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

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

Do you purposefully go out of your way to write the most shocking and triggering books in the world?

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

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

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

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

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