Dr. Cal Newport: How to Enhance Focus and Improve Productivity

welcome to the hubman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology 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 productiv 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 focused 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 extreme 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 am on 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 buffet 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 someone who has issues with attention and focus or whether you're somebody that's just feeling overly distracted by the number of things in your email inbox or the number of text 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

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to get $400 off select ju products and now for my discussion with Dr Cal Newport Dr Cal Newport welcome Dr huberman good to see you 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 why one ought to pursue deep work and slow productivity in service to high quality true productivity Etc um some of the protocols as we'll call them are incredibly easy to Implement others take some discipline so I'd like

to talk about both sets today but the first question I have is um do you own a smartphone I do have a smartphone yeah well here's the thing I don't use social media so it turns out smartphones aren't that interesting if you don't have any social media apps on it yeah what's that like so there's 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 the is a really nice phone and your music you can listen to

things on it and uh 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 uh you don't use it that much what about text messaging do you text message and if so do you get into conversations by text or is it more of a a plan and meet type tool uh I try right so so I try I do use text messaging I mean this is how like my wife gets in

touch with uh but I'm notorious somewhat among my friends of my the ability to capture my attention with text messages 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 H my problem is I'll go to three four hours you know 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 look if they really needed me I guess they would have called so I do text but uh I'm not considered to be very good at it a few other questions about your phone practices this makes me nervous um is your phone in a drawer on on the desktop um while you're working is it face down face up is the ringer on is it off Oh you mean if I'm writing or it's nowhere near me yeah Ian it could be

anywhere it's just not going to be anywhere near me so I have in my house uh two different offices basically right so there's a home office the pr is there the filing cabinets are there like the nice big monitors there you pay taxes that type of thing and then I have a library and there's no permanent technology in the library no computer in there no monitor no printers nothing like this I have this sort of custombuilt desk I had made by a company from Maine that makes desks for college libraries like that's what they do

so I had this like custom fit desk to fit into uh 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 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 I 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 yeah um we get into a mode of anticipation our thinking is at least somewhat linear um and so forth when we are looking at say ocean waves or um up 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 the Mind goes into this sort of um 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 there not a lot of Neuroscience on this but there's a little bit same thing happens when you're looking at an aquarium by the way um so I wonder whether or not staring at the fire which is something that humans have been doing for many many many thousands of years um because it has that uh 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 oh that's interesting actually that there's a a neurological explanation when I use to fire is actually when I read right so chairs by the fire but I think for exactly this reason right because when I'm reading I'm looking to spark ideas right like okay what am I what's my takeaway from this what's the connection you're making between this thing you're reading here and this idea over there that type of connection making is a lot of my brainstorming and I read by the fire when the weather allows

it uh I also walk a lot so I wonder if there's something similar going on like 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 and there might be something similar going on there where you're encountering it's not entirely exotic stimuli right so it's not oh my God you know my attention's being drawn but it's you you don't you don't quite know what you're going to see and you also have that that circuit quieting effect of the

walking your motor neurons are going you can tell me if I'm getting this right or not abely the motor neurons are going and you get some inhibition going on in some of these these key networks which allows you to actually um maintain the the the internal focus on a concept a little bit better so I do a lot of my original focused ideating on foot but a lot of my serendipitous ideating will be with the fire going right it's a win I read by the fire and so when I read that I get a lot

of my original ideas I have this theory that the two opposite states of mind that both facilitate creativity and productivity look something like this and you can tell me whether or not this Maps anything that that you know one is just as you described our body is in motion um could be running walking might be in the shower or something of that sort uh but we aren't trying to direct our mind toward a specific linear trajectory or outcome it's not it's not like working out an equation or a theorem um 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 channeled toward one specific Target um the opposite extreme to me is body still mind very active um which resembles rapid eye movement sleep when we learn a lot and neural rewiring occurs and dreaming but uh for which there's also a lot of examples of very accomplished um creatives using that sort of thing of meditative like um approaches you know forcing oneself to be still and thinking so it sounds like you incorporate both um

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 yeah um right and wrong answer uh involved what is your mode for sitting down and working through something that's linear and hard yeah that it's interesting the way you talk about it right because when I'm walking uh and this is actually something you can train you know and I talked about this one of my books once that you can actually train yourself to uh maintain your internal eye of focus more stably

while you're walking right so I called this productive meditation in deep work actually uh and I I practiced 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 it I don't know exactly what's happening but you get a little bit more uh facility working with your working memory a little bit more efficiency with bringing stuff in and out of the working memory and so I trained myself that I could actually write a couple paragraphs

in my head maybe not word for but basically word for word like figure out how I'm going to do it or uh figure out enough steps of a math proof to capture a key Insight like okay I know I'm going to get around this then you have to sit down and actually formally capture that and 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 uh 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 worldclass concentrators they're 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 the 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 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 to try to alchemize

these insights into actual mathematically precise proofs you get a 20 30% boost in your concentration level and 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 white whiteboard or chalkboard and their two other individuals facing it are they interrupting you or is the um etiquette uh in that scenario to just let the person go until their natural yeah uh inclination to raise a hand and and scream help whoever

has the marker on the board they're the one's 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 and you still work on it so so when I got uh built some offices or worked out some offices near my house like one of the first things we put in there was a whiteboard so I

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 uh Linguistics but half of it was computer science I know those buildings cuz the peow and the McGovern Neuroscience C and those buildings are very interesting people should check them out if they're ever in Cambridge Kendall Square stop the status Center yeah right down the street from the K

sop yeah so the sixth floor was where the theoreticians were this is where I was uh so I you know they opened that building the year I started my the doctoral program and what did they want to show me when they when they brought me to this $300 million Building look at our whiteboards that's what they were proud of they had filled the common space on the sixth floor the theory floor with these uh freestanding 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 Tred I was trying to explain this to someone recently uh 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 uh 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

or pushing each other past where they're comfortable I I love this because I often think about visual maps that represent our internal memory stores and plans etc for productivity I've always relied heavily on the on the Whiteboard I getting one for home I have one here in the podcast studio all of my podcast notes for my solo episodes are distilled down to four 8 and 1 half by 11 notes which are photographs of the the Whiteboard yeah and um I don't use a teleprompter um I've been accused of using one before I don't even know

how that would work um but um it's extremely useful to use the Whiteboard and I think because um ideas are so easily put up there and removed um there's something about uh 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 we're used 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 cited folks um so I I

think there's really something there so um in the absence of colleagues to sit there and boost our attention by 25 to 30% um what could one do do you have a you said you have a whiteboard at home I certainly use the Whiteboard do you um work on it the same way you would in those early days just with in the absence of of colleagues looking on yeah yeah so you work on it just like someone's there uh the hack is using really good notebooks that's always made a big difference for me paper notebooks paper

notebooks yeah yeah though though recently I've been messing around with a remarkable which is one of these digital notebooks where it's eink technology so it's like a Kindle but you can write on it h but you have endless pages on it so I've been messing around with that recently but I remembered when I was a postto for example I found it recently I went and bought a lab notebook because those are expensive at least for a postto right they're like $70 because a lab note book has to have archival quality paper it's bound it's bound

yeah people might not realize this lab notebooks need to be kept for many years yes you you uh 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 yes you can't rip it out and it's thick thick paper acidfree archival paper big sturdy covers um 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 uh the big vertical space as a 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 a whiteboard in class I'm not just going to put up nonsense like I'm GNA 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 look 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 uh this turned into a paper this turned into a grant this 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 a an incredible investment because when I when I got to work in 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 his Pages yeah it seems like we would all do well regardless of our field um 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 um dare I say in a a phone uh notes segment but then something as you're suggesting like a a whiteboard um like a bound note notebook where the moment we look at it it brings about a level of seriousness yeah to our to our thinking and to our actions like this is different than just um texting um I what we're really talking about our our kind of layers of sophistication um but not in a snobby way in terms of um highest productivity and quality to kind of um I don't

know bubble gum wrapper on on the floor type levels of quote unquote productivity well I mean I become a fan of this idea of 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 scrier which is uh specialty this is specialty software writers used to write right I going to go right to a scrier project and start

putting these in the research section of that scrier 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 latch document so so the markup language that you use for doing sort of like applied math papers right the the 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 just something I've been leaning to more is capture the notes in the tool you're going to use take out the middleman in some sense right so it's it's uh 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 thirdparty system that you construct that you then later pull everything out of as needed uh this 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 so 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 um this what I always call protocol if I want to learn something from a manuscript I read or a book chapter yeah I used to highlight things and I had a very elaborate um extracted from my University days system of stars and exclamation marks and underline 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 um and I learned from that study that one of the best things we can do is read information um in whatever form a magazine research article Etc book um and then to take some time away from that material maybe walk maybe close one's 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 um 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 yeah they I don't oh 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 then they did that and then like and then it's crystallized and and when as I say

this I realize of course this should work this is the way that the brain learns um but somehow that's not the way we are taught to learn yeah well I'm smiling because I when I was 22 uh 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 uh 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 uh how did

you study for the last test that you study for how did you take notes for the life 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 uh ideas way used 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 and the thing about it was it's a tradeoff uh it doesn't take it's efficient 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 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 um 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 you're replicating like whole lines from like what

you what you studied I the ideas sort of come out fully formed because it's such a fantastic way to to actually learn um it was my key like the whole premise that got me writing that book is I went through this this period as a college student where where I came in freshman year was like a fine student not a great student but a fine student and uh I was rowing crew and I was sort of like excited to do that um and then I got developed a heart condition and had to stop congenital wiring

in the heart atrial flutter thing mean I couldn't R crew anymore is a prolapse of some sort it was a a a circuit a circuitry issue that would lead to a extremely rapid heartbeat it's like U really rapid like tardia right you get two 250 beats a minute just and it could be exercise induced right which is not optimal um you could take beta blockers which would moderate the electrical timing but beta blockers reduce your max heart rate and if you're a athlete where the entire thing that matters is your max heart rate so you're

doing something like a 2,000 meter rows your performance on beta blockers just goes down it makes no sense it's like being a basketball player that wears weighted shoes it's too frustrating right it also makes you super mow I was pretty mellow guy but I was a worse rower so um so I stopped that I was like okay I want to get serious about my my studies I I I can get serious about my studies and writing right that's when I actually made the decisions that I 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 test and how to write papers and I had I would try this how did it go deconstruct experiment try this how did it go deconstruct experiment and active recall was the thing to turn me all around and so I went from a pretty good student to 40 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 studying 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 I do it from scratch if I could I know that technique if I don't all right I'm gonna come back and try it again later completely transformed you know I did so well academically that's why I

ended up writing that book that 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 ag1 ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens I started taking ag1 way back in 2012 the reason I started taking it and the reason I still take it every day is that it ensures that I meet all of my quotas for vitamins and minerals and it

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that's a drink a1.com huberman and as you pointed out it is very time efficient oh yeah 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 active 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 uh and work on that and then make a new I struggle 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 like it wouldn't 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 neuroanatomy looking down the microscope at 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 neuro Anatomy 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 just so basically I learned neur Anatomy which I you know um I'm poor at a great many things in life but neur Anatomy I'm I'm I'm solid at um with and then some if I may say so and it's because there's a mental map move through it you know fly through it dynamically um and that it's the same process um not all things lend themselves to that approach um I'm guessing maybe we could think of a few that don't um I guess if people were learning music yeah um 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 a professional guitar player at one point you were a professional guitar I studied one oh so for for a book everything's from some book I've written a lot of books I wrote a book 10 years ago um where I was trying to figure out as part of it how to people get better at things and so I spent time with a professional guitar player that said 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 licks for he was a new acoustic style player and they had these kind of blueg grassy type licks um and he probably had it 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 that that push passed where they're 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 is he'd forget to breathe so he'd be like going going going and then just gasp you know like because his body would you know force them force them to breathe so yeah there it seemed to be all about uh 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 uh but every time they been practicing it's almost entirely in a a state of I'm not comfortable with this but if I focus as hard as I can maybe I'm G 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 uh 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 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 how to 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 jimmi Hendrick album uh it was fun and he spent almost no time the pro spent no time having fun practicing

was your brain had to be you know uncomfortable so I learned a lot from that you know um this actually led to a bit of a battle because of my my readers there was this uh a this battle that emerged where people were trying to combine Andre Ericson in deliberate practice with uh Maley chmi and Flo and really they were trying to make flow apply everywhere like it's all about flow uh deliberate practice is flow everything is flow the whole thing is to get into 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 in 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 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 is 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 was 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 um to my knowledge one of of the most um robust of those is the release of the so-called catac colomines dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine um dopamine because it's involved in so many things uh can be a little bit of a distractor so let's just say epinephrine norepinephrine adrenaline nor adrenaline it 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 yeah um that change the conditions for wiring of neurons you know everyone loves fire together wire together yeah beautiful statement by Carla shatz not Donald Hebb Dr Carla shat said that not Donald Hebb um but why would neurons need to change their patterns of connectivity if you can complete the operation the nervous system needs to um it doesn't feel discomfort it creates discomfort but the nervous system needs a cue to that okay this is different I'm failing and it's the failures that actually trigger the plasticity it's

the discomfort that cues that conditions are different 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 we um and I think as kids we can learn so much without that feeling of agitation we get into these modes of looking for flow and um I have respect for the the research on Flow and the people Bal 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 um one of flow it's such an attractive idea right it's like Star Wars like you have the force and you're kind you're doing things without thinking and um awesome but I can't flow myself through a paper Y and extract the critical data I can't create a podcast in flow but when it's done it feels great especially if you nail the the key metrics so what do you think about flow let's I'm not trying to beat up on it I just want to understand how how you place it in the framework of learning and

and deep work if it belongs there at all it doesn't have a big place in it in the Deep work framework and and this was what the controversy was for a while and and I I knew mahaley a little bit like we we corresponded some and I knew Andre a little bit like we corresponded some so I sort of felt like I was um you know and and both of them actually tragically have died in the last three or four years I think oh that's very sad yeah I think both recently um Flo doesn't play

a big role in the Deep the Deep work framework right so so when I was trying to justify deep work so why why focusing without distraction was important I was drawing a lot more for and's work right because uh why is focusing without distraction important well you have to quiet the neural circuitry so 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 this is and that requires uh really intense concentration so is 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 Anders 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 I always used to say okay when your 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 uh actually explicitly says deliberate practice and flow are very different and 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 like 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 undo it's really hard to train guitar but like when you're performing in front of a big crowd you probably maybe you fall in the flow maybe you don't but you could right but it's the performance State not the practicing getting better state so you know to Me Flo 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 um that we learn through focused work and that uh flow does

um manifest itself during performance and sometimes um so much so that people exhibit virtuosity they're surprising themselves even what what's in there and that's kind of I always think of it's a what is unskilled skilled Mastery virtuosity virtuosity seems to incorporate some sort random elements of maybe even the performer has not done that before and they surprise themselves or something like that who knows these are these are words for um for something that uh isn't easily Quantified in the first place but in terms of deep work and getting um a little bit back to kind

of practical steps towards steep work I also have to ask you because I didn't uh 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 um is the Wi-Fi connection to your computer activated or are you offline uh it's connected um because it doesn't really matter to me you know because what what is what's drawing my attention um I mean the most important decision I think I made technically speaking to be a cognitive worker is I the

lack of social media like I 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 they 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 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 um fear of missing something bad right 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 um we'll miss the emergency um 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 a standard 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 uh but this was the case for 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 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 that uh 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 till you're in touch again and so I don't 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 uh I survived before that my parents survived without that my my grandparents survived without that um I don't worry about it as much you know and and some of this maybe is just this doesn't upset people as as much as it used to the fact I don't use a lot of these apps or have my phone um but it really does upset people right there's 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 I get a lot of it yeah well maybe they're upset and you don't know because you're not looking at your phone that's right hey 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 uh yeah I can comment on that but I won't um I am on social media and um I do enjoy

it as I've got started posting on Instagram and then expanded to other platforms including the the podcast but there's a threshold Beyond which it becomes counterproductive for sure um I think there's information there um that like questions that people ask are often informative it's sort of like ending 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 um so there's that but I I completely agree that this is a a very uh

precarious space um and I'll just relay a quick anecdote years ago I gave a quick lecture um down at Santa clar 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 at that time 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 in my body and when it comes back on I feel a lift within my body so I I'd love your thoughts on whether or 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 sort it's a version of us this gets into Notions of AI that we can talk about as well I know you're involved in in Ai and writing about AI

but you know to me the when the phone is used in that way um it really is a almost like a uh a piece of neural Machinery of sorts yeah I mean there's two ways of looking at it yeah so there is the the sort of cyborg image I suppose right like you are you're extending you're you're plugging into this neosphere like you have this sort of digital Network 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 you you'll hear the same thing from a a gambler I really when I'm away from being a ble to to play right to make my bets or do whatever like I feel really if I feel not myself and then when I'm when I'm around it and I can play make some bets play some poke or whatever it is feeling of the chips I feel I feel myself that chips right like they would say so there 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 it does feel bad because moderate behavioral addictions build these these feedback response loops and then you get the dopamine system going when the 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 uh 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 um 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 a stying dopamine response you're like this this is not good I'm uncomfortable and I I think that's a big part of it as well um 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 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 bar is too potent you know and and people are going there to socialize and they're coming home at 3 in the morning you know uh passing out you know it's like the balance is off not that there's not something good there but the balance is 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 bequeath on youth as they become 10 years old but something that we're actually much more careful about uh probably something that's going to be post pubescent is going to make a lot more sense once you've had more brain development once you've had more uh

social entrenchment you sort of understand your identity Etc because we recognize you know the 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 I lean a little bit heavier towards the pessimistic read because I know too many people because of my books um 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 experence experience they don't

report um I'm less mentally agile the information at my fingertips is less I I'm 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 you know I'm a little bit suspicious about exactly what this mechanism is I think you're right about the um moderate behavioral addiction piece years 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 announc to everyone in my lab that if I asked asked for it back prior to 5:00 p.m. that day I would give everyone in the lab I think it was a $100 bill my lab was pretty big at the time I was a junior Professor they did not do not sorry uh academic institutions not to be named um pay us very much despite what people might think and um 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 um 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 I mean it's my it's my super hour right I don't work that hard in the sense that I don't do long hours like I'm not constitutionally suited for long hours this was never my thing uh my brain tires right I mean I'm good for four four and a half good hours a day of actually producing good stuff with my

brain probably Max but you know 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 sort of piles up over time you know and there's this sense of like you must be burning the midnight oil and you have all these things going on uh but again people I think underestimate and it's not the uh they underestimate the impact of this it's not just the the accumulation of time you spend looking on your phone it's also this network switching cost right

because like the phone is very good at inducing a network switch and that's an expensive timec consuming energy consuming neuronal operation task switching I'm going to switch my focus of attention from this to that like we can't do that in two seconds right 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 you know and then after like 15 or 20 minutes you sort of get into the groove I always assumed 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 um 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 task 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 15minute 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 the data I like to site 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 5 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 were switching to this task but then you switch back to this task before that finish but before you could fully lock in on 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 uh 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 why this didn't even take that long so I mean I I think people underestimate what's going on here I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge our sponsor element element is an

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drive and have driven you know the the amount of energy that needs to be used in order to accelerate a vehicle to get up to a you know higher gear it's very different than the um equal amount of increase in speed at a given gear right so it's sort of the this is you hear this if you're not familiar with transmission say it sounds like it sounds as if there's it's more fasile at at higher speeds well how could it be that you're burning less fuel at a higher speed it's not exactly that way but

but I think the brain has these sort of transmission systems and what you're describing with um people switching back and forth and checking email and phone Etc and back to the work um that should be at hand is sort of akin to going up and down the the gear system constantly yeah 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 and I think when we hear about flow I

feel like at least for me that's the sort of notion of flow that I'm looking for or dropping into that deep Groove even if there's some friction within that groove of the the challenge of the work that I'm doing it's about not thinking about anything else it's really about Focus yep right and the word flow is just a wonderfully attractive word um that I think gives us the the false impression that we can just drop into things like a square wave function sit down pen and paper go and there's no possible way that neural circuits

could work that way no we let's let's invent the term and I'm you tell me if the term makes sense I'm invent on the fly but uh neuros semantic coherence this is going to be my alternative term for flow when you're working on something hard um it's not that you're in an actual Flow State where you lose track of what you're doing you're concentrating really hard but I'm why I'm saying neuros semantic coherence is you get to this place where the sort of relevant semantic neural networks are all um those that are activated are all

relevant to what you're doing and you've uh over time inhibited most of the unrelated networks that were fired up before and so you get in this sense of it's hard maybe I'm not losing track of time but like I'm all focused on this you know I'm grappling with the the the bear here the the math equation the book chapter whatever it is um and so it's something different than flow but it's also different than Linda Stone had the term partial continuous attention which is what you're that cognitive disaster of I'm constantly Network switching back and

forth so we'll call it neuros semantic coherence I'm going to coin that term um because it's uh 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 and it might be really hard to do I mean I know the feeling of trying to solve a math proof for me for example could be so difficult because I mean 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 but you have to keep holding this here which takes a lot of concentration okay let me try this that didn't work either but this looked promising okay so now I need to go back and in my mind's eye update this setup and now let me try this so it's a lot of holding things in your working memory um and keeping them loaded while you try an extension and then evaluating how that work without and so it requires um just internal concentration which

isn't pleasant but in neuros semantic coherence it's all that's happening in your world you know is that in that proof so maybe that's what we should be pitching what people should be looking for is yeah forget flow but also remember like this default where you're like the rescue time data set participants checking email once every 5 minutes that's cognitive nonsense that's crazy that's like you're trying to you know play football and you're covering over one of your eyes and wearing like a 50 pound ruck sack on you're just like handicapping your abilities here for no

reason right so what's in between is this idea and that requires Focus you know it requires deep work yeah we're playing football and then um every three Downs or so running into the stands and having a conversation trying to work out something challenging with your spouse or whatever then going back and trying a totally different play set right um at risk of throwing too different too many analogies and and stories I'll just briefly say I went and saw the the play in New York with my sister this year I think it was Harry Potter and

the cursed child or something like that um I didn't really enjoy the play that much but the set stuff was amazing and they had this magic Library I think is very very relevant here where essentially um the book that you open um has a certain topic I don't know maybe it's spells or something as Harry Potter again uh fun show but great set stuff didn't didn't really resonate with me too much in any event and then the book around it change their topic that but are related to that Central book interesting 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 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 sort of that's the way the brain works in cognition is that we get into a frame of of a certain discussion or a certain theme and and the and the the books on the Shelf change according to their relatedness based on memory of past what's going on now and plans

for the future I think anytime we look at uh we change context and we look at you know a raccoon video on Instagram or our calendar and oh there's that thing the books become very scattered so when we return to it there's a lot more friction uh a lot more work or neural neural energy required to get back into that um this uh narrow states of cognition does that exactly explain sort of my experience and the way I think about it yeah yeah because you're it takes time uh to to load up the these sort

of relevant these secondary and tertiary 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 that takes a lot of concentration I mean I I wrote this this article once that got me a little bit of trouble not not trouble but mild trouble uh but it was it was called was for the Chronicle of Higher Education um and the title they gave it was is email making Professor stupid which wasn't my title you basically called every every one

of your colleagues stupid we all check email 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 um um but what I was arguing actually in that article essentially was what do we do at a university is is partially 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 what 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 at the highest level and so this idea that we just allow the the professor serot to to be drowned and um emails and and uh tasks and being 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 the best academics in the world to your University just tell them uh here's at the top of our contract you will not be assigned an email address like you're going to get Nobel laurates coming from you know all over the country to come to this place and so I was making this argu argument um 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 um but we don't it's much more content 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 uh interesting high value new cognitive artifacts this is a very hard thing we're asking you to do um 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 uh but we never have that sort of meta conversation sort of metacognition 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 you know really extract out of it his capabilities or even high school or even Elementary School level I agree you U you have kids yeah um do they have smartphones no yeah how do they feel about that well I mean they're not they're not old enough yet that it's a it's a real problem um but they're they're not going to be having happy with me probably soon hate me now love me later as my mother used to

say basically because I you know I'm 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 like I think where we're going to end up where all the the arrows from the the relevant social psych research which um I've been following This research since you know 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 impact of these tools especially social media and smartphones on young people

and I you can track this right I have a talk I I actually gave it my kids school not happy about this where I tracked how this research evolved and you know like any literatures it's contentious at first and then you see um you you begin to see uh consilience between different lines of evidence and I think where where everything now in the last couple 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 researchers mooved past that and

I think where we're we're landing on is unrestricted internet use pre-puberty is risky and like the new standard is going to be uh 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 um 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 um but video games are so very different than smartphones and um and other Technologies because they uh seem to put at least the kids I've observed playing them and adults um into a very narrow uh trench of attention yeah uh 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 but I've I've looked into this literature a lot um there's a bit of a a gendered breakdown that has a lot of overlaps where when they're looking at potential harms of these Technologies uh young adolescence right pre-adolescent young adolescence you tenden see social media to be more a signal for cognitive distress for young women and girls and the video games to actually be the bigger culprit for uh young men and boys right there is a bit of a difference here because with the the social media impact the the content

of what's Happening matters in this picture right so so um 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 uh 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 that I'm staying up late because I have an iPad in my room and I'm 14 and I going to play fortnite until

3: in the morning morning because my brain cannot handle like what you're what you're giving me here right um so it's less of a 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 video games I'm a computer scientist but I said nothing that'ss online right nothing that was free because if it was free that means uh their business model involves getting you to play it all the time so you can upch charge or whatever uh they

have Nintendo switches like I like Nintendo okay Nintendo switch here's a $60 Zelda game that someone spent 5 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 um they don't have an addictive response to it if they get an iPad with a a game on it they'll just like play that till their eyes bleed because those are meant to be 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 it's a much easier problem to solve I think than the social media the social media issue earlier you talked about books um I still read um hard cover and paperback books um what are your thoughts on audiobooks and learning by way of um audio book uh 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 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 audiobooks right because when I'm in a non-fiction experience I'm just very used to constantly looking for connections and ideas you know and so I to be able to slow down and then speed up and then go back to something I just read um so I really have a distressing experience trying to listen to non-fiction audiobooks Fiction's fine that's great let put a thriller on you know audible great I you know I'll listen through it and I think some of this might be particular to my

my engagement with books which is I'm you know I'm a writer and a thinker so I'm constantly looking for ideas and so I might have a different engagement with a non-fiction 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 what doesn't I agree I I love stories and fiction by by audiobook um you ideally consumed on a long drive or a hike um but non-fiction requires that I take notes and see things in their kind of

um respective spatial layout and yeah um in your most recent book um you describ this concept of pseudo productivity is pseudo productivity a general term term to refer to some of the things we've already talked about this Tas switching context switching or pseudo productivity something that uh includes other categories of of limiting ourselves as well I mean I think it's more specific than that right so it to me sud productivity was the answer that we came up with a 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 centur um when that emerged all the definitions of productivity that we had were inspired from Agriculture and Industry right so so in agriculture we can have ratios um bushels of corn per whatever acres of land under cultivation and Industrial manufactur we have ratios modeles per input labor hour um so you could just measure these things uh 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 to Cent 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 work arises that doesn't work right because I'm working on whatever five different things it's different than what you are working on um how I'm managing my work is entirely ausc right in knowledge work uh organizational ideas is entirely left up to

the individual how you manage your work and your workload and collaboration that's like up to you that's all off you skated there's no number to measure there's no system to improve so I think it was a real quandry my argument is what essentially the management class came up with is p productivity which is okay in 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 like we see you doing things that's better than not the more we see you doing the better

I call that pseudo productivity and I think that's implicitly how we've been organizing the management of knowledge work labor since the 1950s and when you say ability at people doing things this is the um conflating of busyness with actual productivity yes and so the problem came when we had this uh General way of measuring approximating productive effort which wasn't very good but whatever right 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 I'm essentially a techn Critic I see everything

through the lens of technology in my writing we got computers we got networks we got email pseudo productivity can't be be sustainable in that context because now with something like email and 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 um 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 um so there 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 and led to this this 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 pseudo 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 stepen cvy 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 that's like oh my God we're so overwhelmed with task 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 pieace uh what happened in those 10 years was to office it Revolution and now we just felt like we had to constantly be demonstrating that visible effort so you know I think that's where we got into the problem pseudo productivity plus technology recently my podcast team was in Australia and um my producer and uh close friend here uh Rob Moore uh instructed all of us to get rid of social media on

our phones except one guy who would post our weekly episodes announcements um and it was pretty brutal at first and then coming back to social media has actually turned out to be more challenging you really experience the friction coming back the other way and then one experiences the the lack of friction and that's where it gets scary it's it's so interesting the way that the brain can adapt um the friction leaving something behind um the friction coming back to it um and I think for people listening to this I 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 uh productivity and burnout Etc I think a lot of people use the phone in 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 the let's just call it the Cal new poran lens one might argue that those people uh almost certainly have untapped creativity untapped resources within them that um 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 right you have this void in your life because there's the unmet potential uh unmet interest um living in misalignment with the things you care about right I mean a lot of people this is the classic sort of catastrophe of life right social media and there's before this it was other things right there was other intoxicants or other sorts of distractions it's a way for some people of essentially putting a screen over that like gaping

void and it like 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 because I 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 okay a whole mix not just University students I recruited them from my 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 are the people that succeeded for 30 days versus those who didn't the the ones who didn't succeed

it tended to 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 the table White Knuckles they wouldn't 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 um 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 uh I'm going out with friends again I'm 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-reflect experimentation they lasted the 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 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 um 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 um 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 but I'm going out of my way to sacrifice time and attention on behalf of other people I'm feeling the

social void in the right way now I don't really feel like I need to go back uh I'm actually build making my intentions manifest I'm learning skills and Building Things now this sort of pseudo construction and Collective attention economy of social media I'll post this and you'll like it I'll like this um 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 distractive 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 anal anog World working right for you you need something to avoid staring to that void and then 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 U minus the H minus the hyperactivity uh a lot of kids have true clinically diagnosed ad ADHD so we want to be um sensitive to that it's a real issue for a lot of people a lot of adults

true ADHD um but nowadays people talk about ADHD the same way terms like um depression trauma uh gas lighting and um Etc are discussed in in non-clinical territory OCD people use clinically as well right right and um and I'm not disparaging that it's just that we we have sort of a dilution of deeper understanding of what these things really are and aren't um what are your thoughts I realize you're not a psychiatrist but what are your thoughts on the idea that um many uh people that think they perhaps have true attention issues have either um

built those attention issues through neuroplasticity um uh into their system meaning their system probably work 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 um this very distributed cognition um as opposed to um narrow focused attention and what are your thoughts about um just the amount of stimulant use on college campuses and in in adult populations to to try and overcome this I feel like there's a lot of um attempts to use pharmacology to match the level of

distraction to try and make that distraction not seem like distraction um but you know this is a this is an 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 right um and and I think the problem is yeah not solvable as much you don't need pills you need a different phone Rel relationship my optimistic hypothesis is again this uh non-clinical uh difficulty with maintaining attention like in your work or if you're a college student or whatever um it's

not necessarily representing sort of knock on wood like a wholesale nural rewiring like that I basically rewired my circuits on my brain to be a sort of distributed switching processor I think most of this is is persisting um in that much more malleable area that gets affected by moderate behavioral addictions right so the the we have parts of the brain that are part of these like feedback reward Loops that's meant to be malleable right I mean this is supposed to be so we can have really rapid learning about what's happening in our environment and how

we're supposed to respond to it and and this is what gets hijacked when you you build up these behavioral addictions and so it's it's very quick to change um but that malleability means you can change it back right so so I I I think this 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 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 um it's a matter of you know getting the stimuli out of your life doing the same type of training you would do uh ex boredom exposure like get 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 a a large stratum of subclinical attention

issues that are not representing wholesale neural rewirings but are like absolutely sort of expected outcomes of working with malleable reward CU circuits in the brain we can fix those just like we can if you know you're you're uh you're gambling too much or compulsively eating the junk food or something we don't say your whole brain got we red for junk food it's like no you have this ex this particular Q cycle that we have to work on so maybe I'm being optimistic that 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 uh 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 yeah um which is not to say it can't be rescued through the use of dis tools protocols pharmacology nutrition great sleep and if necessary prescription drugs right because there is a case for prescription

drugs in certain um instances for ADHD and and as I understand it um you know anytime people say wait aren't those drugs just meth isn't it just speed y they are amphetamines in most cases and the idea is to increase the deployment of C certain neuromodulators the ones I mentioned before um as a means to induce neuroplasticity so that the focus state becomes more of a default State um so I think that young people are in trouble I think that we I do worry about young people I think we' it's um it's akin to putting

them in a kind of a well we know this in the visual system if you take an animal or human and you put them into an altered visual environment um the visual system changes and your perception of the visual world is becomes inaccurate um 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 um House of uh funh house mirror things which is anything but fun where you look

at yourself and your legs are shorter than and your torso is 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 I'm very concerned about that as well yeah yeah and and I think I don't know what your take on this but like do you think at the undergraduate level that we have just been not explicitly but just sort of implicitly

uh 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 the signal yet that's my interest do we see the 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 neuron Anatomy course and there's a laboratory module so the students dissect brains they're holding actual human brains um that's a real physical contact that cannot be recapitulated um um digitally you just can't do you can try you use VR but it's it ain't the same I mean how would you like it if you're a neurosurgeon learned um on a virtual brain and then

it does surgery on a real brain no not no such thing should or uh happen I think that um my experience with this is perhaps most relevant with respect to social media where I teach Neuroscience yeah and I use a variety of duration of Clips you know the 902 real the you know seven minute thing the two and a half hour podcast that you know we have podcast solo podcast have four and a half hours um I don't know how many people listen start to finish but I think having a variety of different durations really

helps um and I'm told by my team I have a Tik Tok account although I've never logged on there um you know I think Tik Tok represents the extreme of kind of bubble gum level um information SL entertainment and they really nailed some some circuit that can handle information of about 30 to 60 seconds in a format that um tickles the brain just right to keep swiping liking commenting and sharing yeah um and I don't think that's anything like a real understanding or education yeah I mean it's nothing like a real understanding or education yeah

I mean Tik Tok in particular like I think something what people get wrong about Tik Tok is they think that there was a uh real algorithmic Innovation which is not the case like as far as I understand the the machine learning algorithm underneath Tik Tok is probably like a relatively standard sort of multiarm bandant you know uh intermittent feedback reinforcements algorithm all they did is they cleared out all the other noise so you know if you're Facebook or something like this uh 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 Tik Tok just got rid of all the noise and so we're just going to all we're doing is optimizing uh watch time to we we think we don't know but we think watch time is the main thing that they're they're uh optimizing just 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 a 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 watched before they swiped 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 and 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 Tik Tok 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 cybernetic space and so it's like Tik Tok just purified something that was simple basic machine learning but just like purify what we're doing here and 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 Tik

Tok 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 Skinner box you know 100 phones and we we look at all these accounts looking at the variables it seems like that's largely what it's optimizing for is uh how long did you watch before you swiped right and that's it so there I mean it's not this was both uh what was smart about Tik Tok and also why I've been arguing it's it's destabilized the

whole traditional social media narrative is because the traditional massive social media players of the last decade had this uh first mover advantage on these giant actual social networks right so like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram had these uh massive networks of people's uh preferences of I'm following this person and this person I'm following uh 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 100 million people to use something now right Tik Tok

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 will'll just start showing you things and that was more compelling than what you could generate with a social graph but now there's no first mover Advantage so as the big social media players follow the Tik Tok model which is much more Al rmic let's just try to curate based on algorithms not who you follow or who your friends are they're now much more vulnerable because

Tik Tok could come along and do this without having to spend five years getting people to cleare 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 uh 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 Tik Tok 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 Tik Tok is that um sure it makes sense that um 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 um people in their mid to late 40s 50s essentially like playing kids games or engaging through these platforms that are and they're not childlike necessarily but they they just prove that the um or rather that their adherence SL addiction to them just proves that this is tapping into some core neural circuit

that exists in everyone um so while it might be shaping the uh young brain a lot this is adults basically eating junk food all day um which raises a question you know I think um while there are many different ways to eat and it's not a topic we want to get into now um Lord knows that's a great way to to create um a lot of social media content debating which diet on omore carav or vegan Etc um the notion of intermittent fasting um limiting one's portion of the day where they eat to whatever 6

hours 4 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 um for the first 2 hours of the day or 4 hours of the day or for a portion of the day sort of like you're taking a 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 know 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 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 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 pavlovian connection in this sense right so if it's every time I feel bored I'm lack of 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 this is going back you know early 20th century psychology there's probably a more neuroscientific way to think about this but it's like breaking pavlovian Loops if like sometimes at the end of the day I'm exhausted it's Instagram time and it like scratches an itch but other times I'm bored

I'm in line at 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 un super uncomfortable with boredom like

don't go seeking it I'm a big believer of in 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 um are you familiar with this notion of Gap effects in learning these Gap effects are similar to the effects of um neural processing during sleep um focused attention with some agitation triggers neuroplasticity and learning but it's during sleep in particular deep sleep rapid eye movement states of deep bre

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 could be any skill and then they um intermittently are are cued 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 boredom what we're talking about is pauses during which perhaps um we are obtaining accelerated neuroplasticity the Gap effects certainly accelerate learning I've talked about these in other podcasts but I wonder whether or not this thing that 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 know 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 hippoc campus 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 truly beneficial yeah well I mean professors feel this all the time right at least a lot of ones I've talked 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 like I 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 being processing I took that so seriously when I was uh especially at post stock 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 I discovered thorough while

a grat student I read it down by the Charles like the full sort of you know just minus the Beret like pretentious gratitude and thing but I was really in the the the Walden 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 Boston it's it's going across the Longfellow bridge I would say nothing but nature observation like that's what I'm doing I'm just uh oh the ice is 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 that was a very productive

period of my life yeah I feel like in the in the last five 10 years thanks largely in part to Matt Walker's book why we sleep 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 much so that now people devote immense amounts of attention and and resources to trying to get the best possible night sleep whereas it was the I'll sleep when I'm dead mentality prior to that 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 a means to get smarter to get more creative to get better we just need a language fore this and I think it's the you know so often language is a separator when it comes to health and performance tools and something I've really strive 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 Cal but maybe we'll just uh have you rename boredom as um neural rewiring um epox or something like that I'll come up with the term my whole writing cve 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 oh deep work oh okay that's like this activity I kind of knew that was important but 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 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 pavlovian connection to distraction the other 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 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 uh having no period with this Solitude so having no period in your day where your free from stimuli creative from other Minds is Solitude deprivation and it's a 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 I mean we're very social beings a huge portion of our brain is

dedicated to this right um so it's a very cognitively expensive activity when I'm trying to understand another human's 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 um 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 just 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 hypothesize 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 const we have two negative effects now for the constant stimuli and one positive effect for the absence of the constant stimula so I think we're making a case here

for not always being on your device yeah I agree one of my favorite literatures from neurosciences I think most people have heard of the so-call critical period stages of development when the brain is essentially hyperplastic to any input um for better or worse this is uh a stage of Life called childhood um and then of course people throughout the number 25 after age 25 plasticity is possible requires more effort tension Etc and then sleep um so forth but we know based on really beautiful studies that if you deprive someone of sensory input um for even

a few hours um and we're not talking about sitting in a completely blackened room um with no input but you you essentially limit the amount of sensory input in the period that follows you get a uh an opportunity for a hyper plastic response to any stimuli and this just makes sense if you understand Basics about signal the noise and the visual system and uh and the and the Brain it just means when there's a lot of background shatter of stuff it's harder to see the stuff that matters and the stuff that the brain should rewire

to um very computer sciency neuroengineering type perspective but um yes I would love for you to come up with a a two-word description of of this um it's not boredom induced plasticity it's this quiet induced hyper plasticity or something I don't know maybe we can Riff on this together sometime not trying to move into your space but um I have a very practical question um and I'd love to get a little more insight into the structure of your days um but are you a list maker like 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 going to do a lot of small non-only demanding thing oh this first 90 minutes in the morning is like the main time I have uninterrupted okay so this I'm going to work on writing so i' I've been a big believer of 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 in your day and then just as you go through your day saying what do I want to try to

do next which I think is a lot less efficient I'm going to 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 are you no no I'm I'm a 5:30 man okay yeah so 5:30 p.m that's it yeah more or less that's my cuto off now the 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 uh an evening writing session which which I

got used to through long experience of I used to write my blog post at night after like my kids went to bed now 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 90minut evening writing block um but I call this by the way this whole philosophy I call fixed schedule productivity and 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 fix the 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 you want to become a 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 wakeup time what what's your um typical exercise routine and the reason I ask about this is because I

think nowadays we hopefully people understand that exercise and cognitive function are are inextricably 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 an innovation the last couple of years it's it's a fantastic psychologically for me this is a trans I from work to like family time after work so so I'll do like 45 50 minutes uh garage gym you know the we built during covid after I'm done working before

dinner and once you get used to that like it also forces you to 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 uh I do a lot of thinking on foot um you know walking my kids to the bus stop which isn't particularly close in back so I'll do a lot of walking but that's when I my serious exercise now is always always pre- dinner then uh I want to

be up you know in our room by 10: yeah and then at that point I don't track so I have uh 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 it 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 uh 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 the way 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 the like I'm just going to 10 hours a day for the next 10 days we're going to make this deal happen like I can't operate in that space because I worry about it any time 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 huberman Lab podcast are in response to a particular challenge that I've had um or that others close to me have had um and I I love this well I I'm sorry that you suffer from insomnia we have a series uh on sleep with Matt Walker in which he lays out some some great tools that we haven't yet discussed on the podcast I'll just um send you text you I'll call you with with a short list of those

and hopefully they'll help but as we do cover insomnia in 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 focused Clarity that they have um even if they're not sleeping great even if they're raising small children um because that's the real world and certainly that's the real world of deadlines and Academia but um family and um colds and flu and travel and jet lag and arguments and all the happy stuff too Vacations so

um 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 um am I correct in assuming that you have at least one period of say 60 to 90 minutes of real what you would call Deep work uh let's say at least 5 days a week I know that might be an underestimate but seems like that's what what I'm that's what I'm extracting from this that's the goal right so so to me uh depending on the season is how extreme I can get

so the the busiest season would be like a teaching semester right but even then I'm going to make sure that 5 days week I'm starting with deep work and the non-teaching days are more than the teaching days compare 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 uh midday to early afternoon Tuesday Wednesday Thursday um everything else is deep work you know just locked in you 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 hasn't bothered me in years but the the the threat of it like completely shaped the way I I think about things and because I know I'm never going to be uh have a sort of like an Elon mus style energy of like I can just take on seven companies and make it happen right I just don't have

that ability um 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 in my own life at the scale of decades 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 U and that helps like in my 30s I had a 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 adap 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 working and 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 Tik Tok you

know like I'm GNA you whatever it's that coming back to what matters again and again years ago I was in a scientific competition SL battle and 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 which at that time was great and um we want a few they w 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 the the the um slider next

episode slider come up you can skip the intro it's it's just like they've just dialed it in go um so I suggest those to competitors all the time do no longer but um and who knows what role they played but I just noticed in myself um how distracting they could be they could take me to when I started watching Ozark I found myself waking up in the middle of the night perhaps to use the restroom or something and then starting another episode of Ozark was wild and um I I wonder whether or not a way

to reverse engineer one's way to uh productivity or verse 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 which 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 not an academic um who's hearing about all this distraction

that en enjoy 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 um Etc and um and if one isn't in a competitive environment um then maybe it's about setting up different U mental maps of the self and then trying to pit them against one another and be the best version 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 would

really give me a leg up you am I doing this I me but I would also add in here this is like a 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 WR if I'm getting in my writing time I have to write I'm very uncomfortable when 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 homesick or there was 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 contact switch too much and don't be too distracted but still have your fixed TA of productivity like end at 5:30 every day uh 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 the the definition of am I happy with what I'm producing away from a quantity metric and this more am I aggregating the quality reps you know and 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 under load 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 on the thing I care most about which for me is almost always writing then like the rest I just want to it's 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 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 with 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 um 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 U and he blasts because he has four kids he blasts Metallica in NASCAR earphones and I like how do you possibly write like this I think he just trained his mind

has just like a a pure auditory filter that it's uh that it's adapted I guess or maybe his books aren't that good I don't know I but I like silence or like background noise but even background noise is hard I have a hard time riding at cafes for example like I really do like lack of stimuli do you use visual blinders you know like some people actually do this they you it's like a hoodie and they'll like really try and 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 uh my library at home all the interesting windows are like behind me and over here I'm staring across to Windows it just is right next to the neighbors and like just typically blinds down well 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 um have probably just

put put themselves in compromised environments which include smartphone um apps and things that I mean like like there's absolutely no way that they ought to be able to focus in fact perhaps the fact that they can focus at all is is miraculous given the the constraints like trying to run with shackles on yeah I I mean look we're used to this with physical stuff right if 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 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 ineffable 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 value to it it alchemis 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 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 and 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 was smoking all the time like this is crazy like this is directly counter intricacies 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 and you're trying to go from like minor leagues to Major go from a you know uh you know like second string to a starter yeah it's like you have to treat what you're doing like a a professional athlete with 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 whever it is 26.2 3 I forget what it 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 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 intention starts with examples you know I mean there should be a book like

how to think that we just give to everyone learn 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 was like my experience training 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 who cares about it it's a huge Advantage right now like it's a it's a big part of like my success I 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 I can I can actually RPMs I can actually get out of it you know so it's an advantage as you know someone who's 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 advantages compared to the person right next to you like suddenly in your office or you know in in your grad program it's going to be like what's going on here yeah

you know little superpower 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 a something happened fairly seldom I still did it but and it was isolating actually lived alone in a studio apartment I mean it's isolating there you're you're going to 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 goggin the David goggin no no introduction needed um has been um quoted saying you know it's easy nowadays to be exceptional because so many people are just distracted and and wasting their time so you put in 20% more effort to being more focused or to uh toward your fitness program and you're going to you're going to 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 was 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 wanted to be a writer I want to be an academic but you know that takes a lot of work and I I really cared a lot about it so I was a I was a uh fraternity brother for one day and I went to the first meeting where they're doing you

know held the pledging or whatever and I remember I just not for me and and I walked away I like I'm not going because this is going to be distracting like the the hangovers and this and that and and you know I want to focus on writing I want to learn how to do this it is pretty isolating yeah 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 uh I I definitely resonate with it so not everyone yeah me

say is like they don't all have to be as intense as you and I were um but but caring about your brain it gives you a lot of options and if you're playing catchup 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 that's been there's a lot of nerds the other the other nerds Misfits and people who um who are are you know seeking something uh they they come around you f you you find them uh I'm interested in this concept

of burnout yeah um we hear about burn out um we associate with too much adrenaline lack of sleep tired and wired um feeling disengage the poet David White has a beautiful um poem I forget the title about burnout where he says that the I think the cure to burn out 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 work like 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 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 of 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 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 it 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 is burning people out is they're 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 U nihilistic experiment like what what is this why do I have six hours of meetings I'm not actually this 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 prog ress 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 am 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 it's 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 emailing 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 um but we're all just accepting this so 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 there 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 um 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 it's so difficult though because certain things like smartphones 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 going to pick up the kids nope got stuck in traffic you go this way alternate route on Google Maps and 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 is half the work of trying to deload the cognitive systems that would allow you to do deep work yeah well in the workplace is even harder than that right because because part of the issue is email and slack but let's just say digital communication um I spent a lot of time studying that closely right from like a techn critic 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 deoptimization it's not oh I should just check this less often what happened is when we introduce low friction digital communication to the office this 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 check in 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 from a like a mathematical Game Theory point of view it's a suboptimal Nash equilibrium it's not the right place not the right way

to to run this the the the utility value of 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 less 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 instead here you it's a very expensive top down procedure to free ourselves from the suboptimality so like in the world of work that's partially why this is such an intractable problem I I tried to write a book about this recently um 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 to change this

um so it's in some sense email is a more insu 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 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 to reclaim this time well it's like um when I was a graduate student in postto I was focused on eating pretty well meaning just clean-ish food and um people talked less about that at that time I was also really committed to exercise since I was 16 um people were less committed to that in the academic sector at that

time now I think it's common for people like I'm going to my yoga class I'm doing my zone 2 cardio I go to the gym you know men and women do this you know I remember having like like sneak off to the gym like 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 lunch in not there's anything wrong with 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 oh do you have an eating disorder or something like that that's what people would say then yep um now people would probably look and oh 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 y um 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 this going to be the next Revolution and it's going to be a revolution that's going to unlock we're talking on the scale of like a trillion dollar GBP 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 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 rusting and was dropping the doors

and the production pipeline was going down like this is crazy we got to take care of this equipment right um 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 GDP 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 like super deterministic and kind of inhumane about it uh so much is being lost because we're in the suboptimal Nash 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 once it gets 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 cap capable chat GPT to do this like you could solve this tomorrow this is cultural

as much as it's tool based but I think it's going to be a huge Revolution when we get there Ain to uh 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 uh productivity engine I'm using the economics s productivity now um you know dollars per worker uh the economic miracle that came from this process based industrial Innovations in the the late 19th early 20th century that 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 um 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 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 um and 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 of a better term uh 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 endocrinologist um I'll just give him a name because he he did this thing he doesn't know me but I heard about this guy that had been in the department Randy Nelson and everyone was like he used to work a 100 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 I literally had an autoimmune condition I've never had one since then I stopped working that much 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 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 I thought I'd share that 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 to a law firm once years ago about deep work and I was uh invited by a group it was actually a 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 push towards this this uh inequity and these type of 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 that 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 a tractable one nonetheless I'm interested in your thoughts on remote work versus in-person work and the hybrid model yeah um I've heard about a hybrid model recently a friend who owns a big um record company here in Los Angeles said 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 day is it's at your discretion yeah it's kind of an interesting model but for in a five day a week model yeah I mean I my my proposals I've thought about this a lot is okay if you're going to do hybrid work and I I proposed this in Atlantic article recently which created some positive some negative wayes I was 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 it would be much more sustainable remote work

so I did a lot of coverage of 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 Yorker back then that was just looking at the pandemic transforming work and I came away with the idea that remote work can be um 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 uh and there's a lot of differences that 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 this 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 at 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 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 then it didn't really matter if you 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 I used to take Wednesday mornings at home from the lab yeah um but nowadays it's wild because especially during the pandemic but still now I mean you

can do the whole day in pajamas and getting work done and I love this idea of no um 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 um 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 and meetings I we just found ourselves in Zoom all the time for a while that was bigger problem

I mean so 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 with zoom I think was the quantity and 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 that'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 you know we have to talk about this but if you think about a standard online calendar it's difficult to have a meeting that's 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 were all on Zoom we used to all be in 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 4X 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 22% increase in these meetings from 20120 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 it 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 um each day you know if you had if you had three wishes um yes what would they be workers 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 a great

degree of of Life Enrichment like a deep level of enrichment in terms of Happiness feelings of well-being con time for connectivity with others lessons about deep work that can be exported to time with others where we are really present Etc just so much to be gained from these from engaging in deep work and things like it that you've written about in your various books um and talk about on your podcast are you know 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 the the top part of that list which is I'm actively working on these things and keep that top part of your list to 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 Q you said 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 they'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 um 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 them about it and 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 that's going to plumm that down 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 uh with respect to work so that would be top of the list yeah um and then um there could be two other items on this you know top of que 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 would be you know podcast prep you might podcast prep podcast prep you might have the particular topic though right right okay so pod right I'm working on an episode

right now about about skin Health yeah um you could you could have two different episode topics you're prepping 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 in fact y right and then your third might be something that that involves the uh the media companies something around the business side like okay we're trying to figure out um a plan for whatever right content for for brand Association or something okay got it great so that 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 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 it's not being forgotten or here's a there's a business idea like we need to figure out like whatever we want to add do something with our camera configure okay put on the list so it's

not being forgotten like it 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 l l o okay is it an app it's a web based service that the metaphor is just index cards in piles got right but they're

virtual um but you can flip over the index card digitally attach files write notes and 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 onto the Trello card or you could do this with shared documents doesn't matter you're just like literally typing things into a Google doc you or a whiteboard or a whiteboard yeah

yeah you could be we're keeping track of these things right I'm going to 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 um and then uh but 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 uh language do you use to describe this first point this method I love this I called it a pull based pull based right what pulled up you pull into the so you're fixing in 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 I once heard

email described as a public post to-do list yeah that made me scared of email in a way that nothing else had um it's newport's 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 in 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 um Cal newport's pull-based system I'm going to do this and I'm actually going to report back on this at some point um you won't see the post on social media because you're not there but others will all right so that's one all right number two would be multiscale planning okay so now this is planning uh you're planning on three different scales daily weekly 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 the reminders to myself about like what matters like remember like I'm I'm overhauling my my workout routine we're trying to like this with the podcast you look at that scale of planning every week when you build your weekly plan and the weekly plan it could free form 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 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 as 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 work day not my day after work but every minute on my work day 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 multiscale planning you have like the 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 um 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 uh you're you're dealing with each

of these scales when the time is right and so when I find finally gets down to it's now 3:00 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 multiscale planning uh it keeps you focus on what matters it prevents you from wandering through your day and how you disperse your energy um and it gives you control

over your time on different scales from like canceling major ongoing obligations to just being more efficient about what you do during a given day uh so I swear by multiscale planning to try to keep this whole lumbering ship that is sort of like Kell Newport um aiming in the towards the right Shores you know like keep correcting and keeping it aim 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 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 Monday 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 for two days and take

a day off I have my ideal schedule but sometimes it gets compromised and um and then I do that for 16 we 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 um if I dovetail it with this multiscale planning um I love this and you can see the

deadlines now you see them coming right so that's part of what's nice about multiscale planning is you know the deadlines coming up and so when you're doing your semester planning you start thinking like okay the big deadlines like when I get to December I need to be really starting getting after this thing that's going to be due a book do yeah so then you know and so this really helps me 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 2 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 communication 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 um 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 mono Focus

because then uh it's a psychological hack but basically um when you particularly when you schedule communication and distraction now the only thing you have the 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 I know 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 to win than 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 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 Tim restricted eating comes to mind yep um again not that that's the best way to lose weight or maintain weight or it's its role in 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 in other time

blocks is just far more tractable in the real world for them than 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 in their fasting it's just it simplifies the issue yep and as a consequence I think it improves um Behavior overall although the clinical trials point to some mixed results with that last statement again I don't want the uh nutritionista after me the point is the time blocking and the and the the the thick blacklined 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 um is what it's about it it honors the the uh the power of of those sorts of neural computations all right 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 a paper based time block planner so uh 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 say 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 have 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 Whiteboard MIT Observer stuff that you talked about at the beginning which is I often longed 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 coughs that's going to be considered a distraction but does anyone want to join me for some deep work yes where we don't communicate and I've 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 that do this okay yeah it's interesting where you you're you're online with uh or in person with just other people doing deep work so a deep work Club 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 but but there's something really to this right I 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 had 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 lunch and 90 so the the group cohesion of everyone working deeply at the same time writers Retreats are the same way we all go to the same house in the middle of nowhere um so that

we're all just going to encourage each other to write because that's all what everyone'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 and I will sit there on zoom and do deep work with you this is my secret plan I'd pay money I'd pay money to do deep work in parallel with you by with a virtual window there there's Cal in his office doing that I think

there's something nice about having some knowledge of who people are you know like hey logging in today yeah yeah all right let's get down to it set the timer and go and then you know a to them out you know working at the library academic libraries why do people do that right just everyone there is working right yeah now I'm a big believer in that there's really something sticky to that okay number three all right I 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 uh you have to close open Loops right so you got to make sure this is like a a review type period and 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 um really make sure I there's nothing urgent that needs to be dealt with that I didn't and there's nothing that's just in my head that I don't want to forget that'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 um and then you need some sort of demonstrative thing you do to indicate that you finished the routine right right so my my longtime 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 um now I have a planner that has like a checkbox that says shut down 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 if this proof doesn't work and blah 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 are we doing the right thing do we forget this or that instead of engaging in

the rumination well it'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 or I checked 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 being missed and it was okay to shut down work because of that I'm not going to engage with you 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 are really able to actually uh effortlessly disengage from work and do everything you know all the other stuff that matters right without having the constant ruminations 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 grad student career and there's just too much too many ideas and concerns that were just roing

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 par associative nature of the brain can make it um really problematic if you're thinking about work at the dinner table you start to associate the dinner table with work I mean when Matt 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 that you know hence the recommendation that virtually every sleep coach and sleep scientist 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 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 was how was work today yeah how was work what' 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 the work yeah no I think that I think

it makes a huge difference uh 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 multiscale planning and 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 managed their workday and how things happen this gives you massive leeway 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 going to do this thing are we going to remember to do this thing um am I going to 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 going to 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 you'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 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 to enforce these things but I always remind myself and other people

that you know 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 do they um I won't do brainstorm meetings anymore unless it's with my close team it's like you can pitch me a contract and we can reverse engineer the idea you know um but it just doesn't work to to meet with people and kind of 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 onto other people as a way to fill the time yeah it's p productivity as well like this is what I have like visible activity and so let's can we have meetings let's talk let's hop on calls like that all feels useful when 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 Andrew's great at brainstorming meeting so that's why you want to bother no it's because you were

really good at the podcasting you were doing like the Deep thing and then that brings in 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- 10 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 like Georgetown is very good

about this they like we don't uh from our perspective it's a waste of resources to hire you and 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 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 tenured at I mean it's all that matters is yeah research quality um so you have to some 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 ing 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 is 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 or 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 barbecues anymore but um you know like happy hour or I don't know if 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 not on work schedule right so my work schedule is this time block plan part of a multiscale plan um really dialed in like when I'm working I'm 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 like okay what do we want to do like let's go like see people do the

things with the family um I like to be flexible and not overly planned outside of the work day 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 at at work or when you're working at home or or in the office you're you're obese yeah I'm like a black box in the workday like when I'm when I'm working like I disappear nice yeah and then when I'm done like I'm I'm around

but like my family and friends and they've learned like if you text me during the work day 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 that's like Lex fredman 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 you know it's just in fact that it 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 know you're not there and he gets there and he smiles his friend's gone he knows he went the direction of of his of his heart you're saying if you start to

get a lot of like memes texted to you from Lex that's not going to happen you're going to be like what's going on Lex that's never going to happen What struggle what struggle are you having in your life right now I'm a big believer in the phone I'm old school I pick up the phone make a call we'll get on a call sometimes FaceTime um we do text one or two things back it's often really quick yeah really quick and I have 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 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 are you free to talk like I love text as a logistical tool but you're right as a conversational tool yeah it's not for me 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 but no digital anything uh yeah digital is not a problem for me on vacation but my wife won't let me not bring something to work on on vacation because because I become a monster got it your brain needs that it needs it yeah when we had little kids I tried this right I was like okay like this is it I'm not going to think about anything like this is and I would just become a like an xiety case so what I've learned is bring one thing that's 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 every day

no email I don't get not email not no deep work thinking uh I'm much happier it's an itch that you have to scratch yeah if I'm not writing or thinking it's it's I 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 podcast and stuff like this and I'm way out of my cognitive comfort zone here because I'm not vlogging like early in this trip I I was uh on a New Yorker and Atlantic deadline like riding all

the time you know California time up at 5:00 a.m. like you know and I'm done with that now and I'm really cognitively ay like I just feel out of sorts right now you know like I'm not working I'm not thinking love it Cal I 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 uh I started reading your books and um I would say you and

Tim Ferris are the people who early 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 at as a competitive Endeavor with others but and um youve just continue to churn out valuable information actionable tools you know in 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 the pull forward the uh multiscale planning and and the shutdown ritual and all all the others um that you put forth and I guess the the um 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

dissing 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 and 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 always 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 going to I'm going to just bite down and and uh and do this stuff so thank you so much for being a Pioneer in the 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 Deb 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 right well thank you we won't um we won't see each other on social media but but we'll we'll share a meal at some point uh 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 from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to

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