Ep. 341: Drowning, Treading, or Swimming

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ. Joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I want to do a quick crazy or deep segment. We haven't done that in a while. This is one where I really don't know the answer. Like I'm actually interested in not just your thoughts, but the audience's thoughts as well.

So Crazier Deep, if you don't know, is where I have an idea and the question is like, is this cool and deep or is it just insane? Yeah, and a good thing to know is I have no idea what you're going to say. Yeah, well, I mean, and I'm actually torn on this one.

All right, so here at the HQ, we have a couple of rooms in our HQ, and we have one we call the Maker Lab, and this is where... our monitors are it's where we edit the podcast it's it's where there's also we do making i do making in there we have a 3d printer in there and and soldering irons and etc etc so i have a plan i i for how to

update that room and it's i mean it's a good plan uh it's not super exciting but it's replacing tables in their ikea tables with much more sturdy wooden tables so that's fine one of the walls and my plan was going to get pegboard for tools like that's over i do some making then i had some artwork i wanted to put on another wall and on a third wall i was actually going to put these like metal i've talked about before i think these metal

orange book rails and i was going to put first editions of michael creighton books up there which i thought would be cool because i write under that wall um and then like a three-quarter side arcade cabinet against like the smaller back wall so that was the plan like i had this plan for uh

You know, I make stuff in there both physically like 3D printing and designing and intellectually I do a lot of writing in there. I want to make that office cooler. More recently, my sons and I, we've been watching videos where people do. more over the top sort of renovations of their maker spaces. Like we watched one last night where he was making it more like he was inspired by Tron.

And it had like light shooting around and neon. And we watched another video I mentioned on the show where they built – she built like a dark academia. It had old bookshelves and stuff like that. So now I'm trying to wonder like I wonder if it would be interesting just as an experiment for the show and for the brand to actually connect with some sort of maker and do something over the top in there. So it's like should it just be.

like a well-designed intentional workshop like i originally planned or should i be considering doing something you know over the top in there that would require we can execute the first plan the second thing we would need help what do your kids say

I don't think they care. They don't care at all? I mean – Even after watching the videos? Yeah. I mean I don't know. I think they care about what they do in there. They tend to think – I don't think they understand what I do for a living. I think this is all very mysterious to them. Most of their friends' dads don't.

come and talk into microphones and have like weird offices that they can't really explain so i don't know what they think but i'm just wondering like would it be cool for it to be over the top or would i tire of it and be like i wish this was just like a well-designed workshop well i'm sure it could be over the top but pretty cool

So what's your instinct? Well, I don't know what the over the top would be. We were watching, one idea we had, I was watching, my middle son really likes the original Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. i like that too they have really good set design on the on the nautilus right with like these it's like a steampunk victorian whatever like that would be cool i've been on that ride too in disney world like 30 years ago yeah where like it was around the boats

But it's cool. It has like rivets but also like Victorian touch to it but also like steampunk, like Victorian notion of high tech. It's like that would be cool.

Like would you think clearer in a room like that? Would it be like, oh, wow, this is like such a weird, inspiring room. It's like where I go to have like big thoughts and it would be like Brandon Sanderson's lair or maybe just my original design because everything I was going to place in my original design like had some purpose or meaning.

So I'm trying to figure that out. You could probably still add some of those things that you wanted with the Crichton books and stuff. Right. So maybe it's just plussing up. Yeah. Okay. I would do that. All right. All right. So if you have a thought audience, send it to a.

Jesse at CalNewport.com. And if you're a DC-based crazy maker that has a super inspiring pitch, let me know because you might be able to talk me into it. We'll see. But I'm excited about that. I went by this summer. I want to be working in a cooler. I want that space to be cooler because I've been doing more, definitely more polished writing there. Actually, I'm excited too because I'm getting one of those older cheap desks in there in my place and there's been a spot for there. Let's.

For like seven months. Well, we can do the tables first, I guess. I'm just kidding. I'm actually not kidding. Yeah, but the problem is your truck is broken. How are we going to transport the tables? I don't know what. car you're driving now you're uh i'm driving a 1998 bmw yeah it's like really nice it's nice it's got one of those old phones yeah seriously yeah like the wall street phone yeah all right but we're not gonna put

The table on the phone. 15-foot table in the back of your 1998 BMW. So when you get your truck back, then I'll pull the trigger. But you have to help me build the desks. Oh, yeah. Because we can put those there. We can just put the desks in whenever. That's just like a straight-up upgrade. It's just replacing the services with better services. And then the other stuff we can work on later. Deal. All right. My other idea is just lots of pictures of me.

Just the whole room, just the various sizes. So it's interesting, but just like a lot of, and all just my headshot. There's lots of pictures of my headshot because that's what really gets me inspired. All right. We got a good show today. We have a deep dive that is going to.

I have a metaphor. It's going to pull from Tim Ferriss. Interesting. We've got some questions. And then I'm going to react to a meme. We have a lighthearted final segment. Someone sent me a meme based on related to things we've talked about. That was funny. So we'll get into it a little bit.

So let's get started with our deep dive. One of the major themes I talk about here is how to tame overload in your life and work, the type that can be supercharged by modern technology to the place where you... Really have no space left in your life to cultivate more depth. So how do we tame that overload is a question I care about. Today I want to talk about a way of thinking about this problem that I have found useful in my own life. It describes a trap.

that I myself have fallen into and give some glimpse of a way out. Now what's interesting is I was thinking about this concept and around that same time I noticed that tim ferris was working on a new book and i think he's calling it the book of no oh the no book And he had – and I have it on the screen here for people who are watching. He's still writing it, but he posted the introduction on his website. And when I was reading the introduction of his book, I said, oh, wait a second.

What Tim is thinking and writing about in this book really overlaps this idea that I've been toying with. So what I really want to do here is I'm going to read you an excerpt from the introduction to the Tim Ferriss's. pending next book, the notebook. And then I am going to introduce my concept of a metaphor for it, and we'll keep returning to Tim's story to try to help tease out what I mean.

by that metaphor and what the ideas are i'm dealing with right so we got a little bit of a complex web here of ideas but i think it'll make it interesting all right so i have tim's introduction draft up here on the screen I am going to just read an excerpt from it. All right. This is from Tim's introduction. I first realized I had a problem when everything was going right for me.

The day was May 2, 2007, just after 5.30 p.m. in New York when I received a phone call I'll never forget. My editor at Random House wanted to inform me that my debut book, The 4-Hour Workweek, had hit the New York Times bestseller list. As her words sunk in, I staggered backwards and collapsed against the wall in shock, gratitude, and relief. Overnight, I was transformed from a guy begging people to answer his emails to someone on the other side. All kinds of requests and offers poured in.

Speaking gigs, interviews, consulting, partnerships, brand deals. It was a tsunami. Flattered, unprepared, and afraid. This might be my only 15 minutes of fame. I said yes to nearly everything, especially... Anything six, nine or 12 months off in the distance. My calendar seemed like pristine water, clear as crystal for a brief lull. But then I had to pay the piper. All right. So I want to.

Offer a metaphor for understanding sort of what's happening there, a common problem, and how we can get out of it. I will say, by the way, Jesse, though, Ferris is underselling. How successful his book was. I've had many books hit the New York Times bestseller list. That by itself doesn't create the tsunami. It's like the right book and the right book at the right time. The list is not the impressive part. I think it was like that book was really successful.

especially in Silicon Valley. So I think people overvalue the New York Times bestseller list, but this book was very successful. All right. So to make sense of the deeper lessons in Ferris's story, I'm going to introduce a metaphor here that we're going to follow through. All right, so here's the metaphor. Imagine a traveler is on an ocean liner, and the ocean liner sinks. So before he dives into the water...

The traveler instinctively grabs from his cabin all the things that seem important. So like, hey, here's a tool I use for my work or like here's a gift that like a friend gave me or an instrument I play for like entertainment. It's something that's important to me. Here's this book of poetry I'm trying to learn and better myself with this. Like all this stuff that's important, he grabs it from his cabin before the ship sinks.

The problem is he has so much stuff that when he hits the water, he starts to flail. He's taken in water. His thrashing is only making things worse. It's clear to him that he is drowning. So if we connect this back to the Ferris story. This basically describes how Ferris is talking about that first year after the four-hour work week took off. He had so many commitments that they were weighing him down. He couldn't keep his head above water. It was that sense of I am drowning in things to do.

Okay, so then where things get interesting to me is the possible responses to this situation. So if we return to the metaphor, here's one possible response. Maybe our traveler is a high-achieving Type A type. So before heading out on his ocean voyage, he was saying, look, I'm afraid about ships sinking, so I'm going to train. To be comfortable in the water. And I'm going to train like how to tread water. Like what's the right stroke to use. And I'm going to exercise and get my.

my legs strong, and I'm going to get my lungs strong, and I'm going to master how not to panic, and I can be in the water like a rescue swimmer would learn, like how to be comfortable. in the water and staying afloat so maybe our traveler does all that work so now when the ship sinks he jumps in the water with these things that are important to him he's not flailing and drowning he's sort of calmly and strongly doing like the efficient

It's keeping his head above water. But here's the creeping realization. It's taking off his energy just to stay in that spot. He's not drowning right away, but he's also not getting anywhere. He's just... stuck right there where the ship sunk and eventually i mean much more slowly than if he was not prepared at all but eventually you know his his strength will begin to ebb and he he knows eventually he can't stay here forever

He will slip back below the water. If we connect back to the world of Ferris and productivity, to me, preparing and learning the tread water to be good and comfortable in the water in our metaphor is like in Ferris' world. Having good productivity and time management systems. You're prepared to deal with lots of things. You keep track of obligations like I talk about. You manage what you're going to do with your time.

I sometimes talk about this as having a how and when system or what and when system rather. Like you have a system to keep track of what you need to do and some way of figuring out when you're going to do things. This sort of happened – now I'm extrapolating beyond Ferris' excerpt to just things we know about him more generally. I would say this is probably more or less what happened to Ferris a little bit longer in the years immediately following.

the four-hour work week coming out, is he is really good at systems. And I know from that period, and he's talked about in his books, his systems for helping to deal with all the things he had to do.

And Manchin's time got very sophisticated and he had teams and people who would answer things and keep track of and had rules for like when we're going to do this or that and what's going on with this calendar and I don't want to have to book travel. I'll have someone who do that for me. Ferris got really good.

at the treading water. A lot of people in our audience also gets very good at that as well. You have good systems in place so that you're not going to panic if you have a huge amount of stuff on your plate. You'll be able to look at where things are, make sure this is on a waiting to hear from list. I've time blocked this. I'm getting back at this. You're keeping your head above water and you're staying calm, but you're not getting anywhere. So if we return to our metaphor.

what's the final thing our traveler could do? Well, ultimately, the only answer that remains... is that if he lets go of some of these things he's holding, these important things he brought in from the ship before it sunk, he'll be able to start swimming. And now he can actually aim to where he wants to go, like the shore.

And make progress towards there. So what he needs like ultimately to get out of the situation is going to have to let some of those things go. Now, if we go back to Ferris's world, this is where he eventually evolved to. Ferris eventually evolved to a place where he was much more comfortable having less proverbial important things on his body in the water. He got good at saying no to obligations or commitments.

Some that were important to him, some that were coming from friends, some that were very entertaining to him. He got really good at that, which is why he's writing this whole book about saying no. To give you one example. There's another excerpt from the book that's written by Neil Strauss who I think is actually co-writing this book with Ferris. But Strauss has this memory of more recently trying to context him, who he knows, with a text message.

And when he texted Tim, he got the following response. This is like an automated reply. I'm traveling overseas until November 7th. If your text is urgent, please reach out to someone on my team. Otherwise, please rescind your text after November 7th if it still applies. Since catching up would be impossible, I'll be deleting all messages upon my return and starting from scratch. Thank you. As Strauss then says, this is a boss level no. So ultimately where Tim got was recognizing that.

The systems alone wouldn't save him. He had to just have less things going on in his life. So I like that metaphor because... Not only does it have the obvious message of eventually you have to say no to things if you're going to get where you're going to go, but there's a subtler message in there that Ferris' example emphasizes, my own life.

emphasizes and struggles with this as well. There's this subtle message in there, which I think is very important for us to understand overload in our current moment. The traveler still had to learn to be comfortable in the water. and then let go of things as well. So if the traveler had skipped the getting comfortable in the water step, he wasn't going to make it to the shore, even if he dropped all of his things. And I think this is what's often missed.

When we're trying to understand or make sense of a critique productivity or time management organization. It's not that these skills aren't important. But it's realizing, I think it's a frustration that a lot of type A people like myself have. is the skills by themselves cannot make every situation tractable. You can be a really good swimmer, but if you have a bunch of stuff in your arms, you're eventually going to sink.

Same thing. You can be super organized, but if you're trying to do too much, that overhead to actual execution ratio is going to get so high enough that like nothing's going to get done. It's going to be very frustrating. You can keep your head above water for a while. You can keep people from getting upset. The most important thing is get. done or deferred and you sort of figure out how to make the whole puzzle work, but you're not making your way to shore.

What I think people miss is they go to they want one without the other. So the common mistake, the mistake that most people are coming to realize is like, OK, you can't just be really well organized if you're doing too much. But the other mistake is made as well where people are saying. Now, the problem here is just the doing too much, right? And that you shouldn't learn, if we go back to the metaphor, don't learn to swim.

Because that might maybe encourage you to bring too many things with you. It's better not to even bother with that swimming culture. Because we don't want people to think that they can swim their way out of overload. But the problem is if you don't bother with that swimming culture, you can be as zen as you want. I'm not bringing anything with me. It doesn't matter. I say no to everything. You're still going to drown.

You need both. The traveler who survived was a traveler who both trained but also was willing to let go of things that were important. And so I think that's often missed in the anti-productivity discussion. It's the hardest part, I think, of the productivity discussion. No organization is bad. Only trusting organization is bad. You need some organization, but you need all this other stuff as well. And the other stuff is psychological. Or if we read like Oliver Berkman stuff, philosophical.

There's all of these other layers to it, but the layers have to add up on top of each other. They're not alternatives. Like I care about productivity or I care about. like being present and not doing too much. You need both of these things have to work together. So that metaphor where the difference between drowning, treading and swimming, I think it's helpful for me. So anyways, I'm looking forward to Tim's book.

Because he really, really is good at saying no. As anyone who's communicated with him knows, he's good at that. And I think that is... probably the hardest lesson or the most underserved lesson in these discussions of productivity. I can teach you how to swim. I'm good at that. But even I need more help figuring out how to drop some of the stuff I'm carrying.

So I'm looking for that book, and hopefully that metaphor proves as useful to you as it's starting to prove useful for me as well. Maybe it's a little overwrought, Jesse, but I like that idea. Yeah. Treading, swimming. There's a lot of pieces in there. I've listened to all his podcasts for like over 10 years. Do you think he has it all figured out? I think he's still trying to figure it out. I think he has the, the not getting overloaded thing figured out.

Yeah, I don't know that he has life figured out, who Among Us does. Right. But his combination of systems plus he, more so than anyone I know. really does seem to follow these rules. Like I don't want extra stuff in my life. Right. And like a clear example of that is the fact that his podcast is really not, it's remote and not video forward. And he's just, you know, I think we talked about this when I went on his show last.

He's like, I know that's the trend. I should build a studio and have people come to me and then we can film with like really good 4K cameras and have a really good video presence. But he says. That's going to put too big of a footprint on my schedule. I have to be where my studio is. I have to fly people out to the studio. I can't travel.

I can't go spend six weeks in Europe or whatever because I have to be at the studio and we have to be recording it. He says, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to record using a headset.

that I can just pack in a bag and from like any room I am anywhere in the world, I can just put that on and record it, right? Like that's an example of someone following this. It's an opportunity here. Like, no, I want to have like a Rogan style studio. Everyone's doing these studios. It might make my audience bigger.

But his take was, I don't want the extra commitment. It's not worth it for me. The podcast is successful enough. I enjoy it. I don't want to make it more of a burden. So I think with things like that. I think that's someone actually walking the walk, at least when it comes to not doing too much. So I think he really got that book. It's.

It was a successful book. Other people whose books were that successful I don't think got the same degree of overload that he experienced in like 2007, 2008 because of who that book was successful with. So that book was successful with this sort of younger Silicon Valley crowd. who really kind of like obsessively latched on. So I'm sure that was not easy. Deep work was very successful, but I did not have nearly that.

level i mean i have a lot of things in my life that i have to say no to and i have all these teams now etc etc um but i didn't have that same sort of like obsessive focus that i think for whatever reasons tim tim's book generated i wonder if he'll keep his podcast going because he

Kind of alluded to the fact that he doesn't know what he's going to do. He's been there for a while, right? Yeah, he had like the 10-year anniversary or something. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we all wrote something for him. Good question. Good question. All right. Anyways, look forward to that book. We've got questions to handle here I'm looking forward to. But first, I'm going to talk about one of our sponsors. If you're going online without ExpressVPN,

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The Defender line of vehicles, we have the 90, the 110, and the 130, just seating up to eight. Last time we talked about the Defender. alluded to a good friend of the show brad stolberg had sent me a picture of a all-black defender that he saw down in miami doing a A talk down there and he's like, when are we going to get our defender and travel the country podcasting? I was like, that is the right car. That is going to be our podcasting car.

You've got to check out what these things look like. Go to LandRoverUSA.com. It's a very slick-looking car, and it's – when Brad and I go through with our plan of traveling the country podcasting remotely, we've decided that's the car we want to take. Look, it's an icon. I like that about it. It's an iconic vehicle that's been reimagined through thoroughly modern design.

So you still have that iconic look. You have those legendary capabilities off-road and on, but also all the modern tech you would want in a modern state-of-the-art vehicle. Like their 3D surround cameras, their clear sight rear view gives you a rear view you can see even if you have.

like a bunch of podcasting equipment in the back of your, your car and you can't actually see out the window. Their PV pro infotainment system is excellent. Anyways, it's a cool car. It's a classic car or I should say vehicle. It's just not a car. It's a SUV maybe. Iconic, but also quite luxurious. All right? So, Jesse, beware, because when Brad and I are going to travel the country podcasting, you're going to be sitting in the middle seat moving the video switcher.

I was going to say I won't be able to keep up with my truck. The one that Brad sent me a picture of had a nice – because it was tricked out. They had a nice roof rack on there. So you're going to be on the roof. We'll strap you down. It'll be okay. But you'll be up on the roof doing the video switcher as we go down the highway recording our Defender podcast. You can design your Defender at LandRoverUSA.com.

Go to LandRoverUSA.com to learn more about the Defender. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. First questions from Antonio. You discussed that a major impact of AI is that non-experts will be able to use tools at expert level without the training, and this leads to productivity gains.

Don't you think this can also lead to quality productivity loss? If a user is relying heavily on AI for analysis, the work can have fundamental flaws that the non-expert won't be able to fix? I mean, maybe, but I think there's a bit of a... a difference in the model that we're thinking about, about how one would interact with AI in this scenario. I think the last few years, we've been attuned to this chatbot model.

Where the AI is this sort of singular self-contained intelligence that you're asking to do things on your behalf. So I think that's what you have in mind. Like I'm asking the AI, analyze this data. And tell me what you see. And then you don't really know what results it's going to produce. Now, I see it actually much more instrumental than that. It's.

allowing you to do something in a piece of software that you know what it is. You just don't know what is the right way to like click on things or select things to actually make this happen. This is where I think the first impact is going to be. So you're going to be in like Microsoft Excel.

And you have all these columns of data. And you know what you want to do. Maybe what you want to do is like, okay, can we take out every row where the amount in column C, which is like dollar amounts, is below $100? erase all those rows, and then I want to sort all the rows that remain based on their, like...

column F, which is like the location. And you're like, I don't really know exactly how to, or that's going to take me a second to do, or I don't know how to sort, but I know what I want it to do. I could just sort of say that and then some sort of co-pilot type plugin will do that work for me. Or you're in Word and you want to say something like, I don't really know how this feature works, but can we go through and get rid of the – turn off the initial paragraph indents?

Like when you start a new paragraph and a dance, I actually don't like that. Can you turn off those indents? And then can we make the block quotes, right? Where I have a quote. Can we make the vertical spacing? It's like double space. Can we make that single space? Again, you know what you want to do. It's just like, I haven't learned, like, where do I find these formatting things? Where do I go to change it? You know, it's going to be things like that. You sort of know what you want to do.

But you don't know how to do it. You haven't had that training. And so it's like someone sitting with you, like used to be your nephew would sit with you when you're using your computer and they would, okay, I know how to do that. Granddad, here's how it goes, right? That's what I'm imagining the initial productivity gains are going to be. Not as the paradigm we've been trained in the last couple of years to get used to, which is more.

Hey, you singular intelligent entity, I'm going to give you something and you're going to go off and think and come back and bring me something. I actually used AI semi-successfully, Jesse, on the deep dive. I had written it, the metaphor in the deep dive using the second person, you. And I was like, I think this would be better as like a traveler, like a third person. So I asked ChatGPT, I was like, can you rewrite it that way?

And it did. And I, you know, adjust some things. I don't know that it really saved me that much time, but it's an example. Like I knew what I wanted it to do and it like saved me a little bit of time with me trying to do it. I was, I mentioned this to you before, but I was listening to the Ferris Seth Godin one and they were talking about perplexity and Claude. Yeah. Which I never use, but then I started using them and it's pretty awesome.

Yeah. I like perplexity. I use perplexity sometimes too. It's good for you. So you pay for it. I have the, I just use free, I guess. I could only add the option to pay for it, but I pay for it for the year. I was like $200. Maybe I'm paying for it. Uh, it's, it's useful. It's still only marginally useful over Google, and that's because we forget how much artificial intelligence is already in Google. Google is pretty good at, hey, I need an example of this or what's this.

just kind of find you those pages or give you short answers to things, which works pretty well. Perplexity will like summarize it in its own words and give you the links to follow. I find it to be like marginally better than Google for certain things. Also, it makes things up a lot. That does get in the way. If you ask it for examples, it'll find you this perfect example. That's not right.

Like it's just – it's changed it to be like exactly what you're looking for and then you follow the source and it's not at all what it's saying. There was – the example was the other day I was looking for one of my New Yorker pieces from last month. I was looking for an example of like a parent. I forgot the exact details, but like a parent testifying in Congress about the negative impacts of social media on their kids.

like some testimony i could i asked perplexity about it and it was like yep uh there's a famous case it's like a tragic case of this young girl who i think committed suicide and there's a lawsuit after that they sued meta

And perplexity is like, yeah, the mom and here's her name, you know, came before the such and such committee in Congress. Like here's some quotes from her testimony. And I was like, oh, that's just perfect. Let me just, you know, it's a New Yorker. I need a fact check. Let me find the actual source to make sure I'm quoting this right.

Never happened. Never happened. Really? She never testified. Yeah. And I asked perplexity about this. And then finally it was like, yeah, I might've made that up basically. Like I, you're right. I can't actually find a real source that confirms that. So it fed me like exactly what I needed. But it didn't exist. That's incredible. Yeah. It was like the name of the committee. Well, it turns out it was just.

Because I know all the stuff about this particular topic. It was mixing sources about Francis Hogan, the Facebook whistleblower, her testimony in Congress with this parent of the kid. Who was suing Metta and it mixed those two things together and made like the parent testifying in front of Congress. That's interesting. All that got cut anyways. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Natasha.

What counts as non-optimal technology for the digital declutter? You gave an example on a participant only listening to podcasts during his commute. I feel like I spend too long listening to podcasts throughout the day, so I'm considered completely banning them for the 30-day duration to explore other hobbies and reassess things. So the digital declutter, which is from my book, Digital Minimalism,

It has you go 30 days without using what's called optional digital technologies. So I threw optional in there to make it clear this is not you getting out of like answering your work emails. If your kid uses text message to tell you when they're ready to be picked up from practice, you need to still use text messages, right? But the stuff that feels optional, you take it out of your life for 30 days. You aggressively.

work on reflection and experimentation to figure out what really matters and then in the end you figure out what you want to let back so natasha's question is like how do we draw this line about what is an optional technology or not and i basically say trust your gut So she's pointing out – I gave the example in the book of maybe you listen to podcasts still during your digital declutter but you don't do social media.

And she's saying, well, what if I don't want to do podcasts? And I would say, yeah, don't do them. You're kind of trusting your gut here. What you're looking for is information, information both about what really matters, and you will get that. If and when you're more aggressively taking a lot of things out of your life, you're more aggressively reflecting, experimenting with other analog activities. And information about...

What do you really miss or not? And so taking a lot of things out of your life will help you get that information. So it's not so important to me that you get the exact list, but that like you're being honest about it. The stuff that troubles you, you're moving out.

So the other option you have, and I talk about this in the book, is you could leave some things that you need to use to some degree and put fences around it to reduce it. And I think that's probably how I was talking about podcast. I think I was probably saying.

Maybe you put fences around it so you're like, well, I'll still listen to the podcast on my commute. That's what I do on my commutes, but I'm not going to listen to them otherwise. I have this with streaming video, right? A lot of people. When I did this experiment with a lot of people doing a digital declutter, multiple people said, oh, here was my fence around Netflix-style streaming services. I'm allowed to watch during the declutter if there's someone else with me.

So I could still do social watching. Me and my roommate are going to watch a movie because that seems not like a problem, but I can't do binging. I want to try to take a break from binging. So you can either take things out or you can put fences around them. There is no hard. and fast lying about what has to be there, what doesn't have to be there. But you got to trust your gut. I mean, if something is worrying you how much you're using it, then take it out for the digital declutter.

Or have fences around it. But the key thing about the declutter, and it's like the key point of that book, you have to spend the time, when you're taking the break, you have to spend that time aggressively pursuing alternative activities that are valued.

valuable to you that is where the value is if you just try to white knuckle the digital declutter if you try to say i'm just going to stop using all this stuff on my phone because i don't like it i'm just going to do that for 30 days you're not going to make it

You're going to be staring into the void, and it's going to drive you insane. You have to be aggressively pursuing the alternatives to fill the time. That's what makes something like the digital declutter actually work, and it's why I call it a declutter and not a detox.

Because the detox terminology in the context of digital technology is too much used as this idea of taking a break. If you can just get away from things, you can clarify yourself and then go back to using your stuff just the way you were before.

I don't like that detox mindset in the realm of digital. I prefer the declutter because the goal of this process is at the end to only add back the stuff that matters. Your goal with this process is to have a different declutter digital life on the other side. Not just taking a break from your digital life and then returning to it unchanged on the other side. That detox thing is good to me. I mean it's also not the right use of the word detox. I mean in substance abuse.

Treatment. Detox, yes, you're kind of getting something out of your system, but you don't go back to it. You don't detox from alcohol and then go back to drinking. It's the first step towards sobriety. So it's weird the way the digital world has.

Digital wellness has taken detox to now just mean like a temporary break. Like if I could just get some breathing room from social media, I'll be – that will be helpful. And then I'll just go back to using social media again on the other end. It never made sense to me.

On the new white Lotus on max, they call it a detox when they go to Thailand and they're like introducing the guests and stuff. And I lost your phones. I lost it. Yeah. But, and that is using detox in like the digital wellness way, which is like, take a break while you're in Thailand for a week. I just saw it last night and I was thinking of this.

Yeah, I know we watched it too. We watched it too. All right, what do we got? Next question is from Ethan. Can you be in a state of deep work even if your cognitive capabilities aren't being pushed to the limit and not improving a skill? For example, reading a book?

Well, I mean, deep work is a term that was introduced in the context of professional activities. So it was very specifically talking about professional activities where you're doing something hard, like something you'd been trained for, and you were doing it with your full focus.

And the whole point of identifying that professional activity in that book was to say, don't forget, this is really the thing that most moves to needle in most organizations. Like this is the thing that ultimately produces the valuable things that lets you keep your lights on. So don't be seduced into having everyone's day be spent doing the shallow instead, just on email, just in movies. Don't let that – meetings. Don't let that busyness.

somehow in your mind make you feel like you're hustling or running a sharp organization. It's the focus stuff. on things that's not easy to do that ultimately produces the value. That's hard to replicate stuff. So we shouldn't forget that being important. So it's really talking about professional activities.

I think the notion of deep work for a lot of people has taken on this sort of moral valence. It's like good activities versus bad activities, which I don't think is right. I mean even in the work context, it's not like the non-deep activities are bad. I mean … The non-deep work activities include sending the invoices that is going to get you the money for the thing that you created. I mean it's going to be booking the travel that allows you to go.

present the lecture that's based off of a lot of deep thinking like it's not bad my point is though work can't just be that you can't let it crowd out the thing that's actually producing the value but anyways there's this moral valence people take to it and then

This sort of makes people upset because then they feel like they're being accused, that if they're not doing enough of this, that it's somehow bad. And then it captures – once you have a moral valence, you begin to use this term to talk about nonprofessional activities like in your life outside of work.

Deep means good and shallow means bad. And you're like, well, reading a book seems like it's a good activity, so can't I call that deep work? And I'm saying, no, no, this is a narrow concept. It has to do with professional activities in professional settings, in particular knowledge work settings.

Reading a book is what I would call a focused activity, right? It has that element that is a part of deep work in which you're giving something your full attention. I do think focused activities are useful. Your life should have them. Our mind expects them. It can be very stressful and ultimately sort of deranging to have no focused activities in your life. I mean, if you're constantly on a phone.

And your mind can never just do one thing. That is a problem. You're going to exhaust your mind. I talk about this in digital minimalism. Your mind needs what I call solitude, but freedom from input for other minds and focused activities like reading a book give you that. So it was working on like a woodworking project. It might not be in the moment what you're doing, which might be like sanding.

It's not cognitively demanding, but it's a focused activity. It's getting your full attention or your knitting. It's not a hard stitch, but it's taking your full attention. Focused activities are great, but I would use that terminology different than deep work. Deep work is a very specific... Knowledge work specific professional pursuit activity. Focus work is more broad. You do need focused activities. Reading a book is a great focused activity for a lot of reasons, but I want it.

mix that up with the terminology for deep work because deep work is trying to do something very specific, which has to be how do we design and think about running knowledge work organizations and how are we messing that up in the digital age? It's that moral issue, Jesse, that's what...

Yeah, I get surprised or I would get surprised when people get upset about deep work, but they get upset almost always as a consequence of first interpreting deep work with this moral valence. And then as soon as you start thinking like deep work is good. Other work is bad. And whoever does more deep work is better.

than someone who does less, then people start to get upset because they say, well, wait a second, there's different jobs and different people have more opportunities to do deep work than other people. And why are people judging me? And it opens up these whole can of worms. I just see it as a specific activity.

among others, that's done in a knowledge work organization that has been receiving, it's been forgotten or it was being forgotten because high-tech tools were crowding out the attention space. And it was just pointing out, don't forget that. That's actually the thing that keeps the lights on. We might have to go out of our way to protect it these days because of the velocity of distraction coming from things like digital tools. So I like that distinction. Focused activities is a broad category.

Reading books is in there. Knitting is in there. Sanding wood is in there. Deep work is under that umbrella along with other things like sports or flow activities can be under that umbrella too. They're all under that. So I think that's a useful distinction. All right, who do we got? Jeff, what are Cal's thoughts regarding content aggregator services such as InnoReader?

which allow you to subscribe to and view content such as blog posts, YouTube videos, and social media channels outside the original platforms. Is this a good way to be more intentional about content consumption, or is it just another distraction?

Well, I'm a huge booster of aggregators as a way of reclaiming some of the value proposition of the original internet. I don't really get the point of... aggregators that are aimed at algorithmic platforms however like the whole point of an algorithmic platform like a social media platform their whole point was to push back against the aggregation model

When I first got started in new media, I got started with a blog. This would have been back in 2007. I loved that time period because it was individuals producing their own content on their own servers. And what people would do is have a RSS reader. So a reader that could read the automated feeds that would describe like when you had new blog posts. You would have an RSS reader.

that would go around and check for all the blogs you subscribe to. And subscribing was just like you telling the reader, this is a blog I want to follow. And it would just check, hey, is there a new post on this blog? If so, I'll pull it into the reader so you can read it. in the same right there next to any other blog post. And so your reader would just have like, here's the newest articles from around the blogs you follow. You had one tool you would read. I still have memories.

I don't know what tool it was. Google had a good reader. Maybe it was Google's. But being in a classroom, this might have been distributed algorithms I was TAing. I remember reading Zen Habits, Leo Babuda's Zen Habits. post in my rss reader in like 2007 or 2006 or something like this that was a great technology they got rid of like google stopped supporting that and other companies that were trying to do this went out of business why

Because this was a bad model for trying to create a giant company. It was a great model for consumers. I could subscribe to these different sources of information I like. And they'll all show up in one app. So I just have to open up this one app or website. It was websites mainly back then. And it will just tell me if there's a new thing over on Cal's blog. It will just show up and I can just read it. It's like my own personal newspaper. That was fantastic. But you can't make money on that.

fear the company because their content is being pulled from people's individual sites and they're being brought to an individual to read. And so the social companies are like, no, no, no, we need. you to live on our walled garden platform we own all the content and we'll use algorithms to give you a feed of things to read and then we control all the content you see

We can monitor all the behavior you do and we can sell you targeted advertisements. So RSS went out of fashion because they said don't. You don't want an RSS feed. You want a Twitter feed or a Facebook feed or an Instagram feed. That's much more profitable for the small number of investors who are early in those companies. There are, there's like a return to the aggregator model. Notably.

Podcast read, podcast listeners, podcast apps. Podcast apps are basically blog RSS readers, right? So like if you go to Apple podcast. This is not like an Apple app and all this data is in Apple's world. It's not like going on to Instagram. All a podcast listing app does is you say, I want to subscribe to Deep Questions. Just like in the days of blogs, it just goes and notes to itself, keep an eye on the RSS feed for Cal's...

Our podcast is just on a server somewhere. It's nothing fancy. It's not owned by some platform. Just like a blog, it has an RSS feed that updates every time there's a new episode and it has all the information, the metadata for the information and a pointer to where the MP3 file is on the server. And your podcast listener, once you say, I care about deep questions, it just kind of pulls that a bunch.

Hey, is there anything new? Is there anything new? And if it sees something new, it downloads that file off of the server that we just happened to store our podcast on, and you can access it from your listener. So podcasting actually is a return to blog RSS readers, and I think it's fantastic. So the content independent, you know, we own our own content. It's on our own servers and anyone with any type of podcast app.

can subscribe and listen to our content. Or you can even go to like the deeplife.com slash listen and just listen to it right there. So I think that's really cool. So I would like to see a return for it. What I think that the technology is interesting to me now is aggregators for email newsletters. I think that's going to be the blog reader of, you know, 2026. It's going to be like what blog readers were in 2006. That's what I'm looking for because email inboxes are crowded.

You have personal stuff. You have work stuff. You have urgent stuff. The context shifting is immense. You have spam. You have promotional stuff. It's a very crowded attention arena. And I know some of these tools exist, and listeners, feel free to write to jesse at calnewport.com if you have good ones to point out to me. But I think these tools are going to evolve to be really important. Substack is trying to do this just for Substack blogs, but I want there to be independent apps where...

You just tell it. And I know there's a couple like this where they actually give you an email address you use. The subscribe to the newsletter. So like it comes straight to it. But I want there to be a way that all my email newsletters, I just have like one app or website I go to. And it's just like a newspaper except for what you're seeing is what's coming from these email newsletters. And I don't want it to be Substacks app because that has lots of other stuff going on.

I don't want it following me and giving me algorithmic recommendations and trying to keep me in there. I just want it to be. The things I subscribe to, it's showing it to me and I can read them all there and I don't have to go into my inbox that has other distracting things to read them. I think that's going to be this decade.

blogs were. It's going to be a way that you can have this content experience that's non-algorithmic and independent. So I'm a big believer in aggregators. I don't believe in aggregators for giant social media platforms.

because their whole point was to try to destroy aggregators in the first place. So then those emails would get deleted from your email account, right? They would just go right to whatever the solution is. Yeah, so I would be happy with that. So then you would never see them. That would be pretty sweet. Yeah, just have an app.

Right? Like, here's the latest from, like, the different things you subscribe to. Oh, hey, can I see, like, the archive of this one? And here's the older articles, right? I mean, I think it'd be cool. Yeah. Like a podcast. I mean, maybe just integrate these two things. That'd be a cool app. It's like, I like this person. I subscribe. It's like, oh, here's something to read. Here's something to listen to. The whole thing could look like the New York Times app or something like that.

People who have newsletters or podcasts, you can just have them. Here's the newest stuff and you just listen to it. You have like a nice app and it keeps track of where you are. To be quite honest, I like the Washington Post app a lot better than the New York Times because you can still see the physical paper in the post. I haven't tried that app. I subscribe, but okay, I should try it. Check it out. Yeah. The times app's pretty good. I don't like it because you can't see the paper.

So what do you mean? Like it won't show you like what the actual paper looks like? Yeah, at least in the post you have two options. You can see the feed like it is in New York Times, but you can also go to the print edition and you can see. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Yeah, I like that.

You can do that with the Boston Globe too, but for some reason you can't do it with the Times. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah. Even if they're the same company. All right. What do we got next? We have our slow productivity corner. Ooh, this is where we have a question each week that relates to my book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. It's also our excuse to play the Slow Productivity Corner theme music, which we'll hear right now.

What do we got, Jesse? It's from Jacob. I'm a senior executive looking after sales and marketing teams for a medium to large size business in New Zealand. With a large team and ever-changing demands and a competitive retail environment, is it possible to avoid pseudo-productivity and busyness? Time blocking is very difficult with constant disruptions both in person and via other channels.

Well, I see sort of two unrelated issues here. Can you avoid pseudo-productivity and business – and busyness in a competitive retail environment? And then second – Can time blocking somehow by itself help you accomplish this goal? Answer the first part, yes. I mean, think about it. What is pseudo-productivity? This is the core definition of my book, Slow Productivity.

the thing that slow productivity is trying to solve. Pseudor productivity is the belief that visible activity is a reasonable proxy for useful effort. So busyness is the point. If you're busy, that's good. If you're less busy, you're not.

The embrace of pseudo productivity as your primary metric for actually doing things useful is what leads to these sort of hyper distractive environments where we're all hustling and getting after it and jumping off and on and calls and slack. And we figure if we're really, really busy, we must be doing.

something right. But it's also self-evident after just a little bit of reflection that pseudo-productivity doesn't translate or correlate well with actual value produced. If anything, it can make it worse. If all you're doing is trying to be busy...

Where is it that you're actually allowing your mind to fix on a single cognitive context and apply your hard-won skills to produce some sort of new value, some new information that has value? Where are you doing the actual work of producing value in knowledge work?

It's like running a car factory where you're constantly running around and having meetings about the quality management and the best way to produce cars and you're constantly going around and making sure that the machines are oiled and putting in place.

new techniques to oil the machines and making sure that everything is working right and talking to people. Hey, what about this? What's going on with your machine? But no one's actually building the cars. You're all very busy, but eventually that plant's going to go out of business. So no pseudo productivity.

Self-evidently is something you can get away from. How you do it is hard. That's why I wrote a whole book about it. Time blocking, you know, that's like an individual time management strategy. I don't see how that's going to. break a culture of pseudo productivity among an entire team so what sort of things do matter here's some greatest hits from the book first of all make the work that needs to be done transparent and external

Do not just have tasks exist implicitly on people's plates that are being just passed around through emails and requests. Have a Kanban-style board somewhere the whole team can see. Here's things we need to do. Here's things that are being done now and who is working on them. So you can see like immediately this person's already working on three things. I'm not going to give them a fourth.

Have some sort of systematic collaborative way of deciding how to update these assignments. All right, what should we be working on next? Who has capacity? Okay, you have capacity. I'm going to move this card virtually or physically onto your column. what you need from other people to get this done. Let's just talk about this now while we're all here.

And so now you're keeping track of workload. You're preventing people from having too much on their plate at the same time. And you're getting much more efficient collaboration because you can front load the decisions about who needs what from whom as opposed to having that sort of be dragged out in a distributed fashion with just emails. being sent back and forth. Work with things, alternatives to ad hoc messaging. So maybe you have office hours for individuals.

If I have a question for you that you can't answer with a single message, I will go to your office hours and we'll have a five-minute discussion. Me talking with five people during a one-hour office hours. can prevent 50 messages that I have to receive and respond to throughout the rest of the day, which is a much bigger burden. Your team, in addition to keeping track of your external tasks, consider having things like docket clearing meetings twice a week.

We get together. This could be in smaller units. We have a shared document where up to that point, if anything came up that we need to figure out as a team or someone needs to tackle or have a question about, I add it to that shared document called a docket. And in the docket clearing meeting,

We go down that list one after another. All right. Do we really need to do this? Who's going to do this? What do you need? What about this? Maybe we'll move this onto our list. We're going to wait to do this. What about this issue here? Who has the answer for it? So you're consolidating when things get done and you're using the docket to ensure that things will be remembered.

Without doing what most people do to try to remember something that occurs to them is they send off an email and they get sent out there to start bouncing back and forth between people doing an obligation hot potato. So have office hours, have DACA clearing meetings. Be super clear about the metrics that matter. Here's the things we produce. How much are we producing? How good is it? What did you contribute to it? The clearer you are in actual value.

the less entranced you'll be by the simulated value of pseudo productivity. So that's going to matter as well. An idea for my book, A World Without Email. When it comes to external communication, people talking to your team from the outside, clients or other units within your organization have communication protocols.

You want to talk to us about this here and here's how and when you do it. It's not just you have someone's email address individually. In fact, have communication channels that are disconnected from individuals. That itself is a problematic. paradigm that all communication goes between handles that are associated with individuals. No, I have an email address for client questions. Now that changes the whole dynamic if you're a client.

Because when I'm sending this to Jesse, I'm just imagining there's another person. Like in the office next door who I'm asking something and it's rude if they don't get back to me. And why can't they just talk to me? And I'm really mad at Jesse now because he didn't respond to me right away. But if I'm sending that question to client questions at company.com.

I have a completely different set of expectations. Like, oh, this is going into an information tracking system, and I will get a response. In fact, maybe there's some nice guidelines about, hey, here's how this works. Send this to us.

This is emptied out and assigned to people to look at. Like once a day, you'll hear back within 48 hours. And if it's not a person, that's reasonable. Process is a process. If it's a person, we're like, why haven't I heard back in 20 minutes? So there's a lot of things you can do. to begin reengineering a team away from pseudo-productivity. But it's not going to be like one simple hack or habit. It's going to be a whole different way of keeping track of information, keeping track of tasks.

communicating internally and communicating with the outside world. So read Slow Productivity in its entirety. There's a lot of concrete advice in there. Read A World Without Email, a lot of concrete advice in there about just a communication piece. This is possible, but it is really hard.

All right. What do we got next? Do we have a call? We do. All right. Let's see what we have today. Hi, Cal. I have a bit of a silly and relatively simple but not unimportant, I think, question. I'm, like many of us, addicted. to doom scrolling. I've gotten off Instagram for probably over a year, maybe closer to two years now. But then YouTube brought out YouTube shorts, and then I would just infinitely scroll through those.

And I realized that the solution to that was just taking it off my phone. But I just feel like I always need to go to something that allows me to just scroll through my phone and turn off my brain for a few minutes at a time. And the issue now is that I end up going on LinkedIn on my browser. And the advantage of wanting to do this on LinkedIn is that the content is quite boring, and seeing a two-week-old post from someone with a cringy...

insight into life quickly makes you go off of it. But I still find myself going on it quite a few times each day. Do you have any tips about how to get rid of this doom-throlling reflex? I figure it's kind of like a smoker that just wants to fiddle with their hands or something. Thanks. Well, let's use the smoker analogy here for a second longer. Right. So when a smoker who has just quit.

is trying to be successful what is one of the key things you have to do you have to get alternative activities right this is the key thing you have to teach smoker oh this is a situation where you would normally smoke So what you need to do instead is like eat carrot sticks or you drink coffee, right? I mean it's like the coffee at the AA meetings or whatever, right? You have to have alternative activities.

The fill, the role, the thing that you are quitting used to play. If you just white knuckle it, it's hard. Like I'm used to smoking here and I just don't want to do it. And I'm just going to hold my hand tight till my knuckles turn white. You don't last very long that way. You got to get the alternative activities. The same holds, I think, for these information ecosystems. Your problem is you need to train yourself to appreciate alternative types of stuff to do when you're bored.

that you like even better than the stale LinkedIn post, right? You're looking at the stale LinkedIn, but like you must have nothing else that is pulling for your attention. So find other types of information.

And this is – it takes – I talk about this in the digital declutter. It's experimentation and reflection. So you try to figure out like what else is interesting to me and you put healthier habits in place. And that sounds really simple, but it actually is what works. It's simple because it's what works.

It's what we do for all other sorts of addictions. It's what you need to do here as well. And there's a lot of things this could mean. This could be analog, by the way. Like retrain yourself to read fun books. Right. Like if you're into thrillers, go get some. Now I'm going to do this, by the way, Jesse. Go on to like a books and like I'm going to get mass market paperbacks, you know.

Not first edition, so nothing expensive of like thrillers from a given era. Like I'm going to get the James Bond thrillers from like the original sort of whatever editions those were. They used to buy in the drugstore and they're sort of like portable.

paperbacks from from the age where like there was no other distractions i'm going to bring one of those with me and that's what i'm going to read when i'm bored and it's going to be stuff that's just super fun and i like it or have sources of information online that is affirming and interesting and doesn't bring you into a bad place. This time of year, especially this year, things are very grim where we live in Washington, D.C. because...

of all the disruptions to the federal workforce. So like there's a lot of distraction and grimness. What I like to – what I look at right now, what's helping me? Baseball spring training. Like I feel good. I know so much. I mean I just know day to day like what is happening at West Palm Beach with the Nationals, like what exercise they did and how much should we really care about the quadricep tendinitis and James Wood.

And is it really – when is he going to get back to throwing activities? But what's his hitting doing? I mean how are – what is the workload for our new pitcher that we just brought in from the Japanese league who he's used to pitching seven days a week versus the five-day-a-week rhythm that we have in the US? And Travis Soroka's changeup is looking really good. To me, that's like really – I like that distraction. I like that distraction. I read a lot.

And I enjoy it. I read and take notes on like idea books and I get really used to that. It's like an alternative. Maybe there's like podcasts. I think podcasts can be super positive. Like it's interesting, informative podcast or interview podcast. You can kind of get lost in that.

Maybe it's some other sort of more hobby type activity. Some people I know are really good at rabbit holing random topics. I think that could be really interesting, right? Like I'm really in – I want to get really into vintage watches. And they're like a rabbit hole on a non-emotionally salient, non-algorithmically optimized – like I'm on watch forums. And I just love just – Finding nuggets of information about this thing I'm rabbit holing on or I'm just really into right now.

these sprinter vans that get converted into these cool adventure bands. I just want to like rabbit hole on that and read about it and be on email lists and stuff like that. Like that's fun. You know, it's just about finding these alternative things you do.

That you get used to and they just don't feel as dragging. They don't feel like doom scrolling. They feel interesting. I'm learning something. I'm learning about baseball. I'm learning about watches. I'm reading these cool books. I really enjoy it. We put a guitar. I play, my son plays, my other son plays ukulele. My innovation was it needs to be right in the front foyer of the house. So you can just grab it whenever and just like play a little guitar.

It's next to our piano. And they do. They pick it up. They'll play a little bit. And I'm starting to do that a little bit more now. So you've got to find – you've got to aggressively invest in finding the alternative activities to scratch the same inch that the Doom Scroll is doing but doing it in a way that's – A scratch that's much more satisfying than what you're getting from these other content universes. That's where my app idea would be good, Jesse, where it is.

email newsletters and podcasts and in like a really nice app, like that would be a great thing to turn to. Like you're a little bit bored, you're a little bit tired. I'm like, yeah, I'm going to read like an interesting email newsletter. I'm not going to feel bad about it.

There's no weird algorithmic hypnosis that you get when you're looking at social media, and it's not going to make you feel bad. You're not going to read a Cal Newport email newsletter and just be like, oh my god, the world is – it's going to be – Focus is great and don't answer too many emails. It's going to be good. I feel good about it. What's the Vegas over-under for Nats wins this year? Which projections do you care about? There's two different projections.

One of them is a little bit more optimistic, and it's 72, 74. Yeah, there's a less optimistic one that's like 65. I think they'll do 75. You're going to bet on it? Yeah, I'll bet. Matt always has the over-unders for certain teams every year. I would take the over on even the more optimistic. They've done 72 more the last two seasons in a row.

They just have their core is better. Tough division. It's a tough division, but it's not betting on them making the playoffs. It's just betting on them. Winning 74 games. And they have like eight. available pitchers. That makes such a difference when you can react to pitcher injuries in July. much more effectively the wins you get there's four wins right there five wins right there is like yeah when we had two concurrent pitcher injuries we're still able to get

three victories instead of one out of like a five game stretch because we have like a deeper bench. Like that sort of thing adds up. I was, who was I? I was messing around with Holiday, Ryan Holiday. I was texting him the other day. Because I was reading about – it wasn't a national. Or maybe it was a national. Maybe it was a Washington national. But anyways, it was about a baseball player. And they're talking about in the offseason, they have the training camp.

had started a book club so that the days they're not training instead of just being off days they would read and like work on their mind and the the picture they were talking to is like yeah ryan's book ego is the enemy is my that was my favorite or whatever so i texted ryan i was like look

If and when you get invited to speak to the Washington Nationals, I'm coming with you. We'll figure out later why it makes sense, but if you get in with baseball players, I'm coming with you. We'll figure out. I can just be your... What do you say? I got the Tim Ferriss response. I'll be traveling until November 7th and we'll delete any messages. So you'll have to resend it then.

I forgot. I think the national season will be over September 30th. Exactly. Exactly. No, he said, who dis? Who dis? Question mark. With a shrug emoji. Who dis? All right. We got a case study here. Okay, so this is where people send in their accounts of putting the type of things we talk about on the show into practice in their own life so we can see what this actually looks like. Today's – I almost don't want to use his name. I guess he doesn't care about being anonymous, but like –

This is such a specific person. Like, I know who this is. I feel like if I gave their first name and tell this story, it's just 100% identifying him. So I won't give his first name. I still think it's going to 100% identify him. But I also don't think he cares, right? I don't think he's trying to be anonymous.

How many announcers are there? I don't know. Do you watch it a lot? No. But you still know who he is? No, I looked it up. It's not like Joe Buck. No, I didn't. I looked it up. I was like, oh, I've seen him before. Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, anyways. We'll see if we can guess who this is. Joe Buck. I'm a UFC announcer that has loved implementing slow productivity and a lot of other new Portonian ideas to make my life better. So thank you. This, by the way, is where I was like.

Is this Joe Rogan? This would be great because you're right. How many UFC announcers are there? So to get a note from a UFC announcer that says, I've loved your book. I'm like, oh, this could be good. It's not Rogan, though. No, he's not going to like you because you don't like Instagram. I know. Too mean to Elon. I know. I think he literally would not like me. All right. Anyways, back to the question.

My job is different from office-based knowledge work, but finding your podcast in 2023 allowed me to find more efficient ways to execute work tasks and adjust to life with our one-year-old making us a family of four. In early 2024, I pondered taking a break from my podcast and social media to deal with the overload I was feeling. Putting that to the side allowed me to put more focus and effort on my family and the main part of my job, and I believe it made me so good...

That's a confusing sentence. I think he's saying... It made me so good I couldn't be ignored, and that led to lots of fun and unique opportunities from our partners at ESPN. In May, my wife wondered if living out of state for my company could be a possibility to be closer to family and provide a different lifestyle for our two young boys.

I asked and my career capital gave us a yes. So off we went. Since I never missed an episode of Deep Questions, living out of state didn't sound as crazy to me as it would have if I didn't know about lifestyle and career planning. We found a wonderful community.

where we've made great new friends and spend more time with family. Our elementary school age son is thriving and loves his new environment, and I volunteer often at his school, which has fulfilled a yearn for being part of our community that we didn't have in our previous location.

My job requires me to travel as a result, but it is very manageable. And since many of my colleagues that I work closest with live all over the country, it's great for bonding with dinners and a walk to get coffee or chats in the hotel lobby.

For the local co-workers, I actually see them more now in social settings than I did when I lived in the same city because I'm not juggling family responsibilities when I'm there for the two or three days at a time. Can't say thank you enough for the constant flow of ideas and new perspectives with the podcast.

I've read many of your books and can't wait for the next one. P.S. I remember loving Cal's description of what would happen if he played golf at the Masters. I'd love a similar description of Cal as a UFC fighter and how it would go. I don't remember my master's. Was it like the club went flying? You had some funny hat. It injured someone. God, me as a UFC fighter I think would go terrible.

I'm trying to imagine the announcing, right? It'd be like, all right, in the blue corner, we have 42-year-old Cal Newport wearing what appears to be a somewhat... wrinkled blue button-down shirt. Not sure about this decision. Seems a little out of shape, but we'll see here. Okay, and now entering the arena from the other side, we have Francis Nagano.

here to defend his 10 times whatever championship belt. And, oh, yep, Cal is tapping. Newport is tapping. Dugano is still 150 feet from the ring, but he is tapping. And that is a motorcycle. I believe that is producer Jesse driving it. Cal has jumped in a sidecar and they have driven out of the arena. That's how that would go down. That is how that would go down. I would tap in the locker room. They'd be like at the weigh-in.

They'd be like, all right, we need to weigh you in. I'd be like, I'm tapping. I'm out of here. I mean, UFC announcing, I assume, the fights are in different locations, right? That's the one thing I was trying to figure out. He said, I have to travel now, but I would assume once you have to travel anyways, or are they like mainly in Vegas? They're probably mainly in Vegas, but there are in different locations too. It was funny. Coach K had a guest on ESPN NBA guy.

couple weeks ago and he was like he moved to like omaha because he goes otherwise you're just chasing the chasing the team he goes that doesn't work yeah that's i mean this is like uh the people like holiday who live in austin for example one of the things they'll say about it is you're in the middle of the state

So you're minimizing like your average – if you're doing US travel, everything now is under three hours. All right. So that's – OK. So maybe just so we understand the story, right? Maybe he was in Vegas. Maybe like the headquarters of UFC are there. So like there's stuff to do in the headquarters.

And like 80% of your fights were there. So now he has to travel more. I love this. I love this case because I think it's a great example of lifestyle-centric planning, right? They're working backwards from what they want in their lifestyle.

But in order to accomplish that lifestyle, they're working forwards with their career capital. So he's thinking very carefully, what do I do that's really good? Like, what do I do that's valuable to the marketplace? How good am I at that? To what degree can I use that as leverage to help get things?

want in my lifestyle. So the lifestyle plus career capital is that really powerful combination. Typically what someone would do in this situation, there's two big traps that people would fall into. So the first trap would be the grand goal thinking. That just pursuing the really exciting style goal will by itself solve all the problems, which he did. Like if you're really into sports, UFC is an exciting sport to be an announcer.

You know, you're you're you're hanging out at these fights with these fighters and with Joe and Dana White. And like that is like the if you just focus on the big, exciting thing, all you'll be thinking is like, how do I do even more of this? All that matters is like how do I call more fights or how do I make my podcast even bigger? And you don't think about the rest of your lifestyle. But look at all these other things that mattered for his happiness.

involved in his kid's school, being closer to family, being in a community that had more of a community sense. Like I can imagine if you're in Vegas, like it's a big city, right? And maybe they're in a place that is smaller. So he avoided the grand goal trap.

He's doing something really cool, but he's still working backwards from a lifestyle vision and not just thinking that one grand goal if achieved is going to make me happy. But he's also avoiding the other trap, which happens when people are younger. Which is like, I just want all of these things in my lifestyle right away. Why won't people give them to me? Why can't I like live here and just travel to go do things? And I want to live in a completely different place.

But I'll still – you have to pay for me to fly in and why don't people understand this is what I want to do in my life and why is this so hard? This is making me happy. Why would they not want to make me happy? But you have no career capital to barter for it. So that's the other mistake. You want –

To immediately get your ideal lifestyle, we have no bartering chips. Or you have all sorts of bartering chips, but you've just placed all of your emphasis on accomplishing this goal, hoping that will solve everything. He has avoided both of those traps. He's gotten very good at something and then has carefully invested that career capital to make their lifestyle closer to the things that him and his wife think are important. So I think it's a fantastic example.

Let me know when you do your next UFC fight in DC. They don't do them here. It'd be cool. I've never been to a UFC fight, but my, my son has started doing a little bit of jujitsu. Yeah. You mentioned that. So at the Tacoma MMA.

So it'd be great. I could maybe take him to a fight. And if, look, if I need to step in the ring, take care of business, I'll take care of business. Or if your son ever needs an announcer for one of his matches. Yeah, now we're talking. Professional announcer for Tacoma MMA.

All right, so thanks for that case study. We got a cool final segment coming up. I want to react to a meme related to our work. But first, let's talk about another one of our sponsors. So have you ever woken up with a funky symptom?

like a swollen itchy eye or some sort of funny looking rash. And you're thinking, what do I do about this? Let me jump on TikTok and see if I can get some advice. But that doesn't work out well because quickly you're getting TikTok videos where people say like, yeah, my eye was...

itchy and then the next day i lost my leg and now i'm gonna do a dance you know this is not helpful right what you realize is uh i need medical care but how am i going to find a doctor and that's where a lot of us say i give up it's too hard

How do I find out what doctors are around? And then how do I find out if they're taking patients and if they are taking patients? Like, how do I know if they take my insurance and how do I know if their patients actually like them? And then how do I know if they have an appointment anytime soon? This feels like a hundred steps. It's going to take me forever.

I guess my leg is going to just fall off. I'm going to have to do dances on TikTok. This is where ZocDoc enters the scene. ZocDoc is a free app and website where you can search and compare high-quality in-network doctors and click to instantly book an appointment.

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to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash deep ZocDoc dot com slash deep. I would have to burn up my ZocDoc app. If I was going to go do a UFC fight, I think I would do like seven doctors standing by. My life insurance premium, I think, would jump from $55 a month to $500,000 a month.

Like you just owe us a lot of money. All right. I also want to talk about our friends at Oracle. Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere from self-driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it is coming fast. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control? Time to upgrade to the next generation of cloud.

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Thomson Reuters, and Suno AI. Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI. For new U.S. customers with minimum financial commitment, offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for the special offer at oracle.com slash deep questions. That's oracle.com slash deep questions. All right, Jesse, let's move on to our final segment.

i'm literally being you should put them on the air i'm literally being called by brad stolberg once we figure out how to do the bluetooth roadcaster pro 2 we can get so close yeah so our new our new software uh our new software has the ability you can Bluetooth to the mixing board and then bring in a call to the air. So Brad, you were just saved. I was going to put you on the air without you knowing. And then you could have, you know, talked about the defender.

That's the thing. Every time I do that ad, Brad has to call in. That's the new way we're going to do this. All right. For our final segment, have a little bit of fun. Someone sent me Clemens. I'll give him credit. Clemens.

long-time listener of the show, sent me a meme. I'll put it on the screen here. I don't know if he made this or it's just one that exists out there, but it's a meme about my discussion of what really matters when it comes to productivity software. Jesse, can we do the thing where we... Make our YouTube guy mad. Make it full screen. Ha. All right. He's mad because all of our viewers are leaving. All right. I have it full screen on the screen right now.

All right. So this is like one of these internet-y memes where they have those like drawings of the crying face or whatever. Do you know these meme style? Like I'm vaguely aware of it. No. I think it comes out of like 4chan culture or something. Anyways, and I'm sure this is probably inappropriate in all sorts of ways. There's a bell curve here of IQs. On the left-hand side, where it's really low IQs, there's like a picture of a really dumb-looking person, right?

The tool above him is Apple Notes. Then in the middle, like in the middle range of like normal IQs, there's a crying face meme, that sort of like angry crying face meme. And above him is all of these complicated. quote-unquote productivity applications all pointing to each other there's on key and quiz led and adobe and and arrows connecting things to other things and then you go to the right side to the very high iq the 0.1 percent

And you see the sort of meme drawing of like a Jedi, like the person with the hood. And what's above his head, it's Apple Notes again. So the idea is... So using just like a text file for your productivity is both like the dumb thing to do, but also like the thing that the real productivity masters do as well. And it's only the people in between to get lost in all those different types of apps. I almost agree with this Clemens.

Except for one change. I would not use Apple Notes. I would use text edit. Apple Notes is no good. I don't like using Apple Notes. I just use unformatted text edit. On all my computers, I have a file called workingmemory.txt. It's arguably one of the most important digital productivity tools I have because I just dump stuff in it.

I kind of work out what's going on. I drop stuff that I copy in the emails. It literally is an extension of my brain and is the simplest possible technology you can run on a computer. So I love this bigger idea. I make this argument in my old student books, especially how to become a straight A student. And like one of the big observations, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but one of the big observations when I studied students who got really good grades but weren't grinds.

is they cared a lot about their systems, how they studied, how they took notes, how they wrote papers, how they prepared for promises, et cetera. They cared a lot about their systems, but they got rid of any friction they could get rid of. Friction is the killer of systems. So you might really like your like AI optimized, Zapier connected, multi-tool, cloud hosted.

idea, storage, generation, productivity tool. And it might be fun to build that in the same way that it's like fun to build a cabinet if you're into woodworking. But the friction of using that thing is going to Wear down. It's going to strip your momentum and eventually you're going to stop using it. You want the easiest possible tool, the lowest friction possible tool that accomplishes the goal you want to accomplish. And they're never sexy. And they're often just using.

a shared document, a text file. Like the most complicated thing in my digital productivity universe is Trello. And if I didn't have Trello, I would just do this on Google Docs. I'm actually doing this right now for my administrative role. I have to – we've talked on the show before. It's my turn to be the director of undergraduate studies for the computer science department at Georgetown, and there's a lot of student issues I have to keep track of. I'm not even using –

I don't know why I got off of it, but for whatever reason now, I'm just using a Google Doc. And it's not just, it's not even a dedicated Google Doc. It is the Google Doc I created to kind of keep notes on the different processes for this rule. So as I learn. how different processes work, like, oh, how do I approve a credit from an external university? I put notes in this document just so I have them. It's the top of that document. I just have a bold thing that says open.

And a bold thing, it says resolved. And I just am like taking notes. Like this student is working, you know, needs me to approve this. I'm waiting to hear back from this person. I haven't even had the time yet. I haven't even bothered moving it to Trello columns. It's just unformatted. text in a Google doc I'm using for something else. And it's fine because I'm in that document a lot anyways, and I can just review it. Hey, what's going on? What's the status?

It doesn't have to be in like some nice fields or formatted in like an Airtable. I know what I mean. I just type its bullet point list and it's fine. I know what's going on. And when I resolve, I paste it below. And if someone asks me like, hey, whatever happened with that student? I'm like, I'm sure it's in here somewhere. Oh, here's what I did.

So I love that idea. Sometimes, not sometimes, most of the time, the best productivity tool is the one that generates the least amount of friction while still accomplishing more or less what you needed to accomplish. And I don't know. You can't make a lot of money off those tools. They're often stuff you have anyways. But there you go. I do have a new tool, actually. Oh, I didn't bring it in here. I do have a new toy. What do we got?

The good folks at remarkable, uh, sent me their brand new state of the art remarkable. Yeah. We talked about it. You brought to the show. Did I? Yeah. Oh, should we edit this out? So you don't sound like. Yeah, I'm saying I sound body. I remember to edit that out. Let's get Brad on the phone here. Come on. Actually, you know what? Leave it in. People should know. No, we're going to leave it in for sure. People should know I'm tired. Brad, Brad.

Did I talk about the remarkable already? Are you in your defender? Well, I was talking to someone about it. Anyways, I really like it. There you go. This is a good one, but what did I find out? It has... The number one – okay. I'm going to add – here's my remarkable promotion. The thing they added, there's a lot of things they added to this new thing. It's bigger. It's thinner. It has a backlight or a light so I can use it in bed.

But the number one thing they added, like the innovation that has been most useful to me is, you know, the original Remarkable, like an iPad or whatever, you magnetically stick the stylus on the side.

And this was a big problem with me with my original remarkable, because if you put that in a backpack with other stuff, it just gets knocked off. Yeah. Yeah. And you lose it. So I would have to separate the two, right? Like I, I would put the stylus, I would have to like put it in like the pocket. We'd put your wallet, but then it wouldn't charge.

Actually, I don't know if it uses a charge. I like the Apple Pencil. The Remarkable Stylus is not charged. It just stores magnetically, I think. I don't know. But they would always get separated. They added to the new one, to the folio, a little magnetic...

class strap that you just strap around and it holds the pencil on even if you put another bag that's the type of stuff that's low friction right there that saves the friction of having to they probably got a lot of comments about the same problem you're having yeah probably but anyways I do like my remarkable. Um, and I will talk about that once a week. All right. Well, clearly I need to go like take a nap or something like that. So we should wrap up this episode now.

Thank you, everyone who listened. We'll be back next week with another show. And until then, as always, stay deep. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a... new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week.

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