and technology in the working world. That's a whole other issue, and it seems similar, but there's different issues underlying it, so therefore different solutions. But I'm talking about the stuff you do outside of work that, largely speaking, has you looking at your phone. You take a break from them from 30 days. If it's a dual use technology, like I, I mainly use this for personal reasons, but there's some reason I need to use it, then you put up fences, right? So if you're like, "Uh, I don't want to text message, but my daughter uses text messaging to tell me when she needs to be picked up from practice," you put up a fence and say, "Well, I'll still do that, but I'm not going to participate in text chains with my friends for the 30 days." So you can, you can set the rules how you wanna set the rules. And then the only key thing is, you go through 30 days, be very active. So in that experiment, the people who treated this like a detox, and I hate the application of that term to technology, I think it's a complete misappropriation of that term. People who try to just white-knuckle it and say, "Yes, I'm just not gonna use these technologies for 30 days, and just by not using them, something positive will happen," they never made it 30 days. But the people who are like, "I will now be very aggressive about reflection and experimentation, trying new things, going places, going to the library, buying a bike, joining a running club, you know, reading books, going on long walks," they're the ones who really kept with it. And then at the end of the 30 days, you literally write out a code. "Here is the tech I use and the rules by which I use it. You know, uh, I'm going to use Instagram because I'm an artist, but the only way I'm gonna use it is on my computer. The only people I'm gonna follow are these 10 artists that really inspire me, and I have a glass of wine and look at their latest post on Friday evening, and it's the only interaction I have with that service." Right? So you, you get specific. "I'm using this for this reason. Here's how I use it." And then you're, you've reset. You've Marie Kondo'd your digital closet. You took everything out, you only put back in the stuff you cared about, and, uh, and you go for it.
- 2:01:57 – 2:04:06
Cal’s end-of-day shutdown ritual
- TFTim Ferriss
Do you still use, and this could be a dead end and we can just cut it if so, do you still use a shutdown ritual?
- CNCal Newport
Oh, yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Once you close your computer [laughs] . You do? All right. Could you please describe for folks what the shutdown ritual is?
- CNCal Newport
At the end of your workday, you, you go through and you close, to use the David Allen term, all the open loops. So, okay, let me make sure there's nothing I missed. There's not, like, an email I had to answer that was very urgent that I forgot about. You look at your weekly plan in your calendar. What's going on tomorrow? I know what I'm doing tomorrow. Okay, my plan makes sense. You look at your task list. I didn't forget to do something today that was very urgent. All right. I'm, I'm good to stop working. And then you have to do some sort of demonstrative ritual at that point to indicate that you did all those checks. So back in the early days on my blog, the, the thing that me and my readers always talked about doing was actually saying the phrase, "Schedule shutdown complete," because it's absurd, right? Like, it's a weird, absurd thing, but the, the whole idea was then later on when your monkey brain turns on and is like, "Work, work, work. I'm sure we're missing things. Ahh," right, like we do, instead of having to go back and say, "I have to now have a whole conversation with my monkey brain about, well, let me look at my calendar, and I did this, I did that," you can short-circuit all of that and say, "I said the absurd phrase. I would not have, in any other time in my life, have said that phrase if I hadn't actually gone through all the steps of making sure there was nothing open, so I don't need to get into it. I said the phrase. I know I'm okay." And when people would do this, it would take about a week or two, and it would significantly reduce that evening or morning work anxiety where your mind's like, "Uh, I'm sure we're forgetting something. Uh, let's go over the email that we sent, and was that the wrong thing to send?" And you can just say, "I said the stupid thing, and I would never have said that stupid thing [laughs] if, like, I hadn't shut it down." It... Look, I created it because I needed it. As a grad student, I created it, and it took on a life of its own. There's a lot of people out there looking left, looking right, making sure they're alone, and then under their breath going, "Schedule shutdown complete."
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] Schedule shutdown complete. That is so fantastic. Oh, just great.
- 2:04:06 – 2:05:22
Parting thoughts
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, Cal, this has been a very fun conversation. Thank you for taking the time. I don't want to end it prematurely. I want to, of course, ask, is there anything else that you would like to share? I'm in no rush. Is there any type of closing comments, request for the audience, anything you'd like to point people to, anything at all that you would like to say or ask before we wind to a close?
- CNCal Newport
No, this has been great. I, I, I love the territory we covered.
- TFTim Ferriss
Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time. It's nice to see you. And for everybody listening, we will have show notes, links to everything, all the resources to all of Cal's books, including Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and his latest, A World Without Email. We will also link to a number of his New Yorker pieces, to the Deep Questions podcast, and you can find him online, not on any social media platforms, but at calnewport, C-A-L-N-E-W-P-O-R-T, .com. And until next time, be safe, experiment often, and thanks for tuning in. Schedule shutdown complete.
Episode duration: 2:05:43
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