Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Cal Newport. Dr. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science
at Georgetown University. He did his training at MIT and he is currently both a professor and the author of many best-selling books focused on productivity, focus, and how to access the specific states of mind to bring out your best in terms of cognitive performance and indeed in terms of performance in all endeavors. One of his more notable books is entitled
Deep Work, Rules for Focus Success in a Distracted World. Deep Work is a book that has had tremendous positive influence on my work life and indeed my life in general because it spells out how exactly to go about doing one's best possible work. For me, that's in the context of science and podcasting but it includes tools that I and many others have extended to other aspects of their life as well and it's a book that I highly, highly recommend everybody
read. Cal also has a new book out now, it's one that I'm currently reading entitled Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. And as the title suggests, it gets into specific protocols to avoid burnout and to bring about one's highest quality work over the greatest amount of time. Today's discussion starts off with extremely practical steps that any and all of us can use in order to enhance our level of focus, productivity,
and creativity. Cal shares much of his specific practices and also offers some alternative practices for those of you that perhaps do not want to disengage with social media or with smartphones or with email to the extent that he does. I found the conversation to be extremely useful in the sense that I indeed amount in social media. I use email. I use
my phone and texting quite often. So I'm not somebody who's willing to completely disengage from those tools, but I share in the sentiment that those tools can often be an impediment to doing one's best work. So today's discussion gets into not hard and fast rules for enhancing focus and productivity, but a variety of different tools that you can select from in sort of a
fay to suit your particular needs. We also, of course, discuss the specific research studies around focus and distraction, task switching, and context switching, all of which support the specific protocols that Cal offers. So whether you're somebody who has issues with attention and focus, whether you're somebody that's just feeling overly distracted by the number of things in your email inbox or the number of texts or what's happening out in
the world. By the end of today's episode, I'm confident that you will be armed with the best science-supported tools, that is protocols, in order to access the states of mind that will enable you to do your best possible work. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science
and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are of the absolute highest quality. I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that quality sleep is the foundation of mental
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Juve. J0ovv.com slash huberman to get $400 off select Juve products. Now for my discussion with Dr. Cal Newport. Dr. Cal Newport. Welcome. Dr. Heberman. I'm a huge fan. I've been a huge fan ever since I read deep work. I can't say that I've adopted all the principles, but that's on me, not you. You provide incredible incentive for Y1, ought to pursue deep work and slow productivity in service to high quality, true productivity, etc. Some of the protocols,
as we'll call them, are incredibly easy to implement. Others take some discipline. I'd like to talk about both sets today. But the first question I have is, do you own a smartphone? I do have a smartphone. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. I don't use social media. It turns out smartphones aren't that interesting if you don't have any social media apps on it.
What's that like? So there's nothing, if you have nothing that is engineered to try to grab your attention, the smartphone actually goes back to 2007 Steve Jobs keynote address smartphone, which is, this is a really nice phone. And your music, you can listen to things on it. And the phone interface is really good. And look, there's a Maps app. And you can like look at Maps on it. Like it's actually a useful piece of technology that you're
happy to have. But you don't use it that much. What about text messaging? Do you text message? And so do you get into conversations by text or is it more of a plan and meet type tool? I try. Right. So I try. I do use text messaging. I mean, this is how like my wife gets in touch with me. But I'm notorious somewhat among my friends of my, the ability to capture my attention with text message is really hit or miss because I'll go hours
without looking at my phone. So it's not this default appendage. I think for a lot of people, if you know someone, you can basically assume like, look, if I text them, they're going to get right back to me. My problem is I'll go two, three, four hours without looking at my phone. And then there'll be text messages on there from conversations that people were trying to start. And I typically just have to declare text bankruptcy a few times a day.
Like if they really needed me, I guess they would have called. So I do text, but I'm not considered to be very good at it. A few other questions about your phone practices. This makes me nervous. Is your phone in a drawer on on the desktop while you're working? Is it face down face up? Is the ringer on? Is it off? You mean if I'm writing or what? It's nowhere near me. Yeah. It can be anywhere. It's just not going anywhere near me. So I have in my house two different offices, basically. Right.
So there's a home office. The printers there, the filing cabinets are there. Like the nice big monitors there, you pay taxes, that type of thing. Then I have a library. And there's no permanent technology into library, no computer in there, no monitor, no printers, nothing like this. I have this sort of custom built desk I had made by a company from Maine that makes desks for college libraries. Like that's what they do. So I have this like custom
fit desk to fit into. It's not that big of a space. That's where I go to write. I'm surrounded by books that I've really carefully curated. What's where each shelf, like what type of book it has on it. So I can look different ways for different inspirations. I got a fireplace. So I can just turn on a fire if I need it. I'll bring my laptop in there to write if I'm going to write on a computer. And my phone doesn't come in there. Yeah. You don't look
at you don't look at a phone in that room. And it just helps me. It's a ritual, right? If I'm in there, I'm thinking I'm creating with the sort of same patterns of cogitation that we would have been using for hundreds of years when people have been thinking professionally. If I want to be near a printer and I want to go on to a web browser and pay my taxes or whatever, have a different place for that. I'm curious about the fireplace.
I have this theory based on my understanding of visual neuroscience and the fact that when we're looking at visual scenes that have some degree of predictability to them, we get into a mode of anticipation. Our thinking is at least somewhat linear and so forth. When we are looking at, say, ocean waves or in a skyscraper, we're staring down at the street of, say, New York City and the cars are moving in obviously not random fashion,
but at least to our visual perception pseudo random. You're not tracking any one thing that the mind goes into this sort of state where our thoughts become nonlinear. They're not anchored to any kind of if then kind of what I call DPO duration path outcome kind of trajectory. It's not a lot of neuroscience on this, but there's a little bit. Same thing
happens when you're looking at aquarium, by the way. I wonder whether or not staring at the fire, which is something that humans have been doing for many, many, many thousands of years because it has that random aspect to it. Does it tend to spark creativity, linear thinking, at what point in your writing do you turn to the fire and stare at it?
That's interesting. Actually, there's a neurological explanation. When I used a fire is actually when I read, so I have chairs by the fire, but I think for exactly this reason, because when I'm reading, I'm looking to spark ideas. What's my takeaway from this? What's the connection you're making between just thing you're reading here and this idea over there? That type of connection making is a lot of my brainstorming. I read by the fire when
the weather allows it. I also walk a lot. I wonder if there's something similar going on. When I'm trying to work through an idea for an article or a math proof or something like this, almost always I'm going to do that on foot. There might be something similar going on there where your encountering is not entirely exotic stimuli. It's not, oh my God, my attention's being drawn, but it's quite no what you're going to see. You also
have that circuit quieting effect of the walkings. Your motor neurons are going. You can tell me if I'm getting this right or not. The motor neurons are going and you get some inhibition going on in some of these key networks, which allows you to actually maintain the internal focus on a concept a little bit better. I do a lot of my original focused ideating on foot, but a lot of my serendipitous ideating will be with the fire going. It's
a way I read by the fire. It's when I read that I get a lot of my original ideas. I have this theory that the two opposite states of mine that both facilitate creativity and productivity look something like this. You can tell me whether or not this maps anything that you know. One is just as you described our body is in motion. It could be running, walking, might even be in the shower or something of that sort. But we aren't trying to direct
our mind toward a specific linear trajectory or outcome. It's not like working out an equation or a theorem the same way we would if we were at a piece of paper or writing out a sentence, a structured paragraph. So it's body and motion mind, not channel toward one specific target. The opposite extreme to me is body still mind very active, which resembles rapid eye movement sleep when we learn a lot and neurorewiring occurs and
dreaming. But for which there's also a lot of examples of very accomplished creatives using that sort of thing of meditative like approaches, forcing oneself to be still and thinking. So it sounds like you incorporate both. And I'm curious as a computer scientist who writes code, does theorems, does a lot of math where you can't just kind of wing it. There's a right and wrong answer involved. What is your mode for sitting down and working
through something that's linear and hard? Yeah, it's interesting the way you talk about it, right? Because when I'm walking, and this is actually something you can train, you know, I talked about this one of my books once that you can actually train yourself to maintain your internal eye of focus more stably while you're walking, right? So I called this productive meditation in deep work actually. And I practice this in grad school, right?
Okay, so I'm going to work on a particular problem while I walk. And then you actually practice bringing your attention back to the central problem. And I don't know exactly what's happening, but you get a little bit more facility working with your working memory,
a little bit more efficiency with bringing stuff in and out of the working memory. And so I train myself that I could actually write a couple paragraphs in my head, maybe not word for what basically word for word, like figure out how I'm going to do it or figure out enough steps of a math proof to capture like a key insight. Like, okay, now I'm going to get around this. Then you have to sit down and actually formally capture that. Yeah,
for me, that's still working with notebooks. Though when I was coming up in grad school, and I was just excavating these thoughts recently, we were talking before the, we recorded that, you know, I just wrote this essay about what I learned as a grad student that impacted all my writing as a grad student in the theory group at MIT, which was just purified concentration. This is where all the deep work ideas come from, right? I mean, it was just world class
concentrators. There the method was very still more than one person whiteboard. So if you have two or three people staring at the same whiteboard, you're actually going to up to level of concentration you achieve because if you let your attention wander, you disengage that attention, there's a social capital cost. Because now I've fallen out of the whiteboard effect discussion, that's going to be a problem. So you actually maintain your focus at a higher
level. And then when someone else is making their move, okay, you know, what about this? And they're working math. It's all math on the board. You're giving that the highest attention you're capable of because you want to keep up, right? You don't want to fall behind. So it was like this hack that was figured out in the theory group that if you put two or three people at the same whiteboard, they try to alchemize these insights into actual
mathematically precise proofs, you get a 20, 30% boost in your concentration level. And that could make all the difference, right? If you're working on a very hard proof, 20, 30% boost could be the difference between solving it or not.
In one of these situations where you're at the whiteboard or chalkboard and there are two other individuals facing it, are they interrupting you or is the etiquette in that scenario to just let the person go until their natural inclination to raise a hand and scream help? Whoever has to marker on the board, they're the ones talking. So you go, okay, what about this, you say? And now you're working, you're writing down equations or drawing your diagram.
And everyone is just watching. And then when they're done, everyone steps back and looks at it. Then you can step forward. Okay, but what if we did this and then you still work on it? So when I got built some offices or worked out some offices near my house, like when the first things we put in there was a whiteboard so they could have computer science collaborators come because we can't work on theory otherwise. Like it is the thing we
need is a whiteboard, right? When I started grad school, they had just built this new $300 million Frank Gary design building for the computer science artificial intelligence laboratory and linguistics. But half of it was computer science. I know those buildings because the peak hour and the McGovern neuroscience and the building is very interesting. People should check them out if they're ever in Cambridge. Yeah, the scandal square stop. The status center.
Yeah, right down the street from the commercial. Yeah. So the six floor was where the theoreticians were. This is where I was. So I, you know, they opened that building the year I started the doctoral program. And what did they want to show me when they brought me into the $300 million building? Look at our whiteboards. That's what they are proud of. They had filled the common space on the six floor, the theory floor with these free standing double-sided
whiteboards. It was like a maze of whiteboards. And this is what everyone was so excited about. Was, yeah, look at our whiteboard coverage. Surrounded by a $300 million meal. I was trying to explain to someone recently, having good whiteboards to us as like an astronomer saying, look, we got this great radio telescope. Like this is going to allow us to get data to work
on that we wouldn't otherwise have access to. I think to a theoretician, that's why you see a whiteboard because, you know, if you want to think at the very highest level, you need two or three people staring at the same thing, taking turns with the marker, pushing each other past for their comfortable. I love this because I often think about visual maps that represent our internal memory stores and plans, et cetera, for productivity. I've
always relied heavily on the whiteboard by getting one for home. I have one here in the podcast studio. All of my podcast notes for the my solo episodes are distilled down to four eight and a half by eleven notes, which are photographs of the whiteboard. Yeah. And I don't use a teleprompter. That's how I've been accused of using one before. I don't
even know how that would work. But it's extremely useful to use the whiteboard. And I think because ideas are so easily put up there and removed, there's something about writing on things that are vertical as opposed to on a flat surface. I really, because that's actually the way our visual perception casts things. We don't cast visual perception onto the ground where we experience the visual world mostly in front of us. I think the cognitive map and the
visual map are inextricably linked for at least for sighted folks. So I think there's really something there. So in the absence of colleagues to sit there and boost our attention by 25 to 30%. What could one do? Do you have a you said you have a whiteboard at home? I certainly use the whiteboard. Do you work on it the same way you would in those early days just within the absence of colleagues looking on? Yeah. Yeah. So you work on it just
like someone's there. The other hack is using really good notebooks. That's always made a big difference for me. Paper notebooks. Paper notebooks. Yeah. Yeah. Though recently I've been messing around with a remarkable, which is one of these digital notebooks where it's eating technology. So it's like a Kindle, but you can write on it, but you have endless pages on it. So I've been messing around with that recently. But I remembered when I was
a postdoc, for example, I found it recently. I went and bought a lab notebook because those are expensive, at least for a postdoc, right? They're like $70 because a lab notebook has to have archival quality paper. It's bound. It's bound. Yeah. People might not realize that lab notebooks need to be kept for many years. Yes. You're not supposed to tear pages out of them. And so they tend to be bound. So if you have terrible handwriting like I do,
you just have to deal with it. Yeah. You can't rip it out. And thick paper, acid free archival paper, big sturdy covers. But I bought this because I thought, okay, look, I'm going to take it more seriously because I think that's also part of what goes on with the whiteboard is your mind thinks about writing on the big vertical space as a public crystallization of thoughts. I'm putting this up for people to see even if there's no one actually there
to see it. And so you take it more seriously, right? If I'm writing on a whiteboard in class, I'm not just going to put up nonsense. Like I'm going to be very careful about what I'm writing because you imagine there's an audience. This is something for other people to see. And so you get a little bit of a similar effect. If you have a very nice notebook, you think like, I don't want to waste pages. And somehow that helps with the thinking. So then I found
this notebook because I store my old notebooks in my closet. So I found it when I was working on a recent book. I found it. I went through it, right? And then I started ticking off this turned into a paper, this turned into a grant. The notebook I used it for maybe two years, only used maybe about half the pages. It's all very careful, neat script and diagrams. I think I found seven different peer reviewed papers or funded grants where the core ideas
were in this notebook. So it's like that $70 was an incredible investment because when I got to working on that notebook, it must have been pushing my thinking to a new level because it was an incredible concentration of actual, publishable results were coming out of this pages. Yeah, it seems like we would all do well, regardless of our field, to have some very low bar method of capture where if we just have an idea that spontaneously comes to mind
that we can capture that in a voice memo or dare I say in a phone notes segment. But then something as you're suggesting, like a whiteboard, like a bound notebook where the moment we look at it, it brings about a level of seriousness to our thinking and to our actions.
But like this is different than just texting. And what we're really talking about are layers of sophistication, but not in a snobby way in terms of highest productivity and quality to bubble gum wrapper on the floor type levels of quote unquote productivity. Well, I mean, I've become a fan of this idea of having specialized capture for specific type of work. So for example, I'm a big believer in pretty quickly you want to capture ideas
in the tool you use to do that work. So when I have ideas for an article or a book, I'm going to go write the scriptner, which is specialty, this is specialty software writers used to write, right? I'm going to go write to a scriptner project and start putting these in the research section of that scriptner project. When I'm working on a math or computer science thing, I might work out proof ideas on paper, but I pretty quickly want to get
that into a late tech document. So the markup language that you use for doing sort of like applied math papers, right? The tool we use to actually write papers. I'm going to move an idea into there as soon as I can. I'm going to move proofs out of a notebook and into formally marked up like you would for a paper, you know, as soon as I would. So this idea, this is something I've been leaning to more is capture the notes in the tool you're going
to use, take out the middle man in some sense, right? So it's reducing friction, but also puts you in the right mind space. Like, okay, this idea, I'm going to put it where I'm going to need it later as opposed to a more elaborate third party system that you construct that you then later pull everything out of as needed. This is what I've been doing more
recently. Let's just get straight to the tool I'm eventually going to use with maybe a high quality notebook intermediary if I'm actually literally working out thoughts. The math you have to work out thoughts, but I'll get that into an actual paper format
pretty quickly. Tell me what you think of this, what I always call protocol. If I want to learn something from a manuscript I read or a book chapter, I used to highlight things and I had a very elaborate extracted from my university days system of stars and exclamation marks and underlined that mean a lot to me that can, yes, bring me back to a given segment within the chapter. But a few years ago I was teaching a course in the biology department
at Stanford. And for some reason we had them read a study about information retention. And I learned from that study that one of the best things we can do is read information in whatever form, a magazine, research article, etc. book. And then to take some time away from that material, maybe walk, maybe close one of the eyes, maybe leave them open, doesn't matter. And just try and remember specific elements. How much does one remember? Then go
back to the material and look at it. And I've just been positively astonished at how much more information I can learn when I'm not simply going through motor commands of just underlining things and highlighting them, but stepping away and thinking, okay, I don't remember how many subjects there were. I'll go back and check that, maybe make a note. And okay, they did this and they did that. And then it's crystallized. And as I say this,
realize of course this should work. This is the way that the brain learns. But somehow that's not the way we are taught to learn. Yeah, well, I'm smiling because when I was 22, I wrote this book called How to Become a Straight A Student. Right. And the whole premise of the book was, I'm going to talk to actual college students who have straight A's and who don't seem completely ground out, right, like not burnt out. And I'm just going to interview them. Right. And the protocol
was, how did you study for the last test? Did you study for how did you take notes for the last? So I was just asking them to walk through their methodology. The core idea of that book was active recall. That was the core idea that replicating ideas, ways to say is replicating the information from scratch as if teaching a class without looking at your notes. That is the only way to learn. And the thing about it was it's a trade off.
It doesn't take, it's efficient. It doesn't take much time, but it's incredibly mentally taxing. Right. This is why students often avoid it. It is difficult to sit there and try to replicate and pull forth, okay, what did I read here? How did that work? It's mentally very taxing, but it's very time efficient. Right. If you're willing to essentially put up with that with that pain, you learn very quickly. And not only do you learn very quickly,
you don't forget. It's almost like you have a pseudo photographic memory. When you study this way, you sit down to do a test and you're replicating like whole lines from like what you studied, the idea has sort of come out fully formed, good, it's such a fantastic way to actually learn. It was my key. The whole premise that got me writing that book is I went through this period as a college student where I came in freshman year was like
a fine student, not a great student, but a fine student. And I was rowing crew and I was sort of like excited to do that. And then I developed a heart condition and had to stop it congenital wiring in the heart, a true flutter thing, and then I couldn't row crew anymore. So prolapse, some sort. It was a circuitry, a circuitry issue that would lead to an extremely rapid heartbeat. It's like a really rapid like tachardi, right? You get 250 beats a minute
just and it could be exercise induced, right, which is not optimal. You could take beta blockers, which would moderate the electrical timing, but beta blockers reduce your max heart rate. And if you're an athlete where the entire thing that matters is your max heart rate. So you're doing something like a 2000 meter rows, your performance on beta blockers just goes down. It makes no sense. It's like being a basketball player that weighs weighted
shoes is too frustrating. It also makes you super malo. I was pretty milling. But I was a worse rower. So I stopped that. I was like, okay, I want to get serious about my studies. I can get serious about my studies and writing, right? That's when I actually made the decisions they didn't stuck with for the next 25 years after that. But one of the things I did to get serious about my studies is I said, I'm going to systematically
experiment with how to study for tests and how to write papers. And I had, I would try this. How did it go? Deconstruct experiment. Try this. How to go deconstruct experiment. And active recall is a thing to turn me all around. And so I went from a pretty good student to for every single quarter, sophomore year, junior year, senior year. I got one A minus between my sophomore year through my senior year. It was like this miraculous transformation.
It was active recall. I rebuilt all of my studies. So if it was for a humanities class, I had a whole way of taking notes. It was all built around doing active recall for math classes. My main study tool was a stack of white paper. All right. Do this proof, white piece of paper. And just can't I do it from scratch? If I could, I know that technique. If I don't, all right. I'm going to come back and try it again later, completely transformed.
You know, I did so well academically. It's why I ended up writing that book. They basically spread that message to other people. So I'm a huge advocate for active recall. It's really hard, but it is the way to learn new things. I'd like to take a brief moment and thank one of our sponsors. And that's AG one. AG one is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that
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And as you pointed out, is this very time efficient? Oh, yeah. I mean, it was a problem. It was a social problem for me that I would have to pretend during finals period that I was going to the library to study because I would be done studying. This act of recall, it's brutal, but it's incredibly efficient. You sit down there, I would have my cards, I would mark it. Okay, I struggled with this. I'd put it in this pile. I got it done. I'd put it in this pile.
And so then you would just go back to the, I struggled with it pile and work on that and then make a new I struggled with a pile. And these would exponentially decay. And so in like a few hours, you could really master, you know, with a few other tricks that worked, you could really master the material pretty quickly. And then what am I supposed to do? I didn't do all nighters. They want to make any sense. Like, active recall is how you prepare. It's going to take four hours.
And it's going to be tough. So do it in the morning when you have energy and then you're done. I love it. I learned essentially all of neuronatomy looking down the my griscoat tissue samples. And then I would try and take photographs with my eyes. I do not have a photographic memory, but then I would get home in the evening, look through the neuronatomy textbook, lie down, and try and fly through the different circuits in my mind. And then if I arrived at a structure
in the brain that I couldn't identify, I would then go check my notes and go back. So I basically, I learned neuronatomy, which I, you know, I'm poor. I'd agree many things in life, but neuronatomy, I'm solid at. And then some, if I may say so. And it's because there's a mental map. You can move through it, you know, fly through it dynamically. And that it's the same process. Not all things lend themselves to that approach. I'm guessing maybe we could think of a few that don't.
I guess if people were learning music, that might be tricky. Maybe they need the sheet music in front of them. I don't know. I'm not a musician. Yeah. I mean, I studied a professional guitar player at one point. You were a professional guitar player. No, I studied one. Oh, so for a book, everything's from some book. I read a lot of books. So I wrote a book 10 years ago where I was trying to figure out as part of it, how do people get better at things. And so I spent time with
a professional guitar player to say, I just wanted to see how he practiced. Like what does this actually look like? And what I learned from them is like, what they do is, yeah, they have the music in front of them, but for them, it's all speed. So they take a piece. He was working on Lix for, he was a new acoustic style player. And they had these kind of blue grassy type Lix. And he probably had a memorized. And he knew how fast he could comfortably play it. For them, it's all about adding
20% to what they're comfortably doing. And then that push passed for their comfortable. And the thing I remember writing about him was he was concentrating so hard to try to hit this lick 20% faster than he was used to. It was a huge forget the breathe. So he'd be like, going, going, going. And then just gasp, you know, like his body would, you know, force him for some to breathe. So yeah, there it seemed to be all about deliberate practice. So like, how do you, they don't waste
any time professional musicians waste no time doing things they're comfortable doing. Every time they spend practicing. And this is also incredibly difficult. But every time they spend practicing, it's almost entirely in a state of, I'm not comfortable with this. But if I focus as hard as I can, maybe I'm going to pull this off. Like I'll pull off the sonata at this new speed I'm trying to do. Maybe I'll pull it off. It's like the maximal growth stimulating state. And so I wrote in the
in this chapter, why was he so much better at guitar than I was at the same age? Because I played a lot of guitar when I was younger and was in rock bands, right? And this kid was young, right? But really, really good. And I said, okay, now I realize it. I can recognize me. When I look back at my time playing guitar at his age, I played stuff I knew had a play. Like that's what was fun. Like, yeah, I want to like jam along with the songs I knew or, you know, rip some pentatonic scales, you
know, to like a Jimmy Hendrix album. It was fun. And he spent almost no time, the pros, but no time having fun. Practicing was your brain had to be, you know, uncomfortable. So I learned a lot from that, you know, this actually led to a bit of a battle because my readers, there was this this battle that emerged where people were trying to combine Anders Erickson and deliberate practice with Mehali Chiksetmiha and Flow. And really they were trying to make flow apply
everywhere. Like it's all about flow, deliberate practices flow, everything is flow. The whole thing is again to a state of flow. And I remember Anders talking about this at some point and say, like, no, no, no, like the state of practice that makes you better. It's the opposite of flow. Right. And flow, you lose track of time. When you're practicing like that professional guitar player, you know, every second it passes by because it's like incredibly difficult. Like what you're doing,
your mind is rebelling. It's not natural. You know, it's not fun. It's not the skier going down the hill and it's all instinct. It's you, it's all you thinking about exactly what you're trying to do. And so, you know, I began to push this point out here. It's like, it's not all about flow. Like actually getting better at things is really painful sometimes. Deliberate practice is not the same as flow. And there's a lot of fights about this for a while. I think there's a lot of
flow advocates that just wanted life to be flow all the time. But I think Anders was right because I watched these professionals practice. Like that's what it is. It's not fun. Well, everything we know about neuroplasticity, which of course is the nervous system's ability to change in response to experience says that there needs to be some neurochemical or electrical condition that changes
in the nervous system in order to queue up plasticity. And to my knowledge, one of the most robust of those is the release of the so-called catacole means dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine. Dopamine, because it's involved in so many things, can be a little bit of a distractor. So let's just say epinephrine, norepinephrine, adrenaline, noradrenaline, create in the body
and mind to some extent a state of alertness and often a state of agitation. But if you think about it, in the absence of some neuromodulators like those that change the conditions for wiring of neurons, you know, everyone loves fire together, wire together. A beautiful statement by Carla Schatz, not Donald Hebb, Dr. Carla Schatz said that, not Donald Hebb. But why would neurons need to change
their patterns of connectivity if you can complete the operation? The nervous system needs to, it doesn't feel discomfort, it creates discomfort, but the nervous system needs a queue to that, okay, this is different. I'm failing. And it's the failures that actually trigger the plasticity, it's the discomfort that queues that conditions are different now. Otherwise, there's simply no reason to devote energetic resources to rewiring neurons. And I feel like we don't learn this when
we're kids. And I think as kids, we can learn so much without that feeling of agitation. We get it into these modes of looking for flow. And I have respect for the research on flow and the people who are balled in. But I'd like to talk about flow a little bit. The only thing I really know about flow for sure is that backwards, it spells wolf. So one of the flow, it's such an attractive idea, right? It's like Star Wars. It's like you have the force and you're doing things without thinking.
And awesome, but I can't flow myself through a paper and extract the critical data. I can't create a podcast in flow. But when it's done, it feels great, especially if you nailed the key metric. So what do you think about flow? I'm not trying to beat up on it. I just want to understand how you place it in the framework of learning and deep work if it belongs there at all. It doesn't have a big place in it in the deep work framework. And this was what the controversy
was for a while. And I knew Mahaley a little bit. We corresponded some. I knew Anders a little bit. We corresponded some. So I felt like I was, and both of them actually tragically have died in the last three or four years, I think. Yeah, I think both recently. Flow doesn't play a big role in the deep work framework, right? So when I was trying to justify deep work, so why focusing without distraction was important, I was drawing a lot more for Anders work, right? Because why is
focusing without distraction important? Well, you have to quiet the neural circuitries. You can isolate the circuit that's actually relevant to the thing that you're doing, right? You're not going to get better at something if you have noisy circuitry. And that requires a really intense concentration. So one of the big advantages of deep work was if you're used to that cognitive state, you're going to learn things faster. And I think it was all on this to understand why.
So if you're not distracted, I'm really focusing hard on what I'm doing, trying to learn this new thing. You're giving the right mental conditions, but it's not a flow state. And I always used to say, okay, when your deep work is not flow, because of this, like a lot of deep work is you're trying to do something that is beyond your comfort zone. And that's going to be difficult. That's a state of deliberate practice. And there's a famous paper about this where Anders actually explicitly
says deliberate practice and flow are very different. And I wrote an essay years ago called the Father of deliberate practice, disowns flow. And again, people are really flow partisans out there. It's interesting. I think people just like the idea because it feels good. But I mean, flow is the feeling of performance is the way I think about it. I think it's really hard to train for certain sports. But then when you're actually performing, you're in the game, you can fall in the flow,
right? Because then everything is on, it's really hard to train guitar. But like when you're performing in front of a big crowd, you probably maybe fall in the flow. Maybe you don't, but you could, right? But it's a performance state, not the practicing getting better state. So to me, flow has like very little role in how I think about what I do as a cognitive professional. It's just not something that comes up that often. I agree that we learn through focused work and that flow does manifest
itself during performance. And sometimes so much so that people exhibit virtuosity. The surprising themselves even, what's in there. That's kind of, I always think of it's what is unskilled, skilled, mastery virtuosity. Virtuosity seems to incorporate some random elements of maybe even the performer has not done that before and they surprise themselves or something like that. Who knows? These are
words for something that isn't easily quantified in the first place. But in terms of deep work and getting a little bit back to kind of practical steps towards deep work, I also have to ask you because I didn't earlier when you are on your laptop in your library with your fireplace and these books, it's a beautiful image actually that you've drawn for us in our minds is the Wi-Fi connection to your computer activated or are you offline? It's connected because it doesn't really matter to me,
you know, because what is it? What's drawing my attention? I mean, the most important decision I think I made technically speaking to be a cognitive worker is I didn't lack a social media. Like I, I think we underestimate the degree to which our problem with digital distraction is not the internet, it's not our phones, it is specific products and services that are engineered at great expense
to pull you back to them. When you take that away, the internet's not that interesting. Like, I don't have a cycle of sites to go to, you know, I can check my email, but I don't really know where else to go. I mean, I could go to the New York Times, I guess, but then you've seen the articles, right? They change it once a day. There's just not much, I've set things up so there's not much that's that interesting to me. We've all heard of FOMO, fear of missing out. I feel like there's the
other thing which is fear of missing something bad, right? It's sort of like an anxiety, a more primitive anxiety within us that if we are not engaged on social media or looking at our phone often or texting often that it's not that we'll miss the party, we'll miss the emergency. You don't seem to suffer from those kind of everyday ills. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't happen that much. I mean, I have a phone, you know, a standard, no, I mean, I have my phone. I guess if I'm working
away from it, yeah, I guess it's true if there was an emergency. But this was the case for a very long time, right? We didn't have smartphones till really relatively recently. This is, you know, 15 years ago. So we were just used to this until yesterday, essentially, that there's just periods of time where you're out of touch, like you're at a restaurant with someone, you're out of touch until you get back to your office. Like we were okay. You know, we weren't plagued by emergencies
that led to disastrous results because we couldn't hear about it, right? Then you go to the movies, like you're out of touch, right? And be a couple hours, so you're in touch again. And so I, you know, it's not something that's affected me as much. So maybe I'm working without my phone nearby. A lot of people have this response. They begin sort of catastrophizing. Like what if this happens or this or that? And I'm thinking, you know, I survived before that. My parents survived
without that. My grandparents survived without that. I don't worry about it as much, you know? And some of this maybe is just, this isn't upset people as much as it used to. The fact I don't use a lot of these apps or have my phone. But it really does upset people, right? There's, well, what about this?
What about that? What about this? And I don't know how much of this is just maybe I'm oblivious and how much of this is people back sliding explanation for why they do need their phone, why they do need to look at all the time. But I get a lot of it. You know, maybe they're upset and you don't know because you're not looking at your phone. That's right. I'll tell you what, that's a blessing. Not knowing how upset people are at you. Yeah, it's a blessing as a semi-public figure. I'll tell you
that. Yeah, I can comment on that, but I won't. I am on social media. And I do enjoy it. I sort of got started posting on Instagram and then expanded to other platforms including the podcast. But there's a threshold beyond which it becomes counterproductive for sure. I think there's information there. Like questions that people ask are often informative. It's sort of like adding a class
and asking are there any questions? Sometimes the comments that people bring back are truly informative towards both where they might have some misunderstanding, but also sometimes some really terrific ideas. Yeah. So there's that. But I completely agree that there's a very precarious space. And I'll just relay a quick anecdote years ago. I gave a quick lecture down at Santa Clara University, South of Stanford. And I was talking about this issue. I recommended
your book and a student came up afterwards and he said, you don't get it. That's how I was in my early 40s. He said, you don't get it. You know, you grew up without social media and the phone. And so you've adopted it into your life. But we grew up with it. And when my phone, he's speaking for himself in the first person, when my phone loses power, I feel a physical drain within my body. And
when it comes back on, I feel a lift within my body. So I'd love your thoughts on, they're not you think the phone and perhaps social media as well are in some ways an extension of our brain. It's almost like another cortical area that contains all this information. It's a version of us that gets into notions of AI that we can talk about as well. I know you're involved in AI and writing about AI. But you know, to me, when the phone is used in that way, it really is a almost like
a piece of neural machinery of sorts. Yeah, I mean, there's two ways of looking at it. So there is the sort of cyborg image, I suppose, right? Like you are you're extending your plug it into this neosphere. Like you have this sort of digital networked extension of information and what's going on. There's also the much more pessimistic view, which is no, no, that feeling is the feeling of a
moderate behavioral addiction. Right? So you'll hear the same thing from a gambler. I really, when I'm away from being able to the play, right, to make my bets or do whatever, like I feel really, I feel not myself. And then when I'm when I'm around it and I can play and make some bets, play some poker, whatever, the chips, I feel I feel myself that chips, right? Like they would say,
so that it could be both of these things could be true. I think the moderate behavioral addiction side is is more true than than a lot of us want to admit, actually, like it does feel bad because moderate behavioral addictions build these these feedback response loops. And then you get the dopamine system going when anticipation, because what's on there is things that have been engineered that you're going to get this sort of highly engaging stimuli. And then you see the deliverance of that
stimuli, right? This really nice piece of glass on a piece of metal. I'm going to press this sort of carefully, this icon whose colors have been chosen because we know it's going to hit various parts of our neural alert systems to be as engaging as possible. And I'm going to see something in there that's going to generate some sort of emotional response. So of course, when you see that thing sitting
there, you want to use it. And when you can't, it's a stymied dopamine response. You're like, this this is not good. I'm uncomfortable. And I think that's a big part of it as well. Because I've had this, you know, I've had this argument with with some people. And I, by the way, I see both sides of this. Like there are great advantages to what people are doing with these tools. It's just that it's all mixed up with all these disadvantages. And it becomes very difficult. It's like the alcohol
in the neighborhood bars to potent, you know? And people are going there to socialize and they're coming home at three in the morning, you know, passing out, you know, it's like the balances off. Not that there's not something good there. But the balances off, so it becomes pretty difficult to navigate. So I think some of that's what's going on, especially with the younger generation that was raised on it, which is why, by the way, I think the cultural norms are going to change
around this. I think we're going to think about unrestricted internet usage. Not as something that we just sort of be queeth on youth as they become 10 years old, but something that we're actually much more careful about, probably something that's going to be post-pubestance,
going to make a lot more sense once you've had more brain development. Once you've had more social entrenchment, you sort of understand your identity, etc. Because we recognize, you know, the flip side of plugging this thing into your brain is, yeah, you have access to more information, but it also pumps that into your brain. So I don't know. I lean a little bit heavy towards the pessimistic read because I know too many people, because of my books, who've really reduced the
impact of these things in their lives. And they don't, on the far side of that transformation, they don't typically report a great impoverishment and experience. They don't report I'm less mentally agile. The information on my fingertips is less. I'm missing out on life. There's typically this coming out of the fog on the other side of it where they're like, oh, this is fine. So I'm a little bit suspicious about exactly what this mechanism is.
I think you're right about the moderate behavioral addiction piece. A year ago when I was starting my lab, I had grants to write, and I found the phone to be pretty intrusive for that process. So I used to give the phone to somebody in my lab and announced to everyone in my lab that if I asked for it back prior to 5pm that day, we give everyone in the lab. I think it was a $100 bill. My lab was pretty big at the time. As a junior professor, they did not do not, sorry,
academic institutions, not to be named. Pay us very much, despite what people might think. And it was difficult several times throughout the day or more. I was like, I really want to look at that thing. But the end of the day, I'll tell you that no one got paid. I got my phone back. But it's wonderful. The amount of work that you can get done when that thing is out of the room. It's my superpower. I don't work that hard. In the sense that I don't do long hours.
I think I'm not constitutionally suited for long hours. This was never my thing. My brain tires. I'm good for four and a half good hours a day of actually producing good stuff with my brain probably max. But I don't use my phone that much. I don't use the internet that much. And I prioritize it. And a lot just gets done. It just piles up over time. And there's this sense of you must be burning the midnight oil and you have all these things going on. But again,
people I think underestimate. And it's not the underestimate the impact of this. It's not just the accumulation of time you spend looking on your phone. It's also this network switching cost. Because the phone is very good at inducing a network switch. And that's an expensive time-consuming, energy-consuming neuronal operation. I'm going to switch my focus of attention from this to that.
Like we can't do that in two seconds. That's a hard process. It takes a while. It's why when you sit down to work on something really hard, you have that feeling of for the first 15 minutes. This is terrible. And then after like 15 or 20 minutes, you sort of get into the groove. I always assume the part of what's going on is it takes a while for your brain to really start marshalling. Okay, so what semantic networks do we need to start activating here? Oh, we don't
need this. Let's inhibit this. We're not doing that anymore. It takes a while. So what happens then when you have a lot of these quick checks to social media, you're jumping in on email back and forth is you have this disaster catastrophic pile up of aborted pass switches happening, right? And so it's not just the total time you're looking at, let's say, email or social media. It's the 15 minute window you have to add around each of those checks in which you have this cognitive
disorder. That really adds up. And then you realize, oh, there was no time during my day, in which I was more than 15 minutes away from looking at something that induced a network switch. The data I like to cite, which was looking at email and Slack checks and knowledge workers, this came from rescue time, the software company, the median average interval between checks was five minutes. It's the median. And the mode was one minute in this data set. So it was like, we are
we are checking all the time. That means you were never in a state then in your day, where you don't have a confused cognitive space, where you don't have partially you're switching to this task. But then you switch back to this task before that finish, but before you could fully lock it in this task, you look back over here. And so you're spending your entire day in the state of cognitive disorder, which is going to be reduced cognitive output, right? So you get rid of that. I mean,
I always say like one of my advantages is not that I'm doing anything smarter. I'm just avoiding sometimes the dumb thing just holding slowing other people down. You get rid of that and you feel like you're on the world's best neurotropic or something like this. Like, oh, I'm just doing this thing and I'm doing it pretty well. Now I'm done. You know, why this didn't even take that long. So I mean, I think people underestimate what's going on here. I'd like to take a quick break
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environment tends to be dry. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink elements spelled LMNT.com slash Huberman to try a free sample pack. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman. Yeah, I would like to drill into the concept of context and task switching a bit more. I do think that the brain has something akin to a transmission system where for people that drive and have driven the amount of energy that needs to be used in order to accelerate a vehicle
to get up to a higher gear. It's very different than the equal amount of increase in speed at a given gear. This is if you're not familiar with transmission so that it sounds like it sounds as if there's more facile at higher speeds. How could it be that you're burning less fuel at higher speed? It's not exactly that way, but I think the brain has these transmission systems and what you're describing with people switching back and forth and checking email and phone, etc.
and back to the work that should be at hand. It's sort of akin to going up and down the gear system constantly, trying to arrive at a given destination and sure you might arrive, but you're going to burn far more fuel. It's the least efficient way to go about it. You want to get into that deep groove. I think when we hear about flow, I feel like at least for me, that's the notion of flow that I'm looking for, dropping into that deep groove, even if there's some friction within
that groove of the challenge of the work that I'm doing. It's about not thinking about anything else. It's really about focus. The word flow is just a wonderfully attractive word that I think gives us the false impression that we can just drop into things like a square wave function. Sit down, pen and paper, go. There's no possible way that neural circuits can work that way. Let's invent a term. You tell me it's a term, it's not something that's on the fly, but
Neurosimantic coherence. This is going to be my alternative term for flow when you're working on something hard. It's not that you're in an actual flow state where you lose track what you're doing. You're concentrating really hard, but what I'm saying Neurosimantic coherence is you get to this place where the sort of relevant semantic neural networks are all those that are activated or all relevant to what you're doing. Over time, inhibited most of the unrelated networks that were
fired up before. You get in this sense of it's hard, maybe I'm not losing track of time, but I'm all focused on this. I'm grappling with the bear here, the math equation, the book chapter, whatever it is. It's something different than flow, but it's also different than Linda Stone had the term partial continuous attention, which is what that cognitive disaster of I'm constantly
networks switching back and forth. We'll call it Neurosimantic coherence. I got to coin that term because you have this coherence of the semantic neural networks on what you're doing, and that's the feeling of I'm getting after this hard problem. It might be really hard to do. I know the feeling of trying to solve a math proof for me, for example, could be so difficult,
because what does it actually feel like in your head when you're solving a math proof? It's a lot of, you hold this here, and then you try to get to the next step by doing this, and it doesn't work. You have to keep holding this here. It takes a lot of concentration. Let me try this. That didn't work either, but this looked promising. Now I need to go back and in my mind's eye, update this setup, and now let me try this. It's a lot of holding things in your working memory and keeping them
loaded while you try an extension and then evaluating how that worked without. It requires internal concentration, which isn't pleasant, but in a neurosomatic coherence, it's all this happening in your world. Maybe that's what we should be pitching, what people should be looking for is forget flow. Also remember, there's default where you're the rescue time data set participants checking email once every five minutes. That's cognitive nonsense. That's crazy.
That's like you're trying to play football and you're covering over one of your eyes and wearing a 50 pound rucksack on. You're just like handicapping your abilities here for no reason. So what's in between is this idea and that requires focus or requires deep work. We're playing football and then every three downs or so, running into the stands and having a conversation, trying to work out something, challenging with your spouse or going back and trying
to a totally different play set. Right. Erosky of throwing too many analogies and stories. I'll just briefly say I went and saw the play in New York with my sister this year. I think it was Harry Potter and the cursed child or something like that. I didn't really enjoy the play that much, but the set stuff was amazing. They have this magic library. I think it's very relevant here, where essentially the book that you open has a certain topic. I don't know if it spells or something
is Harry Potter. Again, fun show, but great set stuff didn't really resonate with me too much. In any event, and then the books around it change their topic that are related to that central book. And then if you look at one particular thing, like maybe it's potions or something, I'm making this up. And then all of a sudden, the books around it change. They become either more specific. There might be a distant but related idea that could lend itself to creativity.
So that's the way the brain works in cognition is that we get into a frame of a certain discussion or a certain theme. And the books on the shelf change according to their relatedness based on memory of past, what's going on now in plans for the future. I think anytime we look at we change context and we look at a raccoon video on Instagram or our calendar and oh, there's
that thing. The books become very scatters. So when we return to it, there's a lot more friction, a lot more work or neural energy required to get back into that narrow states of cognition. Just that exactly explains my experience in the way I think about it. Yeah, because it takes time to load up the sort of relevant, the secondary, interciary, semantic ideas. And now they're there. So like you can pull from them. And then as you shift,
you have to sort of shift this whole thing around. And that takes a lot of concentration. I mean, I wrote this article once that got me a little bit of trouble. Not trouble, mild trouble. But it was it was called for the Chronicle Higher Education. And the title they gave it was is email making professor stupid, which wasn't my title. You basically called everyone of your colleagues stupid. I got all checking mail.
The dean at the time did call me in for lunch. But actually, he was here's the thing. He was like, hey, this is real. I agree with this. But what I was arguing actually in that article essentially was what do we do at a university is, is a person what we're supposed to be doing is trying to teach what the life of the mind is and how that works. And we've kind of forgotten that. So we like, why we should maybe think about like at universities, we need to be explicitly not just teaching
how to think, but also modeling the life of the mind at the highest level. And so this idea that we just allow the the professor's area to be drowned in emails and and tasks and be as distracted. You know, it's the main war that every research professor has is how do I how do I fight the admin overload until I become famous enough to get an assistant, right? Like this is the big problem. And I was making this proposal of university should be the citadel's a concentration.
I said, if you want to get the best academics in the world to university, just tell them, here's at the top of our contract, you will not be assigned an email address. Like you're going to get Nobel laureates coming from all over the country to come to this place. And so I was making this argument, we should think a lot more about thinking. We should talk more about it. We should model it exactly the type of things you're talking about. But we don't. It's much more content's
focus. But really, this should be something more that we we get into specifically. Like this is how you actually use the mind to produce innovative, interesting high value new cognitive artifacts. This is a very hard thing we're asking you to do. But you can apprentice here because this is what we do. And we've mastered. We're going to teach you how to do it. But we never have that sort of meta
conversation, sort of meta cognition conversation. I've always thought that'd be important. I think you'd have much better outcomes if that's part of what you learned at the university was how to take the thing in your head and really put it to work, really extract out of it as capabilities. Or even high school or even elementary school level. I agree. Yeah. You have kids. Do they have smartphones? No. Yeah. How do they feel about that? Well, I mean, they're not old enough yet that
it's a real problem. But they're not going to be happy with me probably soon. Hate me now. Love me later is my mother used to say. Basically, because I'm convinced having spent some time thinking about this, writing about this, doing some journalism on this, talking to a lot of the experts that I think where we're going to end up, where all the arrows from the relevant social
psych research, which I've been following this research since 2017. This is 2017 is roughly when you see the first warning signs going up that we need to worry about the potential mental health impacts of these tools, especially social media smartphones on young people. And I, you can track this, right? I have a talk I actually gave them my kids school. Do I have you about this? Where I tracked how this research evolved. And you know, like any literature,
it's contentious at first. And then you see, we begin to see a conciliance between different lines of evidence. And I think we're everything now in the last couple of years is starting to come together. This idea of we don't really know if this is bad or not. I think that's just an old take. The research has moved past that. And I think where we're landing on is unrestricted internet use pre puberty is risky. And like the new standard is going to be post puberty is
probably the right time to be given a device that gives you unrestricted access. We're talking like 16 is probably the appropriate age. So this does not make me popular at the middle school, where my son's my oldest son's about to go. I think in two or three years, that's just going to be common sense. This is the direction I see the research literature and the advocacy going. And I think there's a solid ground for this. Because you're a computer scientist, I can ask this
question. What about video games? I'm not a big consumer of video games. It's been years since I've played one. In fact, but video games are so very different than smartphones and and other technologies because they seem to put at least the kids I've observed playing them and adults into a very narrow trench of attention. Yeah. I mean, there are definitely issues with it. I mean, look, I'm not a social psychologist. I just sort of play one in my articles, but I've
looked into this literature a lot. There's a bit of a gendered breakdown that has a lot of overlaps where when they're looking at potential harms of these technologies, young adolescents, right? Pre-adolescent young adolescents. You tend to see social media that be more signal for cognitive distress for young women and girls and the video games to actually be the bigger culprit for young men and boys, right? There is a bit of a difference here because with the
social media impact, the content of what's happening matters in this picture, right? So what I'm seeing, the engagement I'm having, how this impacts my social life, this is part of the mental distress. With video games, it seems to be more an impact of just disharmonious passion and obsession, just the time it takes, right? Because the games can be incredibly addictive. So the problem
that young men are having are just they're playing it all the time. I'm staying up late because I have an iPad in my room and I'm 14 and I'm going to play Fortnite until three in the morning because my brain cannot handle what you're giving me here, right? So it's less of a content concern than it is just a time concern, right? That seems more solvable to me. You know, like my solution with my own kids, I don't mind being a game, I'm a computer scientist, but I said nothing that's online,
right? Nothing that was free because if it was free, that means their business model involves getting you to play it all the time so you can upcharge or whatever. They have Nintendo switches. Like I like Nintendo, okay? Nintendo Switch, here's a $60 L the game that someone spent five years making or whatever. You can only play those games so long at a time before, you know, you're tired,
you come back to it. They don't have an addictive response to it. If they get an iPad with a game on it, they'll just like play that till their eyes bleed because those are meant to be addictive. So I'm wary about video games, but there it's all just a usage game. So you stick away from the more addictive games. It's a much easier problem to solve, I think, than the social media, the social media issue. Earlier you talked about books. I still read hardcover and paperback books.
What are your thoughts on audio books and learning by way of audio book versus paper in front of you flipping a physical device or Kindles? I don't know if there's any real research on this. I've seen a little bit, but I'm curious what you've encountered and what your thoughts are as well. You could speculate. Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you personally, I can only do fiction in audio books, right? Because when I'm in a nonfiction experience, I'm just very used to constantly
looking for connections and ideas, you know. And so I have to be able to slow down and then speed up and then go back to something I just read. So I really have a distressing experience, trying to listen to nonfiction audio books. Fictions, fine. That's great. I'll put a thriller on an audible, great. I'll listen through it. And I think some of this might be particular to my my engagement with books, which is I'm a writer and a thinker, so I'm constantly looking for ideas.
And so I might have a different engagement with a nonfiction book than someone, you know, just listening to one of my books, but I can only do fiction on audio. That makes sense. Thinking about what works for me and what doesn't, I agree. I love stories and fiction by audio book. Ideally consumed on a long drive or a hike. But nonfiction requires
that I take notes and see things in their kind of respective spatial layout. And yeah, in your most recent book, you describe this concept of pseudo productivity. Is pseudo productivity a general term to refer to some of the things we've already talked about, this task-witching, context-switching, or pseudo productivity, something that includes other
categories of limiting ourselves as well? I mean, I think it's more specific than that, right? So, to me, pseudo productivity was the answer that we came up with in knowledge work to a real dilemma, which is that's a sector, you know, using your brain primarily to create value. That's a sector that emerged as a major part of the economy in roughly the mid-20th century. When that emerged, all the definitions of productivity that we had were inspired from agriculture and industry.
Right? So, in agriculture, we can have ratios. Bushels of corn, per whatever acres of land, under cultivation, and industrial manufacturing, we have ratios, model teas per input labor hour. So, you could just measure these things. We also had clearly defined systems of production. So, you could then say, if I change this about the system of production, what happens to this number? And you could do gradient descent, right? Okay, I do this. That number goes down. Let's not do that.
But I make this change. It goes up. That's a better way of building it. Like, this was the dominant way of thinking about productivity since basically Adam Smith, the knowledge worker rises. That doesn't work, right? Because I'm working on whatever, five different things. It's different than what you were working on. How I'm managing my work is entirely off-uscated, right? In knowledge work, organizational ideas is entirely left up to the individual. How you manage your work and your
workload and collaboration, that's up to you. That's all off-uscated. There's no number to measure. There's no system to improve. So, I think it was a real quandary. My argument is what essentially the management class came up with is Souter Productivity, which is, okay, and the absence of being able to be quantitative about this, we will use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. So, that's it. We see you doing things that's better than not. The more we see you doing the better,
I call that Souter Productivity. And I think that's implicitly how we've been organizing the management of knowledge work labor since the 1950s. We say visibility at people doing things. This is the conflating of busyness with actual productivity. Yes. And so, the problem came when we had this a general way of measuring approximating productive effort, which wasn't very good, but whatever. I mean, I want to see you're at the office and you're doing things. The problem was the front-office
IT revolution, right? Because I'm essentially a technocratic. I see everything through the lens of technology in my writing. We got computers, we got networks, we got email. Souter Productivity can't be sustainable in that context, because now with something like email, then later, tools like Slack, I can demonstrate effort at a very fine grain, right? Because I can send an email, respond to this, jump onto a Slack conversation. I can now do that at a very fine grain level, and essentially
everywhere and anywhere. All throughout my day, I can be demonstrating labor at home, I can be demonstrating labor, because we have mobile computing, we get the smartphone revolution. So there's now an ability to constantly be demonstrating effort at all points of our day, and that's where I think the wheels came off the bus, right? And led to this point that got worse and worse starting the early 2000s and hit ahead in the pandemic of knowledge worker burnout,
knowledge worker exhaustion and nihilism of like, what's going on with my job? Like all I do is zoom all day, what's happening? I think that's Souter Productivity Plus front office IT revolution. They did not play nice together, and you can see this by the way, if you look even at productivity books, you see this huge shift that happens early 90s versus early 2000s. It's like a completely
shift in tone, right? Early 90s, it's Stephen Covey is very optimistic. It's like, how are we going to self-actualize and like carefully choose the most meaningful activities to fulfill all of our dreams for all of our roles? Early 2000s, now we have email, you have David Allen, it's like, oh my god, we're so overwhelmed with tasks. All we can hope for is like these little moments of Zen in the day. If we can just automate how we're just churning through these widgets,
at least we can find some cognitive piece. What happened in those 10 years was the front office IT revolution, and now we just felt like we had to constantly be demonstrating the visible effort. So, you know, I think that's where we got into the problem. Souter Productivity Plus Technology. Recently, my podcast team was in Australia, and my producer and close friend here, Rob Moore, instructed all of us to get rid of social media on our phones, except one guy who would post our
weekly episodes announcements. And it was pretty brutal at first, and then coming back to social media, as it actually turned out to be more challenging. You really experienced the friction coming back the other way, and then one experiences the lack of friction, and that's where it gets scary. It's so interesting the way that the brain can adapt. The friction leaving something behind,
the friction coming back to it. And I think for people listening to this, I raise this because, I think, of course, many people listening are, you know, have work that they really need to focus on. They may be having issues with productivity and burnout, etc. I think a lot of people use the phone and social media because it fills their life. You know, it provides some enrichment,
and they aren't necessarily committed to specific projects. But I guess through the lens of the, let's just call it the Cal New Portee and Lens, one might argue that those people almost certainly have untapped creativity, untapped resources within them that they don't yet know about, because they're essentially using that energy elsewhere. Yeah, I mean, I think for a lot of people,
it's papering over the void. You have this void in your life because there's unmet potential, unmet interest, living in misalignment with the things you care about. I mean, a lot of people, this is the classic sort of catastrophe of life. Social media, and before this, it was other things. There was other intoxicants or other sorts of distractions. It's a way for some people of essentially putting a screen over that gaping void, and it just makes
it bearable enough that you can kind of go on with life. And so it is true. If you just rip it out, you see the void. And that's really difficult, right? I mean, I did this experiment for one of my books. I ran an experiment with 1600 people, and they all turned off all their social media for 30 days. 30 days. 30 days, right? These are young people, old people. A whole mix. A whole mix, right? Not just university students. I recruited them from my newsletter readership, so they weren't
university students. And it wasn't formal research. It was, you know, I put out the call, right? So this is not randomly sampled, right? But I put out the call, and I said, here, I'm going to walk you walk you through this. And then I got a lot of information back. So people reported back how it went. And this was like the number one thing I heard was it's really hard at first, right? And so who were the people that succeeded for 30 days versus those who did it? The ones who didn't
succeed at 10 did just try to white knuckle it. Just be like, I don't like how much I'm using social media. I'm just going to stop because it's bad. And I don't want to do a bad thing. I'm just going to like, you know, hold on to tables, white knuckles. They want it make it 30 days. The people who did succeed followed my advice to incredibly aggressively pursue alternatives in those 30 days. So it's like go learn new hobbies, join things right away, get like really
structured about your day, get into exercise again, learn how to knit again. A lot of people said, oh, I learned about I forgot how fun libraries were. Like you can go into this building and like all the books are free. And there's there you could just grab whatever and it's okay if you don't like the book because you didn't have to pay for it. I'm going out with friends again. I'm okay, every week I'm going to have, you know, we're going to have drinks with this person and every Thursday
morning, I'm going to go running with this person. The people who aggressively tried to put in place a more positive alternative through self-reflection experimentation, they lasted to 30 days and beyond. Right? And so then I came to realize like, oh, I see what's happening here is you have these unmet needs. These tools can give you sort of a simulacrum of meeting them. I need I'm a social being. I need to be connected to people. Well, I'm texting and like doing comments on social media.
It sort of touches that a little bit just enough that you don't feel hopelessly lonely, but it's not really fulfilling that. I have a need to like see my intentions made manifest concretely in the world. Humans want to do this. Well, I'm, you know, posting these things and people are responding. It's sort of this simulacrum of real creation. So it's like kind of satisfying that just enough that it's not just intolerable, right? And so what happens is if you remove that, you have to actually
fill those things the right way. So now I'm not socializing on social media, but I'm going out of my way to sacrifice time and attention on behalf of other people. I'm feeling a social void in the right way. Now I don't really feel like I need to go back. I'm actually making my intentions manifest. I'm learning skills and building things. Now this sort of pseudo construction and collective attention economy of social media post this and you'll like it. I'm like this. I don't need that
anymore to fill that void. So it's like you have to fill the void first. So, so, you know, five years ago I wrote a book that was about reforming this part of your life. And a lot of the book was had nothing to do with technology, but about how to actually just rebuild parts of your life. And on my podcast, honestly, like one of the big topics we talk about, which is crazy that I'm a technologist and I write about trying to find focus in a distracted world is this thing we call the deep life,
which is just straight up building a meaningful life 101. And it's like crazy that my podcast is talking about it. But on the other hand, it's not because my it's the podcast people go to when they're fed up with the digital world. And it turns out if you don't get the analog world working right for you, you need something to avoid starting to avoid. And the digital world will do that well enough. It's like just good enough to keep life tolerable.
There's a lot of discussion nowadays about ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder sometimes minus the H minus the hyperactivity. A lot of kids have true clinically diagnosed ADHD. So we want to be sensitive to that. It's a real issue for a lot of people. A lot of adults have true ADHD. But nowadays people talk about ADHD the same way terms like depression, trauma, gaslighting, and etc. are discussing in nonclinical territory. OCD, you know,
C.D. You're technically as well. Right. Right. And I'm not disparaging that. It's just that we have sort of a dilution of deeper understanding of what these things really are and aren't. What are your thoughts? I realize you're not a psychiatrist. But what are your thoughts on the idea that many people that think they perhaps have true attention issues have either built those attention issues through neuroplasticity into their system. Meaning their system probably worked,
nervous system probably worked pretty well to focus. But they engaged in enough task switching that the circuits of the brain involved in cognition became optimized for this very distributed cognition as opposed to narrow focused attention. And what are your thoughts about the amount of stimulant use on college campuses and in adult populations to try and overcome this? I feel like there's a lot of attempts to use pharmacology to match the level of distraction to
try and make that distraction not seem like distraction. But you know, this is a area I hear a lot about given the nature of the things I cover on the podcast. I think a lot of these issues are phone induced. And I think the problem is not solvable as much. You don't need pills. You need a different phone relationship. My optimistic hypothesis is again this non-clinical difficulty with maintaining attention like in your work or your college student or whatever.
It's not necessarily representing sort of knock on wood like a wholesale neural rewiring. Like I basically rewired my circuits on my brain to be a sort of distributed switching processor. I think most of this is persisting in that much more malleable area that gets affected by moderate behavioral addictions. So we have parts of the brain that are part of these feedback reward loops that's meant to be malleable. So we can have really rapid learning about what's
happening in our environment and how we're supposed to respond to it. And this is what gets hijacked when you build up these behavioral addictions. So it's very quick to change. But that malleability means you can change it back. So I think this drive to I have to keep checking my email or my phone is again you build up a moderate behavioral addiction because of like standard reward cues. And that's a part of the brain that you can't it's difficult but it's
not your whole brain is now a social media brain. And that's just the brain you have because you're exposed to this. It's a matter of getting this stimuli out of your life doing the same type of training you would do. Exbordom exposure like it used to the idea of feeling that drive and not actually doing it. You can work with blocking apps like there's stuff you can do. This is sort of like standard. It's painful. It takes two months and then like you're doing better on it.
So I do think we have a large stratum of subclinical attention issues that are not representing wholesale neural rewiring but are like absolutely sort of expected outcomes of working with malleable reward cue circuits in the brain. We can fix those just like we can if you know you're you're you're gambling too much or compulsively eating the junk food or something. We don't say your whole brain got reriered for junk food. It's like no you have this this particular cue cycle that we
have to work on. So maybe I'm being optimistic there and you know the brain better but like it would be extraordinary if in like a 10 year period right your entire brain somehow got rewired in a way that it couldn't sustain focus anymore. I totally agree with that statement unless you're a young person and you grew up in a distracted world and your brain optimized as the
young brain does for the conditions it's in and then I think you have a real issue. Which is not to say it can't be rescued through the use of discipline tools protocols pharmacology nutrition great sleep and if necessary prescription drugs right because there is a case for prescription
drugs in certain instances for ADHD and as I understand it you know anytime people say wait aren't those drugs just math isn't it just speed yep they are in fedamines in most cases and the idea is to increase the deployment of certain certain neuromodulators once I mentioned before as it means to induce neuroplasticity so that the focus state becomes more of a default state.
So I think that young people are in trouble I think that we I do worry about young people. I think it's a kin to putting them in a kind of a well we know this in the visual system if you take an animal or a human and you put them into an altered visual environment the visual system changes
in your perception of the visual world is becomes inaccurate and the way I think of this cognitively with respect to attention the analogy would be I think we've been for the last 10 years or so 10 15 years we've been raising kids in a sort of house of fun house mirror things which is
anything but fun where you look at yourself and your legs are shorter than in your torso long and so everywhere you turn you're getting a distorted perception and trying to navigate the world through that distorted perception is very very difficult you can do it but it's a lot of extra work that's
what I feel we've done to young people. I'm very concerned about that as well yeah yeah and I think I don't know what you're taking on this but like do you think at the undergraduate level that we have just been not explicitly but just sort of implicitly professors in general we have been just sort of slowly adapting the difficulty of what we're teaching etc because we maybe there's a reduced cognitive focus capacity which is like the key skill for this sort of very artificial
thing of learning you know complicated college level work. I think this would be an interesting experiment to find out is have we been implicitly having to sort of simplify things to keep roughly speaking grade distributions where normatively we feel comfortable. I mean do we see this signal yet that's my interest do we see this signal yet if we look back a generation 20
years ago versus now. I don't know for courses of the sort that I teach or taught until very recently I still teach but I was directing the Neuronatomy course and there's a laboratory module so the students dissect brains they're holding actual human brains that's a real physical contact that cannot be recapitulated digitally you just can't do it you can try use VR but it ain't the same. I mean how would you like it if your neurosurgeon learned on a virtual brain and then
does surgery on a brain. No not no such thing should happen. I think that my experience with this is perhaps most relevant with respect to social media where I teach neuroscience and I use a variety of duration of clips you know the 90 second real the you know seven minute thing the two and a half hour podcast that you know we have podcast solo podcast of four and a half hours. I don't know how many people listen start to finish but I think having a variety of different durations really
helps and I'm told by my team I have a tiktok account although I've never logged on there. You know I think tiktok represents the extreme of kind of bubble gum level information slash entertainment and they really nailed some some circuit that can handle information of about 30 to 60 seconds in a format that tickles the brain just right to keep swiping liking commenting and sharing. Yeah and I don't think that's anything like a real understanding or education. Yeah I mean
it's is nothing like a real understanding or education. Yeah I mean tiktok in particular like I think something people what people get wrong about tiktok is they think that there was a real algorithmic innovation which is actually not the case like as far as I understand the machine learning algorithm underneath tiktok is probably like a relatively standard sort of multi-arm bandant you know intermittent feedback reinforcement algorithm all they do is they clear out all the other noise.
So you know if you're Facebook or something like this you're trying to use algorithms to curate things but you have all these other legacy structures you also have to try to satisfy. There's friends and you know you want to show stuff that your friends like more than other people and there's groups you're joining tiktok just got rid of all the noise and so we're just going to all we're doing is optimizing watch time to we think we don't know but we think watch time is the main thing
that they're they're optimizing. So we want to optimize it watch time and everything all these videos all just exist as multi-dimensional points in this sort of semantic cloud and all we're doing is just showing you things and then you swipe another thing swipe another thing so when you get rid
of all the noise from machine learning algorithm it doesn't also have to satisfy that I follow this person on Instagram or this is my friend all I have to do is optimize this one number how long did they watch before they swipe it just turns out like oh it's really easy like you do that for a couple
hours you're going to hone in on these sub regions in this massive multi-dimensional space of stuff that just tickles this particular person's brain you know and it's very cybernetic because now I'm the user of tiktok I'm the content creator I'm getting immediate feedback what's working what's not
I really quickly find these particularly rich regions in this sort of cybernetics space and so it's like tiktok just purified something that was simple basic machine learning but just like purify what we're doing here and that turned out to be enough to create what's like probably the most
addictive force we've seen in the digital world in a long time so tiktok is optimized for dwell time yeah that's the thought right because it's not public so like we don't exactly know how the algorithm works but people have been studying it like a Skinnerbox you know 100 phones and we
we're looking all these accounts look into variables it seems like that's largely what it's optimizing for is how long did you watch before you swiped right and that's it so they're I mean it's not this was both what was smart about tiktok and also why I've been arguing it's it's destabilized
to hold traditional social media narrative is because the traditional massive social media players in the last decade had this first mover advantage on these giant actual social networks right it's like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram had these massive networks of people's preferences of
I'm following this person and this person I'm following and they could leverage these actual social graphs as a huge source of producing interesting content right and this was a huge first mover advantage because you can't it's hard to get a hundred million people to use something now
right tiktok got rid of all that we don't want a social graph you as a user don't have to declare anything you don't have to follow people or say who your friends are we'll just start showing you things and that was more compelling than what you could generate with the social graph but now there's
no first mover advantage so as the big social media players follow the tiktok model which is much more algorithmic let's just try to curate based on algorithms not who you follow who your friends are they're now much more vulnerable because tiktok could come along and do this without having to spend
five years getting people to clear their friends and now if someone else could come along and do this so I think the major players are giving away their competitive advantage which is this the social graph IP that no one will ever replicate again they're giving away that advantage and now it's a
free-for-all playing field of all sources of attention engagement so I don't know I think tiktok accidentally destabilized the social media decade that had been defining until I think just recently what I find so interesting about social media platforms like tiktok is that
sure it makes sense that kids and teens would use it they were raised with it snapchat etc but when I see my peers who you know we call ourselves adults people in their mid to late 40s 50s essentially playing kids games or engaging through these platforms that are and they're not childlike
necessarily but they they just prove that the or rather that their adherence slash addiction to them just proves that this is tapping into some core neural circuit that exists in everyone so while it might be shaping the young grain a lot this is adults basically eating junk food all day
yeah which raises a question you know I think while there are many different ways to eat and that's not a topic we want to get into now Lord knows that's a great way to create a lot of social media content debating which diet omnivore, carnivore, vegan etc the notion of intermittent fasting
um limiting ones a portion of the day where they eat to whatever six hours four hours 12 hours um is an interesting one that maybe has some applicability here um what are your thoughts about simply not turning on the phone maybe even not turning Wi-Fi on if people are are not as disciplined
as you are with the laptop or tablet for the first two hours of the day or four hours of the day or for a portion of the day sort of like you're taking a social media fast that isn't 30 days it's you know which I think for a lot of people is going to evoke um high cortisol release uh just the idea
of it yeah uh now this is an idea I've written about before you know in deep work I had this chapter called embrace boredom that was the entire idea right so the idea was um boredom by itself is not I think laudable right there's a reason why it feels distressing when things feel distressing
that's usually an evolutionary signal that there's something going on here um but what I was arguing in that chapter was exactly what you're talking about you should have some moments every day where you're free from distraction even though you could be accessing distraction and you want to
and like a little bit each day 20 minutes each day and then maybe a longer session once a week like a couple hours um my argument for that was it's about breaking a pevloving connection in this sense right so if it's every time I feel boredom lack a novel stimuli I get this release of the
phone your mind is really going to make that association of like this is what we always do if sometimes you don't it's a different cognitive landscape right your mind is uh sometimes we get the distraction sometimes we don't that's a much better place to be because now when it comes time
to actually focus on something you know your mind's like I've been here before like we don't always get the distraction so you know it isn't going back you know early 20th century psychology there's probably a more neuroscientific way to think about this but it's like breaking pevloving loops if
like sometimes at the end of the day I'm exhausted it's an Instagram time and it like scratches an itch but other times I'm bored I'm in line with the pharmacy and I don't look at the phone my brain learns like yeah we don't always do it and and so the idea is that you know if you make boredom
more tolerable then you're much more likely to succeed with doing things that are boring but hard and I think deep work for example is boring just in the clinical sense of there's lack of novel stimuli you're just doing the same thing for a long time so I've always advocated for that
is like you shouldn't be unsuperon comfortable with boredom like don't go seeking it I'm not a big believer of and boredom is where all creative insight comes from I think it's a strong evolutionary cue like leave this state but you do have to have some tolerance for it I wonder if we need a
different word than boredom are you familiar with this notion of gap effects in learning these gap effects are similar to the effects of neural processing during sleep focused attention with some agitation triggers neuroplasticity and learning but it's during sleep in particular deep
sleep rapid eye movement sleep states of deep brass maybe in some forms of meditation that the actual rewiring takes place and then there's this literature about gap effects which have been demonstrated for music for math for many things in which if people say are practicing new
scales on the piano for instance but to be any scale and then they um intermittently are are queued by a buzzer to just stop and do nothing the the hippocampus which is involved in learning memory replays the action sometimes in reverse just as it occurs during
sleep um at a rate of maybe 20 or 30 times faster at the neural level we're not talking about bored and what we're talking about are its pauses during which perhaps um we are obtaining accelerated neural plasticity the gap effects certainly accelerate learning i've talked about these in other podcasts but i wonder whether or not this thing you're calling boredom so being in line um to get some groceries yeah and not taking one's phone out while the checker is you're scanning the groceries
through and just not really doing much of anything it's entirely possible that the thing that we were working on earlier that day or the previous day is being processed in the hippocampus at an unconscious
level at a much more rapid rate where we to look at our phone we would inhibit those gap effects which are bet truly beneficial yeah well i mean professors feel this all the time right at least a lot of ones off talk to with peer reviews so i don't know if you've had this experience but you're like
reviewing a paper i often have this experience where when i'm first engaging with the paper i feel incredibly frustrated okay i don't quite understand what they're doing here like this mathematics isn't quite making sense to me and it'll often be the fact i come back later
like well let me just like write up what i have so far and your understanding is like much much better right so there's this this sense of maybe something's been processing i took that so seriously when i was uh especially a post-doc like when i was at the height of just all i do in my
life is produce value with my brain every day i would do what i call thorough walks because i discovered thorough well a grad student i read it down by the Charles like the full sort of you know just minus the beret like pretentious grad student thing but i was really in the the the walled in um real influential book for me so every day when i would walk back i was living on beacon hill walking from mit so people who know bossed and it's it's going across the long fellow bridge i would
say nothing but nature observation like that's what i'm doing i'm just uh oh the isis thinner on the Charles today like look at this tree or the leaves coming back partially i think what was going on is like this was right after i'd been whiteboarding it right uh i think it was letting
stuff process right so i had this explicitly in my routine uh a lot of time where i was okay i can't think about work at all i can't do anything else but you know i'm thinking about the tree i'm thinking about the water like really sort of minimal cognitive lifts and i wonder if that's what was going on there like to me that i mean i was a very productive period of my life yeah i feel like in the in the last five ten years thanks largely in part to matt walkers book why we sleep sure and
the advocacy around sleep from others um we've come to understand that sleep is essential for mental health physical health and learning cognitive performance physical performance so much so that now people devoted men's around attention and and uh resources to try to get the best possible night
sleep whereas it was the all sleep when i'm dead mentality prior to that yeah and i i would love to see a world where um people embrace not the notion of boredom per se but the notion of gaps um lack of external stimuli coming into our our eyes and our cognitive system as it means to get smarter
to get more creative to get better we just need a language for this yeah and i think it's the you know so often it language is a separator when it comes to health and performance tools and something i've really strived for is to try and um create language that's not linked to any one
person that illustrates what something is for so maybe um no small task alba maybe we'll just have you rename boredom as um neural rewiring um epochs or something like that i'll go with the term yeah my whole writing career by the way is based on taking things people already intuitively know
in their gut and giving it a two word name just having the language around that really matters like it does oh deep work oh okay that's like this activity i kind of knew that was important i didn't have a name or digital minimalism like oh yeah that i kind of know what that means like it's a
different different philosophy towards it but there's all so i do have a name related to the gaps we're talking about but but for one of the other negative effects right so we have the positive effects you talked about which is consolidation of learning and acceleration of learning we had the
one negative effect which was the pevlo v in connection to distraction the other one i've written about before is solitude deprivation right so so i'm using a different definition of solitude than the colloquial one most people think of it as a physical thing i'm just isolated but there's a
there's a cognitive psychological definition of solitude which means absence of stimuli created by other human minds right so i'm not taking in information that's coming directly from another human mind having no period with this solitude so having no period in your day where you're free
from stimuli created from other minds is solitude deprivation and so real issue and partially it's a real issue because when we're processing input from another human brain it's all hands on deck right and we're very social beings a huge portion of our brain is dedicated to this right so it's a very
cognitively expensive activity when i'm trying to understand another humans what they're saying i'm simulating their mental state i'm trying to understand like where do they fall in this sort of social hierarchy and one of my arguments was when you spend your entire day in that state it's
exhausting and anxiety producing and like until we had smartphones and ubiquitous wireless internet the idea that you could banish all solitude from your day is laughable it's impossible right so of course we had a lot of portions of our day where our brain was not like ramped up in gear four
like the sort of social processing mode but smartphones makes it possible that you can be in that mode all day long and so like one of the things i hypothesized is some of the anxiety rises that goes with the age of smartphones is brain exhaustion right so that's like that's another negative
effect of the constant we have two negative effects now for the constant stimuli and one positive effect for the absence of the constant stimuli so i think we're making a case here for not always being on your device yeah i agree what one of my favorite literature is from neurosciences i think
most people have heard of the so-called critical period stages of development when the brain is essentially hyperplastic to any input for better or worse this is a stage of life called childhood and then of course people throughout the number 25 after age 25 plasticity is possible
requires more effort tension etc and then sleep so forth but we know based on really beautiful studies that if you deprive someone of sensory input for even a few hours and we're not talking about sitting in a completely black and room with no input but you essentially limit the
amount of sensory input in the period that follows you get an opportunity for a hyperplastic response to any stimuli and this just makes sense if you understand basics about signal the noise in the visual system and in the brain it just means when there's a lot of background chatter of
stuff it's harder to see the stuff that matters and the stuff that the brains are required to very computer science-y neuroengineering type perspective but yes i would love for you to come up with a two-word description of this it's not boredom induced plasticity it's this quiet induced hyperplasticity or something i don't know maybe we can riff on this together sometimes not trying to move into your space but i have a very practical question and i'd love to get a
little more insight into the structure of your days but are you a list maker? do you wake up in the morning and make lists and cross things off and then decide what are the key items on that list? no i'm a time blocker time blocker yeah yeah so i'm not a big believer in to-do list i like to grapple with the actual available time like okay i have a meeting here i have to like pick my kids up from school here here's the actual hours of the day that are free and where they fall all right what do
i want to do with that time well okay now that i see that there's a lot of gaps in the middle of the day here they're short maybe there i'm gonna do a lot of small non-convary demanding thing oh this first 90 minutes in the morning is like the main time i have uninterrupted okay so this i'm
gonna work on writing so i've been a big believer this since i was an undergrad like you give your time a job as opposed to having a list which is somewhat orthogonal to what's actually happening your day and then just as you go through your day seeing what do i want to try to do next which i
think is a lot less efficient i'm gonna try your method um i try and structure my days as much as i can but it just never quite works um do you work late into the night or you know no i'm a 5.30 man okay yeah so 5.30 pm that's it yeah more or less that's my cut off now the one
exception is um if i'm writing on deadline i'll sometimes like if i need to get more writing done i can do an evening writing session which which i got used to through long experience i've used to write my blog post at night after like my kids went to bed now they're older and they don't
go to bed as early so it's like the one thing i have left that i'll do after 5.30 is like every once in a while i'll do like a 90 minute evening writing block um but i call this by the way this whole philosophy i call fixed schedule productivity i've been doing it since i was a grad student fix
the work hour schedule that's my commitment i work in these hours um and then work downstream from that for everything else so like this controls like even what you decide to bring into your life because you know i can't go past a schedule um and it drives you to be more innovative and how you
deal with your time and schedule you have to be efficient because you only have these these hours here uh that's been you know a signal for my my life since i was in my early 20s fixed a schedule and don't work outside of that schedule now it's your move to figure out anything you want to do
you have to make that work when we come professor figure out how to make that work you want to write books while you're being a professor figure out how to make that work you don't have the option of just throwing hours at it and you innovate a lot i think when you have the constraints where do
sleep and exercise fit into your schedule uh what's your typical to bed time wake up time what's your um typical exercise routine and the reason i ask about this is because i think nowadays we hopefully people understand that exercising cognitive function are are inexperibly linked yeah
and we're all going to live longer lives and be sharper mentally by doing exercise yeah so i mean my main like actual working with weights i do this pre dinner right and this was the innovation in the last couple of years it's it's a fantastic psychologically for me this is a transition from work
to like family time after work and so so i'll do like 45-50 minutes uh garage gym you know the way built during covid after i'm done working before dinner and once you get used to that like it also forces you like i got to finish work because i got to get this in before dinner but then i'll do
also quite a bit of walking if it's not a teaching day so i'm not on campus i do a lot of thinking on foot um you know walking my kids through the bus stop which isn't particularly close and back so i'll do a lot of walking but that's when i i by serious exercise now is always always pre dinner
then i want to be up you know in our room by 10 and then at that point i don't track so i have insomnia issues which which actually has been like key driver of a lot of the things i think about especially with slow productivity is i'm very wary because i can without any control on my own
just find myself unable to sleep sometimes fall asleep or stay asleep fall asleep yeah i mean i used to get it really bad um not so bad now but you know it comes and goes that really affected the way i thought about productivity because it seemed like to me the the definition of just i get
after it with a bunch of stuff wasn't really on the table because if my notion of productivity depended on me like every day being able to just like hammer on a bunch of stuff i'm very busy have lots of commitments what would happen if i couldn't sleep i wouldn't be able to do that so i drifted naturally towards a definition of productivity which was it doesn't really matter if you work tomorrow but it is important that like this month you work like writing a book it doesn't matter if
you work on your book chapter tomorrow in particular but like this month you have to spend a lot of time working on it so it was like an insomnia compatible definition of productivity was sort of morphed into this idea of slow productivity taking your your time with it so it's interesting so like
sleep issues really shaped away i thought about work and put me on these much longer time scales of productivity try not to be dependent on any particular day being critical to what you do i don't want the high stress situation i don't want to like i'm just gonna ten hours a day for the next ten
days we're gonna make this deal happen like i can't operate in that space because i worry about it anytime my brain could betray me and i could like lose sleep for a couple days i think it's really important that you're sharing this because while people's challenges differ i think oftentimes
people hear the content of my podcast or other podcasts and think oh gosh i have to have everything dialed in just right when in fact most all of the tools and protocols that have been discussed on the human lab podcast are in response to a particular challenge that i've had or that others
close to me have had and i love this i'm sorry that you suffer from insomnia we have a series on sleep with matt walker in which she lays out some some great tools that we haven't yet discussed on the podcast i'll just send you a text to i'll call you with a with a short list of
those and hopefully they'll help but we do cover insomnia and some depth but but i think it's important that people realize that they can be very productive with the hours that they have and the the moments or hours of of high focus clarity that they have even if they're not sleeping great
even if they're raising small children because that's the real world and certainly that's the real world of deadlines and academia but family and colds and flus and travel and jet lag and arguments and all the happy stuff too vacations so sounds like you're very good at adapting your day to what's
going on around it but that you have certain sort of committed time in my correct in assuming that you have at least one period of say 60 to 90 minutes of real what you would call deep work let's say at least five days a week i know that might be an underestimate but it seems like
that's what what i'm got that's what i'm extracting from this that's the goal right so to me depending on the season is how extreme that can get so the busiest season would be like a teaching semester right but even then i'm going to make sure that five days a week i'm starting with deep work and the non teaching days are more than the teaching days compared that to the summer for example where like all i do for the most part is deep work no meetings on Mondays and Fridays all admin stuff
is midday to early afternoon Tuesday Wednesday Thursday everything else is deep work you know just locked in yeah hours at a time but i want if i'm not getting five days five days of starting the day with deep work i'm i'm unhappy right because i mean i keep coming back to this is okay because i'm
not going to be able to i mean fortunately the insomnia doesn't bother it has a bother me in years but the the threat of it like completely shaped away i think about things and because i know i'm never going to be have a sort of like an Elon musk style energy of like i can just take on seven companies and make it happen right i just don't have that ability i've always focused on the long game and to me the long game plays out with get your deep work time in you know just keep working on the
stuff you do best and get better at it you know tomorrow doesn't matter but if you if you're doing this most days for the next four months like that's going to matter you know and so i often think about productivity my own life at the scale of decades like what do i want to do in my 20s
you know okay what do i want to do in my 30s you know what do i want to do in my 40s you know and that helps like in my 30s i'd lot of young kids like it's yeah i mean the amount of time i could spend total working is like much less right but i could still think about what do i want to do in my 30s how do i make that happen let me make sure i'm pushing like on those things then everything else i can adapt to i can give here and there you know it allows you to be very adaptable when you're
thinking about what do i want to do you know for the next 10 years it also means you're not on a random Tuesday chiding yourself because like why didn't i get three more hours of work in that becomes sort of a nonsensical question and what you care about is like what happens in the next decade
which is that's a long game it's not about you know hustling today it's about i came back to deep work day after day after day when other people got distracted by tiktok you know like i got to you whatever it's that coming back to what matters again and again years ago i was in a scientific
competition slash battle in one of my tools it wasn't really the kindest tool was i would just suggest to the competitor um great television series so the wire you know that's how it's great and we want a few they want a few but um you know there's something very addictive about those
um yeah netflix shows i you know i mean they're unbelievably addictive just even seeing that the the slider next episode slider come up you can skip the intro it's just like they've just dialed it in yeah so i suggest those to competitors all the time not what i do it no longer but
then who knows what role they played but i just noticed in myself how distracting they could be they could take me to when i start watching ozark yeah i found myself waking up in the middle of the night perhaps to use the restroom or something and then starting another episode of osark is wild
yeah and um i i wonder whether or not a way to reverse engineer one's way to productivity reverse hack our way to productivity would be to think about all the ways that you would um benevolently deploy distraction for a competitor and then um ask yourself what which of those
you're still engaging in and think of yourself as sort of in a competition with the highly distracted version of oneself yeah um because i think that one task um i think for us today is to try and think about for the person listening to this who's non-academic um we're hearing about
all this distraction that enjoys some social media you know how how can they bring about the best version of themselves in terms of productivity but also presence for family um presence with self et cetera and um and if one isn't in a competitive environment then maybe it's about setting up
different um mental maps of the self and then trying to pit them against one another and be the best version yeah literally i think that's interesting right like think about what would be yeah what what i like this idea of thinking about my competitor you know what what what would really
give me a leg off yeah am i doing this i mean but i would also add in here this is like a slower productivity type idea um you figure out the thing you really care about you figure out what you would need to do to really show up for that thing and then if you're doing that like give yourself
a break on everything else too you know what i mean it's like i'm this way with right if i'm getting in my writing time i have to write i'm very uncomfortable and i'm not writing i just write all the time articles books you know i'm always writing if i'm getting in my writing time then it's
like okay the rest of the day maybe like this week was a kind of a loss like the kids were home sick or there's a crisis at the university or whatever and like i'm just trying to keep that under control and like have good productivity habits and like don't context switch too much and
don't be too distracted but still have your fixed scale of productivity like in the 530 every day and time block and try to be reasonable with that time limit the damage but if i'm doing the thing that ultimately really matters i'm going to be pretty happy with it so it's like moving to the
definition of am i happy with what i'm producing away from a quantity metric and to this more am i aggregating the quality reps you know and it like i think in weightlifting this would make a lot more sense right it's like yeah there's a there's a certain number of like a certain amount of time
each muscle group needs to be on and like if i'm doing that i'm happy if i'm you know weightlifting right there's no notion of like why can't i why didn't i exercise five hours more this or that and so i sometimes try to think about my core intellectual work that way like if i'm getting in the
core deep reps and the thing i care most about which for me is almost always writing then like the rest i just want to it's like damage control like i want to like do the other stuff well and like not get too stressed out about it and you know there's the productivity habits then that are about
doing the stuff that matters and protecting it and then there's the habits that are all just about let's not let the other stuff get out of control um you know i find it a little bit easier you go easier on myself when i think about it that way do you listen to music while you work no
well the data certainly support not listening to music or if you do listen to music listening to music without lyrics yeah you have to train even to get used to it right i mean even to get used to music without lyrics you got to get used to it i guess your brain's building the filters
some people i have met have trained themselves to work with lyrical music which i think it took them a long time but i i met a self-published novelist who does like a million words a year which is crazy and he blasts because he has four kids he blasts Metallica in NASCAR earphones and i think
how do you possibly write like this i think you just train his mind has just like a a pure auditory filter that it's uh that it's he adapted i guess or maybe his books are that good i don't know i like but i like silence or like background noise to but even background noise is hard i have a
hard time writing at cafes for example like i really do like lack of stimuli to use visual blinders you know like some people actually do this they'll you know it's like a hoodie and they'll be like really trying to tunnel their vision which makes perfect sense from the perspective of neuroscience
i mean your visual world strongly constrains to the the narrowness or the or the um broadness of your cognitive maps yeah i mean i just have my spaces engineered right so like where i write in my my library at home all the interesting windows are like behind me and over here
i'm staring across to windows it just goes right next to the neighbors and like just typically blinds down but as you say this it just makes me want to you know shout that you know so many people who think they have attention deficit issues have probably just put themselves in
compromised environments which include smartphone apps and things that so i mean like like there's absolutely no way that they ought to be able to focus in fact perhaps the fact that it can focus at all is is miraculous given the the constraints like trying to run with shackles on yeah i mean
look we're used to this with physical stuff right well if we if we analogize to physical fitness we're so used to all these details right like it matters like what you're eating like how you're sleeping the details of how you train and when you train and how much like we're very used to this
idea that that really matters we have no intuitions for cognitive development or application we like treat our brain i guess because we associate it so much with a sense of self it's just this sort of um an effable connection to us as a person we don't think of it as much of an organ
as like a muscle or something like this but we don't have a sophisticated vocabulary at all for thinking about how do you do stuff with your brain which is the if you're in knowledge work that's the whole game like the whole game is this brain takes an information adds value to it it alchemizes
value out of out of mind stuff and people who who alchemize value out of you know muscles i'm a relief pitcher in baseball that i know like my whole job is like to take a certain muscles on my kinetic chain and use them to move a ball very fast if i if i really am very careful about this
i can have a multi-million dollar deal those of us who do this with our brain don't have any of these intuitions it's just like you know you have to uh work hard you know and we're on our phone all day i mean this has to be the physical equivalent if you had like an endurance athlete who's
smoking all the time like this is crazy like this is directly contra-intercating or indicating um what you need to do what matters like what what the actual activity is that matters for your value production but with cognitive stuff we have no intuition like this yeah when i was a junior
professor this was down in san diego not Stanford my girlfriend at the time she said to me she said you're like a professional athlete that was before i got tenure and she was like in you're trying to go from like minor leagues to major to go from uh you know uh you're like second string to
to starter yeah so you have to treat what you're doing like a professional athlete with their their their game like prioritize sleep prioritize food prioritize time prioritize you know it's and we as you point out we don't do that with the mind we we tend for cognitive stuff we tend to
assume that we just flip a switch and like focus time and i think that's in part because there are certain things such as social media such as a great movie such as certain social interactions that can immediately and completely harness our attention yeah unlike a marathon or where sure
i could probably finish the 26 miles or wherever it is 26.23 i forget what is um if i had to do it right now to save my life but it's not like i can just hit a switch and and and i think that's the that's the kind of um caveat here is that the kid that loves video games can definitely focus
yeah give him or her a video game they love and boom they're focused so it seems as if there's a problem when they can't um but they know they can right it's it's stuff's obvious when one states it but i think um it's worth pointing out that this stuff needs attention it needs it needs work
yeah which means and it starts with vocabulary it starts with intentions starts with examples you know i mean there there should be a book like how to think that we just give to everyone get learned and learn right yeah like how to use your brain like the user manual you know like that
would be a very useful user manual and i think in like elite cognitive professions this gets handed down as lore and people figure it out right i mean like this was like my experience train at MIT in the theory group is that you know everything was focused on getting the most out of
your mind and so it's being passed down from you know person to person it was also in the culture it was in the way that people acted but most places that do cognitive work don't have these don't have these cultures yeah but here's the advantage though here like here's the silver lining right
if you're one of the few cares about it's a huge advantage right now like it's a it's a big part of like my success i don't think i have the highest horsepower brain but like it i care a lot about trying to you know get the most out of it like to push it to like the edges of like the reps like
and i can actually rpms like can actually get out of it you know so it's an advantage as you know someone is listening to this you start caring about your brain how it works how you want to take care of it what you want to get out of it you start caring about this um you're going to get
advantage as compared to the person right next to you like suddenly in your office or you know in in your grad program it's gonna be like well it's going on here yeah yeah super power and sometimes there's a bit of a social cost upfront yeah when i made the shift from being a let's
just call it a not serious student to a serious student in college um and i was coming from behind i had to put so many more hours in and so partying was this something happened fairly seldom i still did it but and it was isolating yeah i actually lived alone in a studio apartment i mean
as it's isolating there you're you're gonna miss out on certain things there there's some deprivation there but um you eventually end up in a position to do far more with your life yeah of course what um you said a moment ago also reminds me david goggins the david goggins no no introduction
needed um has been um quoted as saying you know it's easy nowadays to be exceptional because so many people are just distracted and wasting their time so that you put in 20% more effort to being more focused or toward your fitness program and you're gonna you're gonna surpass many many people
yeah so it's not that hard to accelerate it's just it it takes some practices that are um socially challenging to implement it's it's funny i had that same experience as an undergrad that you had yeah because i cared i was impatient to be done with college and like to do things with my brain
i want to be a writer i want to be an academic but you know that takes a lot of work and i really cared a lot about it so i was i was a fraternity brother for one day and i went to the first meeting they're doing you know he just held a pledging or whatever and i remember i just uh this not for me
and i walk away it's like i'm not gonna because this is gonna be distracting like the hangovers and this and that and and you know i want to focus on writing i want to learn how do this it is pretty isolating yeah i um and i know some people that were in the Greek system that also benefited
tremendously from that i i wasn't one of them um but i i definitely resonate with it yeah yeah so not everyone yeah i mean i'm just saying it's like they don't all have to be at all i work but but caring about your brain it gives you a lot of options and if you're playing catch up
it there's almost always a social cost associated with it but you eventually are joined by many other people you find the other nerds it's a lot of her to the other the other nerds misfits and people who um who are you know seeking something uh they they come around you fight you you find them
uh i'm interested in this concept of burnout um we hear about burnout um we associate with it too much adrenaline lack of sleep tired and wired um feeling disengage the the poet David White has a beautiful poem i forget the title about burnout where he says that the i think the cure to burnout
is wholeheartedness um and i i always like that's a bit more abstract than the kinds of things we're talking about today um but i like that because there's something about wholeheartedness um really leaning into something with with the the true desire to be there and to explore it no matter how hard
that is um the opposite extreme of burnout yeah well i mean i think burnout in if we're thinking knowledge we're people with office jobs my diagnosis there it's not exactly quantity of work that that does play a role it's the kind of work because i think what's happening what what's
been deranging actually for people in these jobs is uh workloads are getting larger right in part because communication is low friction and we always want to be demonstrating activity because a pseudo productivity and people are always asking us to do things we say yes everything we say yes to
brings with it administrative overhead right which is talking about the thing but not actually doing it so it's like emails about the commitment it's a meetings about the commitment um because our workloads are larger what happens then is more and more of our time has to service this administrative
overhead because everything we say yes to brings with it its own overhead it adds up an aggregates right so now more and more of our day is spent talking about work and not actually doing the work and then make it even worse it's not like this overhead is all batched together it's sort of spread
out throughout your day so it's also putting you in that state of uh constant distraction which makes it hard to do work what i think is burning people out is there now in this state where they're saying i'm spending most of my day talking about work sending emails attending meetings very little
time is left to actually make progress on the work and then the the workload gets larger and larger this by itself is deranging right this it feels like you're in some sort of um nihilistic experiment like what what is this why do i have six hours and meetings i'm not actually just can't be the
right way to work um and then what happens of course is you have to recover time in the morning in the afternoon maybe after your kids go to bed to try to actually make progress so now you also have just a straight work quantity issue so you're working more hours there's an energy drain but
i think that psychological piece of this can't possibly make sense that like i'm checking email once every two minutes and spent six hours in zoom like doing very little actual high value work like this can't be the right way to work that's what i think the burnout epidemic right now is coming from
is is that psychological component of we all know this is stupid but no one is saying the emperor has no clothes on we all know that the amount of email and meetings i'm doing is such a waste of my salary like this is a highly trained brain like i could be writing these reports or this code or
creating these business strategies but we're all just accepting this i think the absurdity of the current situation is creating as much of the burnout as it is just we also have to add these extra hours just like a straight aggregation of work quantity it's almost analogous to
taking professional athletes or would be professional athletes and having them do a bunch of other physical labor so that they're showing up not fresh for the game and little micro injuries and distracted and and no one's admitting that this doesn't make sense and everyone's just getting
injured and no one's talking about it so it's the absurdity of it would drive people crazy and it is driving people crazy it's so difficult though because certain things like smart phones are very useful on the hospital ward i mean doctors can communicate nurses communicate so much faster now
um parents and kids can communicate who's gonna pick up the kids nope got stuck in traffic you go this way alternate route on google maps and on and on so it's all woven in with stuff that's that's also highly adaptive it makes it tough yeah you know it's almost like the work of being a
selective filter yeah is half the work of trying to delode the cognitive systems that would allow you to do deep work yeah well in the workplaces even harder than that right because because part of the issue is email and slack let's just say digital communication um i spent a lot of time
studying that closely right from like a technocratic standpoint the introduction of digital communication to the workplace and the problem there is the reason why we're checking this all the time it's not some like individual habit de-optimization it's not oh i should just check this less
often what happened is when we introduced low friction digital communication to the office this it emerging consensus came about that said great let's just use ad hoc messaging as our major way of collaborating like we can just figure things out on the fly i can just be like andrew what's going
on with the whatever and you can answer me and i can send it back um this was very convenient the activation cost was low and so this is how we began actually collaborating on work now what happens is as workloads get higher we now have many things at the same time they're all generating these asynchronous back and forth conversations most of these have some sort of time sensitivity right so if i email you and say like what's going on with like the guest coming later today we have to kind of
resolve this before later today um so now it's not just that these messages are going back and forth with all these different threads but i have to keep checking my inbox to make sure the gap's not too big
this is not a failure of habits it's not a moral failure it's uh necessitated by the fact that all these back and forth conversations have to keep moving forward so it is difficult then if you're in this system to step out by yourself because this is the way we're collaborating is these asynchronous
back and forth messages and i can't disengage myself from that without slowing things down like a from a like a mathematical game theory point of view it's a suboptible Nash equilibrium it's not the right place not the right way to to run this to the utility value this configuration is low
but no one individual can deploy a different strategy that's going to be higher value we're stuck in it right and so now it becomes really hard for an individual just to say i want to check my email as often it it's built in systemically into this hyperactive hive mind workflow and the only way to
break free from the suboptimal configuration is to basically have the organization itself do like a really high cost change to the rules of the game these are how we're collaborating now we're not using email freely anymore we're going to use this system and said here you it's a very expensive top
down procedure to free ourselves from the suboptimality it's like in the world of work that's partially why this is such an intractable problem i tried to write a book about this recently and it was really hard to gain traction because it's not easy to solve this like no individual can
move out of this and you have to put in a lot of energy as an organization to try to change this so it's in some sense email is a more insidious problem than social media on the phone because at least over here this is my engagement with this and i might have these moderate behavioral addictions
but i could make differences here in my company oh this is much worse this is like a systemic problem it's an emergent deterministic work impact on a economic social cultural system that was completely dynamical and went in a way we didn't really expect so it's a it's a it's a really tough situation
sometimes especially in the world of work how do we get out of this constant distraction it's why you know i wrote deep work and i was like well why don't people just do this that's why they don't just do this because it's not so easy to reclaim this time well it's like when i was a
graduate student in postdoc i was focused on eating pretty well meaning just clean-ish food and people talked less about that at that time yeah i was also really committed to exercise and so sixteen people were less committed to that in the academic sector at that time now i think it's
commonplace for people like i'm going to my yoga class i'm doing my zone two cardio i go to the gym you know men and women do this you know i remember i'm like this like sneak off to the gym like oh yeah yeah um and um you know you felt like a bit of a of an oddball if you were the one bringing your
lunch to the the you know the pizza luncheon not there's any wrong pizza love pizza but i was trying to eat well i have for a long time i feel better when i do and i'm grateful that i did but you get some weird looks like out you have a eating disorder or something like that that's
what people would say then yep um now people will probably look and you know that looks better than the pizza people start to understand so i think there needs to be a cultural shift yep um and i think there has been a cultural shift around food and exercise certainly food meditation sleep
i think people are far more accepting and actually encouraging of their workers and co-workers um taking really good care in order to function better for longer yeah i think it's going to be the next revolution and it's going to be a revolution it's going to unlock we're talking on the scale
of like a trillion dollar gvp when we go through knowledge work and have this revolution i call it like the cognitive revolution let's take really seriously how the brains of our workers work like these are our number one assets like not to be too mechanistic about it but what is our main
capital asset if we're a knowledge work organization we have some buildings but it's really these brains that we have like employment contracts with these brains create value let's take seriously how the brains actually operate and as soon as we do we'll say oh my god these brains are checking
email once every two minutes what a disaster it's like if we had a car factory and we spent 20 million dollars on one of these german robots that can you know put cars on the doors or whatever and we just weren't taking care of it and it was like rusty and it was dropping the doors and
the production pipeline was going down we're like this is crazy we got to take care of this equipment right when we have the cognitive revolution the sort of cognitive capital revolution and knowledge work i think it's going to unlock a trillion dollar gvp i think that's how unproductive we've been
if we just think in the pure raw terms of brains producing stuff that's worth money like if we're just like super deterministic and kind of inhumane about it so much is being lost because we're in the suboptimal mass equilibrium everyone just email everyone all the time everyone's just on slack
all the time that when we finally have the revolution to get over that it's going to be a massive economic hit and you know AI might play a role in this right because maybe AI wants to get planning capabilities is going to be able to take the burden of some of this back and forth planning
i think it's easier to get there with cultural shifts i don't think we have to wait to build an email capable chat gpt to do this like you could solve this tomorrow this is cultural as much as this tool based but i think it's going to be a huge revolution when we get there a kin to like the
assembly line in manufacturing which was like a 10x improvement in productivity metrics when we figured out the continuous motion assembly line with interchangeable parts was a massive it created this productivity engine i'm using the economics and so productivity now you know dollars
per worker the economic miracle that came from this process-based industrial innovations in the the late 19th early 20th century the the money generated by that the wealth generated by that was the foundation of the modern west like the whole world as we know it was built there's these huge
latent potentials and right now i don't think we're there with the brain and i think it's going to be a huge revolution it's just it's just difficult right it's not an easy revolution to start but i think it's going to change whole industries in ways that we're not it's going to be hard to even
imagine yeah and i think as long as there are individuals who either by virtue of lack of family or other constraints or by virtue of just having more energy and requiring less sleep because these individuals do exist out there yeah um there will always be these individuals that
can kind of apply themselves more than others in the sense that they can get in earlier and stay in later yeah um and that trying to be them is not a good idea that we all need to optimize for our you know best balance of productivity deep work and um work life balance for lack of a
of a better term when i was a graduate student um i was really committed to my my craft and i remember that hearing about a student he's now a professor a very accomplished in a chronologist um i'll just give him a name because he did this that he doesn't know me but i heard about this
guy that had been in the department randy Nelson and everyone's like he used to work a hundred hours a week yeah so i was like all right great i'm going to start logging my work hours silently i'm going to do 102 hours and i ended up with a flu and an autoimmune condition yeah i literally
had an autoimmune condition i've never had one since i then i stopped working that much yeah started working quote unquote smarter along the lines of many of the things you're saying here although i didn't implement or know about all these tools that time and of course the autoimmune thing
went away it was a fairly minor thing yeah i never had it again but you can destroy yourself simply by working more yeah um even if it's deep work so that the solution is not necessarily more it's um just like with exercise i guess that stands it's obvious but i thought i'd share that i anecdote
because uh randy Nelson taught me what i'm capable of and what i'm not capable of yeah well the other thing that happens by the way too it's not just who's capable of working more get these advantages there's these other unpredictable inequities um i talked at a law firm once years
ago about deep work and i was invited by a group was actually a group of women lawyers who had a reading group and they said part of what was happening at this law firm is that people who were uh disagreeable like just sort of gruff and jerks would get asked to do less of what they would
call non-promotable activities or can you organize this or whatever which meant they had more time to do deep work uh which meant they would do better and they would rise faster and then what was happening then was you had accidentally built a system that said let's make sure we have a fast track for like our most disagreeable employees to the partnership level where actually you need to be pretty agreeable because your uh client acquisition is really on the partners and so they accidentally
had you know pushed towards this uh this inequity and these type inequities happen all the time when we leave it like haphazard and okay so who's doing less work like like well i just sort of like i'm gruff and people don't like me or i have something going on at my house it means i don't have
the the same time to do this um and you end up pushing people up these paths that might not be who you really want to select because you're selecting for uh things that are sort of unrelated to their actual underlying talent or like how much they can actually produce and so i'm i'm with you on that
yeah it's a complex problem but attractable one nonetheless i'm interested in your thoughts on remote work versus in-person work and the hybrid model um i've heard about a hybrid model recently if anyone's a big um record company uh here in Los Angeles so that um they require one in person
day per week unless on sick leave um they require one at home day per week and then the other days it's at your discretion yeah it's kind of an interesting model for you in a five day week model yeah i mean i my my proposals have thought about this a lot is okay if you're going to do hybrid work
and i i proposed this in a lantic article recently which created some positives some negative waves as like here's the way you should do it uh synchronize the schedule here's at home days here's an office days but for everybody for everybody okay or have a few of these schedules but like groups of people who work together have the same schedule but then make the rule at home days no meetings no email like that's the way to really get the full benefit out of hybrid work when we're in the office
we have meetings and we can talk about work and we're at home we're just doing work and we can do it without distraction and we can just stay deep and really turn through things i think it would really make a big difference on the overload issue i think would be much more sustainable remote work
so i did a lot of coverage or remote work as this was first emerging the early pandemic there i became convinced uh i was doing this twice a month column for the new york or back then that was just looking at the pandemic transforming work and i came away with the idea that remote work can be
fantastic but it's difficult and it can't just be do the job you were doing in person but just do it at home and we have zoom and we'll figure it out like if you're going to be fully remote we have to rethink what work means for that and there's a lot of differences it needs to have it needs to be
way more structured it probably needs to be um you're working on less things it's very clear what you're working on the collaboration is much more defined and much less frequent you probably need to be freed from the sort of hyperactive hive my dance of we're just emailing each other all day
and in zoom meetings all day you have to sort of reconstitute what a remote work job is i think before it works and we know this in part because software developers pre-pandemic were one of the only knowledge sectors to have a really successful track record with remote work that is the only
sector within knowledge work where we had large companies fully remote they did that because their jobs they they had really structured them around these these agile workload management systems where okay here's when we talk about work here's how long it takes here's how we assign you new work
you work on one thing at a time you sprint till it's done they had all this structure around work which didn't really matter if you're in the office or not so the less structured work is the more free for all the more you need we have to be in the office so like i'm a huge fan of full-time
remote work but i think those jobs have to look very different than like a standard 2019 job yeah i've always done a hybrid of remote work um a stick Wednesday mornings at home from the lab yeah um but nowadays it's wild because it's especially during the pandemic but still now i mean
you can do the whole day in pajamas and you know worked on and i i love this idea of no no email and limiting text and social media while at home doing work to really extract the most out of it yeah are there any data maybe from the pandemic era or um prior or beyond about zoom and
things like it in terms of how they enhance or diminish or perhaps have no effect on productivity like zoom specifically and yeah meetings we haven't we just found ourselves in zoom all the time for a while that was the bigger problem i mean so there is data that says for example a hybrid meeting
some people are online some people aren't these are less effective meetings they don't they don't work as well um but the bigger problem is zoom i think was the quantity and part of it was just the the technology involved right so so if we're in the office together and i have a relatively quick thing to talk to you about i can just grab you and we can talk about this and then the footprint is going to be five minutes but it's not just that it's five minutes it's five well allocated minutes
because i'm probably going to use the social cues of your doors open or you're going to get coffee anyways right um in the zoom era instead we would say well we should set up a meeting right because as you know we have to talk about this but if you think about a standard online calendar it's
difficult to have a meeting this less than 30 minutes long i mean you just you have to drag it you know i mean 30 minutes is like the default smallest length meeting so we're taking a lot of informal back and forth and inflating the time i think that was part of it so we just had too much zoom going
on right if it was just i do one meeting a week now it's on zoom it used to be in person we're all on zoom we saw being person it's that's not that big of a deal it's maybe like a slightly less effective meeting but it's fine it's good enough but if it's i have four x more meetings than i used
to because of the the inherent inefficiencies of having to go to prescheduled virtual for basically all collaboration that could be a huge problem the data i saw from microsoft the last data i saw was a two hundred fifty two percent increase in these meetings from twenty twenty to now and it's not
a number it's not like it peaked and then it started coming back down again once we went to hybrid we just it's just high and it's still creeping up right that's a lot of time that just vanished and we sort of pretend like it didn't but that's a lot of time that is not actively working on things
and just talking about work or talking about other stuff while we get around the talking about work i think it's a real issue is there a top three list of things that if you had a magic wand you would see everyone do each day you know if you yeah if you had three he wishes um yes you mean would they
be if these are the ones worker if these are the enhancing work creativity focused work i mean i think you and i both um clearly agree that there's not just great value in terms of productivity yeah but great a great degree of life enrichment yeah like a deep level of enrichment in terms of
happiness feelings of well-being kind of time for connectivity with others yeah lessons about deep work that can be exported to time with others where we we are really present etc just so much to be gained from these from engaging in deep work yeah and things like it that you've
written about and in your various books um and talk about on your podcast are you know if is there a top three yeah yeah yeah so if i do three i would say okay um first of all with your workload simulate something like a pull system instead of a push system and what i mean by that is when
you keep track of what you're working on have a the top part of that list which is um actively working on these things and keep that top part of your list like two or three things everything else is in the bottom part of the list it's to work on next and it's in an ordered queue and so when
you finish something that you're working on you pull something new to take it slot from the list below right so what i'm trying to do with that advice is reduce all this administrative overhead because now even if like you can't get away you have to say yes to these things because it's the
way like your your organization works the stuff that's in the waiting to work on queue you say i don't have meetings about that i don't do emails about that i wait till i'm actively working on it and i only actively work on three things at a time now i'm going to finish those things really quickly
because i don't have 15 items worth of meetings i'm going to every day so things are going to pull up there pretty quickly and so the rate at which i'm accomplishing things will probably be higher than it was before but i only work on three things actively you could even make this visible it's in a shared document if you want to when someone asks you to do something new tell them to put it on the end of your queue you're like oh okay so like andrew is not working on this right now he's working
on these three things and there's seven things here and i'm adding something number eight so i know not to expect something for a while in fact i can keep checking this list until i see andrew's working on it so i can see it's making progress and then once i know he's working on it i can start
email him about it we can do just a normal type of overhead you would have with with projects right uh that alone is going to have a huge difference like now the amount of distraction your day is going to uh plummet because that's generated from overhead of things you've agreed to do and that's
going to that's going to plummet that out all right so that'd be number one could i just uh thank you could i just ask a few questions about that just to clarify so for i use myself as an example selfishly but then of course i don't know what everyone else out there is pursuing but so substitute
the specifics i'm about to insert here for whatever it is that you care about in your life so um researching podcasts yeah solo podcasts in particular for me is my major task in life these days yeah uh with respect to work so that would be top of the list yeah um and then uh
there could be two other items on this you know top of q um would daily activities like like exercise social time with loved ones etc would that be included there or we're talking specifically about work yeah let's just keep just work okay so it'll be you know podcast prep
so you might have the podcast prep you might have the particular topic though right right okay so part right i'm working on an episode right now about about skin health yeah um so you could you could have two different episodes topics your copying those could both be up there yep so skin
health allergies episode these are two that i'm spending a lot of time on um months yeah in fact yeah right and then you heard might be something that it involves the uh the media company something around the business side of it like okay we're trying to figure out um a plan for whatever right
content for for uh new context brand association yeah exactly okay got it great so those three would be top of the list and every day until those are done they could sit top of the list and then there are a number of items underneath those that fall under whatever yeah and critically when
these other items come up right like oh this is like a topic for example i want to do a show on you have a place to put it um it's not being forgotten or here's a there's a business idea really we need to figure out like whatever we want to add do something with our camera configure okay put
on the list it's not being forgotten like it's on there and you can see where it is not only is it on there but like this could be shared among your team so as people had extra information or things to add to one of these projects they can add it to it on the list right so the information is
aggregating so if you use a tool like trello for this trello spelled t-r-e-l-l-o okay is an app it's a web-based service that the metaphor is just index cards in piles got it right but they're virtual okay but you can flip over the index card digitally attach files write notes and so i
use trello for my own organization what i'm working on so now you have a place where you can gather like oh we just i just heard about something that's relevant to this thing i need to work on you have a place to put it like it goes on to the trello card or you can do this with shared documents
doesn't matter you're just like literally typing things into a google doc or a whiteboard or a whiteboard yeah yeah you could be we're keeping track of these things right i'm gonna do this by the way yeah well i mean i'm a big believer in this and then everyone can see what you're working on
and then the key thing is if it's not in your active list you don't have meetings about it and you don't have emails about it right like if people have ideas or things they just add it to the card so when that gets up to the active list we can work on all the information there we haven't
forgotten anything and what two word language you used to describe this first point this method i love this i called it a pull-based pull-based right what gets pulled up you pull into the so you're fixing it advance here's how much concentration i have to give on work and you pull stuff into that
the alternative is push-based which is how most organizations run which is when i want you to do something i just push it on to you and now you have to deal with it got it um once her email described as a public post to do list yeah that made me scared of email in a way that nothing else
had yeah um it's new ports pull-based system i called it that by the way um this is what in the a lot of the advice in the first uh one of the chapters of the new book is basically how do you get away with implementing this and when you have a boss and there's like all sorts of different
so you're your own boss so you can just say this is what we're doing here's the board but there's a lot of like subtle ways you can do this yeah um right so that's number one that's number one the cal nuke where it's pull-based system i'm gonna do this and i'm actually gonna report back on this
at some point um you won't see the post on social media because you're not there but others well all right so that's one all right number two would be multi-scale planning okay so now this is planning uh you're planning on three different scales daily weekly nice seasonally or quarterly
however you want to think about it right so you have a a plan for like the semester the season or the quarter like this is what i'm working on these are the big objectives i want to hit here's to remind us to myself about like what matters like remember like i'm overhauling my my workout
routine we're trying to like do this with the podcast you look at that scale planning every week when you build your weekly plan and the weekly plan it gets freeform text you don't need anything you know any special tools your weekly plan you're looking at the actual calendar all right uh what
from my bigger scale plan my seasonal quarterly plan what am i trying to make sure i can make progress on this week and you confront the reality of your week you see where's the empty space where there's the busy space you also change what's on your plate right here you know if i cancel this thing
that frees up that whole morning which means like i could really make progress on this which i really want to make progress on so great i'm going to cancel that thing on friday so you're looking at the whole week is one unit then every day you look at your weekly plan like okay so so i'm going to
use this when i make my plan for the day and when you do your daily plan you do time blocking now i'm every i'm giving a job every minute on my workday not my day after work but every minute on my workday i'm time blocking so i call it time blocking is you're literally drawing blocks
around the free time okay this i'm working on this this i'm working on this so you're making a plan for your day that is informed by the weekly plan so in multi-scale planning you have like the big picture things you care about trickle their way all the way down to okay i'm what am i going to
do during this hour during the day but you don't have to grapple every this what most people do every time i'm figuring out what to do next i'm not grappling with all these scales at the same time what are my objectives what's my big plan what's going on this week you're you're dealing with
each of these scales when the time is right and so when it finally gets down to it's now three o'clock you're just doing what that block is and you figured out that block earlier today when you looked at your weekly plan that weekly plan reflected what was in your semester plan which you figured out
you spent a whole afternoon working on at the beginning of the semester so multi-scale planning it keeps you focused on what matters it prevents you from wandering through your day and how you disperse your energy and it gives you control over your time on different scales from like
canceling major ongoing obligations that just being more efficient about what you do during a given day uh so i swear by multi-scale planning to try to keep this whole lumbering ship that is sort of like Kell Newport aiming in the towards the right shores you know like keep correcting and keeping
it aimed back i love this i this is more or less what i do with my physical workouts every week i know i'm going to get three resistance training sessions yep two or three cardiovascular training sessions i know i'm going to train my legs once it's either going to be on depending on travel
Sunday money or Tuesday i'll train torso muscles in the middle of the week i'll train sort of limb accessory muscles on a Saturday yeah long run on Sunday or hike on Sunday or some other day there'll be some sort of hit workout in the middle of the week and ideally there's a jog in there too
and you can adjust it a little bit based on the reality of the week yeah i might double up yeah for two days then take a day off i have my ideal schedule but sometimes it gets compromised and um and then i do that for 16 week cycles where i vary the kind of intensity load etc um and i've
done this for years and it's just kind of works for me yeah um now with cognitive work i don't tend to do this it tends to be more deadline based yeah but i think that the um the pull-based system is really going to help yeah um if i dovetail it with this multi-scale planning um i love this
and you can see the deadlines now you see him coming right so that's part of what's nice about multi-scale planning is you know the deadlines coming up and so when you're doing your semester planning you start thinking like okay for the big deadlines like when i get the December i need to be
really starting getting after this thing that's going to be due yeah i've got a book to yeah so then you know and so this really helps in book writing because now when i'm planning it's like you know a year in advance i know this month i need to get like roughly the rough draft of chapter two
done you know and then that trickles down to my week where i'm going to make sure i have enough time cleared to like be on track for finishing it and then that trickles into my day now i know to like block those mornings to work on it so it all it all works together an added bonus of the daily
scale is i would say communications should get its own block email social media whatever that's like you communicating with the outside world goes into your time block plan so if your block doesn't include that you don't do it so it's like this block is writing it's not email it's not social media
so the rule is really simple i'm not going to use email or social media but i still need to do email at some point so i have to put a block in for it and when i'm in my email blocks i'm doing the email if i need to go on social media to see what's going on with like the latest episode or
something i got to give that time and then you can monofocus because then it's a psychological hack but basically when you particularly when you schedule communication and distraction now the only thing you have to muster willpower to do is obey the single rule of i'm following my blocks if you
don't do that if you're like i just sometimes do email and social media sometimes i don't now what you have to do is just constantly be having this debate is now the right time to do this and i'm going to do it at some point today why not now well what about now what about now like you're just
constantly asking yourself right that's impossible right that's going to drain you but if all you have to do instead is say my commitment today is to follow my blocks and i get i really feel good when i do it and like i check off a box if i do give yourself some feedback here it's a much easier
cognitive battle the win then just trying to be reasonable about well let me wait a little longer to check my email like you're going to lose that battle you know eight times out of 10 which is like enough to really overcome it so that's like a a hidden bonus of time blocking
is now you can really get your arms around separating different cognitively distinct activities this is where the analogy of time restricted eating comes to mind yeah um again not that that's the best way to lose weight or maintain weight or it's it's rolling longevity is still debated
etc but i think for many people not all but for many people the decision that they do not eat during certain time blocks and they do eat another time blocks it's just far more tractable in the real world for them then trying to limit portion size decide whether or not they're
going to eat they're going to pass the cookie and have a little bit nope they're they're interfasting window it's just it simplifies the issue yep and as a consequence i think it improves behavior overall although the clinical trials point to some mixed results with that last statement
again i don't want the nutrition east does after me though the point is the time blocking and the and the the thick black line didness of the yes no the binary yes no as um eat don't eat or single commit email communicate don't communicate in a given time block i think that's that really
is what it's about it it honors the the the power of those sorts of neural computations and there's another hidden bonus of time blocking too is visually distinct blocks so what i do for example is i put a double thick line around deep work blocks focusing on some not just deep work
but deep work on things i really care about just this gives you a visual record how much deep work am i doing right like it's this diagnosis i use a paper-based time block planner so you flip through those pages and you're just looking for dark blocks right so you see if i see i don't have
a lot of dark blocks i see this is my whole job like my whole life i've been trained in a lab to think really hard about things and write things why do i not have very many dark blocks you get this feedback mechanism so there's all these bonuses when you start doing this type of doing this
type of planning before you tell us about number three i often fantasized about a web-based program that seems to run countercurrent to much of what you're talking about but goes back to this the white word MIT observer stuff that you talked about the beginning which is often long for okay i need to
write today i need to write a book or i'm going to do some podcast prep i'm going to pop up a few windows of other people that are also doing deep work and we're not going to communicate in fact if we do or if music comes through on the microphone or somebody costs that's going to be considered a
distraction but it does anyone want to join me for some deep work yes where we don't communicate and i often thought i would just pay someone to be there yeah to just sit there and um but i haven't done that there are multiple companies to do this okay yeah it's interesting where you
you're you're online with uh or in person was just other people doing deep work so a deep work club basically the challenge is synchronizing schedules because i might want to do this with somebody on the east coast and they might not be doing deep work at the same time and a recording
isn't the same because then you know they're not really watching yeah but but there's something really to this right yeah especially for at home workers or people like me that work often in isolation students do this right dissertation boot camps i don't know if if you have this experience
but Georgetown does a lot of colleges do this uh okay everyone working on their dissertation we're all going to get together and we're going to work on it together because they would often have me come speak at these things earlier in my career it would just be a bunch of grad students
they were just coming to the same space and they would work for like okay 90 minutes and then they would have like a speaker come in or launch and nine so the the group cohesion of everyone working deeply at the same time writers retreats are the same way we all go to this same house in the
middle of nowhere um so that we're all just going to encourage each other the right because that's all what anyone's doing here yeah so social pressure i'm with you i was thinking if i ever needed to you know put a big extension on my house that's that's what i should do just like okay pay me money
then i will sit there on zoom and do deep work with you this is my secret plan i pay money i'd pay money to do deep work in parallel with you by with a virtual window there there's calon his office doing that i think there's something nice about having some knowledge of who people are you know
like hey login in today yeah yeah all right let's get down to it set the timer and go and then you know osta i'm out you know working at the library academic libraries why did people do that right this everyone there is working right yeah no i'm big believer in that there's really
something sticky to that okay number three all right have a shutdown ritual which clearly demarcates uh the end of work in the start of the night after work and the shutdown ritual so it has to you have to close open loops right so you got to make sure this is like a review type period
let me look back at my inbox and look at my plan let me look at my you know my time block and my calendar really make sure i there's nothing urgent that needs to be dealt with that i did it and there's nothing that's just in my head that i don't want to forget it's not written down
somewhere like take care of all of that right so you review all these things you get what am i going to do tomorrow you don't have to build your whole plan for tomorrow you have a sense for it and then you need some sort of demonstrative thing you do to indicate that you finished the routine
right so my my long time newsletter readers know i used to actually have a phrase i would say schedule shutdown complete like a crazy phrase right it's not how normal people talk right now i have a planner that has like a checkbox that says shutdown complete next to it the reason why
that it's a demonstrative anchor is that you use this then for cognitive behavioral therapy because at first people have a hard time shutting down work i mean i invented this because i had a very hard time shutting down working on my dissertation i just what this proof doesn't work and blah blah
so what you do is when you're you get a rumination post shutdown hey what about what's going on with our work we're doing the right thing do we forget this or that instead of engaging in the rumination well let's like no i think we're okay let me think about my schedule tomorrow what's my plan
you instead can just say um i said that crazy phrase right check that box i wouldn't have said that phrase unless i had gone through everything and made sure that i had a good plan and nothing's been missed and it was okay to shut down work because of that i'm not going to engage with
your rumination i said the weird thing let's get back to what we're doing this is like cognitive behavioral therapy that after a month or so you were really able to actually effortlessly disengage from work and do everything you know all the other stuff that matters right without having
the constant rumination about work which gives your mind an actual break to you know do other things so i mean this is more mental health and productivity but for me it was critical i mean i can really remember when i came up with this you know exactly where i was in my graduate career and there's
just too much too many ideas and concerns that were just roiling and like once i did this you know it took a few weeks and then i could actually like shut down and go on and do other things yeah the paired associative nature of the brain can make it really problematic if you're thinking
about work at the dinner table you start to associate the dinner table with work i mean it when a mat walker came here to do this six part series that's soon to be released um and we were discussing insomnia he said you know one of the major issues with insomnia is people who have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep will often stay in bed when they can't sleep and then the bed becomes associated with challenges with sleep yeah that you know hence the recommendation that
virtually every sleep coach and sleep scientists um recommends that people actually if they can't sleep for 20 minutes or so of effort then you get up and leave the bed and go someplace else until until you feel sleepy enough to go back and try or fall asleep on the couch elsewhere yeah um i
put put that in as a as a note to you um but um this seems incredibly important also for enrichment of of relationships with spouses and children and people in your life i mean the the problem is the first thing that we ask people when they walk in the door typically it was how was work today yeah
how was work what did you do today yeah tell me about your school day tell me about your work maybe we need to come up with better questions yeah like here's something interesting we could do or here's like something i read about unrelated to work yeah no i think i think it makes a huge difference
um and again there's all these meta benefits for these things so so one of the meta benefits for all of these is also these are all very structured you'll begin to build a reputation as someone who is very careful about how they manage themselves in their time like if you're doing multi-scale planning certainly if you're doing you know pull-based workload management people are going to start thinking this is someone who thinks a lot about like how they manage their work day and how things
happen this gives you massively way right yeah because we we think what like our colleagues want from us is accessibility but really why they want accessibility is because they have no clarity about you know are we gonna do this thing are we gonna remember to do this thing um and i gonna have to
keep bothering you you know what if i don't really think you have your act together i just wish you would just do this right away or respond to me right away because i'm gonna have to worry about this until i hear back from you that you did it like accessibility is born from lack of trust or
lack of clarity right so if you have the reputation of someone who really has to act together you can for example lean into a shutdown i don't do email at all and people they don't think that you're being lazy or that you're not keeping up with the work they're like no like Andrew has
his act together with this stuff i trust him when you show him something like this workload management system like this is where the queue is like i can't get to this yet like okay that's a reasonable like you have your act together so there's this meta benefit of starting to get a little bit more structured about your your time and cognitive work is that people will give you more flexibility to work with the better you get at actually working with you know the resources you have
as your reputation grows um your autonomy grows yeah and of course as your reputation grows um more gets thrown at you and it probably takes a bit more discipline to enforce these things but i always remind myself and other people that you know that the reason people want to access you is
because of presumably the consequences of the deep work you did yeah not um but people love meetings gosh to the um i won't do brainstorm meetings anymore unless it's with my close team yeah it's like you can pitch me a contract yeah and we can reverse engineer the idea you know um but it just
doesn't work to to meet with people and got brainstorm stuff and but i don't know what this is like i think maybe people are taking their own lack of structure and um projecting it on to other people is a way to fill the time yeah pseudo productivity as well like this is what i have like visible
activity and so let's quit meetings let's talk let's hop on calls like that all feels useful when it ultimately it's not like i'm with you on it like remember the reason why everyone wants to talk to me is because not i'm so great at brainstorming meetings you know people like this is great
like and you's great at brainstorming meetings so that's why we want to bother no it's because you are really good at the podcast and you're doing like the deep thing and then that brings in you know the better you get at what you do best the more the world conspires to take away your time to
actually work on it uh like professors know this well like pre ten year they most big universities are pretty good at preaching the professors all that's going to matter is going to be your research but they throw a ton of other stuff at you at that time it depends on the school like i would say
George town's very good about this they're like we don't uh from our perspective it's a waste of resources to hire you and and have you not get tenure so like we want to try to protect you from they keep service requirements low for example and like just focus on you know just focus on your
research because that's what's going to matter and at least professors know this right like uh there's a clear process like the tenure process most people don't understand tenure they think it's like getting promoted at a job and there's like all these different ways you can sort of impress
your boss it's none of that right i mean it's these confidential letters from leading scholars in your field that are doing nothing but brutally assessing your research how good is Cal who are two people who are better than him on the market right now who are like two people he's slightly
better than would you tenure him at your university what university could he get tenureed at i mean it's all that matters is yeah research quality um so you have to somehow rediscover what that is if you're not a professor like ultimately like this is the thing i do best for my company so let me
do that let me do that really well there's also an aspect by the way of uh if you do a deep thing really well that does not attract as much work as if what you do is you're just really good at like responding to people's things and putting out fires it's like you don't want to get too much trapped
in that game unless that's the game you want to play you know if you get trapped in the game of how I distinguish myself as I reply right away doesn't matter when it is I make your life easier you're playing the game and making other people's lives easier and that's what they're going to
ask you to do but if instead you play the game of i'm competent with this like i'll respond to the emails and not be uh i won't be pathological about it but the real thing you care about is like this code on producing these reports on producing are just really second to none then you're not
going to get a much of the small stuff they're like okay well do that then you know like that's what we want that's what we want you to work on so like what is your equivalent of research is probably a really key question for a lot of people how do you treat um social engagements through work like
you know like the company barbecue i don't know anyone does company barbecue is anymore but um you know like happy hour or i don't know anyone does that either um and social engagements with family like you know because obviously those things are important too yeah um are those on your
schedule well you know i treat uh work schedule different from non-work schedule right so my work schedule is this time block plan part of a multi-scale plan um really dialed in like when i'm working on working right um but then when i'm not working i'm way more lax you know so i don't do time block
planning of my weekends or my evenings uh the work shutdown being clear gives you more flexibility there so i was like okay what do we want to do like let's go like see these people see these things with the family um i like to be flexible and not overly planned outside of the workday but then
during the workday itself you know it's much more machine-like so you're you're fairly um not lax but you're a bit more relaxed around social engagements and engaging with the kids but yeah at work or when you're working at home or in the office you're you're obese yeah i'm like a black
box in the workday so like when i when i'm working like i disappear nice yeah and then when i'm done like i'm around but like my family and friends and they've learned like if you text me during the workday i'm i'm not part of that game of like i'll just respond back to it people know like it
may have been four hours since i saw my phone it's like lex freedman yeah and people often ask to get in touch with lex and i've you know made that connect for a few people but i always point out you know lex will go long periods of time where we don't connect and then we're close close friends
we spent a lot of time in person on the phone text but i understand that if i text lex i might not hear from him for four or five days and it's all good yeah yeah you know it's just yeah in fact that tells me he's good it's like that that scene at the end of goodwill hunting where he's like i just
want to show up at your house you're not there and you get there and he smiles as friends gawney knows he went the direction of of his of his heart so you're saying if you start to get a lot of like memes texted to you from lex that's not gonna happen you're gonna be like what's going on lex that's
never gonna happen what struggle let's struggle are you happy to your life right now yeah i'm a big believer in the phone i'm old school pick up the phone make a call we'll get on a call sometimes face time we do text one or two things back to us often really quick yeah really quick and i've
other friends in the podcast space for which it's the same it's just um phone is a great tool yep and you know drop in and then get back to it yeah not a lot of chitter chatter on i like that i always like text is like a great logistical tool you know like wait what what restaurant are you at
oh you know okay i'll meet you there or it can't are you free to talk like i love text as a logistical tool but you're right as a conversational tool yes not from either and do you take vacations where you are on pure vacation so just with family or or maybe even solo or with your spouse where it's
like no digital anything uh yeah digital's not a prompt for me on vacation but my wife won't let me not bring something to work on a vacation because because i become a monster got it your brain needs that it needs it yeah when we have little kids i tried this right it's like okay like this is
it i'm not gonna think about anything like this is and i would just become a like an anxiety case so what i've learned is bring one thing just like very deep and non-urgent um like a book concept i'm trying to make work or an academic paper that i was like trying to crack or like something new and i
need like that 90 minutes a day to like walk on the beach and think and i have to have a notebook i have it with me in here i have to have a notebook with me so that like i can capture notes and get them out of my head on vacation and that now we have a happy medium like i work a little bit
everyday no email i don't get that email not no deep work thinking uh i'm much happier it's like an itch that you have to scratch yeah if i'm not writing or thinking it's it's i get cognitively antsy i get anxious you know like i'm on i've been now i'm talking to you now but i've
been you know traveling doing some podcasts and stuff like this and i'm way out of my cognitive comfort zone here because i'm not logging like early in this trip i was uh on a new yorker in a Atlantic deadline like writing all the time you know in california time up at five a.m. like you know and i'm done with that now and i'm really cognitively antsy like i just feel out of sorts right now you know like i'm not working i'm not thinking love it cal for me this has been such an honor i mean i
should have said this at the beginning of the episode but i've been such a fan for such a long time um long before we met or communicated at all i started reading your books and i would say you and tim ferris are the people who are really in my academic career had such a profound influence
on how i approach work and and it required that i do things um kind of against the grain people around me and very quickly i saw um that i was making progress much faster than i would have otherwise yeah and i never looked as a competitive endeavor with others but and um you just
continue to turn out valuable information actionable tools you know book and after book after book and um and obviously they require some structure and some some restriction but also some moving toward um action items and i love these these top three that you provided us on the pull forward
the multi-scale planning and the and the shutdown ritual and all all the others on the you put forth and i guess that the uh major takeaway for me today is is that yes you've developed all these tools but you also use them and um it's not lost on me that you also have a flourishing career as a
computer scientist so you're not just somebody who talks about and here i'm not dishing anyone else in the in the information sphere like just talks about habits or just talks about protocols you do these things and you implement them in the context of your work life your creative life your family
life in your relationship to self and you exercise and um and i think that that all combines to to be an amazing example of what's possible if we introduce um a bit of understanding about how we function as a as a being um and that we implement some of these tools in in the user manual that
that you've come up with and so i just want to say on behalf of myself and everyone who's listening and watching you know thank you so much this is incredibly valuable information regardless of what one is doing in life and um i'm certainly going to implement this um three step uh system and
i do have the book i was like to read books after guests are on i'm going to read the book um and i'm going to do some posts about uh what i uh experience as a consequence so thank you so much i would pay a substantial amount of money to do deep work sessions with you in the on the screen
there but i won't put that on you i'm just gonna i'm gonna just bite down and uh and do this stuff so thank you so much for being a pioneer in this space and for such a clear communicator we all owe you a debt of gratitude oh thanks Andrew well and for the rest of us professors who are also podcasting we owe you a debt of gratitude because you're showing us what's actually uh what's actually possible so this has been great meeting you as well has been fantastic all right well thank you we won't
um we won't see each other on social media but we'll we'll share a meal at some point before long thank you for joining me for today's discussion with dr cal newport to find links to cal's website books and to his excellent podcast please see the links in the show note caption if you're learning
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