BEST OF: Cal Newport on why you need to change your workflow, not your habits, when it comes to boosting productivity

a Noisy World. Cal's work has been published in over twenty languages and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Of, the Washington Post, and The Economist. And his book Deep Work Deeply Impacted How I Have chosen to change the way I work over the last three years.

head to Cal to hear about how he works. Cal, Welcome to the show.

actually have in my house. I had a custom library table built that was reminiscent of the tables at the university library where I used to work as an undergraduate, with sort of brass library lamps next to the dark wood bookcases. And I have a ritual for writing where I clear off that whole desk and I just have those bright lights shining right down on the custom desk.

It's just me and my computer. But that's very different, for example, than when I'm trying to solve a theoretical computer science proof, where the rituals I use almost always involve various walking routes around my town. And so I really differentiate now what the ritual is the best match the character of the cognitive effort.

I was feeling frustrated. And so my memory was I really had my deep work rituals built around solving proofs because that was at the core of my job as a professor, and so a lot of what I needed to do, for example, for writing, like reading hard things or taking notes or actually sitting down and writing chapters wasn't being captured by the same rituals I would use

to solve proofs. And I was just getting really frustrated and I would say, Wow, you know, I didn't do any deep work this week, And I said, wait a second, actually I did.

well honed skill to something cognically demanding. But you really might get into a flow of you know, I'm writing and I'm in a flow, or I'm sort of making I'm thinking through a proof and I'm starting to make

progress on it. I just feel completely engaged. But another type of important deep work is when you're trying to learn something new or improve a skill, which requires a deliberate practice where you're stretching yourself paste you're comfortable because you're constraining really hardless stay to try to learn a new idea that you've never known before, to learn a new tool. That is by definition actually kind of the opposite of a flow state, when you're in a state

of deliberate practice. The Anders ericson, who really helped innovate the research and deliberate practice, is very clear that it's unpleasant. You don't lose track of time when you're trying to learn something new. You actually are quite aware of every minute because it's hard. But that's also deep work, and so it's just a broad umbrella. Some deep work you feel great, you lose track of time. Some you're white

knuckling it because it's really hard. But the fulfillment you're going to get is afterwards, when you're knowing that you did something, you did something difficult.

that you weren't a very good theoretician. People had pride in the number of hours they could spend staring at a whiteboard, and so in this sort of esoteric field I was in, deep work was at the core of it,

and so I really understood it. The insight that really surprised me, however, is when I discovered that deep work is just as important in almost every other knowledge field as well, and So for me, the process of coming to write that book Deep Work Work was sparked by the process of saying, Okay, well, for me, concentration is

really important, but what's important in other fields? And keep coming up with the same answer, the sort of discovery that this thing that I thought was pretty narrow that applied to only a small number of rarefied jobs, turned out to be core to almost everything in the knowledge economy.

is am I working harder? Am I not? And this is the trap that a lot of people fell into in the last ten or fifteen year in this age of sort of very low friction communication and internet accessibility, is that it just work is work, and either you're working a lot or not. It was very easy to be very busy and think that that was good. But once you have the terminology of deep work and shallow work and realize that in most jobs, at most levels, deep work is what moves the needle right. Deep work

is what gets you promoted. Deep work is what gets you more revenue as a company. Deep work is what actually produces value in the knowledge context, and shallow work just supports them. Once you make that distinction, then suddenly you become incredibly uncomfortable if you notice that you're doing almost no deep work, because in knowledge work, the main manufacturing process is mine's concentrating to produce information with more value.

If you are not doing that, there's something probably problematic. You're not producing value. You just talked about producing value, doing logistics about producing value. You're planning about producing value.

So step one is getting the vocabulary right. Once you have the vocabulary right, people get a hunger for well, I want to do the deep work and so something as simple as just well, let me keep track of how much I'm doing can be incredibly powerful because if deep work is the main activity that actually creates new value in almost any position, at almost any level, and you see that you're doing two hours of a week, then suddenly, instead of thinking, Wow, aren't I great, I'm

really hustling, you look at this and say, what in the world is going on? This is sort of a degenerate setup I've ended up in. I'm spending almost no time actually trying to produce things that are valuable and that can give you the big spark you need to make big changes because it's not easy. It's not easy to push back against the cold the business. So you need something like that to really help break you up.

like any other meeting or appointment. So once it's on there, that time is taken up you have to plan around it. If someone tries to schedule something during that time, you say, already have a thing. People are used to the social conventions, run meetings, and appointments. If someone tries to get in touch with you during one of these blocks and they're upset because hey, why don't you get back to me, you can say, well, I had a thing from twelve

to two, like you really do. Treat it like you're going to the dentist or in a meeting right where you can't be reached. That's really helpful. So then in advance people can start putting this time and locking it in and then forcing themselves to work around the anchor time to try to fit in the other shallow work.

That's useful. The other thing that's useful I've been hearing from readers is having a conversation with your supervisor, or if you work for yourself, sort of have this conversation with yourself where you say this is what deep work is. This is what shallow work is. Both are important for the organization. What's the ratio I should be shooting for in a typical forty hour work week? How many of

those hours should be deep work for shallow work? And the answer will be different for different jobs, right, But you get an answer, and then you work backwards and say, Okay, what changes might we have to make so that we can accomplish this goal that we decided together was going

to optimize the value I produce for the company. So it's a way of approaching deep work with the people you work with that is positive, saying how can we use this idea and agree on how to do it together to make more value, as opposed to what most people do, which is negative, which is stop bothering me, I don't want to answer an email. Stop scheduling me in meetings, right, which just tends to make people defensive.

So those two things scheduling deep work like meetings and appointments, and two agreeing on a deep to shallow work ratio are things I've been hearing from readers to be really effective for getting more of this into your life.

make that stick. But I'm wondering if you could describe how your workday ends, because I've found that quite fascinating and I'm not sure if it's changed since writing the book.

Get everything out of your mind. I used to, depending on what's going on in the week, I'll often at this point check my calendar, check my task, check my plan. Make sure that Okay, I'm on track. I've got a plan for the week. I know what I'm doing. I'm on track to get things done. I'm not missing anything. So that there's no open loops, no concern. Make your last look at the inbox. There's nothing lurking there that's an emergency, right, and then you shut it down. So

you and I recommend having at first a phrase. You say whatever you want it to be. The idea being that once you've done the shutdown and you've said whatever the phrase is, if later in the evening your mind starts to bother you right and say, you know, like maybe we're missing something. Maybe we should go back and think some more about this, you can say, you know what I said the phrase. I wouldn't have said the phrase if I hadn't checked on everything and made sure

that I trusted our plan. So there must be a plan. I trust. I don't have to think about it anymore. And what people experience is when they do this shutdown routine, and that kind of pushback on the ruminations. After a couple of weeks that urge to ruminate and think about work after work is over starts to really diminish which allow to have a much more sort of present and relaxed evening.

a grad student. I'd planned my day around my wife's work schedule, so I was like, I want to use every minute that she's at work to get as much done. But then I don't want to be one of the grad students who sort of was lazy during the day and then has to be on campus all night. I want to be home with her and doing other sort of things. So I have this tight schedule. When I'm working, work really hard. When I'm done, be done. So then once we had kids, that kind of worked really well.

So I was like, Okay, when I'm at the office, I'll work really hard. But then I was already used to the idea that when I'm done, I can shut down completely. And now shutting down completely wasn't just well, it's just kind of relaxing when I'm home doing what I want to do. Of course, now it's kind of, you know, it keeps things off my mind when I'm home running around doing childcare. But it fits really well.

And so this notion if I want to work deeply, really intensely, keep the shallow work incredibly organized and contained, and when I'm done, when I'm done, incredibly compatible with being a parent.

you know? Again, like when I was reflecting, when I was reading the book and reflecting on my own life, it's quite scary to think about how infrequently I was feeling bored and how infrequently I would imagine a lot of people experience boredom because there's just constant inputs, and I'm.

what about tech in our life outside of work? Because people in the last couple of years particular, were really beginning to feel that their life outside of work was being taken over by screens in a way that was making them uneasy. Right, And it wasn't that, Okay, I hate what I'm doing when I look at the screen. It was the fact that they were looking at the

screen so much. It was almost like they were losing their autonomy, that their whole life was getting eaten up by just glance after glance after glance at the screens was making them anxious, making them unhappy. I was keeping away from friends and family, and so digital minimalism was about, Okay, what's going on with this unease in our personal relationship with tech, so outside of work, outside of things like email and slack, and what can we do about it?

And so getting back to your question. So that's one of the ideas I talked about in digital minimalism is that when you kill every moment that you could potentially be alone with your thoughts by looking at a screen. So every time you're in line, every time you're waiting for the subway, when you know someone gets up at dinner and goes to your bathroom and you're waiting for

them to come back. If at every single moment like that you look at a screen, what you do is you put yourself into a state calls solitude deprivation, where you're never alone with your own thoughts. And we know that this is actually really unhealthy and it's probably going to make you anxious. It's also probably going to retard your ability to have sort of self development or professional

insights or breakthroughs. We really do need regular time spent alone with our thoughts, which is why I recommend that you get that in your life. And so what's the easiest way to do that is my suggestion is most days, do at least one or two things without your phone. And that simple thing I go on one errand and I do whatever one thing around the house each day

where there's no earbuds and no phone. Something as simple as that can have a major impact on your cognitive health, anxiety levels, and happiness.

a phone handy, so I do locks exercise. When I'm at home, I typically my phone will be in my bag somewhere, So I don't accept this premise that I'm like in an emergency room doctor that needs to be accessible at all times on a communication device. And so once you change your mindset to one where it's I use my phone to do various things, but it's not something I always have with me, you just naturally get

lots of solitude. So throughout my day there's just lots of times with just me alone with my thoughts because I don't have easy distraction nearby. And so something as simple as that, I think if the phone as a tool you occasionally use, not a constant companion, can really make a big difference in terms of getting more solitude.

we both consume a lot of is podcasts. And I really became aware of this habit where in any moment where I could have been experiencing solitude, Like I generally spend the hours of six to seven am either walking or at the gym or exercising or moving in some way. Podcasts and my AirPods would be glued in my ears. But one of the changes I made in the last month is actually going, well, what if I just spent that hour in silence and it just made things completely different.

I found that some of my best ideas were coming to me at that point where I was previously just consuming stimulus.

particular podcast and it's gonna be good. On the other hand, I say, oh, I have a walk coming up, and say, you know, I'm walking my kid to school and I'm going to walk home alone. I usually won't listen to a podcast. Then I've just become used to. I really like that solitude. And so it's not that there's a hard and fast rule, but I plan when I'm going to do stimuli, and you know, I have to think about it right and say do I want to listen

to something or not? Do I want the silence or is there something I think this might be a good chance to listen to something. Same thing with my commutes when I come to campus. Probably about half the time I think, the other half the time I listen. And you know, I don't have a precise heuristic that says this is when I do this and this is when I do the other. But I just keep in mind that both are possibilities and that it's worth thinking about in any given moment, which one I want to do.

And on the topic of habits, I think this was a blog maybe that you wrote a few months ago around habits versus workflows, which I found really interesting because I think in the productivity space there's such an emphasis on different hacks and quick fixes, whereas you write about the importance of actually reviewing your workflow, and I was wondering if you could like expand a bit on what you meant by that concept and maybe gives some examples

of what are the different workflows that you have in your own working life.

interact with your work. So maybe when you check your email, or your methods you use for organizing your email, or maybe your personal planning like how you plan out your day or keep track of what you need to get done, whereas workflow is the underlying either explicit or implicit system that specifies how work gets done, so how obligations are assigned, executed and tracked. A lot of times we think about habits, but it's actually the underlying workflow that's causing the problem.

So the key place, I think, the key example where this distinction comes up is when it comes to email overload. So to me, the big problem with email is this underlying workflow that says the way that we work in our organization is that we maintain this sort of ad hoc, ongoing unstructure conversation using email inboxes, and it's very flexible, it's very convenient if we all just kind of keep hey, you get that what's going on over here, and that

this is how we're going to work. Is how we're going to pass tasks off to each other, how we're going to follow up on things. It's how we're going to communicate with people. It's just we're going to have this ongoing, unstructured conversation. Now, you can have a lot of habits on top of that workflow to try to tainment,

So maybe you don't check email all the time. And maybe you have some nice folder system for organizing emails moving to a to do list, But until you change that underlying workflow, there's nothing just going to solve the need in such an environment to check email a lot, spend a lot of time doing email. And so, like when I'm out there talking about the problem of email overload,

people really want to just focus on the habits. They think, well, we could just change some norms about how often we check email, or you know, batch it, or let people know that we're not going to respond right away, that we can we can solve all the problems we're having. But often the underline issue is that there's this workflow that depends on ongoing email communication you get anything done, and so if you want really systemic change, you have

to replace that with something better. And so I think organizations have to think about this, and I think individuals can think about this in their own life as well. To what extent are you rearranging the deck chairs on the sinking Titanic when you're building more complicated systems for an underlying workflow that's just inevitably going to keep you overwhelmed or not doing what's important And so I like

that distinction. There's the underlying decisions about how tasks and obligations are identified as sign tracked, and executed, and then there's what you do on top of that to help sort of interact with those workflows. And those are two different things.

them twice a day. This is how you know, we assign things. They have a really structured workflow. Because of that structured workflow, they don't need to be on slack all day. But without that structured workflow, they need to be on slack because how else are tasked going to get passed around or things checked on? In terms of like in your individual life, I mean, one way to think about it, I suppose is in terms of processes or systems that you use for identifying tasks and making

sure they get done or assigning them. And so sometimes these can be pretty subtle, but a concrete example is like on my book tour which I'm on now for digital minimalism, there's a lot of bookings that have to happen, and so I thought about the underlying workflow of well, what's the what's the right way to actually sort of get things identified and scheduled and information to me? And we built a system with the publicity team where I could identify time when I'm available. They then had access

to those parts of my calendar. They could then book things directly on the calendar with all the information I need I could if I book something else, that time would get blocked off. And we rebuilt the workflow that minimized back and forth communication required to accomplish the goal of getting the proper things like this interview scheduled, for example.

And so that might be an example of working on the underlying workflow as opposed to just the upper level habits of like how often do I check my emails about when things are being scheduled?

due till Friday. But you're seeing on the calendar that Wednesday and Thursday have a lot of meetings, right, And so looking at the whole week and trying to plan out what's going to happen when I think that's important. Believer in time blocking on a particular day. Give your time a job. Here's the hours I have available. What am I doing with this hour? What am I doing with this thirty minutes? What am I doing with this

three hour block? Give your time a job, as opposed to just approaching your day with a generic to do list, You're much more effective at getting things out of your day if again, you look at the free hours of the day and reconfigure them, move them around, and figure out how can I get the most out of this? And then I often am a believer in ad hoc systems and rituals that match what's going on at the time. And so if you have, let's say, a big event coming up, do you have to do a lot of

planning for you might just say here's I'm doing. It's thirty minutes after launch every single day, thirty minutes every single day just checking in, moving things, seeing what's going on or whatever. Right, But this idea of having temporary systems that you put into place to help you make a lot of progress on important, non permanent things in a way that doesn't have you just completely an ad

hoc looking at a tasklic type mode. So if you do weekly planning, daily time blocking, build temporary systems and rituals as needed for temporary but large obligations, that usually combines to help you get a pretty effective use of the time available.

much time, So that gets better. But then what do you do in the moment? Well, if you don't give yourself enough time, then you know if you keep going till you finish what needs to get done, and then you just adjust your schedule for the rest of the day, which is fine. And one of the ways that people get time blocking wrong is they think that it's a game where you win the gold medal if you never

have to change your schedule. But there's actually no prize you get for getting your schedule exactly right and never having to change it. You probably might have to change it three, four or five times. The goal is not to have a perfect schedule. It's to always have some intention about what you're doing with the time that remains of the day. Same thing if you underschedule, so you

have a couple options here. You could add something new, or you could take advantage of that time just to relax, or to do something that's going to dogative rest like

that's actually kind of a nice scenario. But the point I always make about time blocking is that, regardless of what you do, having a good understanding of how long things take is crucial because if you don't, regardless you're time blocking or not, you're just going to keep getting yourself in the trouble and you're going to keep having colliding deadlines, You're going to keep having late nights, you're going to keep having these sort of stressful moments when

you realize, ah, a lot still needs to get done and I'm not there, And time blocking trains you to better appreciate how long things take and then otherwise just be comfortable with the fact that you might have to change your schedule several times throughout the day and that that's not negative, that's actually how the system works.

related article. It's just too close and now you're kind of context shifting to that other article and it's going to be hard to come back. You also want to avoid open loops, exposing yourself the loops that you can't close during the break. And so this is what's dangerous about looking at email. For example, in a fifteen minute break, you're going to see a lot of things that you can't get to, a lot of emails you can't quite answer. Open loops really eat at our attention and reduce our

cognitive capacity going forward. So a deep break, you want to void looking at similar type of work or open loops. And so you can look at stuff, for example, that's completely unrelated to work. You know, you can read an article about your local sports team is probably not gonna be a big deal. You can go for a walk, you can read a book, a chapter from a book, or a magazine article that's completely unrelated to your work. These type of things are fine. You can talk to

people you know, non work related conversations. All that's fine. Those would be deep breaks, But you don't want to do something similar. You don't want to expose yourself to open loops.

you can talk to my speaking age. And thus the address publicity, here's like a publicist you can talk to. If you want to send me links or articles which I really like, you can send them to this address. But I don't answer. A look at it, but I don't answer, and I don't give an option, for example, for and if you just have like questions for me, or want to talk to me or ask me to get involved in a business or whatever, there's just no

option for that. Now you would worry that that might make readers upset because you're sort of cutting off accessibility, but I found that didn't happen. People are okay with clarity. They don't really need accessibility as long as it's clear.

So if they know for a fact, like, okay, there's no way for me to really reach you about this, and they're okay with it, that's better than them just having a generic email address and sending their business pitch to you with some expect that you might answer, and then being upset that you don't. And so I try to cut down on what comes in or expectations on reply.

And then in terms of dealing with the email that I do get, you know, I schedule when I look at it, and how often that is just depends on what's going on, and so it's not maybe I go a day or so without having to without being able to look at it, and over time people get mad at me a lot. But people have learned that I don't use email like an ongoing, constant communication or chat service.

It's just not something you can use to grab my attention real quickly, even if it's really convenient for you. That's just not the way I use email. It might be a day or two till I see it, and so I always tell my students that when we begin class, my colleagues have learned it, my family has sort of learned about it, and people adjust. And so for me, some days I don't look at it, other days I do, and when I do, I try to take care of it in basically one session.

to assess the impact on productivity and other variables. And so I guess a couple of questions there, because I've heard you talk about it's actually quite hard to land on a definition of productivity, like if an organization introduces a workflow that is more around prioritizing deep work when we're talking about knowledge workers over shallow work, like how do we actually measure the impact of that on productivity, and then what are the other variables that we would

expect it to change, like you know, ranging from job satisfaction to health and well being and stress levels. But I guess, in the context of this study, how would you be measuring productivity when it comes to the impact that deep work would have.

a lot? Are you answering emails very quickly? Just in general, if you're doing something, at least we know you're not being lazy or taking advantage. And that's the sort of metric we put into place. But what really matters is is the activity producing concrete value for the organization, such as dollars coming in in a for profit organization. And it's there that I think that we're finding that we

should be a little bit concerned. Like if you look at the US, for example, our labor department tracks this productivity right, revenue per sort of employment hour, and they break it out for the non industrial sector, so particularly for they call it non industrial productivity metrics, so not counting manufacturing, but mainly just knowledge work. That metric has been stagnant for a long time. I mean throughout this last decade period where we invested billions to make communication

as fast and flexible and easy as possible. It's never been easier for you to get information or to contact someone and get a quick response ever before in the history of work. It doesn't show up at all in the economic metrics, and I think that's something they should have us really worried, right, And I think in large part of it is because it turns out that all this communication information gathering has an impact on our brains functioning. It makes it hard for the brain to do the

actual job of thinking and producing value. And so if I was measuring productivity, you know, from a study perspective, I want to know about how much dollars are we paying in salary, what are we getting back in terms of revenue coming in, Like sort of these these baseline numbers.

And just as an aside, there's this really interesting study from the nine We're an economist from Georgia Tech was watching personal computers enter the desk like the workforce, like the front office workforce in fortune five hundred companies in the US. Right, So what happened when you got these productivity enhancing computers on everyone's desk? And he measured the numbers very carefully in the way I'm talking about. His

name was Peter G. Sassone, and what he found. I think this is really interesting is that the organization said, hey, look, this is great. These computers make certain things that we used to have dedicated support staff do, like typing and sending letters or whatever. Right, it makes some of these things easy enough that we no longer have to hire

dedicated people just to do these administrative tasks. Is the higher level they called the managers in this study, but sort of the higher trained employees can now do it themselves. And so we're going to save all this money by firing all the typists, and we don't need everyone to have secretaries anymore because you can send emails and do word processing. What ended up happening, however, is that that

he calls us the diminishment of intellectual specialization. Now you take the people who were actually producing the things to brought value into the organizations, and all this administrative work fell onto their plate. It then took more of those people to produce the same amount of work, but their salaries are much higher than the support staff that they fired.

And what with sasone crunched all the numbers, he figured out that you were actually about twenty percent less effective in the sense that you could cut your payroll by twenty percent to produce the same amount of work by bringing back support staff and allowing people just to focus at the higher level on just their work, and you wouldn't need as many of these expensive high level employees.

That's the type of study I think we need to have in mind who are thinking about productivity when you get to the dollars and cents bottom line, I think a lot of what we're doing with this constant communication, hyper convenient business is having a huge economic impact. So that's a long answer to a short question, but it's something that I feel really strongly about, and I'm glad that the University of South Wales is thinking about some studies along these lines.

is also really negative. So if you're constantly trying to deal with tons of communication, each of which is someone who needs something from you, and you can't keep up with it because you have hundreds of messages and it's always piling up and you're always behind. That collides with the sort of ancient paleolithic social wiring in our brain in a very unnatural way. That makes us very unhappy

and very stressed and very anxious. It's really just in the way that eating junk food hits our paleolithic you know, food processing system in a bad way. It makes us

really overweight. Our body isn't meant for it. Our paleolithic social brain is not meant for an inbox that's always failing and we can't keep up with because it doesn't know the difference between that email is not that important and what it was evolved for, which is, if someone around the tribal fire is trying to get your attention, you better listen to them because there's a lot at stake if you snub them, right, I mean, social dynamics

is something we're incredibly cue to, and things like email completely mess around with these finely tuned social dynamics, which is why we just feel compulsively like we have to check it. We feel if a text message comes in and we're driving, we still check it, even though I put in our kids' lives in danger, because to us, it's the same as like if someone's tapping your shoulder at the tribal fire and you ignore them, like you might get a spear in the back, right like, we

take that really, really seriously. And so the more time you spend trying to keep up with never ending communication, the more unhappy you get. The more time you spend focusing deeply to try to produce valuable things, the happier we get. So if you can increase the ladder and decrease the former, people are going to have a much more healthy relationship with their work. Your employees are going to be much more protected against burnout, and the positions are going to be much more sustainable.

send messages all the time. I can make the case so that's actually quite arbitrary, and that there's this growing movement of organizations who are much more careful about thinking. We have these brains, we want these brains to produce value. We don't want these brains to burn out. We're getting incredibly innovative in answering the question of what's the right way to work in a digital world.

blogging at for over a decade. And so that's a pretty quick way to sort of dive in and see in more detail some of my ideas.