Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools
for everyday life.
I'm Andrew huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is dr. Cal Newport. Dr. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He did his training at MIT and he is currently both a professor and the author of many best selling books focused on productivity.
Uppity focus and how to access the specific states of mind to bring out your best in terms of cognitive performance and indeed in terms of performance in all Endeavors one of his more notable books is entitled deep work rules for Focus success in a distracted World deep work is a book that has had tremendous positive influence on my work life and indeed my life in general because it spells out how exactly to go about doing one's best possible work for me. That's in the
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 cow also has a new book out. Now. It's one that I'm currently reading entitled slow productivity the Lost Art of accomplishment without burnout and as the title suggests, it gets into specific protocols to avoid burnout and to bring about one's highest quality work over the greatest amount of time. Today's discussion starts off with extremely
We 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 among social media. I use email I use my phone and texting quite often. So I'm not somebody who's willing to
Pletely 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 somebody
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 texts or what's happening out in the world by the end of today's episode. I'm confident that you will be armed with the best science supported tools that is protocols in order to access the states of mind that will enable you to do your best possible work before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort.
To
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Word. Dr. Cal Newport. Welcome, dr. Hubermann, it's 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 have 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 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 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 smart phones aren't that interesting if you don't have any social media apps on it. Yeah, what's that like, so there's nothing if you have nothing to do is engineered to try to grab your attention. The smartphone actually goes back to 2007 Steve Jobs keynote address smartphone, which is this is a really nice.
Phone and your music you can listen to things on it and the phone interface is really good and look there's a Maps app and you can like look at maps on it. Like it's actually a useful piece of technology that you're happy to have but you don't use it that much. What about text messaging do you text message? And if so, do you get into conversations by text or is it more of a plan and meet type tool? I try right? So I try I do use text messaging. I mean, this is how like my wife gets in touch with me.
But I'm notorious somewhat among my friends of my the ability to capture my attention with text 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. My problem is I'll go two three four hours, you know without looking at my phone and then they'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 you like if they really
Needed me. I guess they would have called so I do text but I'm not considered to be very good at it a few other questions about your phone practices just makes me nervous is your phone in a drawer on on the desktop while you're working is it face down face up is the ringer on as it off, you know if I'm writing or that's nowhere near me. Yeah, and it could be anywhere. It's not going anywhere near me. So I have in my house to different offices basically, right? So there's a home office the printers there.
The filing cabinets are there like the nice big monitors their you pay taxes that type of thing then 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 to sort of custom-built desk. I had made by a company from Maine that makes desks for college libraries. Like that's what they do. So I had this like custom fit desk to fit into it's not that big of a space. That's where I go to right. 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 too. Right 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 it's a ritual right? If I'm in there. I'm thinking I'm creating with this 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.
R and I want to go on to a web browser and pay my taxes or whatever have a different place for that.
I'm curious about the fireplace. I have this Theory based on my understanding of visual neuroscience. And the fact that when we're looking at visual scenes that have some degree of predictability to them we get into a mode of anticipation are thinking is at least somewhat linear and so forth when we are looking at say ocean waves or in a skyscraper. We're staring down at the street.
Say New York City and the cars are moving and obviously not random fashion. But at least to our visual perception pseudo-random, you're not tracking any one thing that the Mind goes into this sort of state where our thoughts become nonlinear. They're not anchored to any kind of if then kind of what I called EPO duration path outcome kind of trajectory. It's not a lot of Neuroscience on this but there's a little bit same thing happens when you're looking at an aquarium, by the way, 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 because it has that random aspect to it. Does it tend to spark creativity linear thinking at what point in your writing do you turn into the fire and stare at it? That's interesting. Actually. There's a neurological explanation when I use the fire is actually when I read right? So I 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 take away?
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 a lot of my brainstorming. I read by the fire when the weather allows it. I also walk a lot. So I want to share 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 is being drawn butter.
You know, you don't quite know what you're going to see and you also have that that circuit quieting effect of the walking's your motor neurons are going you can tell me if I'm getting this right or not. Yeah have the motor neurons are going and you get some inhibition going on and some of these key networks, which allows you to actually maintain 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 still where I read by the fire. And so when I read that I get a lot of my original idea
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 map standing you thing that that you know one is just as you described our body is in motion and could be running walking might even be in the shower or something of that sort, but we aren't trying to direct our mind toward a specific linear trajectory or outcome. It's not
it's not like working out an equation or a theorem the same way we would if we were at a piece of paper or writing out a sentence a structured paragraph So it's body in motion mind not Channel toward one specific Target. The opposite extreme to me is body still mind very active which resembles rapid eye movement sleep when we learn a lot and neural rewiring occurs and dreaming but for which there's also a lot of examples of very accomplished.
Creatives using that sort of thing of meditative like approaches, you know forcing oneself to be still and thinking so it sounds like you incorporate both and I'm curious as a computer scientist who writes code does theorems there's a lot of math where you can't just kind of wing it. There's a right and wrong answer involved. What is your mode for sitting down and working through something that's linear and hard. Yeah that
it's interesting the way you talk about it, right? Because when I'm walking and this is actually something you can train, you know, and I talked about this one of my books once that you can actually train yourself to maintain your internal I of focus more stably while you're walking right so I called this productive meditation in deep work actually and I practice this in grad school, right? Okay, so I'm going to work on a particular problem while I walk and then you actually practice bringing your attention back to the central.
And I don't know exactly what's happening. But you get a little bit more facility working with your working memory a little bit more efficiency with bringing stuff in and out of the working memory. And so I trained myself that I could actually write a couple of paragraphs in my head. Maybe not word for what basically word for word like figure out how I'm going to do it or figure out enough steps of a math proof to capture like a key Insight like okay. Now I'm gonna get around this then you have to sit down and actually formally capture that yeah for me. That's still working with notebooks.
Though when I was coming up in grad school and I was just Excavating these thoughts recently. We were talking before the we recorded that you know, I just wrote this essay about what I learned as a grad student that impacted all my writing as a grad student in the theory group at MIT, which was just purified concentration. This is where all the Deep work ideas come from, right? I mean, it was just world-class concentrators there. The method was very still more than one person whiteboard. So if you have two or three people staring at the
Same whiteboard. You're actually going to up the level of concentration you achieve because if you let your attention wander you disengage that attention. There's a social capital cost has now fallen out of the Whiteboard effect discussion that's going to be a problem. So you actually maintain your focus at a higher level and then when someone else is making their move, okay, you know, what about this and they're working math. It's all math on the board. You're giving that the highest attention you're capable of because you want to keep up right? You don't want to fall behind. So it was like this Hack That was figured out.
Out in the theory group that if you put two or three people at the same white board the try to alkalize these insights into actual mathematically precise proves you get 20 30 percent boost in your concentration level and that could make all the difference. Right? If you're working on a very hard proof 20-30 percent boost could be the difference between solving it or not in one of these situations where you're at the Whiteboard or chalkboard and their two other individuals facing it. Are they interrupting you or is the etiquette in that scenario to just let the person go
Tell their natural inclination to raise a hand and scream help whoever has the marker on the board. They're the ones talking. Hmm. So you go to 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 they want steps back and looks at it then you can step forward. Okay, but what if we did this and then you still work on it, so when I got built some offices or worked out some offices near my house, like one of the first things we put in there was a whiteboard.
So they could have computer science collaborators come because we can't work on Theory otherwise like it is the thing we need is a whiteboard right when I started grad school. They had just built this new 300 million dollar Frank gehry-designed building for the computer science artificial intelligence laboratory and the Linguistics, but half of it was computer science. I know those buildings because the peak hour and the McGovern Neuroscience with ordinary. Am I and those buildings are very interesting people should check them out if they're ever in Cambridge yet the Scandal Square stop the status in
Get right down the street from the commercial. Yeah. So the sixth floor was where the theoreticians were. This is where I was so I you know, they open 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 stingy million dollar Building look at our white boards, and that's what they were proud of they had filled the common space on the sixth floor the theory floor with these freestanding double-sided whiteboards was like a maze of whiteboards and this is what everyone was so excited about was you look at our whiteboard coverage. Yeah surrounded by a 300 million dollar.
Emil the I tried I was trying to explain to someone recently having good whiteboards to us as like an astronomer saying look we got this great radio telescope like this is going to allow us to get data to work on that. We wanted otherwise have access to I think to a theoretician that's why you see a white board because you know, if you want to think at the very highest level you need two or three people staring at the same thing taking turns with the marker pushing each other past for their comfortable. I love this because I often think about visual maps that represent our internal memory stores and plans Etc.
For productivity. I've always relied heavily on the on the Whiteboard getting one for home. I have one here in the podcast studio all of my podcast notes for the my solo episodes are distilled down to four eight and a half by 11 notes that which are photographs of the the Whiteboard. Yeah, and I don't use a teleprompter. That's why I've been accused of using one before I don't even know how that would work, but it's extremely useful to use the Whiteboard and I think because idea
Has are so easily put up there and removed. There's something about writing on things that are vertical as opposed to on a flat surface. I really because that's actually the way our visual perception casts things. We don't cast visual perception under the ground where you sit 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 four sided folks. So I think there's really something there. So in the absence of colleagues to sit
There and boost our attention by 25 to 30 percent.
What could one do do you have a you said you have a whiteboard at home? I certainly use the Whiteboard. Do you work on it the same way you would in those early days just within the absence of colleagues looking on. Yeah. Yeah see work on it. Just like someone's there. The other hack is using really good notebooks. That's always made a big difference for me paper Note Paper notebooks. Okay. Yeah. Yeah the recently I've been messing around with a remarkable, which is one of these digital notebooks where it's eating.
Ecology. It's like a Kindle but you can write on it, but you have endless pages on it. So I've been messing around with that recently, but I remembered when I was a postdoc, for example, I found it recently I went and bought a lab notebook because those are expensive at least for a postdoc right like $70 because a lab notebook has have archival quality paper. It's bound its bow people might not realize is lab. Notebooks need to be kept for many years. Yes, you 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.
That yeah, you can't rip it out and it's thick thick paper acid free archival paper big sturdy covers, but I bought this because I thought okay. Look I'm going to take it more seriously because I think that's also part of what goes on with the Whiteboard is your mind thinks about writing on the big vertical space as a public crystallization of thoughts. I'm putting this up for people to see even if there's no one actually there to see it and so you take it more seriously, right? If I'm writing on a whiteboard in class. I'm not just going to put up nonsense like I'm gonna be very careful about what I
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 I don't want to waste pages and somehow that helps with the thinking so then I found this notebook because I store my old notebooks in my closet. So I found it when I was working on a recent book. I found it. I went through it right and then I started ticking off this turned into a paper this turned into a grant this notebook I used to for maybe two years only use maybe about half the pages. It's all very
Our full meet script and diagrams. I think I found seven different peer reviewed papers or funded grants where the core ideas were in this notebook. So it's like that $70 was an incredible investment because when I 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 to have some very low
Cobar 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 there is a and phone notes segment, but then something as you're suggesting like a whiteboard like a bound notebook where the moment we look at it. It brings about a level of seriousness to our to our thinking and our actions are like this is different than just texting and what we're really talking about our kind of layers.
Sophistication but not in a snobby way in terms of highest productivity and quality to out of bubble gum wrapper on the floor type levels of quote-unquote productivity. Well, I mean, I become a fan of this idea of having specialized capture for specific type of work. So for example, I'm a big believer in pretty quickly. You want to capture ideas in the tool you use to do that work. So when I have ideas for an article or a book
Book I'm going to go write the scrivener, which is specialty this especially software writers use the right right? I'm going to go right to a scrivener project and start putting these in the research section of that scrivener 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 latex document. So the markup language that you use for doing sort of like applied math papers, right the the tool we use to actually write papers. I'm going to move an idea into there as soon as I can.
Going to
move proofs out of a notebook and into formally marked up like you would for a paper, you know, as soon as I would so this idea this is something I've been meaning 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 a reducing friction, but also puts you in the right mind space like okay this idea. I'm going to put it where I'm going to need it later as opposed to a more elaborate third-party system that you construct that you then later pull everything out of as needed. This would have 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 some math. You have to work out thoughts but I'll get that into an actual paper format pretty quickly. Tell me what you think of this what I always call protocol if I want to learn something from a manuscript. I read or a book chapter. Yeah. I used to highlight things and I had a very elaborate extracted from my University days system of
There's an exclamation marks and underline that mean a lot to me that Justin. 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 and I learned from that study. The one of the best things we can do is read information. Yeah in whatever form a magazine research article Etc book and then to take some time away.
From that material maybe walk maybe close ones eyes, maybe leave them open doesn't matter and just try and remember specific elements. How much does one remember then go back to the material and look at it. And I've just been positively astonished at how much more information I can learn when I'm not simply going through motor commands of just underlining things in highlighting them but stepping away and thinking okay. Yeah. They I don't know. I don't remember how many subjects that were all 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
As I say this, I realize of course this should work. This is the way that the brain learns but somehow that's not the way we are taught to learn. Yeah. Well, I'm smiling because I when I was 22, I wrote this book called How to Become a Straight A Student, right? And the whole premise of the book was I'm going to talk to actual college students who have straight A's and who don't seem completely ground out right like not burnt out and I'm going to interview them right in the protocol was
how did you study for the last test to study for how do you take notes for 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 ideas ways to say is replicating the information from scratch as if teaching a class without looking at your notes. That is the only way to learn and the thing about it was it's a trade-off. It doesn't take it sufficient doesn't take much time, but it's incredibly mentally taxi, right? This is why students often avoid it is difficult.
The sit there and try to replicate and pull forth. Okay. What did I read here? How did that work? It's mentally very taxing, but it's very time efficient. Right if you're willing to essentially put up with that with that pain you learn very quickly. And not only do you learn very quickly. You don't forget it's almost like you have a pseudo photographic memory when you study this way you sit down to do a test and you're replicating like whole lines from like what you what you studied idea is sort of come out fully formed because it's such a fantastic way to actually learn.
And it was Mikey like the whole premise that got me writing. That book is I went through this this period as a college student where I came in freshman year was like a fine student not a great student but a fine student and I was rowing crew and I was sort of like excited to do that and then I got to develop a heart condition and had to stop congenital wiring in the heart atrial flutter thing and then I couldn't row crew anymore the prolapse some sort. It was a circuit Reen circuitry.
You that would lead to a extremely rapid heartbeat. It's like really rapid like the cardia right you get to 250 beats a minute just and it could be exercise-induced. Right which is not optimal. You could take beta blockers which would moderate the electrical timing but beta blockers reduce your max heart rate. And if you're a athlete or the entire thing that matters is your max heart rate. So you're doing something like 2,000 M rows. Your performance on beta-blockers just goes down. It makes no sense. It's like being a basketball player that weighs weighted shoes. It's too frustrating.
And also makes you super mellow. I was pretty mellow guy, but I was a worse rower. So so I stopped that I was like, okay, I want to get serious about my studies. I decided to get serious about my studies and writing right? That's when I actually made the decisions. They didn't stuck with for the next 25 years after that but one of the things I did to get serious about my studies is I said, I'm going to systematically experiment with how to study for tests and how to write papers and I had I would try this. How did it go deconstruct.
Try this how to go deconstruct experiment and active recall is 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 - 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 that 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 The 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 a G1 H. G1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens.
Started taking a G1 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 ensures that they get enough Prebiotic and probiotic to support gut health now gut health is something that over the last 10 years we realized is not just important for the health of our gut but also for our immune system and for the production of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators things like dopamine and serotonin in other words gut health is critical for
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So many different systems within the body that are involved in mental health physical health and performance to try a G1 go to drink AG one.com huberman and you'll get a year supply of vitamin D3 k 2 and 5 free travel packs of a G1 again. That's a drink AG one.com hubermann. And as you point out is it's very time efficient. Oh, yeah, you know, 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, too.
Study because I would be done studying does 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 put it in this pile. I got it done and put it in this pile. And so then you would just go back to the I struggled with it pile and work on that and then make a new I struggle with a pile and these would exponentially Decay and some like a few hours. You could really Master with a few other tricks that work. You could really Master the material pretty quickly. And then what am I supposed to do? I didn't do all nighters. They want to make any sense like
active recall is how you prepare. It's going to take four hours. It's gonna 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 neuroanatomy 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'm just so basically I learned neuroanatomy, which I you know, I'm poor at a great many things in life. But neuroanatomy. I'm solid at and then some if I may say so and it's because there's a mental map you can move through it, you know fly through it dynamically and that it's the same process not all things lend themselves to that approach. I'm guessing maybe we could think of a few that don't I guess if people were learning music, yeah.
It might be tricky. Maybe they need the sheet music in front of them. I don't know. I'm not a musician. Yeah, I mean, I studied a professional guitar player at one point. You were a professional Guitar by studied 100. So for a book everything's from some book I've written a lot of books. I wrote a book ten years ago where I was trying to figure out his part of it. How do people get better at things and so I spent time with professional guitar player. He said I just want 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 Bluegrass you type licks and he probably had to memorize and he knew how fast he could comfortably play it for them. It's all about adding 20 percent to what their comfortably doing. And then that that push past 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 as a huge forget to breathe. So he'd be like going going going and then just gasp you know, like
His body would have you know for some for some to breathe. So yeah there it seemed to be all about deliberate practice. So like how do you they don't waste any time professional musicians waste no time doing things are comfortable doing every time they spend practicing and this is also incredibly difficult. But every time they spend practicing is almost entirely in a state of I'm not comfortable with this. But if I focus as hard as I can maybe I'm going to pull this off like I'll pull off the Sonata at this new speed. I'm trying to do maybe I'll pull it off.
The maximal growth stimulating State and so I wrote in the in this chapter. Why was he so much better at Guitar? Then I was at the same age because I played a lot of guitar when I was younger and was in rock bands, right? And this kid was young, right but really really good and I said, okay now I realize it I can recognize me when I look back at my time playing guitar at his age. I played stuff. I knew 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 gym.
Hendrix album 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, this actually led to a bit of a battle because of my readers there was this a this battle that emerged where people were trying to combine unders Ericsson and deliberate practice with mihaly csikszentmihalyi and flow and really they were trying to make flow.
Apply everywhere. Like it's all about flowed deliberate practice is flow. Everything is flow. The whole thing is to go into a state of flow and I remember on doors talking about this at some point and say like 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 that passes by because it's like incredibly difficult like what you're doing your mind is rebelling it's not natural, you know, it's not fun. It's not the skier going down the hill and it's
Saul 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's a lot of flow Advocates that just wanted life to be flow all the time, but I think honors was right because I watch 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 systems ability to change.
In response to experience says that there needs to be some neuro chemical or electrical condition that changes in the nervous system in order to queue up plasticity and to my knowledge one of the most robust of those is the release of the so-called catecholamines dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine dopamine because it's involved in so many things can be a little bit of a distractor. So let's just say epinephrine norepinephrine adrenaline. Noradrenaline.
Create in the body and mind to some extent of state of alertness and often a state of agitation. But if you think about it in the absence of some neuromodulators like those that change the conditions for wiring of neurons. Everyone loves fire together wire together. Yeah, beautiful statement by Carla shots, not Donald Hebb. Dr. Carla shot said that not Donald Hebb, but why would neurons need to change their patterns of connectivity if you can complete the operation the nervous system
It's too it doesn't feel discomfort. It creates discomfort, but the nervous system needs a cue to okay, this is different. I'm failing and it's the failures that actually trigger the plasticity is the discomfort that cues that conditions are different now. Otherwise, there's simply no reason to devote energetic resources to rewiring neurons and I feel like we don't learn this when we were kids we and I think as kids we can learn so much without that feeling of agitation. We got into these modes of looking for flow.
And I have respect for the research on Flow and the people who are balding by 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 what a vicious blow it such an attractive idea, right? Is that Star Wars? It's like you have the force or and you're going you're doing things without thinking and awesome, but I can't flow myself through a paper. Yep and extract the critical date. I can't create a podcast in flow, but when it's done
It feels great. Especially if you nail the the key metric, so what do you think about flow? Let's I'm not trying to beat up on it. I just want understand 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 this was what the controversy was for a while and I knew my Haley a little bit like we correspond to some I knew honor is a little bit like we correspondence. I'm so I sort of felt like it was you know, and both of them actually tragically died in the last
Three or four years. I think yes, very sad. Yeah, I think both recently flow doesn't play a big role in the deep deep work framework, right? So when I would try to justify deep work, so I why focusing without distraction was important I was drawing a lot more on ders work, right because 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 things that you're doing, right? You're not going to get better at something if you have noisy circuitry this
Is and that requires a really intense concentration? So that 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 on Durst 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 you're when you're 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 it
Famous paper about this we're on ders actually explicitly says deliberate practice and flow are very different and I wrote an essay years ago called the father of deliberate practice disowns flow and I can people are really flow partisans out there. It's interesting. I think people just like the idea because it feels good. But me flow is the feeling of performance is the way I think about it. It gets 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 under and 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 write but it's the performance State not the practicing getting better state. So to Me Flo has very little role in how I think about what I do is I cognitive professional. It's just not something that comes up that often. I agree that we learn through focused work and that flow does manifest itself.
During performance and sometimes so much so that people exhibit virtuosity is the surprising themselves. Even at what's in there. You know, that's kind of I always think of it's a what is unskilled skilled Mastery virtuosity virtuosity seems to incorporate some sort of random elements of maybe even the performers not done that before and they surprised themselves or something like that. Who knows these are these are words for for something that isn't easily Quantified in the first place, but in terms of deep work,
And getting a little bit back to kind of practical steps towards deep work. I also have to ask you because I didn't perlier when you are on your laptop in your library with your fireplace and these books it's a beautiful image. Actually they've drawn for us in our minds is the Wi-Fi connection to your computer activated or you offline. It's connected because it doesn't really matter to me, you know, because what is it what's drawing my attention? I mean the most important decision. I think I made technically speaking to be
Cognitive worker is I didn't like a social media. Like I think we underestimate the degree to which our problem with digital distraction is not the internet is not our phones. It is specific products and services that are engineered at Great expense the pulley back to them when you take that away the internet is not that interesting but 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 and I could go to the New York Times I guess but then you've seen the
calls right? They change it once a day. There's just not much I've set things up. So there's not much this that interesting to
me.
We've all heard of fomo fear of missing out. I feel like there's the other thing which is fear of missing something bad. Right? Let's sort of like an anxiety a more primitive anxiety within us that if we are not engaged on social media or looking at our phone often or texting often that it's not that will miss the party. We'll miss the emergency. You don't seem to suffer from those kind of everyday ills. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't happen that much when I have a phone.
You know
a standard. No, I mean I have my phone I guess if I'm working away from it. Yeah, I guess that's true if there was an emergency but this was the case for a very long time, right? We didn't have smartphones till really relatively recently. This is you know, 15 years ago. So we were just used to this until yesterday essentially that there's this periods of time where you're out of touch like you're at a restaurant with someone you're out of touch until you get back to your office like we were okay, you know, we weren't plagued by emergencies that that led to disaster.
His results because we couldn't hear about it right then go to the movies like you're out of touch right and be a couple hours. So you're in touch again. And so I you know, it's not something that's affected me as much it is so maybe I'm working without my phone nearby. A lot of people have this response they begin to sort of catastrophizing like what if this happens or this or that and I'm thinking, you know, I survived before that my parents survived without that like my grandparents survive without that. I don't worry about it as much you know, and some of this maybe is just this doesn't upset people as much as it used to the fact. I don't use a lot of these apps.
My phone but it really does upset people right? There's well. What about this? What about that? What about this? And I don't know how much of this is just maybe I'm oblivious and how much of this is people back sliding explanation for why they do need their phone while they do need to look at all the time, but I get a lot of it, you know, maybe they're upset and you don't know because you're not looking at your phone. That's right. Hey, I'll tell you what, that's a blessing not knowing how upset people are at you. Yeah. It's a blessing is a semi-public figure. I'll tell you that. Yeah, I can comment on that, but I won't.
I am on social media and I do enjoy it as I've got started posting on Instagram and then expand it to other platforms including the podcast but there's a threshold Beyond which it becomes counterproductive for sure. I think there's information there like questions that people ask often informative. It's sort of like adding a class and asking are there any questions sometimes the comments that people bring back are truly informative towards both where they might have some misunderstanding but also sometimes
Really terrific ideas. Yeah, so there's that but I completely agree that this is a very precarious space and I'll just real a quick anecdote years ago. I gave a quick lecture down at Santa Clara University south of Stanford and I was talking about this issue. I recommended your book and a student came up afterwards and he said you don't get it at that time. I was in my early 40s. It 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
But we grew up with it and when my phone he's speaking for himself in the first person when my phone loses power, I feel a physical drain within my body and when it comes back on I feel a lift with in my body. So I'd love your thoughts on their not you think the phone and perhaps social media as well are in some ways an extension of our brain that's almost like another cortical area that contains all this information. 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 Ai and
About AI but you know to me the when the phone is used in that way. It really is a almost like a piece of neural Machinery of sorts. Yeah. I mean, there's two ways of looking at it. Yeah, so there is the the sort of cyborg image I suppose right like you are you're extending your plug it into this newest fear like you have this sort of digital Network extension of information what's going on? There's also the much more pessimistic view, which is none of that feeling is to
Feeling of a moderate behavioral addiction, right? So you'll hear the same thing from a gambler. I really when I'm away from being able to the playwright the 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 poker whatever it is looking at the chips. I feel I feel myself that ships right like they would say so there it could be both of these things could be true. I think the modern behavioral addiction side is is more true than a lot of us want to admit actually like it does feel bad because
Modern behavioral addictions build these these feedback response loops and then you get the dopamine system going when anticipation because what's on there is things that have been engineered that you're going to get this sort of Highly engaging stimuli. And then you see the Deliverance of that stimuli right this really nice piece of glass on a piece of metal. I'm going to press this sort of carefully this icon whose colors have been chosen because we know it's going to hit various parts of our neural alert systems to be as engaging as possible and I'm going to see
Thing 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 stymie dopamine response, you're like this. This is not good. I'm uncomfortable. And I think that's a big part of it as well because I've had this, you know, I've had this argument with with some people and by the way, I see both sides of this like there are great advantages to what people are doing with these tools. It's just that it's all mixed up with all these disadvantages and it becomes very difficult. It's like the alcohol on the neighborhood.
Too potent, you know and and people are going there to socialize and they're coming home at 3:00 in the morning, you know passing out, you know, it's like if the balance is off not that there's not something good there but the balance is off so becomes pretty difficult to navigate. So I think some of that is 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
we're actually much more careful about probably something just 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 social entrenchment you sort of understand your identity Etc because we recognize you know, the flip side of plugging this thing into your brain is yeah you have access to more information but it also pumps out into your brain. So I don't know I lean a little bit heavier towards the pessimistic read because I know too many people because of my books have really reduced the impact of these things in their lives, and they
Don't on the far side of that transformation. They don't typically report a great impoverishment and experience experience. They don't report I'm less mentally agile the information at my fingertips is less. I'm missing out on life if 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. Yeah. I think you're right about the moderate behavioral addiction peace years ago when I was starting my lab I had grants to
right 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 announce to everyone in my lab that if I asked for it back prior to 5 p.m. That day we give everyone in the lab. I think it was a hundred dollar bill. My lab was pretty big at the time. I was a junior Professor. They did not do not sorry academic institutions not to be named pay us very much despite what people might think and and it was difficult several times throughout the day or more. Like I really want to look at that thing, but the end of the day
I'll tell you that no one got paid. I got my phone back but it's wonderful the amount of work that you can get done when that thing is out of the room. It's my it's my superpower, 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 my brain tires, right? I mean, I'm good for for 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 a sense of like you must be burning the midnight oil and you have all these things going on. But again people I think underestimate it's not the the 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 time 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 Marshland? Okay. So what semantic networks do we need to start activating hero? We don't need this inhibit this we're not doing that anymore. It takes a while.
So what happens then when you have a lot of these quick checks to social media, you're jumping in on email back and forth is you have this disaster catastrophic pileup of aborted tasks, which is happening. Right? And so it's not just the total time you're looking at let's say email or social media. It's the 15-minute window. You have to add a round 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.
A from looking at something that induced a network switch the data. I like to cite which was looking at email and slack checks and knowledge workers is came from rescuetime a software company. The median average interval between checks was five minutes. So 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
Which back to this task before that finish before you could fully lock it in this task? You look back over here. And so you spend your entire day in the state of cognitive disorder, which is going to be reduced cognitive output. Right? So you get rid of that. I mean, I always say like one of my advantages is not that I'm doing anything smarter. I'm just avoiding. Sometimes the dumb thing just holding slowing other people down you get rid of that and you feel like you're on the world's best neurotropic or something like this like, oh, I'm just doing this thing. I'm doing pretty well. Now I'm done. You know why it doesn't even take that long.
I mean, 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 electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't that means zero sugar and the appropriate ratios of the electrolyte sodium magnesium and potassium and that correct ratio of electrolytes is extremely important because every cell in your body, but especially your nerve cells or neurons relies on electrolytes in order to function properly. So when you're well hydrated and you have the appropriate amount of electrolytes in your
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It tastes best if they are put into water dissolved and then heated up I tend to do that in the winter months because of course you don't just need hydration on hot days and in the summer and spring months, but also in the winter when the temperatures are cold and the environment tends to be dry. If you'd like to try element. You can go to drink element spelled LMN t.com huberman to try a free sample pack again. That's drink element.com hubermann. Yeah would like to drill into the concept of context and task switching.
Being a bit more. I do think that the brain has something akin to a transmission system where you know for people that drive and have driven, you know, 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 equal amount of increase in speed at a given gear, right. So as to whether this is you hear this if you're not familiar with turns emissions as it sounds like our home it sounds
If there's it's more facile it at higher speeds while how could it be that you're burning less fuel at higher speed so it's not exactly that way. But but I think the brain houses these sort of transmission systems and what you're describing with people switching back and forth and checking email and phone Etc and back to the work that should be at hand is sort of akin to going up and down 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
To 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 dropping into that deep Groove. Even if there's some friction within that groove of the challenge of the work that I'm doing. It's about not thinking about anything else. It's really about Focus. Yep. I'm and the word flow is just a wonderfully attractive word that I think gives us the false impression that we can just drop into things like a square wave function sit down pen and paper go and there's
No possible way that neural circuits could work that way. Now we go. Let's invent a term and I'm gonna you tell him to turn make sense. I'm events on the fly. But neuro semantic coherence. This is going to be my alternative term for flow when you're working on something hard. It's not that you're in an actual Flow State where you lose track what you're doing you're concentrating really hard but I'm saying neuro semantic coherence is you get to this place where the sort of relevant semantic neural networks are all those that are activated are all relevant to what you're doing and
you've overtime inhibited most of the unrelated networks that were fired up before and so you get in this sense of it's hard maybe not losing track of time. But like I'm all focused on this, you know, I'm grappling with the the bear here the the math equation the book chapter whatever it is 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 them constantly Network switching back and forth. So we'll call it neuro semantics.
Here in cycle 2 coin that term because it's 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. We have to keep holding this here was takes a lot of concentration. Okay, let
Try this that didn't work either but this look promising. Okay. So now I need to go back and in my mind's eye update the setup and now let me try this. So it's a lot of holding things in your working memory and keeping them loaded while you try and extension then evaluating how that work without and so it requires just internal concentration which isn't pleasant. But in neuro semantic coherence, it's all this happening in your world, you know, is that in that proof? So maybe that's what we should be pitching but people should be looking for is yeah forget flow, but also,
Member like this default where you're like the rescuetime data set participants checking email once every five 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 rucksack on your just like handicapping your abilities here for no reason, right? So what's in between is this idea and that requires Focus, you know, our cars deep work. No, we're playing football and then every three Downs or so running into the stands and having a conversation trying to work out.
Something challenging with your spouse or whatever then going back and try to totally different place that ye are risk of throwing into different to many analogies and stories. I'll just briefly say I went and saw the play in New York with my sister this year. I think it's Harry Potter and the cursed child or something like that. I didn't really enjoy the play that much but the set stuff was amazing and they have these magic library that I think is very very relevant here where essentially the book that you open has a certain topic anime spells.
Johnny's Harry Potter again fun show but great set stuff, then didn't really resonate with me too much in any event. And then the books around it change their topic that but are related to that Central book. And then if you look at one particular thing, like maybe it's potions or something. I'm making this up and then all of a sudden that 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 a that's the way the brain works in cognition is that we get into a frame of of us are in discussion.
Or a certain theme and the books on the Shelf change according to their relatedness based on memory of past what's going on now and plans for the future. I think anytime we look at we change context and we look at you know a raccoon video on Instagram where our calendar and oh there's that thing the books become very scatters that when we return to it. There's a lot more friction a lot more work or neural neural energy required to get back into that this narrow states of cognition. It's not exactly explain sort of my experience in the way I think about
Yeah, yeah because you're it takes time to load up the sort of relevant the secondary and tertiary semantic ideas. And now they're there it's 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 wrote this this article, once that got me a little bit of trouble might not trouble but mild trouble but it was it was called The Chronicle of Higher Education and the title they gave it was as email making Professor stupid which wasn't my title you basically called everyone.
Your colleague stupid I got y'all check email the dean at the time to call me in for lunch. But actually he was here's the thing. He was like, hey, this is real. I agree with this. But what I was arguing actually in that article essentially was what do we do at a university is 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 we why we should maybe think about like at universities. We need to be explicitly not just teaching how to think but also modeling
A life of the mind at the highest level. And so this idea that we just allow the professor's area to be drowned and emails and tasks and be as distracted. You know, it's the main war that every research Professor has is how do I how do I fight the admin overload until I become famous enough to get an assistant right? Like this is the big problem and I was making this proposal of universities should be the citadel's of concentration. It's if you want to get the best academics in the world to University, just tell them here's at the top of our
Our contract you will not be assigned an email address like you're going to get Nobel laureates coming from you know all over the country to come to this place. And so I was making this argument we should think a lot more about thinking we should talk more about it. We should model it exactly the type of things you're talking about, but we don't it's much more contents Focus, but really this should be something more that we we get into specifically like this is how you actually use the mind to produce Innovative interesting high-value new cognitive artifacts. This is a very hard thing we're asking you to do, but you can appreciate
This
year because this is what we do and we've mastered we're going to teach you how to do it. But we never have that sort of meta conversation sort of 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 as capabilities or even high school or even Elementary School level. I agree. Now you have kids. Yeah and 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 real problem, but they're not going to be happy with me. Probably soon hate me now. Love me later as my mother used to say basically because I'm you know, I'm I'm convinced having spent some time thinking about this right 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 I've been following This research since you know 2017, this is 2007.
Is roughly when you see the first warning signs going up that we need to worry about the potential mental health impacts of these tools, especially social media smartphones on young people and I you can track this right. I have a talk. I actually gave him my kids school and I happy about this where I tracked how this research evolved and you know, like any literature's it's contentious at first and then you see you begin to see concealed Ian's between different lines of evidence. And I think we're everything now in the last couple of years is starting to come together.
And this idea of we don't really know if this is bad or not. I think that's just an old take the research is move past that I think we're we're landing on is unrestricted internet. Use pre-puberty is risky and like the new standard is going to be post puberty is probably the right time to be given a device to give you unrestricted access. We're talking like 16 is probably the appropriate age. So this is not make me popular at the middle school where my son's my oldest son's about to go I think in two or three years, that's just going to be
Common Sense this is the direction. I see the research literature and the advocacy going and I think there's a solid ground for
this
because you're a computer scientists. I can ask this question. What about video games? I'm not a big consumer of video games. It's been years since I've played one. In fact, but video games are so very different than smartphones and and other Technologies because they seem to put at least the kids. I've observed playing them and adults into a very narrow trench of attention.
Oh, yeah, I mean there are definitely issues with it. I mean, look, I'm not a social psychologist. I just sort of play one in my articles, but I've looked into this literature a lot. There's a bit of a gendered breakdown that has a lot of overlaps where when they're looking at potential harms and these Technologies young adolescents right pre-adolescent young adolescents you tend to see social media to be more signal for cognitive distress for young women and girls in the video games to actually be
The bigger culprit for young men and boys right? There is a bit of a difference here because with the social media impact the the content of what's Happening matters in this picture, right? So what I'm seeing the engagement I'm having how this impacts my social life. This is part of the mental distress with video games. It seems to be more an impact of just disharmonious passion and Obsession just a 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 am going to play fort night until three in the morning because my brain cannot handle like what you're what you're giving me here, right? So it's less of a Content concern than it is just a Time concern right that seems more solvable to me, you know, like my solution with my own kids. I don't mind video games. I'm a computer scientist, but I said nothing that's online right nothing that was free because if it was free that means their business model involves. You need to play it all the time.
So
you cannot charge or whatever they have a Nintendo switches like I like Nintendo. Okay. Nintendo switch. Here's a $60 Elder 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. They don't have an addictive response to it. If they get an iPad with a game on it. They'll just like play that till their eyes bleed because those are meant to be is the be addictive so I'm wary about video games but they're it's all just a usage game. So you stick away from the more addictive games. It's a much easier problem to solve. I think then the
All media the social media issue earlier you talked about books. I still read hardcover and paperback books. What are your thoughts on audio books and learning by way of audio book versus paper in front of you flipping a physical device or Kindles? I don't know if there's any real research on this I've seen a little bit but I'm curious what you've encountered and what your thoughts are as well. You could speculate. Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you personally I can only do fiction and audiobooks.
Because when I'm in a nonfiction experience, I'm just very used to constantly looking for connections and ideas, you know, and so I have to be able to slow down and then speed up and then go back to something. I just read so I really have a distressing experience trying to listen to nonfiction audiobooks fictions fine. That's great. Let's put a thriller on a, you know, audible great, you know listen to 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 some costly looking for ideas. And so I might have
A different engagement with a non-fiction books and 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 it? I agree. I love stories and fiction bye-bye audiobook ideally consumed on a long drive or a hike but nonfiction requires that I take notes and see things in their kind of respective spatial layout and yeah in your most
And book you describe this concept of pseudo productivity is pseudo productivity a general term to refer to some of the things we've already talked about this task switching context switching where pseudo productivity something that includes other categories of limiting ourselves as well. And I think it's more specific than that, right? So it to me sort of productivity was the answer that we came up with a knowledge work to a real dilemma, which is that's a sec.
Are you using your brain primarily to create value? That's a sector that emerged as a major part of the economy in roughly the mid-twentieth century when that emerged all the definitions of productivity that we had were inspired from Agriculture and Industry, right? So in agriculture, we can have ratios bushels of corn per whatever acres of land under cultivation and Industrial manufacturing. We have ratios model T's per input labor hour. So you can just measure these things. We also had clearly
find systems of production so you could then say if I change this about the system of production what happens to this number and you can do gradient descent, right? Okay, I do this that number goes down. Let's not do that by make this change it goes up. That's a better way of building it. Like this was the dominant way of thinking about productivity since basically Adam Smith the knowledge worker Rises that doesn't work, right because I'm working on whatever five different things. It's different than what you were working on how I'm managing. My work is entirely off you skated right in knowledge work organizational ideas is entirely left up to the
Visual how you manage your work and your work load and collaboration that's like up to you. That's all obfuscated. There's no number to measure there's no system to improve. So I think it was a real quandary. My argument is what essentially the management class came up with is Suitor productivity, which is okay in the absence of been 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 Suitor productivity and I think that's implicitly how
I've been organizing the management of knowledge work labor since the 1950s.
And we say visibility people doing things that this is the conflating of busyness with actual productivity. Yes. And so the problem came when we had this 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 because I'm essentially a technocratic. I see everything through the lens of technology in my writing. We got computers. We got networks. We got email Suitor.
Can't 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 and essentially everywhere and anywhere all throughout my day. I can be demonstrating labor at home. I can be demonstratively because we have mobile Computing we get the smartphone Revolution. So there's now an ability to constantly be
Strating effort at all points of our day. And that's where I think the wheels came off the bus right and led to this this this point that got worse and worse during the early 2000's and hit ahead in the pandemic of knowledge worker burnout knowledge worker exhaustion and nihilism of like what's going on with my job like all I do is zoom all day what's happening? I think that's shooter productivity plus front office it Revolution. They do 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 2000's. It's like a completely shift in tone. Right early 90s it Stephen Covey is very optimistic. It's like, how are we going to self-actualize and like carefully choose the most meaningful activities to fulfill all of our dreams for all of our roles early 2000s. Now we have email you have David Allen this like, oh my God, we're so overwhelmed with tasks all we can hope for is like these little moments of Zen in the day if we can just automate how we're just turning through these widgets. At least we can find
Cognitive peace what happened this 10 years was the front 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're going to the problem suit of productivity plus technology recently. My podcast team was in Australia and my producer and close friend here Rob more instructed all of us to get rid of social media on our phones except one guy who would post our weekly episodes announcements.
And it was pretty brutal at first and then coming back to social media as actually turned out to be more challenging you really experience the friction coming back the other way and then one experience is the lack of friction and that's where it gets scary. It's so interesting the way that the brain can adapt the friction leaving something behind the friction coming back to it. And I think for people listening to this I raise this because I think of course many people
Listening are you know have work that they really need to focus on they may be having issues with productivity and burnout Etc. I think a lot of people use the phone and social media because it fills their life, you know, it provides some enrichment and they aren't necessarily committed to specific projects, but I guess through the lens of the the let's just call it the Cal Newport Ian lens one might argue that those people almost certainly have untapped creativity untapped resources within them that they don't
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 unmet potential unmet interest 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's 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 that's really difficult. Right? I mean cuz I did this experiment for one of my books. I ran an experiment with 1,600 people and they all turned off all their social media for 30 days 30 days 30 days, right? These are young people old people a whole mix a whole mix right? Not just University student. I recruited him from my
Newsletter readership so they weren't University students and it wasn't formal research. It was you know, I put out the call, right? So this is not randomly sampled right but I put out the call and I said here I'm going to walk you walk you through this 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 did it the the ones who didn't succeeded 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.
Don't want to do a bad thing. I'm just going to like, you know, hold on the table the White Knuckles. They wouldn't make it 30 days. The people who did succeed followed my advice to incredibly aggressively pursue Alternatives and those 30 days. So it's like go learn new hobbies joined things right away get like really structured about your day get into exercise again. Learn how to knit again. A lot of people said, oh I learned about I forgot how fun libraries were like you can go into this building and like all the books are free. And there's there you can just grab whatever and it's okay if you don't like the book because you
you have to pay for it. I'm going out with friends again. I'm okay every week. I'm going to have you know, we're going to have drinks with this person and every Thursday morning. I'm going to go running with this person the people who aggressively tried to put in place a more positive alternative through self-reflection experimentation. They lasted to 30 days and Beyond right? And so then I came to realize like, oh I see what's happening here is you have these unmet needs these tools can give you sort of a simulacrum of meeting them. I need are my social being I need to be connected to people.
I'm texting and like doing comments on social media. It's sort of touches that a little bit just enough that you don't feel hopelessly lonely, but it's not really fulfilling that I have a need to like see my intentions made manifest concretely in the world humans want to do this. Well, I'm you know, posting these things and people are responding. It's sort of this simulacrum of real creation. So it's like kind of satisfying that just enough that it's not just intolerable, right? And so what happens and if you remove that you have to actually fill those things the right way.
So now I'm not socialising on social media, 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. I'm actually build making my intentions manifest. I'm learning skills and Building Things now the sort of pseudo construction and Collective attention economy of social media post this and you'll like it. I like this. I don't need that anymore to fill that void. So it's like you have to fill the void first. So, you know five years ago. I wrote a book.
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 talked about which is crazy that I'm a technologist and I write about trying to find focus and distracted world is this thing we call the Deep life, which is just straight up building a meaningful life 101 and it's like crazy that my podcast is talking about it, but on the other hand, it's not because my it's the podcast people go to in there.
Fed up with the digital world and it turns out if you don't get the analog world working right for you, you need something to avoid starting to that void and send 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 - the h- the hyperactivity a lot of kids have true clinically diagnosed ADHD. So we want to be sensitive to that.
It's a real issue for a lot of people a lot of adults have true ADHD, but nowadays people talk about ADHD the same way terms like depression trauma gas lighting and Etc are discussing in non-clinical. Territory CD OCD iranica lie as well. Right, right, and and I'm not disparaging that it's just that we have sort of a dilution of deeper understanding of what these things really are and aren't what are your thoughts. I realize you're not a psychiatrist, but what are your thoughts?
Thoughts on the idea that many people that think they perhaps have true attention issues have either built those attention issues through neuroplasticity into their system meaning their system probably work nervous system probably work pretty well to focus but they engaged in enough task switching that the circuits of the brain involved in cognition became optimized for this very distributed cognition as opposed to narrow.
Attention and what are your thoughts about the amount of stimulant use on college campuses and in adult populations to to try and overcome this I feel like there's a lot of attempts to use pharmacology to match the level of distraction to try and make that distraction not seem like distraction. But you know, this is a 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? And I think the problem is not solvable as much
Many pills you need a different phone relationship. My optimistic hypothesis is again, this non-clinical difficulty with maintaining attention like in your work order college student or whatever. It's not necessarily representing sort of knock on wood like a wholesale neural rewiring like the dive basically rewired my circuits on my brain to be a sort of distributed switching processor. I think most of this is is persisting in that much more malleable area that gets affected by moderate.
Haverhill addictions, right? So 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 how we're supposed to respond to it. And this is what gets hijacked when you build up these behavioral addictions and so it's very quick to change but that malleability means you can change it back right? So I think this this drive to I have to keep checking my email and my phone is again you build up a moderate behavioral addiction because
If 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 social media brain and that's just the brain you have because you're exposed to this. It's a matter of you know, getting these stimuli out of your life doing the same type of training you would do it's boredom exposure like get used to the idea of feeling that drive and not actually doing it. You can work with blocking apps like their stuff you can do this is sort of like standard. It's painful it takes two months and then like you're doing
Better on it. So I do think we have a large stratum of subclinical attention issues that are not representing wholesale neural rewiring but are like absolutely sort of expected outcomes of working with malleable reward Q circuits in the brain. We can fix those just like we can if you know your your your gambling too much or compulsively eating the junk food or something. We don't say your whole brain got we wired for junk food. It's like no you have this exists particular.
Ooh cycle that we have to work on. So maybe I'm being optimistic there and you know the brain better but like it would be extraordinary if in like a 10 year period right your entire brain somehow got rewired in a way that it couldn't sustain Focus anymore. I totally agree with that statement unless you're a young person and you grew up in a distracted world and your brain optimized as the young brain does for the conditions. It's in and then I think you have a real issue. Yeah, which is not to say it can't
He rescued through the use of discipline tools protocols pharmacology nutrition great sleep and if necessary prescription drugs, right because there is a case for prescription drugs in certain instances for ADHD. And as I understand it, you know any time people say wait aren't those drugs just math, isn't it just speed? Yep, they are in feta means in most cases and the idea is to increase the deployment of certain certain neuromodulators once I mentioned before as a means to
Induce neuroplasticity so that the focus state becomes more of a default state. So I think that young people are in trouble. I think that we I do worry about you. Yeah, I think we've it's it's akin to putting them in a kind of a we know this in the visual system. If you take an animal or human and you put them into an altered visual environment the visual system changes in your perception of the visual world is becomes inaccurate and the way I think of this cognitively with respect to attention. The analogy would be I think
We've been for the last 10 years or so 10 15 years. We've been raising kids in a sort of House of Fun House mirror things it which is anything but fun where you look at yourself and your legs are shorter than 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 concerned very concerned about that as well. Yeah. Yeah, and I think
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 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 learning, you know complicated college-level work. I think this would be an interesting experiment to find out is have we been
And 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 generation 20 years ago versus now, I don't know four courses of the sort that I teach or taught until very recently I still teach but I was directing the neuroanatomy course and there's a laboratory module. So the students dissect brains. They're holding actual human brains. That's a real physical contact.
That cannot be recapitulated digitally. You just can't do it. You can try use VR but it ain't the same. I mean, how would you like it? If you're a neurosurgeon learned on a virtual brain for and then it does surgery on a road right now not know such things should or happen. I think that my experience with this is perhaps
most relevant with respect to social media where I teach neuroscience and I use a variety of duration of Clips, you know, the 92nd real the you know, seven-minute thing the two and a half hour podcast that you know, we have podcast solo podcast. We have four and a half hours. I don't know how many people listen start to finish but I think having a variety of different durations really helps and I'm told by my team. I have a tick tock account. Although I've never logged on there, you know, I think Tick-Tock represents the
Extreme of kind of bubblegum level information / entertainment and they really nailed some some circuit that can handle information of about 30 to 60 seconds in a format that tickles the brain just right to keep swiping liking commenting and sharing. Yeah, and I don't think that's anything like a real understanding or education. Yeah. I mean it's nothing like a real understanding or education. Yeah, I mean tick-tock.
And in particular I think something people what people get wrong about tech talk is they think that there was a real algorithmic Innovation, which is actually not the case like as far as I understand the machine learning algorithm underneath Tick-Tock is probably like a relatively standard sort of multi-armed Bandit, you know, intermittent feedback reinforcements algorithm. All they do is they cleared out all the other noise. So, you know, if you're a Facebook or something like this, you're trying to use algorithms to curate things, but you have all these other Legacy structures.
Also have to try to satisfy those friends and you know, you want to show stuff that your friends like more than other people and there's groups. You're joining Tick-Tock just got rid of all the noise and so we're just going to all were doing is optimizing watch time to we think we don't know but we think watch time is two main thing that they're they're optimizing. So what optimize it watch time and everything all these videos all Just exist as multi-dimensional points in this sort of semantic loud 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,
Noise from machine learning algorithm. It doesn't also have to satisfy that I follow this person on Instagram or this is my friend. All I have to do is optimize this one number. How long did they walk before they swipe? It just turns out like, oh, it's really easy. Like you do that for a couple hours. You're going to hone in on the sub regions in this massive multi-dimensional space of stuff that just tickles this particular person's brain, you know as very cybernetic because now I'm the user of tech talk on the content creator. I'm getting immediate feedback. What's working? What's not I really quickly find these particularly Rich regions in this
Cybernetic space and it's like Tick-Tock just purified something that was simple basic machine learning, but just like purify what we're doing here. And that turned out to be enough to create was like probably the most addictive Force we've seen in the digital world in a long time. So Tick-Tock 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 hundred phones and we look at all these accounts look in two variables. It seems like that's largely.
Lee what is optimizing for is how long did you watch before you swiped? Right and that's it. So they mean it's not this was both. What was smart about Tick-Tock and also why I've been arguing it's destabilize the whole traditional social media narrative is because the traditional massive social media players are last decade had this first mover advantage on these giant actual social networks, right? So like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram had these
Passive networks of people's preferences of I'm following this person and this person. I'm following and they could leverage these actual social graphs as a huge source of producing interesting content. Right? And this was a huge first-mover Advantage because you can't it's hard to get 100 million people to use something now, right Tick-Tock out rid of all that we don't want to social graph you as a user don't have to declare anything. You don't have to follow people or say who your friends are. We'll just start showing you things and that was more compelling.
Then what you could generate with the social graph, but now there's no first-mover Advantage. So as to Big social media players Follow The Tick-Tock model, which is much more algorithmic. Let's just try to curate based on algorithms not who you follow who your friends are there now much more vulnerable because Tick-Tock could come along and do this without having to spend five years getting people to clear their friends. And now it's someone else could come along and do this. So, I think the major players are giving away their competitive Advantage which is this the social graph IP that no one will ever replicate again. They're giving away that advantage
Now it's a free-for-all playing field of all sources of attention and engagement. So I don't know I think Tick-Tock accidentally destabilize the social media decade that had been defining until I think just recently what I find. So interesting about social media platforms like Tick-Tock is that sure it makes sense that kids and teens would use it. They were raised with it Snapchat Etc. But when I see my peers who we call ourselves adults people in their mid to late 40s.
50s essentially playing kids games or engaging through these platforms that are on there not childlike necessarily, but they they just proved that the or rather their adherence / addiction to them just proves that this is tapping into some Corner L circuit that exist in everyone. So while it might be shaping the young brain a lot this is adults basically eating junk food all day which raises a question, you know, I think while there are many different ways.
To eat and it's not a topic we want to get into now Lord knows that's a great way to create a lot of social media content debating which diet omnivore carnivore vegan etcetera the notion of intermittent fasting limiting ones portion of the day where they eat to whatever six hours four hours 12 hours is an interesting one that maybe has some applicability here. What are your thoughts about simply not turning on the phone maybe even
Turning Wi-Fi on if people are are not as disciplined as you are with the laptop or tablet for the first two hours of the day or four hours of the day. We're for a portion of the day sort of like taking a social media fast that is in 30 days. It's you know, which I think for a lot of people is going to evoke High cortisol release just the idea of it. Yeah. Now this is an idea of written about before in deep work. I had this chapter called Embrace boredom. That was the entire idea, right? So the idea
Was boredom by itself is not I think laudable right? There's a reason why it feels distressing when things feel distressing that's usually an evolutionary signal that there's something going on here, but I was arguing 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 my argument for that was it's about
About breaking a pavlovian connection in this sense, right? So if it's every time I feel bored, I'm lacking 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 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 minds like I've been here before like we don't always get the distraction so you know it is it going
Act, you know early 20th century psychology is probably a more neuroscientific way to think about this but it's like breaking pavlovian Loops if like sometimes me at the end of the day, I'm exhausted. It's Instagram time and it like scratches in it. 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 that. We don't always do it. 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 if 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 unkind super uncomfortable with boredom. Like don't go seeking it. I'm not a big believer of in boredom as we're all creative Insight comes from I think it's a strong evolutionary Q like leave this state, but you do have to have some tolerance for it. I wonder if we need a different word than boredom. Are you familiar with this notion of Gap effects in learning these Gap effects are similar to the effects of neural.
Listen during sleep focused attention with some agitation triggers neuroplasticity and learning but it's during sleep in particular deep sleep rapid eye movement sleep states of deep breaths, maybe 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 be any scale and then they intermittently are cued by a buzzer to just stop and do nothing the the hippocampus.
Campus, which is volved in learning memory replays the action sometimes in Reverse just as occurs during sleep at a rate of maybe 20 or 30 times faster at the neural level.
We're not talking about board and what we're talking about is pauses during which perhaps we are obtaining accelerated neuroplasticity the Gap effect, certainly accelerate learning. I've talked about these another podcast, but I wonder whether or not this thing you're calling boredom. So being in line to get some groceries. Yeah and not taking one's phone out while the checkers you're scanning the groceries through and just not really doing much of anything. It's entirely possible that the thing that we were working on earlier that day or the previous day is being processed in the hippocampus at an unconscious.
Level at a much more rapid rate where we to look at our phone. We would inhibit those Gap effects which are 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 review. So I know if you've had this experience but you're like reviewing a paper. I often have this experience where when I'm first engaging with the paper. I feel incredibly frustrated. Okay? I don't quite understand what they're doing here. Like this mathematics isn't quite making sense to me and it will often be the fact I come back later. Well, let me just like right up what I
Have so far and your understanding is like much much better. Right? So there's this the sense of maybe something's been processing. I took that so seriously when I was a especially a postdoc like when I was at the height of just all I do in my life is produced value with my brain every day. I would do what I call Thoreau walks because I discovered thorough while a grad student. I read it down by the Charles like the full sort of, you know, just - the Beret like pretentious grad student thing, but I was really into the the Walden real influential book for me. So every day when I would walk back I was living on
Can Hill walking from MIT so people who know Boston it's going across the Longfellow bridge. I would say nothing but nature observation like that's what I'm doing. I'm just the Isis thinner on the Charles today, like look at this tree or the leaves coming back. Partially. I think what was going on is like this was right after I'd been whiteboarding it right? I think it was letting stuff process. Right? So I had this explicitly in my routine 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 when I was a very productive period of my life. Yeah, I feel like in the in the last 5-10 years. Thanks. Largely in part to Matt Walker's book why we sleep Sir and the advocacy around sleep from others. We've come to understand that sleep is essential for mental health physical health and learning cognitive Performance Physical performance so much so that now people devote immense amounts of attention.
And and resources to try to get the best possible night sleep whereas it was the I'll sleep when I'm dead mentality prior to that and I would love to see a world where people embraced not the notion of boredom per se but the notion of gaps 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 for this. Yeah, and I think it's the you know, so often
Language is a separator when it comes to health and Performance Tools something I really strive for is to try and create language. That's not linked to any one person that illustrates what something is for. So maybe no small task album. Maybe we'll just have you rename boredom as a neural rewiring a fox or something like that. But the term yeah my whole writing career by the way is based on taking things people already intuitively know in their gut and giving it a two-word name just having to language around that really matters like it does he
Work. Okay, that's like this activity. I kind of knew that was important. I didn't have a name or digital minimalism like oh, yeah that I kind of know what that means. Like it's a different different philosophy towards it but there's also 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 effect you talked about which is consolidation of learning and acceleration of learning. We had one negative effect, which was to pavlovian connection to distraction. The other one I've written about before is solitude.
Ation, right? 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 having no period with this Solitude so having no period in your day where you're free from stimuli created from other models.
Mine's is Solitude deprivation and it's a real issue and partially it's real issue because when we're processing input from another human brain, it's all hands on deck. Right and we're very social beings a huge portion of our brain is dedicated to this, right so it's a very cognitively expensive activity when I'm trying to understand another humans what they're saying, I'm simulating their mental state. I'm trying to understand like where do they fall in this sort of social hierarchy and one of my arguments was when you spend your entire.
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 for 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 that's another
Other negative effect of the console. We have two negative effects now for the constant stimuli and one positive effect for the absence of the constant stimuli. So I think we're making a case here for not always being on your device. Yeah, I agree. One of my favorite literature's from neurosciences. I think most people have heard of the so-called critical period stages of development when the brain is essentially hyperplastic to any input for better or worse. This is a stage of Life called childhood. And then of course people throughout the number 25 after age 25
Blastoise he's possibly requires more effort tension etcetera and then sleep so forth, but we know based on really beautiful studies that if you deprive someone of sensory input for even a few hours and we're not talking about sitting in a completely black and room with no input but you essentially limit the amount of sensory input in the period that follows you get a an opportunity for a hyperplastic response to any stimuli and this just makes sense if
You understand Basics about signal the noise in the visual system and and the and the Brain it just means when there's a lot of background chatter of stuff. It's harder to see the stuff that matters in the sense that the brains are wired to bury computer science. He neuroengineering type perspectives. But yes, I would love for you to come up with a two-word a description of this. It's not boredom induce 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 I have a very practical question.
Question and I'd love to get a little more insight into the structure of your days. But are you a list maker when 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.
I see that there's a lot of gaps in the middle of the day here. They're short. Maybe they're I'm going to do a lot of small non kagwe 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've been a big believer this since I was an undergrad like you give your time a job as opposed to having a list which is somewhat orthogonal to what's actually happened in your day. And then just as you go through your day see, what do I want to try to do next? I think it's a lot less efficient. I'm going to try your method. I try and structure. My day is as much as I
I can but it just never quite Works. Do you work late into the night or you know, no, I'm a 5:30, man. Okay. Yeah, so 5:30 p.m. That's it. Yeah more or less. That's my cut off. Now the one exception is if I'm writing on Deadline, I'll sometimes like if I need to get more writing done I can do an evening writing session which 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. They're older they don't go to bed as early as like the one thing I have left.
They'll do after 5:30 is like every once in a while. I'll do like a 90-minute evening writing block, but I call this by the way this whole philosophy. I call fixed schedule productivity. I've been doing it since I was a grad student fix the work our schedule. That's my commitment. I work in these hours and then work Downstream from that for everything else. It's like this controls like even what you decide to bring into your life because you know, I can't go past the schedule 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 hours here.
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 when we come Professor figure out how to make that work. You want to write books while you're being a professor figure out how to make that work. You don't have the option of just throwing hours at it and you innovate a lot. I think when you have the constraints, where do you sleep and exercise fit into your schedule? What's your typical to bedtime? Wake up time? What's your typical exercise routine? And the reason I
Go out this is because I think nowadays we hopefully people understand that exercising cognitive function 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 of the last couple of years. It's a fantastic psychologically for me. This is a transition from work to like family time.
Work is so so I'll do like 45 50 minutes garage Jim, you know that 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 finished work because I got to get this in before dinner, but then I'll do also quite a bit of walking if it's not a teaching day. So I'm not on campus. I do a lot of thinking on foot, you know walking my kids to the bus stop which isn't particularly close and back so I'll do a lot of walking but that's when I like serious exercise now is always always pre-dinner then I want to be up, you know.
In our room by 10 and then at that point, I don't track so I have insomnia issues which actually has been like key driver of allowed 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 a really bad 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. I've lots of commitments what would happen if I couldn't sleep I want to be able to do that. So I drifted naturally towards the 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.
Like this month you have to spend a lot of time working on it. So it was like an insomnia compatible definition of productivity was sort of morphed into this idea of slow productivity taking your 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 anytime I bring 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 think oftentimes people here the content of my podcast or other podcasts and think 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 loud podcast are in response to a particular challenge that I've had or that others close to me of had.
And I love this. Well, I'm sorry that you suffer from insomnia. We have a series on sleep with Matt Walker in which he lays out some great tools that we haven't yet discussed on the podcast. I'll just send you a text to I'll call you with a short list of those and hopefully they'll help but 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 high focus Clarity that they have.
And even if they're not sleeping great, even if they're raising small children because that's the real world and certainly that's the real world of deadlines and Academia, but family and colds and flus and travel and jet lag and arguments and all the happy stuff to Vacations. So sounds like you're very good at adapting your day to what's going on around it, but they go certain sort of committed time in my correct in
Assuming that you have at least one period of say 60 to 90 minutes of real what you would call Deep work. Let's say at least five days a week. I know that might be an underestimate but it seems like that's what what I've got. That's what I'm extracting from this that's the goal. Right? So to me depending on the season is how extreme neck and get so the busiest season would be like a teaching semester right? But even then I'm going to make sure that five days a week. I'm starting with deep work and the non-teaching days off more than the teaching.
He 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 midday to early afternoon Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Everything else is deep work, you know just locked in 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 an 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 as a bother me in years, but the
The threat of it like completely shaped the way I think about things and because I know I'm never going to be have a sort of like an Elon Musk style energy of like I can just take on seven companies and make it happen. Right? I just don't have that ability. I've always focused on the long game and to me the long game plays out with get your Deport Chi Minh, you know, just keep working on the stuff you do best to get better at it, you know, just tomorrow doesn't matter. But if you if you're doing this most days for the next four months like that's going to matter, you know, and so I often think about productivity
My own life at the scale of decades what I want to do in my 20s, you know. Okay, what do I do in my 30s? You know what I want to do in my 40s, you know, 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 can still think about what do I want to do in my 30s? How do I make that happen? Let me make sure I'm pushing like on those things then everything else I can adapt to I can give here and there, you know, it allows you to be very adaptable when you're thinking about what do I want to do, you know for the next 10 years it also
Also means you're not on a random Tuesday tried in yourself because you like why didn't I get three more hours of work at that becomes sort of a nonsensical question and what you care about is like what happens in the next decade, which is that's the 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 Tick-Tock, you know, like I got to yeah, whatever it's that coming back to what matters again and again,
Years ago I was in a scientific competition / battle and one of my tools it wasn't really the kindest tool was I would just suggest to the competitor great television series. So The Wire yeah sure. That sounds great. And we want a few they want a few but you know, there's something very addictive about those. Yeah Netflix shows. I you know, I mean, they're unbelievably addictive just even seeing the the the slider next episode slider.
Come up, you can skip the intro. It's just like Dave just dials it in go. Yeah, so I suggest those two competitors all the time. Not only no longer but then who knows what role they played but I just noticed in myself how distracting they could be. They could take me to when I started watching Ozark. Yeah, I found myself waking up in the middle the night perhaps to use the restroom or something and then starting another episode of those is wild and I wonder whether or not a way to reverse engineer once way to productivity.
Hack our way to productivity would be to think about all the ways that you would benevolently deploy distraction for a competitor and then ask yourself what you 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, because I think that one task I think for us today is to try and think about for the person listening to this who is not an academic who is hearing about all this distraction that
Boy some social media, you know, how can they bring about the best version of themselves in terms of productivity but also presents for family presence with self Etc and and if one isn't in a competitive environment than maybe it's about setting up different 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 would I like this idea of think about my competitor, you know?
What would really give me a leg up in my doing this but I would also add in here. This is like a slower productivity type idea you figure out the thing you really care about you figure out what you would need to do to really show up for that thing. And then if you're doing that like give yourself a break on everything else too. You know what I mean? It's like I'm this way with right if I'm getting in my writing time. I have to write I'm very uncomfortable and I'm not right. I just write all the time articles books. I'm always writing if I'm getting in my writing time then it's like okay the rest of the day.
Day, maybe like this week was a kind of a loss like the kids were home sick or there's a crisis at the University or whatever and like I'm just trying to keep that under control and like have good productivity habits and like don't context which too much and don't be too distracted but still have your fixed total productivity like ended 5:30 every day and time block and try to be reasonable with that time limit the damage. But if I'm doing the thing that ultimately really matters I'm going to be pretty happy with it. So it's like moving to the definition of am I happy with
What I'm producing away from a quantity metric and to this more in my aggregating the quality reps, you know, and it like I think in weightlifting this would make a lot more sense, right? It's like yeah, there's a 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 ride my exercise 5 hours more this or that and so I sometimes try to think about Mike or intellectual work that way like if I'm getting into Cordy preps in the thing I care most about was for me is almost always
Writing then like the rest. I just want to it's like damage control. Like I want to like do the other stuff well and like not get too stressed out about it. And you know, there's the productivity habits then that are about doing the stuff that matters and protecting it then there's the habits that are all just about let's not let the other stuff get out of control. Yeah. I find a little bit easier you go easier on myself when I think about it that way do you listen to music while you work? No?
Well the data certainly support not listening to music or if you do listen to music listening to music without lyrics. Yeah, you have to train even to get used to it. Right? I mean even to get used to music without lyrics you got to get used to it. I guess your brains building the filters some people I have met have trained themselves to work with lyrical music, which I think it took them a long time, but I met a self published novelist who does like a million words a year, which is crazy then he blasts because he has four kids. He blasts Metallica in
Your phones and I like how do you possibly write like this? I think you just train his mind has just like a pure auditory filter that it's that it's he adapted I guess or maybe his books aren't that good? I don't know but I like silence or like background noise too. But even background noise is hard. I have a hard time writing at cafes. For example, like I really do like lack of stimuli do use visual blinders, you know, like some people actually do this they'll you know, it's like a hoodie and they'll be like really try and tunnel their Vision which makes
Make sense from the perspective of Neuroscience. I mean your visual World strongly constrains the the narrowness or the or the broadness of your cognitive Maps. Yeah. I mean I just have my space has engineered right? So like where I write in my my library at home all the interesting windows are behind me and over here. I'm staring across two windows. It just was right next to the neighbors and like just typically blinds down as you say this. It just makes me want to you know, shout that, you know.
So many people who think they have attention deficit issues have probably just put themselves in compromised environments which include smartphone apps and things that I mean like like there's absolutely no way that they ought to be able to focus. In fact, perhaps the fact that can focus at all is miraculous given the constraints like trying to run with shackles on. Yeah. I mean look we're used to this with physical stuff. Right? Well if we analogize to physical fitness we're so used to all these details right like it matters like
What you're eating like, how are your sleeping the details of how you train? And when you train at how much like we're very used to this idea that that really matters. We have no intuitions for cognitive development or application. We like treat our brain, I guess because we associate it so much with a sense of self is just this sort of ineffable connection to us as a person. We don't think of it as much of an organ is 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.
The whole game is this brain takes an information adds value to it. It alkalizes value out of out of mine stuff and people who alchemy's value out of you know muscles. I'm a relief pitcher in baseball, but I know like my whole job is like to take a certain muscles on my kinetic chain and use them to move a ball very fast. If I 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 just like you know, you have to
Work hard, you know, we're on our phone all day. I mean just has to be the physical equivalent if you had like an endurance athlete who's smoking all the time, like this is crazy. Like this is directly contrary intricate intricate eating are indicating what you need to do what matters like 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 I was before.
Tenure and she was like in you're trying to go from like minor leagues to measure to go from you know, you're like second string to starter. Yeah, so you have to treat what you're doing like a professional athlete would 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 tend to for cognitive stuff. We tend to assume that we could 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 we're sure I could probably finish the 26 miles or wherever it is 26.2 three. I forget what is 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 I think that's the that's the kind of 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 but they know they can write itself. So obvious 11 states it but I think 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. And you know, I mean, there should be a book like how to think that we just give to everyone can 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 a leak
Of professions. This gets handed down as Lauren people figure it out. Right? I mean like this 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 was also in the culture is in the way that people acted but most places that do cognitive work don't have these don't have these cultures. Yeah, but here's the advantage though here. Like here's the Silver Lining right? If you're one of the few cares about it's a huge Advantage right now.
Like it's a big part of like my success. I don't think I have the highest horsepower brain, but like it I care a lot about trying to you know, get the most out of it like to push it to like the edges of like the wraps. I can I can actually RPMs I can actually get out of it, you know, so it's an advantage as you know, someone is listening to this you start caring about your brain how it works how you want to take care of it what you want to get out of it. You start caring about this you're going to get advantages compared to the person right next to you like suddenly in your office or you know in your grad.
G could be like what's going on here? Yeah, super power and sometimes there's a bit of a social cost up front. Yeah, when I made the shift from being a let's just call it a not serious student to a serious student in college 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 you actually lived alone in a studio apartment. I mean, it's isolating their your you're going to miss out on certain things. There's some deprivation there, but you eventually end up
In a position to do far more with your life. Yeah, of course what you said a moment ago also reminds me David Goggins the David Goggins. No, no introduction needed has been quoted as saying, you know, it's easy nowadays to be exceptional because so many people are just distracted and wasting their time so you put in twenty percent more effort to being more focused or 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
it did it take some practices that are socially challenging to implement. It's funny. I had that same experience as an undergrad that you had. Yeah, because I cared I was impatient to be done with college and like to do things with my brain. I want to be a writer. I want to be an academic but you know that takes a lot of work and I really cared a lot about it. So I was I was a fraternity brother for one day.
And I went to the first meeting they're doing you know, he was held up pledging or whatever and I remember I just not for me and I walked was like I'm not going because this is going to be distracting like the hangovers and this and that and you know, I want to focus on writing. I want to learn how to do this. It is pretty isolating. Yeah, and I know some people that were in the Greek system that also benefited tremendously from that. I wasn't one of them, but I definitely resonate with it. Yeah, so not everyone. Yeah, I mean about me saying is like they don't
All have to be as intense as you and I were but but caring about your brain. It gives you a lot of options and if you're playing catch-up it there's almost always a social cost associated with it, but you eventually are joined by many other people you find the other nerds. It's been like it's a lot of hurt the other the other nerds Misfits and people who were, you know seeking something they come around you fight you if you find them I'm interested in this concept of burnout. Yeah, we hear about burnout.
We associate with it too much adrenaline lack of sleep tired and wired feeling disengage the poet David White has a beautiful poem. I forget the title about burnout where he says that the I think the cure to burnout is wholeheartedness and I always like that's a bit more abstract than the kinds of things we're talking about today, but I like that because there's something about wholeheartedness really leaning into something with with the
the true desire to be there and to explore it no matter how hard that is the opposite extreme of burnout. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think burn out in for thinking knowledge worker people with office jobs my diagnosis there. It's not exactly quantity of work that does play a role. It's the kind of work because I think what's happening what's been deranging actually for people in these jobs is workloads are getting larger right in part because communication is low friction.
And we always want to be demonstrating activity because a pseudo productivity and people are always asking us to do things. We say yes, everything we say yes to brings with it an administrative overhead, right which is talking about the thing but not actually doing it. So it's like emails about the commitment. It's a meetings about the commitment 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
twerk and not actually doing the work and then make it even worse. It's not like this overhead is all batch together. It's sort of spread out throughout your day. So it's also putting you in that state of constant distraction, which makes it hard to do work. What I think is burning people out is there now in this state where they're saying, I'm spending most of my day talking about work sending emails attending meetings. Very little time is left to actually make progress on the work and then the the workload gets larger and larger this by itself is deranging right this it feels like you're in some sort of
Nihilistic experiment like what is this? Why I have six hours of meetings. I'm not actually just can't be the right way to work. And then what happens of course as you have to recover time in the morning in the afternoon, maybe after kids go to bed the try to actually make progress. So now you also have just a straight work quantity issue. So you're working more hours. There's a an energy drain but I think that psychological piece of this can't possibly make sense that like, I'm checking email once every two minutes and spent six hours and zoom like doing very little a
Actual high-value work like this can't be the right way to work. That's what I think. The burnout epidemic right now is coming from is is that psychological component of we all know? This is stupid but no one is saying the emperor has no clothes on. We all know that the amount of email and meetings I'm doing is such a waste of my salary like there's a highly trained brain. Like I could be writing these reports or this code or creating these business strategies, but we're all just accepting this. I think the absurdity of the current situation is creating as much of the burnout as it is just we also have to add these extra hours or 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 no one's admitting that this doesn't make sense and everyone's just getting injured and no one's talking about it. So it's the absurdity of it would drive people crazy and it is driving people crazy.
It's so difficult though because certain things like smartphones are very useful on the hospital Ward. I mean doctors can communicate nurses communicate so much faster now 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 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 deal.
Reload 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. Let's just say digital communication. I spent a lot of time studying that closely right from like a techno 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 happens is when we
Use 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 plug and you what's going on with the whatever and you can answer me and I can send it back. This was very convenient. The activation cost was low. And so this is how we began actually collaborating on work. Now what happens is workloads get higher. We now have many things at the same time. They're all generating these asynchronous back and forth conversation.
And 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. So now it's not just that these messages are going back and forth with all these different threads, but I have to keep checking my inbox to make sure the gaps not too big. This is not a failure of habits. It's not a moral failure. It's 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 I like a mathematical Game Theory point of view. It's a suboptimal Nash equilibrium. It's not the right place the not the right way to run this to convey the utility value. This configuration is low, but no one individual can deploy a different strategy is 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 its built-in systemically into this hyperactive hivemind workflow and the only way to break free from the sub optimal 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 hear you. It's a very expensive top down procedure to free ourselves from the sub optimality. It's like in the world of work. That's partially why this is such an intractable problem and I tried to write a book about this.
Recently and it was really hard to gain traction because it's not easy to solve this like no individual can move out of this and you have to put in a lot of energy as an organization to try to change this. So it's in some sense email is a more Insidious problem than social media on the phone because at least over here, this is my engagement with this and I might have these moderate behavioral addictions, but I could make differences here in my company all this is much worse. This is like a systemic problem. It's an emergent to
Monistic work impact on a economic social cultural system that was completely dynamical and went in a way. We didn't really expect so it's a it's a 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 think we'll why don't people just do this. That's why they don't just do this because it's not so easy to reclaim this time. Well, it's like when I was a graduate student in postdoc, I was focused on eating pretty well meaning just
Clean-ish food and people talked less about that at that time. Yeah. It was also really committed to exercise and sort of 16 people were less committed to that in the academic sector at that time. Now, I think it's commonplace for people. Like I'm one of my yoga class. I'm doing my zone two cardio I go to the gym, you know men and women do this. You know, I remember having like this like sneak off to the gym like, okay. Yeah, and you know, you felt like a bit of an oddball if you were the one bringing your lunch.
To the you know, the pizza launchin not there's any round Pizza love pizza, but your 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 Audi have an eating disorder or something like that. That's what people would say then. Yep. Now people would probably looking. Oh that looks better than the pizza people start to understand. So I think there needs to be a cultural shift. Yep, and I think there has been a cultural shift around food and exercise certainly food meditation sleep think people are far more accepting and actually
encouraging of their workers and co-workers taking really good care in order to function better for longer. Yeah. I think it's going to be the next Revolution and it's going to be a revolution. It's going to unlock we're talking on the scale of like a trillion-dollar 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 make these are our number one assets like not to be too mechanistic about it. But what is our main capital asset if our knowledge work organization? We have some buildings but 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 twenty million dollars on one of these German robots that can, you know, put cars on the doors or whatever and we just weren't taking care of it and it was like Rusty and it was dropping the doors and the production pipeline was going down we take this is crazy. We got to take care of this equipment right when we have the
- Revolution the sort of cognitive Capital revolution in 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 it's like super deterministic and kind of inhumane about it so much is being lost because we're in the suboptimal Nash equilibriums. 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 a I might play a role in this right because maybe a I want to get planning capabilities is going to be able to take the burden of some of this back and forth planning. I think it's easier to get there with cultural shifts. I don't think we have to wait to build an email capable chat CPT to do this like you could solve this tomorrow. This is cultural as much as tool based. But I think it's going to be a huge Revolution when we get there akin to like the assembly line in manufacturing which was like a 10x Improvement in productivity.
Tivity metrics we figured out the continuous motion assembly line with interchangeable parts was a massive it created this productivity engine. I'm using the economics and some productivity now dollars per worker the economic miracle that came from this process based industrial Innovations in the late 19th early 20th century, the the money generated by that the wealth generated by that was the foundation of the modern West like the whole world as we know it was built. So there's these huge latent potentials and right now I don't think we're there with the
Right, and I think it's going to be a huge Revolution. It's just it's just difficult right? It's not an easy Revolution to start but I think it's going to change whole Industries in ways that we're not going to be hard to even imagine 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. There will always be these individuals that can kind of apply themselves more than others in the sense that they can get in early.
Sure and stay in later 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 work life balance for lack of a better term when I was a graduate student. I was really committed to my craft and I remember that hearing about a student. He's now a professor a very accomplished endocrinologist. I'll just give him a name because he did this that he doesn't know me but I heard about this guy that had been in the department Randy Nelson. Everyone's like he used to work 100 hours a week. Yeah, so I was like, oh
Great. I'm going to start logging my work hours silently. I'm going to 100 two hours and I ended up with a flu and an autoimmune condition. Yeah, I literally had an autoimmune condition never had one since then. I stopped working that much started working in quote unquote Smarter on 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. You never had it again, but you can destroy yourself simply by working more. Yeah, even if it's deep work so that the solution is not necessarily.
We more it's just like with exercise and I guess that stand is obvious but I thought I'd share that I anecdote because 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 to it's not just who's capable of working more get these advantages. There's these other unpredictable and equities. I talked at a law firm once years ago about deep work and I was invited by a group is actually a group of women lawyers who had a reading group and they said part of what was happening at this Law Firm is that people who?
Were disagreeable 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 whatever which meant they had more time to do deep work 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 do the partnership level where actually you need to be pretty agreeable because your client acquisition
Mission is really on the partners. And so they accidentally had you know, push towards this this 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 well, I just sort of like I'm Gruff and people don't like me or I have something going on at my house to means I don't have to the same time to do this and you end up pushing people up these paths that might not be who you really want to select because you're selecting for things that are sort of unrelated to their actual underlying Talent or like how much they can actually produce.
So I'm with you on that. Yeah, it's a complex problem but attractable one nonetheless. I'm interested in your thoughts on remote work versus in person work and the hybrid model. Yeah, I've heard about a hybrid model recently a friend who owns a big record company here in Los Angeles said that they require one in person day per week unless on sick leave. 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 for in a five-day week model. Yeah, I mean I my proposals of thought about this a lot is okay, if you can do hybrid work and I propose this an Atlantic article recently was created some positive some negative waves as they here's the way you should do. It synchronized a schedule. Here's at home days. Here's an office days, but for everybody for everybody or have a few of these schedules but like groups of people who work together on the same schedule, but then make the rule at
Is no meetings no female 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 would really make a big difference on the overload issue. I think would be much more sustainable remote work. So I did a lot of coverage or remote work. It's just was first emerging the early pandemic there. I became convinced. I was doing this twice a month column for the New Yorker back then it was just looking at the pandemic transforming work and I came away.
Away with the idea that remote work can be fantastic, but it's difficult and it can't just be do the job you were doing in person, but just do it at home and we have zoom and we'll figure it out. Like if you're going to be fully remote we have to rethink what work means for that and there's a lot of differences that needs to have it needs to be way more structured. It probably needs to be you're working on less things as very clear what you're working on. The collaboration is much more defined and much less frequent. You probably need to be freed.
From the sort of hyperactive hive my dance of we're just emailing each other all day and zoom meetings all day. You have to sort of reconstitute. What a remote work job is I think before it works and we know this in part because software developers pre-pandemic. We're one of the only knowledge sectors to have a really successful track record with remote work. There is the only sector within knowledge work where we had large companies fully remote. They did that because their jobs they had really structured them around these agile work.
Load Management Systems. We're okay. Here's when we talk about work. Here's how long it takes. Here's how we assign you a new work you work on one thing at a time. You sprint till it's done. They had all this structure around work which didn't really matter if you're in the office or not. So the less structured work is to 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 a stick Wednesday mornings at home from the
Bob yeah, but nowadays it's wild because it specially during the pandemic but still now I mean you can do the whole day in pajamas and getting worked on and I love this idea of no no email and limiting texts and social media while at home doing work to really extract the most out of it. Yeah. Are there any data Maybe from the pandemic your or 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 meetings. We have been we just found ourselves in Zoom all the time for a while. But that was the bigger problem. I mean it's 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. But the bigger problem is zoom I think was the quantity and part of it was just the technology involved right? So if we were in the office together, and I have a relatively quick thing to talk.
To about I can just grab you and we can talk about this and the footprints going to be 5 minutes, but it's not just that as 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 in the zoom error instead. We would say what we should set up a meeting right? Because as you know, we have to talk about this, but if you think about a standard online calendar, it's difficult to have a meeting that's less than 30 minutes long. I mean you just you have to drag it, you know, I mean 30 minutes just 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 where we were all on Zoomies 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 inherent in efficiencies of having to go to pre-scheduled Virtual for basically all collaboration. That could be a huge problem the data I saw from Microsoft the last data I saw was a to
Hundred fifty two percent increase in these meetings from 2022 now and it's not a number. It's not like it peaked and then started coming back down again. Once we went to hybrid. We just it's just high and it's still creeping up, right? That's a lot of time that just vanished and we sort of pretend like it didn't it but that's a lot of time that is not actively working on things and just talking about work or talking about other stuff while we get around the talking about work. I think it's a real issue.
Is there a top three list of things that if you had a magic wand you would see everyone do each day, you know, if you yeah had if you had three wishes. Yes, you mean would they be if these are the olives workers like the enhancing work creativity focused work? I mean, I think you and I both clearly agree that there's not just great value in terms of productivity. Yeah, but a great degree of life.
Enrichment like a deep level of enrichment in terms of Happiness feelings of well-being conic time for connectivity with others lessons about deep work that can be exported to time with others where we are really present at cetera 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 and talk about on your podcast are you know, if is there a top three? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if I do three, I would say okay first of all with your work
Load simulate something like a pull system instead of a push system and what I mean by that is when you keep track of what you're working on have a the top part of that list, which is I'm actively working on these things and keep that top part of your list like two or three things. Everything else is in the bottom part of the list. It's to work on next and it's in an ordered q and so when you finish something that you're working on you pull something new to take its lot from the list below right? So what I'm trying to do with that advice
This 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 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 til I'm actively working on it and I only actually 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 cue like, oh, okay. So like Andrew is not working on this right now. He's working on these three things and there's seven things here and I'm adding something number eight so I know not to expect something for a while. In fact, I can keep checking this list until I see Andrews working on it so I can see it's making progress and then once I know he's working on it I can start emailing about it and we can do just a normal.
Type of overhead you would have with with projects right that alone is going to have a huge difference like now the amount of distraction your day is going to plummet because that's generated from overhead of things you've agreed to do it that's going to that's going to pull my down. All right, so that be number one. Could I just 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 researching podcasts, yeah SOLO podcast in particular for me is my major task in life these days. Yeah with respect to work. So that would be top of the list. Yeah, and then there could be two other items on this, you know top of qu 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'd be you know podcast prep.
So you might have a cast prep my God, you might have the particular topic though. Right? Right. Okay, so party right now. I'm working on an episode right now about about skin Health. Yeah, because you could have two different episode gotta fix. Your cropping does could both be up there. Yep. So skin Health allergies episode These are two that I'm spending a lot of time on months. Yeah. In fact, yeah and then your third might be something to it involves the media companies something on the business side a bit like okay. We're trying to figure out a plan for whatever write content for for new contest, right?
Associations exact okay got it. Great. So those three would be top of the list and every day until those are done they could sit top of the list and then there are a number of items underneath those that fall under whatever. Yeah and critically when these other items come up right like oh this is like a topic. For example, I want to do a show on you have a place to put it hmm. It's not being forgot or here's a here's a business idea or like we need to figure out like what ever we want to add do something with our camera configure. Okay put on the list. It's not been forgotten like it's on there and you can see where it is.
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 aggregated. So if you use a tool like Trello for this Trello spelled Tre, llo, okay. It's an app. It's a it's a web-based service that the metaphor is just index cards in piles got right there, but their virtual okay, 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 on to the Trello card or you could do this with share documents doesn't matter. You 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 and then the but the key thing is if it's not in your active list, you don't have me
It's about it and you don't have emails about it, right? They get people have ideas or things they just add it to the cart. So when that gets up to the active list, we can work on all the information that we haven't forgotten anything and what two-word language do you use to describe this first point this method. I love this. I called it a pull based pull based. Right? What gets me hold up you probably all into the so you're fixing an advanced. Here's how much concentration I have to give on work and you pull stuff into that. The alternative is pushed based which is how most organizations run which is when I
You to do something. I just push it on to you. And now you have to deal with it. Got it. 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 its Newports pull based system. I called it that by the way, this is what in the a lot of the advice in the first one of the chapters of the new book is basically how do you get away with implementing this and when you have a boss and there's like all sorts of different. So you're Your Own Boss. You can just say this is what we're doing. Here's the board, but there's a
A lot of like subtle ways you can do this. Yeah. All right. So that's number one. That's number one the Cal new quartz pull based system. I'm going to do this and I'm actually going to report back on this at some point. You won't see the post on social media because you're not there but others well, alright, so that's one. Alright number two would be multiscale planning. Okay. So now this is planning you're planning on three different scales daily weekly seasonally or cordially, however, you want to think about it.
Right. So you have a plan for like the semester the season or the corridor like this is what I'm working on. These are the big objectives. I want to hit here's two reminders to myself about like what matters like remember like I'm overhauling my workout routine. We're trying to like do this with the podcast you look at that scale of planning every week when you build your weekly plan and the weekly plan because freeform text you don't need anything any special tools your weekly plan. You're looking at the actual calendar. All right. What from my bigger scale?
Plan my seasonal quarterly plan. What am I trying to make? Sure I can make progress on this week and you confront the reality of your week. You see, where's the empty space or 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 workday. Not my day after work, but every minute of my workday I'm time blocking. So I call it time blockings. 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 big picture things you care about trickle their way all the way down two. Okay. I'm what am I going to do during this hour during the day, but you don't have to Grapple every
that's what most people do every time figuring out what to do next. I'm not grappling with all these scales at the same time. What are my objectives? What's my big plan? What's going on this week? You're dealing with each of these scales when the time is right. And so when I finally gets down to it's now 3:00, you're just doing what that block is and you figure 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 the whole afternoon working on at the beginning this semester. So multiscale planning. It keeps you focused on what matters it.
You from wandering through your day and how you disperse your energy and it gives you control over your time on different scales from like canceling major ongoing obligations to just be more efficient about what you do during a given day. So I swear by multiscale planning to try to keep this whole lumbering ship that is sort of like Cal Newport aiming in the towards the right Shores, you know, like keep correcting and keeping it in back love this. This is more or less what I do with my physical workouts.
Every week I know I'm going to get three resistance training sessions. Yep, two or three cardiovascular training sessions. I know I'm going to train my legs once it's either going to be on depending on travel Sunday Monday or Tuesday. I'll train torso muscles 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. They'll be some sort of hit work out 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, my double up. Yeah for two days then take a day off. I have my ideal.
Schedule but sometimes it gets compromised and and then I do that for 16 weeks Cycles where I vary the kind of intensity load Etc and I've done this for years and it's just kind of works for me. Yeah now with cognitive work, I don't tend to do this. It tends to be more deadlines based. Yeah, but I think that the the pull based system is really going to help ya if I dovetail it with this multiscale planning, I love this and you can see the deadlines now you see him 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 plan and you start thinking like okay if the big deadlines like when I get the December, I need to be really started getting after this thing that's going to be do I've got a book do yeah, so then you know, and so this really helps me book writing because now and I'm planning it's like, you know a year in advance. I know this month. I need to get like a roughly the rough draft a chapter to done, you know, and then that trickles down to my week or I'm going to make sure I have enough time cleared to like be on track for finish.
Seeing 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 and 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.
Sounds like this block is writing. It's not email. It's not social media. So the rule is really simple. I'm not going to use email or social media, but I still need to do email at some point. So I have to put a block in for it. And when I'm in my email blocks, I'm doing the email if I need to go on social media to see what's going on with like the latest episode or something. I got to give that time and then you can mono Focus because then it's like a logical hack, but basically when you particularly when you schedule communication and distraction now, the only thing you have to muster willpower,
Our to do is a bay the single rule of I'm following my blocks. If you don't do that if you like. I just sometimes do email and social media. Sometimes I don't now what you have to do is just constantly be having this debate is now the right time to do this and I'm going to do it at some point today. Why not now? Well, what about now? What about now? Like you're just constantly asking yourself, right? That's impossible. Right that's going to drain you but if all you have to do instead is say my commitment today is to follow my blocks and I get I really feel good when I do it and like I check off a box if I do give yourself some feedback here. It's a much easier.
Year cognitive battle the wind then just trying to be reasonable about well, let me wait a little longer to check my email like you're going to lose that battle, you know eight times out of ten which is like enough to really overcome it. So that's like a hidden bonus of time blocking is now you can really get your arms around separating different cognitively distinct activities. This is where the analogy of time restricted eating comes to mind. Yep. Again, not that that's the best way to lose weight or maintain weight or
it's rolling longevity is still debated etcetera, 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 box 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 it or are they going to pass the cookie and have a little bit know they're there in a fasting Windows just it simplifies the issue. Yep, and as a consequence, I think it improves Behavior overall, although the clinical trials point to some mixed results.
It's with that last statement again. I don't want the nutritionist does after me the point is the time blocking and the the thick black lined did nests of the yes/no the binary. Yes. No as eat don't eat or single committee male communicate don't communicate in a given time lock. The I think that's that really is what it's about. It honors the the the power of those sorts of neural computations and there's another hidden bonus of time blocking to is visually distinct blocks. So what I do,
Do for example is I put double thick line around Deport blocks focusing on some not just eat pork but deep work on things are really care about Justice gives you a visual record. How much deep work am I doing? Right? Like it's this diagnosis. I use a paper based time block planner. So you flip through those pages and you're just looking for dark blocks, right? So you see if I see I don't have a lot of dark blocks. I 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've often fantasized about a web-based program that seems to run counter current too much of what you're talking about. But goes back to this the Whiteboard MIT Observer stuff that we talked about the beginning which is 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.
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 it 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, they're just sit there and but I haven't done that. There are multiple companies that do this. Okay? Yeah. It's interesting where your your online with or in person was just other people doing deep work. So a deep work Club it is
The challenges 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 in a recording isn't the same because then you know, they're not really watching. Yeah, but but there's something really to this, right? Yeah, and especially for at home workers or people like me that work often and isolation just do this, right dissertation boot camps. I don't know if you had this experience but Georgetown does a lot of colleges do this. Okay, everyone working on their dissertation. We're all going to get together and we're going to work on it together cause they would often have me come speak at these things earlier in my career. It would just be a bunch of grad students.
They were just coming to the same space and they would work for like okay 90 minutes and then they would have like a speaker come in or launch and 9. So the the group cohesion of everyone working deeply at the same time writer's Retreat for the same way. We all go to the same house in the middle of nowhere so that we're all just going to encourage each other right? Because that's all what anyone's doing here. Yeah. So social pressure with you. I was thinking if I ever needed to, you know, put a big extension on my house. That's what I should do. Just like okay pay me money then I will sit there on zoom and do deep work with you this.
Secret flypaper, I'd pay money to do deep work in parallel with you by with a virtual window there. There's Callen has office doing that. I think there's something nice about having some knowledge of who people are. Yep, you know, like hey logging in today. Yeah. Yeah. Alright, let's get down to it set the timer and go and then, you know awesome out, you know working at the library academic libraries. Why do people do that? Right? Yes, everyone there is working, right? Yeah. I'm a big believer in that. Mmm. There's really something
sticky to that. Okay number three. Alright have a shutdown ritual.
Which clearly demarcates the end of work in the start of the night after work?
And the shutdown ritual so it has to you have to close open Loops, right? So you got to make sure this is like a review type period let me look back at my inbox and look at my plan. Let me look at my Emi time block and my calendar really make sure I just nothing urgent that needs to be dealt with that. I didn't it and there's nothing that's just in my head that I don't want to forget. It's not written down somewhere like take care of all of that. Right? So you review all these things you get what am I gonna do tomorrow? You have to build your whole plan for tomorrow. You have a
For it and then you need some sort of demonstrative thing. You do to indicate that you finish the routine, right? So 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 now. I've a planner that has like a checkbox that says shutdown complete next to it. The reason why that is a demonstrative. Anchor is that you use this then for cognitive behavioral therapy because that
first people have a hard time shutting down work the I mean I invented this because I had a very hard time shutting down working on my dissertation. I just what this proof doesn't work and blah blah blah. So what you do is when you're you get a rumination post shut down. Hey, what about what's going on with our work 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 I said that crazy phrase or I checked that box. I wouldn't have said that phrase unless I had
I'm 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 were really able to actually effortlessly disengage from work and do everything, you know, all the other stuff that matters right without having the constant 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.
Activity, but for me, it was critical. I mean I can really remember when I came up with this exactly where I was and my grad student career and there's just too much too many ideas and concerns that were just roiling and like once I did this, you know, it took a few weeks and then I could actually like shut down and go on and do other things. Yeah, the parrot associative nature of the brain can make it really problematic if you're thinking about work at the dinner table you start to associate the dinner table with work. I mean when
Matt Walker came here to do this six part series that soon to be released 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 while off and 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 scientists 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.
Go back and try or fall asleep on the couch elsewhere. Yeah, I've put put that in as a as a note with you, but this seems incredibly important also for enrichment of relationships with spouses and children and people in your life. I mean, 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'd you do today? Yeah. Tell me about your school day. Tell me about your work. Maybe we need to come up with better questions. Yeah, like here's something interesting we could do or here's like something I read about unrelated to work.
Yeah. No, I think I think it makes a huge difference. And again, there's all these meta benefits for these things. So one of the many 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 when you're doing multiscale planning and certainly if you're doing you know, pull base workload management people are gonna start thinking this is someone who thinks a lot about like how they manage their workday and how things happen. This gives you massive leeway.
Right. Yeah, because 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? Am I gonna have to keep bothering you? You know, what if I don't really think you have your act together, I just wish you would just do this right away or respond to me right away because I'm 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 her act together
So you can for example lean into a shutdown. I don't do email at all and people they don't think that you're being lazy or that you're not keeping up with the work. They're like no like Andrew has his act together with this stuff. I trust them when you show them something like this workload management system. Like this is where the queue is like, I can't get to this yet. Like OK 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 time and cognitive work is that people will give you more flexibility to work with the best.
You get at actually working with you know, the resources you have is your reputation grows your autonomy grows. Yeah, and of course as your reputation grows more gets thrown at you and it probably takes a bit more discipline to enforce these things, but I always remind myself and other people that you know, the reason people want to access you is because of a presumably the consequences of the deep work you did not but people love meetings gosh do they I won't do brainstorming meetings anymore. Unless it's with my clothes team.
Yeah, so you can pitch me a contract and we can reverse engineer the idea, you know, but it just doesn't work to meet with people and kind of brainstorm stuff, but I don't know what this is. Like, I think maybe people are taking their own lack of structure and projecting it onto other people as a way to fill the time. Yeah souter productivity as well. Like this is what I have like visible activity. And so let's quit have meetings. Let's talk. Let's hop on calls like that all feels useful when ultimately it's not
Come with you on it. Like remember the reason why every wants to talk to me is because not so great at brainstorming meetings, you know people like this is great like Andrews great at brainstorming meeting. So that's why I want to bother no it's because you're really good at the podcast and you're doing like two 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 like professors know this well, like pre-tenure they most big universities are pretty good at preaching the professor's all that's going to matter is going to be your research, but they
So a ton of other stuff at you, it depends on the school. Like I was like Georgetown was very good about this. They like we don't from our perspective. It's a waste of resources to hire you 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 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 eye.
It's these confidential letters from leading scholars in your field that are doing nothing but brutally assessing your research. How good is Kyle 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 tin your em at your University what university could he get tenured at? I mean, it's all that matters is research quality. So you have to somehow ReDiscover what that is, if you're not a professor like ultimately like this is to 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 if you do a deep thing really, well, it does not attract as much work as if what you do is you're just really good at like responding to people's things and putting out fires. It's like you don't want to get too much trapped in that game unless that's the game you want to play, you know, if you get trapped in the game of how I distinguish myself as I reply right away doesn't matter when it is I make your life easier you're playing the game and making other people's lives easier and that's what they're going to ask you to do. But if instead you play the game of I'm competent with this like I'll
On to the emails and not be I won't be pathological about it. But the real thing you care about is like this code on producing these reports on producing or just really Second To None, then you're not going to get a much the small stuff like, okay, we'll 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 social engagements through work like, you know, like the company barbecue or anyone does come anymore?
Quick use anymore, but you know, like happy hour or I don't know anyone. Does that either and social engagements with family like, you know, because obviously those things are important too. Yeah are those on your schedule? Well, you know, I treat work schedule different from non work schedule, right? So my work schedule is this time block plan part of a multi scale plan really dialed in like when I'm working I'm working right but I'm not working. I'm way more relaxed, you know, so I don't do time block plan.
My weekends or my evenings the work shut down being clear gives you more flexibility there. So it's like, okay, what do we want to do? Like, let's go like see these people to do things with the family. I like to be flexible and not overly planned outside of the workday, but then during the workday itself, you know, it's much more machine like so you're fairly not lakhs, but you're a bit more relaxed around social engagements and engaging with the kids. But yeah.
At work or when you're working at home or in the office. You're you're obese. Yeah. I'm like a black box in the work days when I when I'm working like I disappear nice. Yeah, and when I'm done like I'm around but like my family and friends and they've learned like if you text me during the work day, I'm not part of that game of like I'll just respond back to it. People know like it may have been four hours since I saw my phone it's like likes Friedman. Yeah and people often ask to get in touch with lakhs 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 tax, but I understand that if I text Alexis, I might not hear from him for 45 days and it's all good. Yeah, you know, it's just in fact that tells me he's good. It's like that scene at the end of Good Will Hunting where he's like, I just want to show up at your house and now they're not there you got there and he smiles as friends gone. He knows you went the direction of his of his heart. So you're saying if you start to get a lot of like meme's text it to you from Lex that's not going to happen like what's going on lads?
That's never going to happen what we struggle with struggle. You have it in your life. Yeah. I'm a big believer in the phone. I'm old school pick up the phone make a call. We'll get on a call sometime space-time. We do text one or two things back was often really quick. Yeah really quick and I have other friends in the podcast base for which it's the same as just phone is a great tool. Yep, and you know drop in and then get back to it. Yeah, not a lot of chitter-chatter on I like that. I always like Texas like a great logistical tool, you know, like wait. What what restaurant are you at OU
Okay, I'll meet you there or are you free to talk? Like I love Texas a logistical tool but you're right as a conversational tool. Yes, 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's but no digital anything digital is not a problem for me on vacation, but my wife won't let me not bring something to work on a vacation because because I become a monster got it your brain needs that needs it. Yeah.
When we have little kids I tried this right? It's like, okay like this is it I'm not gonna think about anything like this is and I would just become a anxiety case. So what I've learned is bring one thing just like very deep and non-urgent 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 and here I have a notebook with me so that like I can capture notes and get him out of my head on vacation and that now we have a happy.
Idiom like I work a little bit every day. No email. I don't get my email not know deep work thinking I'm much happier. It's like an itch that you have to scratch IVF. I'm not writing or thinking it's it's I get cognitively antsy I get anxious, you know, like I'm on I've been now I'm talking to you now, but I've been you know traveling doing some podcast and stuff like this and I'm way out of my cognitive comfort zone here because I'm not logging like early in this trip. I was a New York
Or in Atlantic deadlines, like writing 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 antsy, like I just feel out of sorts right now, you know, like I'm not working. I'm not thinking love it Cal for me. This is 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 long before we met or communicated at all. I started reading your books.
And I would say you and Tim Ferriss 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 and up against the grain people around me and very quickly. I saw that I was making progress much faster than I would have. Otherwise, yeah, and I never looked as a competitive Endeavor with others, but and you just continue to churn out valuable information actionable tools, you know book and after book after
A book and and obviously they require some structure and some some restriction but also some moving toward action items and I love these these top three that you provided us the pull forward the multi-scale planning and the shutdown ritual and all the others on the you put forth. And I guess the the major takeaway for me today is that yes, you've developed all these tools, but you also use them and it's not lost on me.
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 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 exercising and I think that that all combines two to be an amazing example of what's possible if we introduce a bit of understanding about how
We function as a as a being and we Implement some of these tools in the user manual that you've come up with. And so I just want to say on behalf of myself and everyone who's listening and watching thank you so much. This is incredibly valuable information regardless of what one is doing in life, and I'm certainly going to implement this three step system and I do have the book. I always like to read books after guests are on. I'm going to read the book and I'm going to do
Posts about what I experienced 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 and do this stuff. So thank you so much for being a Pioneer in the space and such a clear Communicator. We all owe you a debt of gratitude. No. Thanks Andrew. Well and for the rest of us professors who are also podcasting we owe you a debt of gratitude because you're showing us what's actually
What's actually possible so this has been great meeting you as well as been fantastic. Alright, well, thank you. We won't we won't see each other on social media, but we'll we'll share a meal at some point before long. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with dr. Cal Newport to find links to Cal's website books and to his excellent podcast. Please see the links in the show notes caption. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition, please.
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