Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media | Lex Fridman Podcast #166

The following is a conversation with Cal Newport. He's a friend and someone whose writing, like his book Deep Work, for example, has guided how I strive to approach productivity and life in general. He doesn't use social media, and in his book, Digital Minimalism, he encourages people to find the right amount of social media usage that provides value and joy. He has a new book out called A World Without Email, where he argues brilliantly, I would say, that email is destroying productivity in companies and in our lives. And, very importantly, he offers solutions. He is a computer scientist at Georgetown University who practices what he preaches. To do theoretical computer science at the level that he does it, you really have to live a focused life that minimizes distractions and maximizes hours of deep work. Lastly, he's a host of an amazing podcast called Deep Questions that I highly recommend for anyone who wants to improve their productive life. Quick mention of our sponsors: ExpressVPN, Linode Linux Virtual Machines, Sun Basket meal delivery service, and SimpliSafe home security. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that deep work or long periods of deep focused thinking have been something I've been chasing more and more over the past few years. Deep work is hard, but it's ultimately the thing that makes life so damn amazing. The ability to create things you're passionate about in a flow state where the distractions of the world just fade away. Social media, yes, reading the comments, yes, I still read the comments, is a source of joy for me in strict moderation. Too much takes away the focused mind, and too little, at least I think, takes away all of the fun. We need both, the focus and the fun. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman, if you can only figure out how to spell that. And now, here's my conversation with Cal Newport. What is deep work? Let's start with the big question.

So, I mean, it's, it's my term for when you're focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task, which is something we've all done, but we had never really given it a name necessarily that was separate from other type of work. And so I gave it a name and said, "Let's compare that to other types of efforts you might do while you're working and see that the deep work efforts actually have a huge benefit that we might be underestimating."

What does it mean to, to work deeply on something?

I, you know, I had been calling it hard focus in my writing, uh, before that. Well, so the context you would understand, I was in the Theory Group in CSAIL at MIT, right? So I was surrounded, at the time when I was coming up with these ideas, by these professional theoreticians. And that's like a murderer's row of thinkers there, right? I mean, it's like Turing Award, Turing Award, MacArthur, Turing Award. I mean, y-y-you know the crew, right?